The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 9

Madame Bonaparte asked that our theme be nautical in nature, but other than that, we can write whatever we like. Within reason,” Emma amended.

She looked expectantly at Mr. Whittlesby.

Nothing.

Emma tried again. “We can even use your Cytherea. She lives in a casement by the sea. Doesn’t she? Mr. Whittlesby?”

Mr. Whittlesby didn’t answer. Eyes glazed, he was lost in poetic reverie. At least, Emma hoped it was poetic reverie. She had heard rumors about the sorts of aids to invention applied by those of artistic temperament, strange, oriental smokes and potions that dulled the mind but awakened the senses, or so they claimed.

That was all she needed, partnership with an opium eater.

It was all Emma could do not to drop her forehead to her desk and just stay there. She could burrow down among the papers and hide, hide until Kort gave up and cousin Robert went away and tangles of brambles climbed along the walls of her Paris house, leaving only a whisper and a rumor of the crazy American lady who had once lived there.

What had she gotten herself into? She didn’t know the first thing about constructing a theatrical production. She didn’t want to be coaxing a poet into coherence. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to be, but it wasn’t here. Or New York.

Perhaps she ought to find a casement by the sea somewhere.

“Mr. Whittlesby?” Emma waggled her fingers at the poet. “Hello?”

It was all Kort’s fault, Emma decided. Well, maybe not all Kort’s fault. Some of the blame went to Jane. If Jane hadn’t set Whittlesby on her…If Kort hadn’t gotten on her nerves like that…

If, just once, she had been able to curb her own impulsive tongue.

That was what really lay at the crux of it, not Kort, not Jane, not Mr. Whittlesby in his loose shirts and tight breeches, but her own silly tongue, flap, flap, flapping without any reference to rational thought, ruled always by her heart rather than her head. Something would set her off and off she would go, off to Paris, away with Paul, away from Paul, into the arms of Marston, and now this, ricocheting from one drama to the next, with never a moment to catch her breath in between.

Think, Emma, her mother used to say. Emma could hear her voice now, affection and exasperation, all rolled into one. Think before you speak.

Take a deep breath, people suggested. Count to ten. Count sheep. Oh, wait, that was for sleeping. Even in her own head, her tongue ran ahead of her brain. It propelled her into all sorts of absurd situations. Elopements. Scandals. This.

On the plus side, over the years, she had gotten very good at making the best out of bad situations. There was no cloud without a substantial silver lining—even if that lining did more often tend to be silver plate than solid sterling.

All that mattered was that it glitter.

Emma brightened at the thought. Glitter, she understood. She could make this masque glitter. She might not be a Racine or a Corneille, but she could put on a grand and gaudy spectacle with enough fireworks and mechanical effects to make the audience clap and exclaim and ignore the fact that at the core it was all fundamentally hollow.

It shouldn’t be that hard, after all. People would be predisposed to like whatever they set before them, especially with Hortense playing the heroine, and the entire spectacle dedicated to cousin Robert. In fact, she thought, spirits rising, she could send everyone up on stage costumed as dancing aardvarks and this particular audience would still applaud. It didn’t matter what they performed, just that they performed something. It was a very reassuring thought.

“Hark! I heard my name?” Mr. Whittlesby’s words were daft, but his eyes were clear. Not, Emma decided, the eyes of an opium eater. Not that she had ever met an opium eater, but she had the idea that they were meant to be bleary-eyed and vague.

“One word about Cytherea and you were away with the fairies. Love struck?”

“Horror struck! My Cytherea to peddle her wares on the common stage?”

“It’s a very exclusive stage,” said Emma. They could do this. Really, they could. It might even be good, especially if she avoided the extraneous use of aardvarks. “Quite uncommon. Have you been to Malmaison?”

“The deities have yet to invite me to their fair Olympus,” intoned Mr. Whittlesby.

Emma took that as a no. “There’s a lovely little dollhouse of a theatre, right near the main house. It’s quite new, only built the year before last.”

Before that, they used to put on their plays in the house or out in the open in the field outside the house, risking rain and stormy weather. Emma tilted her head, listening to lines long since recited, songs long since sung. It boggled the memory to try to recall how many productions she had seen, how many bit roles she had acted, the laughter, the mishaps, the camaraderie. They had had such splendid times.

The new theatre might have all the conveniences, but it would never be quite the same.

“Madame Delagardie?”

Emma gave a brisk shake of her head. “If not Cytherea, who shall we press into service for our plot?”

“Have you considered as your theme,” Mr. Whittlesby asked, “the New World bringing to the Old the fruits of its bounty? It would,” he said grandly, “be a nice compliment to the envoy, your cousin.”

“Goodness, how very courtly of you. But Madame Bonaparte wanted us to write something nautical in nature.”

Mr. Whittlesby rested both palms on the edge of the desk. “The wonders of the New World,” he said delicately, “would be delivered by ship.”

“Of course,” Emma muttered, feeling like an idiot. “Ships. Water. Nautical. Clever!”

If she kept this up, some day she might even manage a full sentence.

“With waves.” Mr. Whittlesby made his hand go up and down in illustration.

Emma flushed. She had deserved that. “Well, it’s certainly nautical,” she said, doing her best to regain control of the situation. This was meant to be her masque, after all. Whittlesby was just the hired pen, no matter how dashing he looked in those knit pantaloons of his. Emma rested her elbows on the desk, and her chin on her hands. “We’ll need something more than that, something to provide the drama.”

“A chorus of dancing gendarmes?” suggested Mr. Whittlesby blandly.

Emma sat up straighter in her chair as she was hit by an idea, a glorious, wonderful, attention-grabbing beauty of an idea.

“Pirates!” she exclaimed. “Our fleet could be attacked by pirates—nasty, vicious, scimitar-wielding pirates.”

“One seldom hears those terms pronounced in tones of such glee,” murmured Mr. Whittlesby.

Emma ignored him. She could already picture them on stage, vivid in their tattered finery, gold hoops swinging from their ears. Everyone loved pirates. Well, at least in fiction. The real ones were a good deal less attractive. “They can wear bandannas on their heads and carry cutlasses between their teeth, and their ship will be called…well, something scary and nasty. We can figure that out later.”

“Pirates or privateers?” queried Mr. Whittlesby, sounding almost sensible.

“Pirates,” said Emma definitively. “Our ship will be beset on all sides, besieged by the pirates, when in sails the French navy, captained by our hero, to knock the pirates’ heads together, secure the treasure, and save the fair. Now, there’s nautical for you!”

She beamed at Mr. Whittlesby, swept away by the brilliance of her own inspiration. Was this what it felt like to receive the muse? If so, she understood why Mr. Whittlesby spent so much time courting her.

Mr. Whittlesby seemed slightly less swept away. “It has a certain élan.”

“A certain élan? It’s perfect. Admit it.” Emma dipped her pen in the ink, spattering violet drops on Mr. Fulton’s diagram of a new hydraulic pump. “The theme is a nice compliment to both sides and we can have all sorts of fireworks and big booming noises when the various fleets collide.”

“You seem to have forgotten something.”

“Pardon?” Emma was scribbling away busily, her mind far away on the high seas. She hadn’t actually seen the sea since her passage over, a good ten years before, but she had no intention of letting reality be an impediment to imagination. There were such things as wave machines; she had seen them. There would be a storm and a pirate attack.…“We’ll have ships and fireworks and a battle. What can be missing?”

She looked up to meet Mr. Whittlesby’s warm brown eyes. “A heroine.”

“Oh.” Emma ducked her head. He didn’t mean her, of course. There was no reason to feel quite so flustered. “I knew I had you here for a reason. Well, that and the actual writing. You’re quite right, of course. A play wouldn’t be a play without a romance in it. Our heroine can be captured by the pirates. That always goes over well.”

“An American heroine?”

Emma quickly shook her head. “One whose part can by sung by Hortense. But”—now there was an idea—“we might have an American hero. It will be just the thing for my cousin. The younger one,” she specified hastily. Cousin Robert was a charming man, but a bit old to play the romantic lead. If he tried to pull himself up to a tower window, he would probably pull half the scenery down with him. The last thing Emma wanted was to accidentally create an international incident.

Another international incident, that is.

Mr. Whittlesby tapped a finger idly against the corner of the desk. “Does Mr. Livingston intend to remain that long in Paris?”

Sometime in June, cousin Robert had said. Sometime in June was the ship that was meant to take both Kort and Emma away. Just knowing that Kort had booked passage for her without asking her—without so much as mentioning it to her—made Emma see red.

It would serve him right if she conscripted him for a performance without telling him. After all, she just assumed he would want to.

She wouldn’t, she knew. But it was still a lovely thought.

“I can certainly ask him,” Emma said. “The worst he can do is say no.”

“How could anyone possibly flee our shores with such an opportunity to hold him?” There was a strangely sarcastic undertone to Mr. Whittlesby’s words. “Mr. Livingston’s accent will lend a charming verisimilitude to the roll.”

“Art imitating life imitating art? Or do I mean life imitating art imitating life?” Emma bent back over her notes. “Our American hero could be bringing a fleet filled with the bounty of the New World as a pledge to win the heroine’s hand.”

Mr. Whittlesby considered the idea. “Like Marlowe’s promises to his shepherdess? There will I make thee beds of roses / And a thousand fragrant posies, / A cap of flowers, and a kirtle / Embroider’d all with leaves of myrtle.”

Emma remembered the poem from long ago, from sunny afternoons in the apple tree and stolen moments with a book of poetry among the roses at Mme. Campan’s. Paul had read her Ronsard, but Marlowe she had read for herself.

She grinned at Whittlesby. “You forgot A belt of straw and ivy buds / With coral clasps and amber studs.”

For the first time, he looked at her, really looked at her. His eyes weren’t the simple brown Emma had thought; there was a darker circle around the iris, so deep it looked almost purple. His hair fell loose around his face, too long for fashion, with a natural curl any woman would envy.

He met her line and finished it. “And if these pleasures may thee move, / Come live with me and be my love.”

On the mantel, the clock chimed, three dulcet rings, one after the other.

The chimes struck the silence like a mallet against glass, making it shiver and break. Emma jumped up from her chair, wincing at the screeching noise it made as the legs scraped against wood.

Three? How was it three already?

She rustled through the debris on her desk, speaking and searching at the same time, avoiding Whittlesby’s eyes, brown and violet. “I’m afraid I have an engagement for which I’m already late.”

How did her desk manage to eat papers? After she had faithfully promised she would bring it…Of course, she had also faithfully promised she would be on time this time, and look where she still was.

Better to think of obligations and obligations unmet rather than shepherds and love.

She glanced fleetingly at Whittlesby. “Are you free tomorrow morning? And by morning, I mean afternoon.”

“I believe that can be arranged. After some consultation with the muses, that is.”

Ha! There it was. Emma snatched up the sheet of paper before it could get away again. Paul had insisted that inanimate objects couldn’t have malignant motivations, but Emma had extensive proof to the contrary.

“Well, as long as your muses don’t wake up too early, I’m sure we’ll all deal very well together.” Opening her reticule, Emma jammed the paper inside, trapping it by clicking the silver clasps shut. Rising from her chair, she held out a hand to Mr. Whittlesby, like a gentleman transacting business. That was what they were, after all, two partners embarked on a joint venture, as merchants might band together to back a ship or share a cargo. “Thank you, Mr. Whittlesby, for being so generous with your time. Tomorrow morning?”

His words were airy but his grip was firm. “I shall fly to you on the fleet feet of Hermes, Madame.”

“Won’t he want them back?” When he looked at her, she shook her head, making a rueful face. “Never mind. It made sense in my head. Many things do.”

Mr. Whittlesby stood aside to let her precede him through the door. “Shall I see you to your engagement?”

“Loath to leave my company?”

“I meant merely that we might speak more of the masque.”

Why did she always say these things? “I didn’t mean—”

He raised his voice, carrying on as though she hadn’t spoken. “We have sadly neglected the spectacle in favor of the substance. The mechanics,” he specified, when Emma looked at him blankly. “Honesty and art demand that I make full confession of my shortcomings. If spectacle there is to be, it must come from some other soul than me. These modern mechanics are beyond my ken.”

He was rhyming again. He hadn’t been before. For a little while, he had been speaking almost normally. He donned rhyme like armor, keeping her at bay. She could have told him he didn’t need to. She flirted without thinking. That was armor, too.

She knew better than to let herself be lulled by the shepherd’s song. “Come live with me and be my love.” She had believed those words once; she had followed them into an early marriage. With the arrogance of youth, she had ignored the nymph’s reply: “The flowers do fade, and wanton fields / To wayward winter reckoning yields; / A honey tongue, a heart of gall, / Is fancy’s spring, but sorrow’s fall.”

“I had thought to ask Mr. Fulton for help,” Emma said quickly. “The inventor. He created the panorama a few years ago. You must have seen it. Everyone did.”

“Saw it? I wrote a poem about it! ‘An Ode to the Experience of Art in the Round.’ It was much admired in certain circles.”

“I’m sure it was.” With relief, Emma seized on the excuse offered her by the presence of her sedan chair in the courtyard, the bearers ready and waiting. There were still places in Paris where it was easier to take a chair than a carriage. “We do have much to discuss, but, as you see, my chair is already waiting.”

With the ease of long practice, she climbed into her own personal chair, reciting an address to the chairman as she did. She felt the familiar lurch of the chair as they rose to their feet.

Mr. Whittlesby’s face appeared in the chair window. “You go to Madame Hortense?” he asked.

“Yes, to tell her the good news about the masque.” Emma patted her reticule. Paper crinkled beneath her fingers. “And to bring her this.”

Emma nodded to the chairmen and they set the chair into motion, stepping in perfect pace on the uneven cobbles.

“Until tomorrow, Mr. Whittlesby!” she called out through the window.

From the corner of her eye, she could see him standing there still, his open shirt inadequate protection against the chill of an unseasonably cool May day.

When Emma was shown into Hortense’s boudoir, the others were already deep in conversation, a china pot of coffee on the table between them, two cups half full and a third glaringly empty.

Jane Wooliston smiled at Emma over her coffee cup. “Only fifteen minutes late this time. You’re improving.”

Hortense Bonaparte made a face at Jane. “Don’t be unkind!” Rising, she embraced Emma, the differences in their height reversed from when they had first known each other, when Hortense was eleven and Emma fourteen. Now Hortense was the taller of the two, a grown woman and a mother. But she still had the same sweet nature that had endeared her to everyone at Mme. Campan’s. “I’m sure there was an extenuating circumstance. Such as…”

“A stampede of bears across the Champs-Élysées?” suggested Jane. “Typhoons? Hurricanes?”

Emma plumped down with a thump on the yellow silk settee. “A hurricane, indeed! Hurricane Augustus, you mean. Someone”—she looked hard at Jane—“unleashed a poet on me.”

“ ‘Unleashed’ is such a strong term,” said Jane.

“No one ever tells me anything,” complained Hortense, to no one in particular.

It was meant jokingly, but Emma felt a twinge of guilt all the same. If she thought her own position was fraught, Hortense’s was far worse. Bad enough being the First Consul’s stepdaughter, but she was made doubly a Bonaparte by her marriage to Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis. As the family rose in prominence, those who surrounded them were increasingly likely to be toadies, informers, or both. There were few these days whom Hortense could call friend and believe it.

Emma angled herself towards Hortense. “Trust me, you aren’t missing much of anything. You know Augustus Whittlesby, don’t you?”

“The poet?” Hortense perked up. She turned to Jane. “Isn’t he in love with you?”

“Perpetually,” said Emma, before Jane could jump in.

“Poetically,” countered Jane repressively. “It isn’t at all the same thing.”

“Yes, yes, we’ve had this discussion,” said Emma. And Augustus Whittlesby had been so very terrified when he had thought she might be flirting with him. Emma pushed that thought away; it wasn’t a particularly flattering recollection. “What did you tell him about me?” she demanded. “You didn’t say anything about my predilection for his pantaloons, did you?”

“Oh, my,” said Jane, raising one brow. “One afternoon in his company and you’re already away with the alliteration.”

“Don’t change the subject,” said Emma severely. “The poor man is terrified that I intend to seduce him.”

“Do you?” asked Hortense with interest. The intense scrutiny of a jealous husband left her little opportunity to seduce anyone, but she took a generous interest in her friends.

“No! Absolutely not. I’m just using him for his help with my masque.” She wasn’t quite sure when, but somehow, it had become her masque, hers, quite hers. Maybe it had something to do with the pirates.

“So you are writing it!” Hortense put down her cup with a delicate clink. “Maman will be so pleased. She was terrified she might have to ask Caroline to help instead, and you know how Caroline is.” She made an admirable effort to sound cheerful, but there was no mistaking the strain beneath it.

“And Whittlesby,” said Jane. “Is he…helpful?”

“Stop that! And, yes,” Emma admitted. “He is. Or at least he might be. We’ll see. If you don’t stop smirking, I’ll send him back to writing odes for you.” She turned to Hortense. “You will be my heroine, won’t you?”

Hortense took a deep interest in the contents of her coffee cup. “You know I want to be…but it might not be possible.”

“There won’t be much to…Oh.” Emma stared at Hortense’s hand, where it rested gently on her stomach as her friend’s words took on new meaning. “Are you…I mean—”

Hortense nodded. “Yes.”

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t perform.” Women tended to go about in society up until the very last moment, a pregnancy no bar to one’s usual social whirl. The masque was in less than a month. “You won’t even be showing.”

Hortense shook her head, not meeting Emma’s eyes. “Louis wouldn’t like it.”

Emma and Jane exchanged a look. It was no secret that Hortense’s marriage was a sham, her husband delighting in all manner of petty persecutions.

It was a hideous situation. Hortense had never wanted to marry Louis, nor Louis Hortense, but if he wanted a dynasty, Bonaparte needed heirs, and Hortense and Louis were to provide them.

Emma’s heart ached for her friend.

And, just a little bit, for herself. She certainly didn’t envy Hortense her situation, but she did envy her the curve of her hand across her belly, the child sleeping in the nursery, the press of small arms around her neck.

They had been planning to try for a child, she and Paul, towards the end. After all the years of confusion, of separation and reconciliation, they were going to be a family. They had gone so far as to commission a cradle.

But Paul had died. And so had gone not only that hard-won sweetness, but all their other plans with him, all the children and hopes that might have been, leaving her to a cold and barren bed and an empty nursery. It hurt, sometimes, seeing her friends with their children, seeing Hortense, so many years younger than she, with one in the nursery and another on the way. Bonaparte’s sister Caroline, bane of Mme. Campan’s academy, had three.

Oh, she wouldn’t trade. She wouldn’t take Hortense’s Louis or Caroline’s Murat. But it would be nice, so very nice, to have a pair of plump little arms around her neck instead of the cold press of gems, the downy scent of a child’s head instead of perfume.

“When are you due?” she asked, trying to sound cheerful, and fearing that she had failed as badly as her friend.

“In the autumn,” said Hortense. She twisted in her seat to look at Jane. “Will you take my part for me? I’d rather you than Caroline.”

“Won’t your mother mind?” said Jane. “She intended the part for you.”

Hortense tried to make a joke of it. “She would also rather anyone than Caroline. Please? It would be a pleasure for me to have you there.”

What she didn’t say, although the others both understood, was that she wanted allies, people outside the Bonaparte clan and the narrow circle of the court. Both Jane and Emma, aliens as they were, were safe. They had no ambitions to be satisfied, no ulterior motives to be pursued at Hortense’s expense.

There was a pause, and then Jane said, “I’ll hold the part in trust for you. In case you change your mind. The same costumes will fit us both.”

Hortense only shook her head.

“Shall we go shopping next week?” Emma jumped in. “Surely, a new baby is an excellent excuse to treat yourself to a few new hats.”

“You are a dear. But that’s not where the baby is!” Hortense’s eyes brightened and for a moment she looked almost like her old self. Her face fell. “I can’t. I have to be at Saint-Cloud. My stepfather has an important announcement to make.”

“Oh?” Emma said, without interest.

“You’ll hear about it soon enough. Maman has a surprise for you, too, but she wants to tell you herself, so it will have to wait until Malmaison.” Hortense broke off at a barely heard sound, craning her neck towards the door.

It opened slowly, not Louis eavesdropping, nor one of his minions, but Louis-Charles’ nursemaid, who dropped a curtsy, and said, in a low voice, “Madame…”

Hortense was out of her chair before the word was finished.

Emma and Jane followed suit, placing their cups on the tray as they rose.

“Forgive me,” Hortense said, her attention already elsewhere, in the nursery with her child. “Louis-Charles…”

“Of course,” said Jane gracefully.

“Malmaison, then,” said Emma. “I’ll bring sweets for Louis-Charles. Oh, and I nearly forgot! Stupid me!”

Opening her bag, she delved into her reticule, wondering, as she always did, how objects managed to hide in a bag no bigger than a man’s fist.

Hortense signaled to the nursemaid to wait just a moment. “You did bring it, then?”

Emma held out the crumpled piece of paper. “A little the worse for wear, I’m afraid.”

“Even so,” said Hortense, with heartfelt gratitude. “Thank you. What are a few creases with so much at stake?”