The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 20

Sussex, England

May 2004

I hightailed it to the library.

I’m not sure what I had been expecting to find. Dempster and Serena in flagrante delicto? Dempster going through my notes, chortling like a stage villain? Instead, the library was as it always was, an oasis of evening calm, the setting sun streaming through the long windows, picking out the worn patches on the red and blue carpet, and highlighting the dust that collected in the long grooves of the ornamental pilasters between the bookshelves. My notebook lay where I had left it, the research books I had been using scattered around in my usual cheerful disarray. It all seemed normal enough.…

I ventured closer. Why was I walking like a member of the bomb squad from Law & Order? This was silly. I marched briskly up to my favorite table. A folio of letters from Jane to Henrietta, detailing Jane’s role in the masque at Malmaison, all present and accounted for. Copy of the masque, printed in a vanity edition with red morocco covers, check. The spiral notebook I used when I didn’t feel like lugging my laptop, check. Four assorted volumes on American history, used for background research on the Morris/Monroe/Livingston and Fulton connections, all there.

My reference books had verified what I’d found in Jane’s letters. I’d never known that Mr. Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, had lived in France for a number of years, working on his steamboat and various other devices before teaming up with Mr. Livingston and going home to New York. But it appeared that he had. He had also come up with the first-ever panorama, which caused a rage in Paris. Theatrical equipment must have been a no-brainer for him after that.

If it was theatrical equipment, that is, and not the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction.

Wouldn’t that be an interesting double fake! What if Fulton were, in fact, working for the French Royalists? There were various groups floating around, often at odds with each other, seldom in sync with the English and Austrian agents who purported to be working in their interests. Someone had tried to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the theatre in Christmas 1800—why not in his own theatre in 1804?

Because it hadn’t happened, I reminded myself. That’s the weird thing about reading history through peoples’ papers and documents. You forget that you do know how it all turned out. Charles I was beheaded, Marie Antoinette never made it past Varennes, Bonaparte wasn’t assassinated in 1804.

That didn’t mean someone might not try. Maybe Marston was a double agent.

Huh. That was weird. Not Marston—although he was peculiar enough all by himself—but the folio on the desk, next to the biography of Fulton that I hadn’t quite got around to finishing (or starting). The folio I had thought was the one I had been reading—well, it wasn’t. It had been replaced with another. They all looked the same, those folios, from the outside at least. A late Victorian member of the Selwick clan had catalogued the family papers, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion, pasting them in chronological order into large folio volumes, all of which looked alike, but for the labels on the spine. The one I was holding wasn’t the correspondence of Henrietta Dorrington (née Selwick) and Miss Jane Wooliston, 1804–1805. It was Henrietta Dorrington and Lady Frederick Staines (née Deveraux), 1803–1806.

I’d been through those papers before. They had to do with various intrigues in India, although they weren’t much use without the corresponding documentation from the archives of a now defunct Indian administrative province, fortunately preserved in the notebooks of Colin’s great-aunt, in her flat in London. In short, nothing to do with anything I was doing.

So what was it doing on my desk?

I lifted the folio, turning it this way and that, but it told me nothing. Not as if it was going to pipe up like an item out of a fairy tale and sing, “Folio, folio on the shelf / Dempster is an evil elf!” or something like that.

What would Dempster want with Henrietta’s India correspondence? His interest, like mine, was in the Pink Carnation and her league. If he wanted that, the Delagardie affair was a positive gold mine. But that folio, the folio dealing with Jane’s summer sojourn at Malmaison, sat chastely on my chair where I had left it, seemingly undisturbed.

Now that I looked for it, I could see the marks of hasty turning on the pages of my notebook, the bent paper, the tiny tears. Okay, well, maybe some of those had been me, but it still made me feel like Sherlock Holmes. And was that a smear of blood on one corner? Oh, coffee. That had been me, then. Oops.

I closed the red plastic cover of my notebook and, defiantly, left it sitting in plain sight on the desk. No point in closing the barn door, right? I jammed my feet harder into my tottery stilettos and marched purposefully towards the library door. Dempster and I were going to have to have ourselves a little talk. I was historian, hear me roar!

Or not.

The library door yanked open just as I put my hand to it, causing me to wobble dangerously on my three-inch heels.

“Steady there,” said Colin, grabbing me just as I pitched face-first into his chest.

There were worse places to be. “Hi,” I mumbled into his shirtfront. “Looking for me?”

“Do you know what time it is?” he said, but I could hear the annoyance fading away even as he said it, in the softening of his tone and the way his arms wrapped around me. “I thought you had done a bunk rather than go down to dinner with me.”

I rubbed my nose into his chest, smelling his familiar scent of detergent and deodorant. “And miss the fun?” I said. “I’m thinking of going down to dinner like this. It’s very comfy.”

He slid a finger beneath my chin, tilting my face up. “You might have some trouble eating that way.”

It would have been nice to just stay that way, but guilt and knowledge lay heavy upon me. By the lurching of my tum, something Dempster this way come, and Colin didn’t know it yet.

“Hey,” I said, reluctantly peeling away. “Is Serena supposed to be here tonight?”

Maybe that hadn’t been the best opening gambit. He let me go. I felt very wobbly without his hands on my arms, wobbly and cold, the crisp air biting into that exposed triangle at the small of my back.

“Why?” He started down the hall to the stairs, me trailing alongside.

I hated the shuttered look on his face. Serena was a closed topic as far as Colin was concerned. Efforts to get him to Talk About It resulted in one of two things: diversion, i.e., kissing that sensitive spot behind my ear, pointing out a rare yellow-billed redheaded warbler through the window (I still wasn’t convinced there was any such bird, but if there was, it clearly responded to the sound of Serena’s name), or simply smiling and changing the subject. Or this. Complete shutdown. No one home, admittance interdicted, beware of dog.

There was nothing to do but blurt it out. “Dempster is here. He’s DreamStone’s historical consultant.”

“What?”

“I know, that was my reaction, too. And it gets worse.” Catching a heel on the worn carpet that ran down the center of the hall, I stumbled in my too-high heels.

“Worse?” He caught my arm, drawing it through his for support, mine or his.

“According to Cate—no, you haven’t met her yet,” I added, before he could ask. “She’s their clipboard girl, and I’ve told her she can use our computer if she likes. Don’t worry, you’ll like her.”

Colin was beginning to look a little bewildered. “What does this have to do with Dempster?”

“Right.” I took a deep breath. “Anyway, according to Cate—you know, the clipboard girl—Dempster got the job through personal connections. Apparently, he’s dating someone connected to the film.”

The carpet came to an end just at the landing. We stood at the top of the stairs, the polished wooden banister stretching along in front of us. One of Colin’s ancestors had redone it all during the height of the Arts and Crafts movement, getting rid of the old white moldings and pale paint, replacing them with heavy walnut and shiny brocades. Small golden gargoyles on a dark green background snarled down at me from the wall.

Colin turned to me, his sun-streaked hair bright against the hunter green backdrop. “Do you think—?”

I shook my head. “I don’t know. She didn’t say.” I didn’t like this any more than he did, but there was no ignoring the evidence. “Who else could it be?”

Colin pressed his eyes closed. I could see the network of fine lines around his eyes, pale against his suntanned skin. There was more than one way to save the world. Colin might not be a swashbuckling double-oh-something, but he had his own variety of hero complex. He had single-handedly held up his sister through the trauma of their father’s death, their mother’s defection, and Serena’s own romantic disasters.

I squeezed Colin’s arm. “She’s a grown woman.” Serena was a full two months older than me. Right now, I felt positively ancient. “She’s old enough to make her own decisions.”

“Yes. She has done, hasn’t she?” Colin nodded towards the stairs, his face showing nothing, revealing nothing. “Shall we go down?”

I thought of and discarded at least half a dozen saving phrases. She didn’t mean it; she does love you, you know; that’s not what I meant. None of them would do the least bit of good. It would only draw us both further into a conversation neither of us really wanted to have. Sometimes, talking about it doesn’t make it better.

There was also the selfishness factor. My relationship with Colin still felt, even six months in, too new and fragile to risk, even for a good cause.

I wrinkled my nose at him. “Unless you want to order takeout and have it delivered up to the second floor? Right. I didn’t think so.” We made it about two steps before I tugged him to a halt. “There’s one more thing you should know.”

“Don’t tell me,” Colin said flatly. “They’ve decided to rebuild the whole house as a Disney castle and staff it with singing Martians.”

“Er, no. Jeremy’s seated us at opposite ends of the table.” I did my best to dispel the image of a kick line of musical Martians pouring our after-dinner tea. That was probably DreamStone’s next movie, with Micah Stone as the kick-ass alien hunter. “The joke will be on him when we spend the whole evening communicating in semaphore. Like that Monty Python sketch with Cathy and Heathcliff.”

Colin slid his arm around me for a quick squeeze. “Whatever Jeremy might think, it is still my table. No one’s seating arrangement is set in stone.”

“Except for Micah Stone!” We paused on the landing where the stairs turned. “That was a joke.”

Colin scanned the arriving guests from the safety of the balustrade. “Do you see Dempster?”

From the landing, we had an excellent view of the center hall. The house had never been a grand mansion, only a modest gentleman’s residence, but, to my apartment-bred eyes, the hall was still a generously proportioned one. It might not be Blenheim or Chatsworth, but it could still hold a good thirty people with room for catering staff to circulate with their faux silver rent-a-trays. The door kept opening and closing, admitting more and more people as cars made hash of the carefully combed gravel circle outside, some veering off onto Colin’s precious lawn.

They were a mixed bag, the guests. I amused myself by playing Spot the Americans. It wasn’t a fail-safe game, but I prided myself on a fifty percent accuracy rate. It wasn’t just the clothes, but something about expression and carriage. My theory has always been that different vocal constructions shape our facial muscles differently, so that you can tell an American face from a British one simply by the way the person holds her mouth.

Not a fail-proof system, but reasonably reliable. In this case, there was the added clue of the Curse of the American in England, the attempt to out-British the British, the Americans wearing what they presumed Brits wore for a country house weekend, while the Brits themselves, a far flashier and more glamorous crowd than the gang at the pub or the academics of my acquaintance, were dressed in the latest of Madison Avenue couture. DreamStone backers, I imagined, or friends of Colin’s mother and her husband. They moved in moneyed circles, hobnobbing with the artsier end of the international jet set—and by artsy, I mean those who bought art, not those who produced it. That was Jeremy’s job. He sold high-end art, acting as agent to a series of prestigious modern artists, among them, Colin’s mother.

I didn’t see Colin’s mother. I gathered, from what I had heard, that she had a phobia about Selwick Hall. The phrase “gives me hives” may or may not have been used. Besides, this production was Jeremy’s baby, not hers. It didn’t matter to her that her only son might be involved or that his life might be disrupted by it.

My fingers had curved into claws on the timeworn walnut of the banister. I forced them to unclench and went back to scanning the crowd.

Below me, I could hear someone saying in cut-glass tones, as pretentiously posh as Dempster’s, that, heavens, no, she wasn’t here with the film crew, she was the representative from Manderley; hadn’t they heard of Manderley?

I looked down and saw a perfectly coiffed blond head, not a hint of telltale roots showing, highlighted to feign a vacation in St. Barth’s, cut in a kicky sweep not unlike my last haircut, the one that had now grown out into straggles. Oh, damn. Unconsciously, I reached for the ends of my hair, too short to put up, too long for style.

Even up half a flight of stairs, Joan Plowden-Plugge still had the power to make me feel like a mugwump.

I tugged at Colin’s sleeve. “Hey. What’s Joan doing here?”

“I didn’t invite her,” he said quickly. I believed him. Not out of consideration for me and my feelings, but because Joan had made no bones about her desire to become mistress of Selwick Hall, or at least of its master. “She’s here for Manderley.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Colin had been quite clear about wanting to keep a lid on publicity, at least as it pertained to Selwick Hall. The movie itself he couldn’t do much about. That was DreamStone’s province.

Colin’s lip twisted. “I’m not okay with any of this.”

Fair point. That wasn’t what I’d meant, though, and he knew it.

He leaned a hand on the other side of the railing next to me, boxing me in. “Look, if I have to have reporters in my home, I’d rather it be Manderley than one of the tabloids.”

I wasn’t sure a periodical that looked down its nose at Town & Country as hopelessly plebeian counted as a substitute for the gossip rags. But if Colin thought doing a piece in Manderley would stave off the tits’n ass crowd, then so be it. I had my doubts. Where Micah Stone went, there went the paparazzi. And nothing would suit Jeremy better than a double-page spread of himself in front of “his” ancestral home, complete with wellies and a gun propped over his shoulder.

Colin looked down at me, his hazel eyes concerned. “I know Joan isn’t your favorite person—”

“I can’t imagine where you get these ideas,” I muttered. Just because she had all but hired a coyote to drop an Acme anvil on my head.

“But I’ve known her since we were children. I trust her not to say anything…” Colin paused, searching for the right phrase.

“Libelous?” I’m not the child of two lawyers for nothing.

Colin pushed away from the railing. “Embarrassing.”

“Right. That, too. Do you think we should go down, or shall we just stay up here and keep staring at people? I’m fine going either way.”

“Was that a hint?” Colin asked.

“It was more of a directive.” I took his arm in a proprietary grasp. Take that, Joan Plowden-Plugge! She might have two names, but I had one Colin, and, by gad, I wasn’t sharing, not for all the cupcakes in kindergarten. “I could use one of those glasses of bubbly.”

“Only one?”

“Do you really want me to get blotto and start singing show tunes?”

Colin’s lips brushed the top of my head. “You’re cute when you’re blotto,” he said.

I noticed he didn’t say anything about my singing ability.

“You’re just hoping I’ll lose it and say horrible things to Jeremy so you won’t have to.” Oops. Did I say that out loud?

Colin didn’t seem too perturbed by the prospect. “That would be a plus, yes.”

I poked Colin in the arm. “There’s Dempster.”

We weren’t the only ones who had spotted him. Joan’s carefully highlighted head turned and, with just the right words of good-bye, she excused herself and maneuvered her way through the crowd, her black dress narrow enough not to make so much as a whisper as she passed. Her heels were a modest inch and a half. Sling-backs. Unlike me, she wasn’t relying on the shoemaker’s art for lengthening and slimming.

Toad.

How did she know Dempster? The Vaughn Collection, I guessed. It made sense that the editor of a fine-arts magazine would be on more than nodding terms with the archivist of London’s answer to the Frick Collection.

But this looked like a hell of a lot more than nodding terms. Holding her champagne glass out to the side, Joan leaned in, not for the traditional air kiss but for a solid peck on the lips. As she leaned back, Dempster’s hand settled in a proprietary way just above her waist.

What?

I looked at Colin, gawping like a child catching Mommy with Santa Claus. If Santa Claus was evil, that is. And if Mommy were the wicked stepmother. “Did you—?” I said.

Colin shook his head, looking just as befuddled as I felt. “No. I—No.” He looked down at them, a man at sea. “They are colleagues.…”

“His hand is still on her ass,” I pointed out. “That’s not collegial behavior.” A little lightbulb went on in my brain. “Do you know what this means? Serena didn’t invite Dempster. Joan did.”

Colin seemed insufficiently excited by this revelation.

I tugged on his sleeve. “Don’t you get it? Serena isn’t back together with Dempster!”

Not to mention that now Joan was safely off the market, so maybe she’d stay out of our hair for five minutes. And by ours, I meant mine. It would be nice to go to the pub without Joan throwing darts at me instead of the board.

“I got that,” said Colin slowly. I followed his gaze and saw what had caught his attention. Oh, damn. There was another corollary to Serena not being back together with Dempster, one I hadn’t quite thought through.

Serena stood in the shadow of the front door, looking like someone had just run a knife straight through her heart.

Dempster had been using Serena, and the odds were that he was probably using Joan, too. He had even made a play for me. I didn’t think the man was capable of decent, disinterested affection. But I doubted that would make much of a difference to Serena right now. All that mattered was that the man who had broken her heart was in her home in the company of another woman.

I had spent months privately griping about Colin cosseting Serena, about our relationship being crowded with three when it ought to have been cozy with two. And let’s just say I hadn’t been too happy with her when she had sided with Jeremy, flinging Colin to the wolves. But now…

“Go to her.” I gave Colin a little push. “She needs you.”

Colin did his best imitation of an Easter Island statue, nothing but the finest granite.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I started down, slipping and skidding in my inappropriate heels, only to find myself checked four steps up by Dempster.

“Eloise!” he said volubly, for all the world as though he were the host. I could see Serena over his shoulder, looking shadowed and fragile. It wasn’t lost on me that even though she had grown up in this house, it was Serena who was coming in from outside. Some people, it seemed, were doomed to be perpetual outsiders, like a moth at the far side of a lighted patio, always hovering just out of reach of the light.

I was too generally pissed off to bother with the amenities. “I see you’ve found another way of getting into Selwick Hall.”

Dempster’s chest expanded. “I’m the historical consultant for the film,” he said.

From what I’d seen, calling it a film seemed like a stretch. “I wasn’t talking about the movie. Excuse me.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Dempster said suavely, ignoring my attempt to get around him.

“Why? So you can steal my notes?”

I had to give him this much. He put on a good show of confusion.

“What’s this?” Colin had come down behind me. We might be having our own tiff, but it was a solid front when it came to barbarians at the gate. Colin’s fingers fumbled for mine.

I slid my hand gratefully into his.

“Ask Dempster,” I said, nodding at the other man. “Ask him just what he’s looking for at Selwick Hall.”