There, however, reality ends and fiction takes over. Unlike the king’s earlier illness, the queen was not forbidden the king’s chamber in 1804. The Prince of Wales did throw his oar in, lobbying for a regency (Princess Sophia’s irritated comment to Charlotte about her brother was taken from a letter she wrote to Theresa Villiers in 1804), but without any success. The French plot and the kidnapping are entirely my own invention. After treatment by Dr Simmons, the king recovered relatively rapidly and held on to his marbles until his final lapse into madness in 1810.
Would it have been possible for a spy to kidnap and replace the king? While it certainly didn’t happen (at least, not that we know of), I don’t believe it would have been outside the realms of possibility. Despite assassination attempts in 1786 and 1800, the king showed remarkably little concern for his personal safety. Burney’s journals recount the king (while still sane) slipping off entirely alone, without any attendants, to visit friends in Kew, causing the anxious queen to come searching for him (as Burney reports, ‘Yes,’ [the king] cried, ‘I ran here without speaking to anybody’). One of the most surprising facts I learnt in the course of researching Crimson Rose was that the king’s bedchamber in Buckingham House opened directly into the Great Library. Public access to the library was provided through the binderies in the basement floor. The presence of pages and other members of the king’s household would have ensured a certain modicum of security, but the sheer size of the king’s household would have also made it relatively easy for interlopers to infiltrate unnoticed.
By 1804, the royal court was no longer the centre of political power and patronage it had once been (a fact that Charlotte’s grandmother, reared in an earlier era, finds hard to grasp), but it was still an immense and complex entity that employed a plethora of people from all walks of life, from the Earl of Winchelsea, the King’s Groom of the Stole, all the way down to the seamstresses and starchers who dealt with His Majesty’s linen. For those interested in the workings of the royal household, I recommend the exhaustive report prepared by the Institute of Historical Research, Office-Holders in Modern Britain (Volume 11): Court Officers, 1660 – 1837, which lists every single office in the king’s and queen’s households as well as the individual holders of those offices (just in case you feel a burning need to know the name of every one of the queen’s maids of honour). The chapter on the later Hanoverian court in Anne Somerset’s Ladies in Waiting provides a more general overview of life in the queen’s household, while Fanny Burney’s journals present a detailed personal account of the odd mix of formality and informality that made up day-to-day life with Their Majesties.
Most of the action in the novel takes place in the Queen’s House, now known as Buckingham Palace. Although St James’s Palace was still the ceremonial centre of royal life, the setting for the king’s formal levees on Wednesdays and Fridays and the Queen’s Drawing Rooms on Thursdays and Sundays, the royal family preferred to live in Buckingham House, which the king had purchased for Queen Charlotte in 1762. For those of you who have noticed that the palace looks rather different, it was; the building was extensively remodelled in 1847. For the details of the palace’s design and interior decoration in 1804, I am deeply indebted to Jane Roberts’s George III and Queen Charlotte: Patronage, Collecting and Court Taste.
Like Buckingham House, Medmenham Abbey is a real location. In 1752, Sir Francis Dashwood founded the Order of the Friars of St Francis of Wycombe, known to posterity (although not to its members) as the Hellfire Club, providing inspiration for generations of libertines to come. Geoffrey Ashe’s The Hell-Fire Clubs: A History of Anti-Morality provides a thoughtful and thorough account of both Sir Francis’s club and those that preceded and followed it. As always, for the purposes of the story, I took some liberties with the record. I decided to place the Lotus Club’s orgies in the caves, even though Ashe states that, contrary to popular legend, the group’s revels probably took place inside the Abbey. Although the layout of the caves, including the River Styx, is much as I described, I added an anteroom to the back of the Banqueting Chamber and a ladder leading up to the mausoleum. Likewise, while the golden orb on top of the Church of St Lawrence was indeed hollow and designed to seat several guests, I moved it to the back of the church and made it accessible only by portable ladder.
As for the revels of the Order of the Lotus, they are very loosely based on the orgies of the Monks of Medmenham, combined with a few practices borrowed from a similar group that set up shop in Poona, in British India, in 1813. The Asiatic trappings represent a hodgepodge of unrelated elements appropriated, willy-nilly, for their exotic flavour. (Neither Wrothan nor Medmenham was particularly concerned with cultural accuracy.) Despite the genuine setting, Sir Francis Medmenham was entirely a figment of my imagination; upon the death of Sir Francis Dashwood (by then, Baron Le Despenser), Medmenham Abbey and its grounds were inherited by Sir John Dashwood-King, not the fictional Sir Francis Medmenham.
Tempted to unmask more flowery spies?
Read on for further details of the
Pink Carnation series …
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The Secret History of the
Pink Carnation
BY LAUREN WILLIG
Nothing goes right for Eloise. The one day she wears her new suede boots, it rains cats and dogs. When the tube stops short, she’s always the one thrown into some stranger’s lap. Plus, she’s had more than her share of misfortune in the way of love. In fact, after she realises romantic heroes are a thing of the past, she decides it’s time for a fresh start.
Eloise is also determined to finish her dissertation on that dashing pair of spies, the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian. But what she discovers is something the finest historians have missed: the secret history of the Pink Carnation – the most elusive spy of all time. As she works to unmask this obscure spy, Eloise stumbles across answers to all kinds of questions. How did the Pink Carnation save England from Napoleon? What became of the Scarlet Pimpernel and the Purple Gentian? And will Eloise Kelly escape her bad luck and find a living, breathing hero of her own?
The Masque of the
Black Tulip
BY LAUREN WILLIG
‘If modern manhood had let me down, at least the past boasted brighter specimens. To wit, the Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian and the Pink Carnation, that dashing trio of spies who kept Napoleon in a froth of rage and the feminine population of England in another sort of froth entirely.’
Modern-day student Eloise Kelly has achieved a great academic coup by unmasking the elusive spy the Pink Carnation, who saved England from Napoleon. But now she has a million questions about the Carnation’s deadly nemesis, the Black Tulip. And she’s pretty sure that her handsome on-again, off-again crush Colin Selwick has the answers somewhere in his family’s archives. While searching through Lady Henrietta’s old letters and diaries from 1803, Eloise stumbles across an old codebook and discovers something more exciting than she ever imagined: Henrietta and her old friend Miles Dorrington were on the trail of the Black Tulip and had every intention of stopping him in his endeavour to kill the Pink Carnation. But what they didn’t know was that while they were trying to find the Tulip – and trying not to fall in love in the process – the Black Tulip was watching them …
The Deception of the
Emerald Ring
BY LAUREN WILLIG
‘All in readiness. An unmarked carriage will be waiting for you behind the house at midnight …’
History student Eloise Kelly is in London looking for more information on the activities of the infamous 19th century spy, the Pink Carnation, while at the same time trying to keep her mind off the fact that her mobile phone is not ringing and her would-be romantic hero Colin Selwick is not calling.
Eloise is finally distracted from checking for messages every five minutes by the discovery of a brief note, sandwic
hed amongst the papers she’s poring over in the British Library. Signed by Lord Pinchingdale, it is all Eloise needs to delve back in time and unearth the story of Letty Alsworthy and the Pink Carnation’s espionage activities on the Emerald Isle …
The Seduction of the
Crimson Rose
BY LAUREN WILLIG
Hoping to track down the true identity of the elusive French spy the Black Tulip, graduate student Eloise Kelly delves ever deeper into the archives at the British Library and the family papers of her boyfriend Colin Selwick, the modern-day descendant of her Napoleonic spy subjects. As she becomes ever more entwined with Colin, her research brings her closer to uncovering the Black Tulip’s true identity.
Determined to secure another London season without assistance from her new brother-in-law, Mary Alsworthy accepts a secret assignment from Lord Vaughn on behalf of the Pink Carnation: to infiltrate the ranks of the dreaded French spy, the Black Tulip, before he and his master can stage their planned invasion of England. Every spy has a weakness, and for the Black Tulip that weakness is black-haired women – his ‘petals’ of the Tulip. A natural at the art of seduction, Mary easily catches the attention of the French spy, but Lord Vaughn never anticipates that his own heart will be caught as well. Fighting their growing attraction, impediments from their past, and, of course, the French, Mary and Vaughn find themselves lost in the shadows of a treacherous garden of lies.
About the Author
A native of New York City, Lauren Willig has been writing romances ever since she got her hands on her first romance novel at the age of six. Like Eloise Kelly, Lauren is the proud possessor of an unfinished Harvard History department dissertation, and spent a year poring over old documents at the British Library before abandoning the academic life for the more lucrative world of law. Once Lauren received her JD magna cum laude from Harvard Law School, she practised as a litigation associate at a large New York firm, but decided that book deadlines and doc review didn’t mix and departed the law for a new adventure in full-time writerdom.
www.laurenwillig.com
By Lauren Willig
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
The Masque of the Black Tulip
The Deception of the Emerald Ring
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
The Temptation of the Night Jasmine
The Mischief of the Mistletoe
Copyright
Allison & Busby Limited
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Copyright © 2009 by LAUREN WILLIG
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
Paperback first published in Great Britain in 2011.
This ebook edition first published in 2011.
First published in the US in 2010.
Published with arrangement with Dutton,
a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
All characters and events in this publication other than those clearly in the public domain are fictitious and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent buyer.
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN 978–0–7490–4025–3
Lauren Willig, The Temptation of the Night Jasmine
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