The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 30

“Mr. Whittlesby?” It took several moments for Augustus to realize that someone was speaking to him, and still more for the source of the voice to register. Jane’s serene smile was beginning to look a little ragged around the edges as she said, “You had promised me a word about my lines.”

“Of course, my pulchritudinous princess,” Augustus said mechanically. Emma was on the other side of the room, sharing a coffeepot with the soon to be former American envoy to France, the elder Mr. Livingston. She was not looking at Augustus. It had been nearly twenty hours since they had last spoken. Not that Augustus was counting. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”

“One would never be able to tell,” murmured Jane.

“I beg your pardon.” Augustus fluttered his sleeves in the old style, but the move felt forced. “Affairs of verse have weighed heavily upon me.”

Affairs, but not affairs of verse.

Emma had kept her word; there had been no midnight raids on his bedroom by the Ministry of Police. She had kept her word in other ways as well. With the masque rapidly approaching, she had managed to ever so subtly pretend he didn’t exist. Oh, yes, she said the right things, made the right noises about being terribly excited about the performance and so very grateful to Mr. Whittlesby for his expert assistance with the script, but she said it in her society voice, glib and meaningless, as if he were merely the hired poet the world believed him to be.

There was only an hour left until the masque. The primary members of the cast, with the exception of Jane, had already made their way to the theatre, to be outfitted and assume their roles each in their own individual style. Miss Gwen had last been seen marauding somewhere out back, a ragtag band of pirates trailing along behind her. Bonaparte was in his council chamber, closeted with the cream of the Admiralty, while the remainder of the party, those involved in neither playacting nor policy, partook of coffee and cakes in the drawing room prior to the evening’s promised spectacle. There was to be an alfresco supper served after the performance, supper and a fireworks display reputedly a secret but already known to everyone.

The younger Mr. Livingston was already in the theatre, assuming his theatrical breeches, but the elder Mr. Livingston was partaking of coffee. Marston, Augustus noticed, was also hovering near, but never quite next to, Emma. Augustus scowled. It went unnoticed by either party. Emma had her gaze resolutely fixed on her cousin Robert, as he waxed lyrical about the benefits of the territory of Louisiana, the purchase he had negotiated with Bonaparte.

Blast it all, no one was that fascinated by the Mississippi River.

Jane shook out her script, wafting it underneath Augustus’s nose. “It’s this rhyme,” she said loudly. “It doesn’t quite scan.” In a softer voice, she added, “I have promising tidings.”

“Of what?” murmured Augustus, rubbing his nose. “My dear lady, you have got the pronunciation wrong. If you simply change the stress on the last vowel, you will find it rhymes perfectly well.”

“How inventive!” exclaimed Jane, then dropped her voice. “Our inventor. He is, it seems, dangerously disaffected with the current regime.” And then, more loudly, “But doesn’t that change the meaning of the word?”

“Oh, fair one, have you not heard of the term poetic license?” Augustus bent his head over the script. Good God, they had written drivel, he and Emma. But what fun they had had doing it. Those long afternoons in her book room, laughing over a particularly ridiculous turn of phrase…Augustus yanked himself back to the present. “Will he defect?”

“I grant you no license, Mr. Whittlesby, poetic or otherwise, save those accorded by good manners,” said Jane severely. “All it will take is a word in his ear. I heard him speaking to Emma yesterday.”

Emma. Automatically, Augustus’s eyes sought her out. She was still seated by the elder Mr. Livingston, partaking of coffee from one of Mme. Bonaparte’s delicate china cups. She wore one of her extravagant costumes, white satin decorated with silver flowers embroidered around glittering diamond centers, but, for once, her demeanor failed to echo the sparkle of her costume. There was an unaccustomed fragility about her, in the delicate bones of her shoulders, in the hollows below her cheekbones.

“Yesterday,” Augustus repeated. “Yesterday?”

“Yes, in the theatre,” said Jane, frowning at him. Inattention was not acceptable. Jane preferred to say her piece only once. “He reiterated his concerns to Mr. Livingston this morning.”

Yesterday. Augustus remembered Fulton’s mutinous expression as he stormed out of the summerhouse. If he hadn’t been so rattled by Emma, if he had stopped to consider the ramifications of that then…

“Livingston,” added Jane, “counseled caution, at least until his official term as envoy is done. Mr. Fulton seemed disinclined to heed him.”

If he had had his wits about him, would there have been any need to steal the plans?

If he had spoken to Mr. Fulton then—subtly, cleverly—there would have been no need to steal the plans. There would have been no need to puzzle over them. There would have been no need to hide them beneath his coverlet. If the infernal plans hadn’t been beneath his coverlet…

Emma would have needed to be told sooner or later, Augustus argued with himself. Given his imminent departure for England, the operative word was “sooner.”

But did it have to be just then?

His body was firmly of the opinion that it had been very poor timing, indeed.

“I infer that,” said Jane, “from the fact the Mr. Fulton was already packing his baggage, even though the party does not end until tomorrow. When I saw him, he was tearing apart the summerhouse, looking for his plans.”

Augustus straightened. “Looking for his plans?”

Jane regarded him levelly. “They seem to have gone missing.”

The careful construction wasn’t wasted on Augustus. He had just been scolded, in the most imperceptible of fashions.

“No, they haven’t,” Augustus said grimly. They would have to find Fulton, find him and bring him over before he could make a scene. “But if you think he can be—”

“Insupportable!” The door to the drawing room banged open. “Utterly insupportable!”

Mr. Fulton was far from his usual dapper self. His curly hair was in disarray, his jacket misbuttoned.

“You were saying?” murmured Jane.

“Damn,” muttered Augustus.

Fulton made a beeline for the older Mr. Livingston. “I wish to make a formal complaint,” he announced.

With his jowls jowly and his coat pleasantly creased, Livingston looked like an affable country squire, but the warning look he gave Fulton belied his easygoing air. “Let’s just discuss this ourselves, shall we?” he said comfortingly. “Have a cup of coffee, Robert. Or would you prefer chocolate?”

“I don’t want coffee, or chocolate. My plans.” The word came out as a lament, Hecuba crying for Troy. “My plans. They’re gone.”

Emma sat silently, her head down over her coffee cup, her face hidden. Horace de Lilly paused in his game of cards. Marston drifted closer.

“I call this a travesty,” said Fulton, refusing the chair Livingston offered him. “Our negotiations may have come to a standstill, but simply to appropriate the fruits of a man’s labor— Not that it should surprise anyone! The very art on the walls—”

Livingston neatly cut him off before he could say anything that might cause an international incident. “Are you sure they’re gone, Robert?” he said soothingly. “Might you not have misplaced them?”

“No,” said Fulton firmly. “I know where they were and they’re not there anymore.”

Emma lifted her head. “I have them,” she said flatly.

Both men turned to look at her in surprise.

“You?” said Mr. Livingston.

Emma set down her coffee cup with a distinct clink. She had missed the center of the saucer. Augustus could hear it rattling as it rocked back and forth.

“Yes,” she said.

Having made her decision, she wasn’t going to do it by halves. Her back straightened and her eyes fixed on her cousin, wide and blue and guileless. She didn’t look at Augustus, but Augustus knew she was aware of him, as he was of her.

As Augustus watched, she went on, “I am so sorry, cousin Robert, Mr. Fulton. You must have left them backstage when you helped me with the wave machine. I stumbled upon them and put them away for you.” She made a self-deprecating face. “And then I forgot to give them to you. I feel so terribly foolish.”

It wasn’t a brilliant performance. She was too stiff, too self-conscious, but Livingston and Fulton were too caught up in their relief over the safe return of the plans to notice. Did anyone else? Jane, certainly. Her eyes flickered from Augustus to Emma and back again, her expression assessing. But other than she…No. Augustus didn’t think so. They were safe. Because of Emma.

“In that case…” said Mr. Livingston, obviously relieved. It was no small thing to have to accuse an emperor of appropriating other peoples’ property, even if he had and did. “Crisis averted, I believe, Robert?”

“Hardly a crisis.” Slightly red about the ears, Mr. Fulton tucked his chin into his cravat. “I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly. But it is a relief to know they haven’t gone astray. I spent a great deal of time on that project.”

“I could get them for you now if you like.…” Emma pushed back her chair and made as though to rise.

Mr. Fulton put out a hand to forestall her. “There’s no urgency. I know you have a great deal to do in the theatre before tonight.”

“Don’t you mean you have a great deal to do in the theatre tonight?” Emma teased. “I’m relying on you to run that brilliant mechanism for me, Mr. Fulton. I shall just sit in the audience and applaud wildly at every clap of thunder.”

“And drown out my thunder, clap by clap?” protested Mr. Fulton. As an attempt at banter, it was weak. Mr. Fulton’s mind was clearly elsewhere.

“Yes,” murmured Augustus to Jane, intuiting her unspoken question. “I’ll speak to him.”

“Good,” said Jane.

“Thank you for retrieving my documents,” Mr. Fulton was saying to Emma. “I really should be—” He wafted vaguely at the door, the one that led through the billiard room to the entrance hall.

“Yes, and so should I,” agreed Emma, standing. “I have actors to herd. They’re worse than cats.”

“We look forward to the fruits of your labors,” said Mr. Livingston kindly.

“Don’t look forward too much,” warned Emma.

With that parting sally, she set off in the opposite direction, towards the long gallery and the side door that opened to the theatre. Augustus looked from Fulton to Emma and back again—Fulton moving one way, Emma the other.

Drawing a deep breath, he moved to follow Fulton.

Emma managed to make it across the drawing room into the gallery before tripping over her own feet.

Everything felt strangely out of shape, her perspective skewed, her own perceptions no longer to be trusted. The edges of objects softened and twisted; shadows masqueraded as substance, and substance as shadow; and there was no way of being sure that anyone was what he or she seemed.

She wasn’t even sure about herself.

Why had she done that just now? She might have kept her head down and let events play themselves out. They probably wouldn’t have traced the plans to Augustus. Mr. Fulton was an inventor and everyone knew that inventors were crazy anyway, nearly as crazy as poets. She had done her bit—and more!—in the name of their former friendship by the simple act of not betraying him. He, after all, had betrayed her. He had betrayed her and he had used her—or was it the other way around? Not that it mattered. She had been over it from every angle, tossing and thrashing in her bed, knowing that no amount of champagne would ever put her to sleep this time.

He had betrayed her. She kept having to remind herself of that, like a child’s lesson learned by rote. It should hurt more, shouldn’t it? She should be angry, angry as she had been at Paul. Instead, she felt curiously numb.

Emma pushed open the door that led out of the gallery to the side of the house, the narrow path along which Augustus had pursued her only two nights ago, wanting to talk about the kiss. How mammoth that had loomed then and how insignificant it seemed now. She had been fussing and fretting over a kiss while Augustus played with the affairs of nations.

Had she been nothing more than that to him? Something small and insignificant, a pin on a map?

This much is true, he had said. But how could she believe him? She had lost all faith in her ability to distinguish between truth and illusion.

“Emma!” A hand closed over her shoulder, hard, jerking her to a halt. “There’s no need to run away like that.”

Emma blinked up at Georges Marston. His ruddy face was bent towards hers as he oozed self-satisfaction out of every pore.

“Surely,” he said smugly, “there’s no need to be shy now. I knew you weren’t indifferent. I knew you were just playing coy.” He gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze.

Emma wriggled out from under his hand. “I beg your pardon?”

“Just now. Covering for me like that. Just playing hard to get, weren’t you, you clever thing, you?”

Emma wondered when the world had gone mad. Had it always been this way, and she just hadn’t noticed? “I don’t understand.”

“Come now, Emma,” Georges said exuberantly. “You can drop the act now. I know why you did it. And you won’t regret it. Once I sell them, you’ll be set up like a queen—no! Like an empress. Not this empress,” he amended. He gave a derisive laugh. “She’s not going to last long.”

Emma gaped at him. Georges, being Georges, took it for admiration.

Leaving aside the obvious insult to Mme. Bonaparte…“Just what are you talking about?” Emma demanded.

“The plans!” said Georges. “The plans! Tucked safe away in my—well, you don’t need to know that.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Least said, soonest mended.”

The more he said, the less sense it made. “You have the plans.”

“I got them last night. From Fulton’s room. He didn’t even bother to hide them.” Georges’ voice was rich with contempt for people too stupid to know when they might be burgled. “They were right there in the open.”

Emma’s mind raced over the possibilities. It wasn’t entirely impossible. What if Augustus, struck by a fit of remorse—a not entirely displeasing prospect—had replaced the plans in Fulton’s room after she had left him? What if that had been his way of trying to earn back her good judgment? Or, said the more cynical part of her mind, simply a means of protecting himself in the event that she broke her word and set the authorities on him. It would be very hard to prove anything without the files actually in his room.

The more she thought about it, the more plausible it seemed. In which case—if she could have, Emma would have banged her head against the side of the building—by oh so nobly and foolishly protecting Augustus, she had, in actuality, been protecting Georges.

Who said there was no justice in this world? She had just been served it, twice over, with a garnish of sour grapes.

“I have a buyer all set up,” Georges was saying smugly. “My contact in Kent. Usually, I would send a courier, but with a package this important, I plan to escort it personally. Along with a few cases of third-rate brandy. They’ll drink anything, those English, if you tell them it’s French, and pay through their teeth for the privilege.”

He grinned wolfishly at his own cleverness.

“You’re selling Mr. Fulton’s plans to the English?”

“Not so loud! Who else did you think would pay so well? I offered it to the Austrians, but they had no interest,” he added.

Emma could see where they wouldn’t, being largely landlocked.

There appeared to be one obvious issue. “Isn’t that treason?’

“Treason is such a nasty word. Good business is what I call it. Besides, it would never have worked anyway, that machine. I’m doing the Emperor a favor by seeing it diverted. He should be paying me to rid him of it.”

Mr. Fulton was many things, but he wasn’t a hopeless dreamer. If he said something worked, it generally did.

“What’s wrong with it?” asked Emma cautiously.

“It’s meant to be a ship that sails under the water.” Marston’s expression showed just what he thought of that crazy idea. “But these plans I found, they don’t look like any type of ship I’ve ever seen.”

Emma remembered the plans she had seen in Augustus’s bed. She would have a very hard time forgetting them. There had been a long, tubular structure, certainly not her image of a sailing vessel, but anyone with some imagination and some experience of the sea could imagine how it might be intended to work. And Georges, for his sins—especially for those sins enjoyed in the company of Bonaparte’s brother-in-law—was in charge of a regiment at Boulogne, overseeing Bonaparte’s prized new naval base.

“It was all little pieces,” he complained. “A box and a drum and a pistol. Is the drum meant to float? At that rate, we can just close a man in a crate, hand him a pistol, drop him in the Seine, and see what happens.”

“It would have to be a waterproofed crate,” said Emma, but her mind was busily turning over the elements Georges had just described.

A box, a drum, a pistol. Lots of little pieces.

Georges had stolen the plans for the wave machine.