The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 2

“You really must stop poking at him like that,” said Jane, as the poet made his offended way out of the room.

“I wasn’t poking,” said Emma.

Her friend gave her a look. Jane had a way with looks.

“Well, maybe just a little,” Emma admitted. “But when he perpetrates poems like that, it’s just too tempting not to poke.”

Jane continued to look, her gray eyes amused.

“What?” said Emma defensively.

“There are better ways to get someone’s attention.”

Emma chose to ignore that. “All I did was offer a little helpful criticism.”

“In the middle of his reading,” pointed out Jane.

“Was it the middle? It’s so hard to tell when it goes on for forty-five cantos.”

“Twenty-two,” corrected Jane. She would know. Whittlesby had dedicated all of them to her, his Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes. “Haven’t you ever thought of just conducting a conversation with him rather than embarrassing him in public? It might better serve your cause.”

Emma wrinkled her nose at her friend. “I don’t have a cause.”

Jane adjusted an already perfectly aligned flounce. “You go to every single one of his readings. Poetic devotion?”

“Consider it a well-developed sense of the absurd?” Emma suggested. “For farce, he’s better than the commedia dell’arte.”

“Almost anything is better than the commedia dell’arte,” said Jane. As Emma had learned, her friend was something of a snob when it came to theatre. It was one of the few flaws in an otherwise perfect personality. Fortunately, Emma had caught Jane reading gothic novels, or else they might never have become friends. “Care to try again?”

“It’s not like that,” said Emma. “Well, it’s not! It’s like…pining after an actor. You don’t mean anything to come of it, but he does look so very nice in his pantaloons.”

“Mmm,” said Jane. “Does he now?”

Emma felt her cheeks flush. “That was meant as a general he, not this he in particular. Although, yes,” she admitted, “he does look very good in his breeches. It’s his one redeeming quality. That and his hair. He has very nice hair. And fine eyes. Oh, stop!”

“Hmm?” said Jane, but the lace of her fan couldn’t quite hide her smile. “Did I do anything?”

“You know what you did,” said Emma severely. “It’s really just a diversion. Something safe and harmless.”

There was nothing like an affair, her friends had told her years ago. How else was a young widow to divert herself? She had tried it and found it wanting. Now all she wanted was a little amusement, just a little game to play, silly and safe.

What could be sillier or safer that Augustus Whittlesby?

It hardly even counted as a tendre. It was just a diversion.

“If you say so,” said Jane, in that maddening way of hers. “Aren’t you to be writing your own magnum opus soon? That ought to engender some artistic fellow feeling with Mr. Whittlesby.”

“Magnum opus?”

“I heard you were commissioned to contrive a play, for a party at Malmaison.”

“Oh, that.” Emma shook her head in dismissal. “Not a play, a masque, just a short piece, more spectacle than verse. Madame Bonaparte suggested it. I told her I would think about it.”

“I won’t accept no,” Madame Bonaparte had said in her lingering Creole drawl, tapping Emma’s cheek in that way she had, that way that made her feel fifteen again, a schoolgirl at Madame Campan’s academy for young ladies, meeting Hortense’s mother for the first time, surrounded by the scent of roses and the warmth of Madame Bonaparte’s smile.

They had been more family to Emma than her own family in those early days after her elopement, Hortense de Beauharnais and her mother. Hortense’s mother had just married again, an army sort, a general named Bonaparte, but they found room for Emma anyway, in the crowded house in the Rue Chantereine. They had taken her in while her own family had roared with disbelief and disapproval, had sheltered her during the disillusionment of those early days of her marriage to Paul, comforted her, helped her, asking no questions and demanding no favors in return.

It was meant as a signal honor, this conferring of the writing of the masque. An honor and a politic move. As much as Hortense and Mme. Bonaparte might love her for herself, Emma didn’t delude herself that the offer was tendered out of affection alone. The only reason she had been asked to contrive the entertainment was because the party was being held in honor of her cousin, the American envoy to France. Bonaparte needed the goodwill of the Americans, and Emma was about as American as they came, at least when it came to being related to envoys. Her uncle, Monroe, had been the first of the envoys to France; her cousin, Robert Livingston, currently held the post. In diplomatic circles, Emma had become known as a person to cultivate, not out of any virtue of her own but as a circumstance of the position of her relations.

She didn’t want it to be like this. She didn’t want to think of position and status and political advantage. Only of old friendship and good fellowship. Was that so much to ask?

“Madame Bonaparte wants the masque as a surprise for cousin Robert.” Emma looked at Jane over her fan. “I suppose that means that half of Paris already knows it, and the rest will be told by nightfall.”

“Three quarters,” corrected Jane, with a smile. “And everyone agog to know what the subject will be and who is to act which part.”

“Would you like to tell me?” Emma quipped. “I’m sure the rest of Paris will know before I do. Madame Bonaparte suggested a nautical theme, but other than that, there were no requirements, other than that there be a nice singing part for Hortense.”

“Is Monsieur Talma to help you?” The famous actor regularly directed plays for the theatre-mad Bonapartes in their private theatre at Malmaison.

“If I agree to do it.”

“Why not?” asked Jane.

Emma toyed with the edge of her fan. Nervous hands, her mother had called it, as if one could be scolded to serenity. “I don’t mind scribbling in my spare time, but it seems cruel to inflict it on a whole audience. Just look at Mr. Whittlesby!”

“But he brings amusement to so many,” said Jane blandly.

“Laughing with him or at him? Ha! My point.” Emma cast around for a change of subject before Jane pressed on about the masque—or about Mr. Whittlesby. Emma pointed with her fan. “Look. That man over there. Another of your admirers? He’s been staring at us for a good ten minutes.”

Seeing he had caught their attention, the man moved hesitantly forward. He was dressed correctly for evening, in breeches, silk stockings, and buckled shoes, but the clothes were all slightly wrong somehow, the coat last season’s cut, the shirt points too low, the cravat functionally but not elegantly tied.

He came to a stop before Emma and Jane, looking from one to the other. “If you’ll pardon the interruption…I was told I could find Madame Delagardie here?”

His French was heavily accented, so heavily accented as to be nearly incomprehensible. Another American. That explained that, then. Emma had become something of a first port of call for American expatriates in Paris, a convenient resource for the complicated manners and mores of the French capital. “Call on Madame Delagardie,” they told them back home. “She’ll arrange the introductions for you and point you to a tailor who won’t rob you blind.” And so she did and was glad to do it. She would have been glad of such guidance once.

Emma let the fronds of her fan tickle her chin as she looked up under her lashes at the newcomer. “Your quest has been successful, then. You’ve found her. Me,” she specified, just in case he hadn’t gotten it. Poor man, he was still looking all befuddled. Paris did that to some people.

This one seemed more than usually bewildered. Twin furrows formed between his wide-set blue eyes. “Emma?” he said. “Emma?”

“Do I know—?” The words died on Emma’s lips. Blue eyes. Very familiar blue eyes. Slim the shoulders, lighten the hair, take away a decade’s worth of lines from eyes and lips.…“Kort?”

“Emma?”

“Gracious heavens!” Rising on her tiptoes, Emma flung her arms around her cousin’s neck, enveloping him in silver spangles and causing a minor stir on the other side of the room. The rumors would be flying, but Emma didn’t care. “It’s you? It’s really you?”

Kort untangled himself, drawing away to arm’s length, clasping her hands lightly in his, his laughter making him look ten years younger again, a boy on a pier on the Hudson. “I was about to say the same to you! I’ve been prowling this mausoleum all evening trying to find you.” He shook his head, taking her in. “Emma. Little Emma.”

Emma smiled up at him. “I haven’t grown so very much. In fact, I’ve shrunk.” She turned one foot, displaying her flat-heeled slippers. The diamond rings on her toes sparkled. “The last time you saw me, I had some help from heels.”

Kort blinked, dazzled by diamonds. He shook his head again. “Emma…I would never have known you. I expected…”

“A thirteen-year-old in calico?” A slight shift in Jane’s stance caught Emma’s attention. “Good heavens, I am being rude! Forgive me, please. Jane, this is my very favorite cousin, Mr. Kortright Livingston. Kort, I have the honor to present you to the most beautiful woman in Paris, Miss Jane Wooliston.”

Jane bent her knees at just the right angle, only so far for a mister, and an American one. As far as Emma could tell, the English were born with protocol in their very bones.

“It is an honor, Mr. Livingston,” said Jane, slipping into English as the others had done. “With so many cousins, to be Madame Delagardie’s favorite must be a signal distinction indeed.”

“You are English, Miss Wooliston?” Kort said, looking at her quizzically. Technically, travel between England and France was prohibited. Jane was something of a special circumstance. Bonaparte admired beauty.

More important, Hortense had taken Jane under her wing. Bonaparte might not respect many peoples’ wishes, but his stepdaughter had a special place in his affections. Sometimes, Emma forgot that Jane hadn’t attended Madame Campan’s with them; she had fit so seamlessly into their fellowship.

“English by birth,” said Jane calmly. “Paris is my adopted home.”

“Miss Wooliston has cousins here,” Emma jumped in before the conversation could become awkward. Although some of Emma’s cousins had remained Tories, her branch of the family had supported the colonies’ split with Britain; even thirty years on, feelings towards the British could not be termed warm. Kort had always minded terribly that he had been born too late to take an active part in the Revolution. “You’ve met Monsieur de Balcourt, I think. Or if you haven’t, you will.” She wafted her fan around the music room, with its oversize sarcophagi and smirking sphinxes. “This is his home.”

Kort looked dubiously at a mummy case. “It’s all very…exotic.”

Emma remembered the family homestead on the Hudson, decorated in the last word of pre-Revolutionary style, all clean, classical lines and plain dark wood. Her mother didn’t go in for fads. Kort’s mother, her own mother’s second cousin, considered herself somewhat more stylish, cutting a dash in Albany, but even she would have seen nothing like this.

“It’s called Retour d’Egypte,” explained Emma, “in honor of the First Consul’s expedition to Egypt.”

“Hence the name,” contributed Jane blandly. “If you will excuse me, there’s a wounded soul I must soothe.”

Emma followed her gaze to the doorway. Whittlesby clasped his scroll to his heart, looking soulfully at Jane.

Was it silly that it stung, just a bit?

“Wounded soul, indeed!” Emma turned back to Jane, the silk of her skirt swirling around her legs with a very satisfying swish. “It was only a flesh wound.”

“You gouged his ego,” teased Jane.

“Yes, but I left his heart alone,” said Emma severely. “You’ll lead him on if you continue to encourage him so.”

Jane made a face. “That depends on whether you believe Petrarch really loved his Laura. I’m nothing more than a poetic object of expedience.”

Emma grinned. “A muse of convenience?”

“Every poet must have one,” said Jane. “Mr. Livingston.”

With a cordial nod to Emma’s cousin, she crossed the room to rejoin the poet, accepting the arm he held out to her.

Emma watched them as they made their way across the room. Jane was tall, but the poet was a head taller. He had to bend to speak to her, the linen of his shirt stretching across a back that was broader than it had any right to be. Hefting a quill must be better exercise than it seemed.

“What was that all about?” Kort asked.

Emma yanked her attention back to her cousin.

“Oh, nothing,” she said hastily. “Just a poet.”