Book : The Masque Of The Black Tulip (pink Carnation) -...

-Titulo Original : The Masque Of The Black Tulip (Pink Carnation)

-Fabricante :

Berkley

-Descripcion Original:

...But now she has a million questions about the Pink Carnations deadly French nemesis, the Black Tulip. And shes pretty sure that her handsome onagain, off-again crush, Colin Selwick, has the answers somewhere in his archives. But what she discovers in an old codebook is something juicier than she ever imagined. About the Author Lauren Willig is a law student and Ph.D. candidate in history at Harvard University. She is the author of The Secret History of the Pink Carnation. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. Chapter One London, England, 2003 I bit my lip on an “Are we there yet?” If ever silence was the better part of valor, now was the time. Palpable waves of annoyance emerged from the man beside me, thick enough to constitute an extra presence in the car. Under the guise of inspecting my fingernails, I snuck another glance sideways at my car mate. From that level, all I could see was a pair of hands tense on the steering wheel. They were tanned and callused against the brown corduroy cuffs of his jacket, with a .ne dust­ing of blond hairs outlined by the late-afternoon sun, and the white scar of an old cut showing against the darker skin on his left hand. Large hands. Capable hands. Right now he was probably imagining them clasped around my neck. And I don’t mean in an amorous embrace. I had not been part of Mr. Colin Selwick’s weekend plans. I was the fly in his ointment, the rain on his parade. The fact that it was a very attractive parade and that I was very single at the moment was entirely beside the point. If you’re wondering what I was doing in a car bound for parts un­known with a relative stranger who would have liked nothing better than to drop me in a ditch-well, I’d like to say, so was I. But I knew exactly what I was doing. It all came down to, in a word, archives. Admittedly, archives aren’t usually a thing to set one’s blood pounding, but they do when you’re a fifth-year graduate student in pursuit of a dissertation, and your advisor has begun making ominous noises about conferences and job talks and the nasty things that happen to attenuated graduate students who haven’t produced a pile of paper by their tenth year. From what I understand, they’re quietly shuf.ed out of the Harvard history department by dead of night and fed to a relentless horde of academic-eating crocodiles. Or they wind up at law school. Either way, the point was clear. I had to rack up some primary sources, and I had to do it soon, before the crocodiles started getting restless. There was a teensy little added incentive involved. The incentive had dark hair and brown eyes, and occupied an assistant professorship in the Gov department. His name was Grant. I have, I realize, left out his most notable characteristic. He was a cheating slime. I say that entirely dispassionately. Anyone would agree that smooching a first-year grad student-during my department’s Christmas party, which he attended at my invitation-is indisputable evidence of cheating slimedom. All in all, there had never been a better time to conduct research abroad. I didn’t include the bit about Grant in my grant application. There is a certain amount of irony in that, isn’t there? Grant...grant.... The fact that I found that grimly amusing just goes to show the pa­thetic state to which I had been reduced. But 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. Of course, when I presented my grant proposal to my advisor, I left out any references to evil exes and the aesthetic properties of knee breeches. Instead, I spoke seriously about the impact of England’s aristocratic agents on the conduct of the war with France, their influence on parliamentary