The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 24

“Private?” Emma echoed.

Behind her, on the blanket, Hortense studiously pretended not to listen. She was not listening so hard, Emma could practically hear it.

Emma scowled at Augustus. “Surely, whatever it is, you can tell me here.”

“There are some things one prefers to discuss without an audience,” Augustus said circumspectly.

That was certainly informative.

“You plan to abandon poetry and set up as a mantua maker,” Emma extrapolated extravagantly. “No, no, wait, don’t tell me. You have a sudden desire to go prospecting for gold in the outer Antipodes, accompanied only by your faithful bearer, Calvin.”

“Calvin?” If she had hoped to annoy Augustus into an admission, the strategy failed. Her companion conducted a leisurely survey of the grounds, his gaze moving impartially over the revelers, some lounging on blankets, others, less daunted by the warmth of the sun, playing an impromptu game of tag.

“What would you prefer?” Emma grumbled. “Hobbes?”

“Solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short?” Augustus raised a brow. “Why not? We have a fine exhibition of the state of nature here before us.”

One of Mme. Bonaparte’s younger ladies stumbled on the hem of her skirt, tumbling into the grasp of the gallant who had been chasing her. She squeaked as he squeezed her, and dealt him a resounding slap.

Oh. Emma grimaced. Maybe that hadn’t been tag.

“Hardly poor,” she said. There were enough jewels in evidence to fund a small revolution. “Or solitary.”

“You didn’t say anything about brutish.” Augustus regarded the assemblage with a jaded eye. “This lot won’t go in until the food runs out. We’ll have no privacy back here.”

As if in illustration, the guitar struck up again, discordantly. Oh, dear, Lieutenant Caradotte had gotten hold of it. He would insist on playing, despite being tone-deaf. Emma winced as he struck a chord that sounded like an offended feline on a bad day. There was a thud and a squawk as someone tried to wrestle the guitar away.

“Madame Delagardie!” Someone came jogging up. It was another of Bonaparte’s aides—no, not an aide anymore, but he had been three years ago during one of their endless summers at Malmaison. He was something important now, but Emma couldn’t remember what. To her, he would always be the aide whose pantaloons had split during a game of prisoner’s base. Sans Culottes, they had called him for weeks. “Come join us for blindman’s buff!”

Emma waved back, all too aware of Augustus’s hand on her other elbow. Privacy, he had said. Privacy for what? They had agreed there was nothing to talk about. It might be nothing more sinister than plans for the masque, an addendum to the script, a change of cast. There were a hundred and one innocent reasons he might want to speak to her.

“Later,” she called back to Sans Culottes. What was his name? “It’s too warm.”

“See?” murmured Augustus. “You’re far too much in demand. I won’t have five minutes without someone dragging you away for a game or a gossip.”

“I’m not so much in demand as all that. We could speak here. There’s no place so private as among a crowd.”

A yard from them, Caradotte crashed onto the turf, triumphantly raising the guitar in both hands. “Nice try!” he yelled back.

“Doesn’t someone want to call him out?” a lady called out from her semi-prone position on a blanket.

“Lutes at ten paces!” shouted someone else.

Augustus didn’t need to say anything. His point had been made for him.

Emma sighed. “We could go to the theatre.”

The minute the words were out of her mouth, she knew she had made a mistake. They stared at each other for an awful, frozen moment. The last time they had been in the theatre together—well, the less of that, the better.

“The front of the theatre, I mean,” Emma babbled. “The large part with the stage in it.”

“Er, yes,” said Augustus, and Emma felt her cheeks going even redder. What was wrong with her? She had managed to conduct an entire affair with Georges with complete sangfroid, and an accidental kiss had her bumbling and babbling. “I did rather get that. Miss Gwen is rehearsing her pirates. Remember?”

“That’s right.” Emma seized on the distraction with relief. “What was it she called them? She said they were insufficiently fearsome.”

“I believe the exact phrase was couldn’t pillage their way out of a wet paper parcel,” said Augustus delicately.

They grinned at one another, completely in accord.

Emma felt something catch at the back of her throat. She had missed him. She had missed this. Which was absurd, she knew. How could you miss someone when you hadn’t been apart?

“I never understood why they were in that wet paper parcel,” Emma said, her voice constricted. She cleared her throat. “It sounded like a very uncomfortable venue.”

“Perhaps they couldn’t afford a proper ship,” suggested Augustus. “They might be penurious pirates.”

“You’re alliterating again,” Emma pointed out. “You needn’t do that with me.”

They had been strolling rather aimlessly along the side of the house, but at that, Augustus paused. “No,” he said. “Not with you.”

There was a strange note in his voice. Emma let her own steps dawdle to a halt. She looked up at him quizzically. He was looking at her, none of the usual mockery in his face. There were twin furrows between his brows, and he suddenly seemed older than she had thought him to be.

“What is it?” she asked. “What’s wrong?”

Whatever it was, he thought better of it. He shook his head, moving briskly along. “Where shall we go? The back of the house is occupied and the house itself is swamped with people.”

Oh, yes. Their mysterious talk. Despite her growing unease, Emma strove to keep her voice light. “I draw the line at the stables. And the gardeners are very protective of the greenhouses.”

Augustus didn’t look at her. “What about the rose garden?”

It wasn’t an unreasonable suggestion. Leaving aside the romantic connotations of roses, it was well away from both the revelers in the back and the pirates in the theatre. A long alley of trees led down one side, shading the area and separating the roses from the bustle of the drive. It was as private as they could hope to be, with only one small caveat.

“Is the Emperor working in the summerhouse?” Emma asked, as they turned their steps in that direction. “If he is, we might want to stay out of the way.”

“Summerhouse?”

She’d forgotten that Augustus didn’t know Malmaison. Sometimes, it felt as though he had always been there. “It’s at the end of the alley,” said Emma, “just past the roses. On fine days, the First Consul—I mean, the Emperor—brings his work out there. As long as the windows are closed, we should be all right, though.”

“Mm-hmm,” said Augustus, which might have meant anything from yes to no to maybe. Emma took it as yes.

Emma glanced at Augustus’s shuttered face, doubly screened by the long fall of curly hair. One thing was certain: She wasn’t getting anything out of him until he was good and ready to speak.

They cut around the far side of the house from the theatre, along an alley of trees leading towards Mme. Bonaparte’s famous roses and the nondescript, octagonal façade of the summerhouse. Some of the roses, the earlier sorts, had already unfurled their petals to the sun. The leaves were stiff and glossy. There were rare and exotic varieties, Emma knew, smuggled in from all around the world, whisked into France in direct contravention of the blockades. The authorities knew to turn a blind eye when it came to Mme. Bonaparte’s garden.

Emma knew she ought to know more about it, to be able to appreciate the distinctions of this rose versus that, but her knowledge of horticulture was limited to “Ooh, aren’t the pink ones lovely!” A connoisseur might appreciate the niceties of specific species; Emma had only a jumbled impression of color and the heavy, heady scent of roses, all the more intense in the hazy heat of the day.

The low buzz of the bees was broken only by the sound of voices from the summerhouse, too low to be distinguishable, just loud enough to jar the peace of the garden. Emma could hear the earnest tones of Mr. Fulton’s voice, followed by the Emperor’s sharp bark, then another voice, softer, interceding. It must be very hot in there, with that many people crammed inside around the small table.

A bee bumbled past, drunk with pollen.

Emma looked at Augustus, who wasn’t looking at her. “All right,” she said. “We’re here now.”

Augustus clasped his hands behind his back. He paced towards the summerhouse, head bent, body angled forward, pausing for what felt like a very long while. The silence stretched between them, broken only by the staccato rhythm of voices from the summerhouse and the low hum of bees among the roses.

Emma’s skirt brushed against a rosebush, catching on thorns. She yanked it free again, making the flowers shake. The bee buzzed angrily and zigzagged away.

She knew how it felt.

The day was humid, despite the hot sunshine. Drops of sweat dripped down beneath her bodice, catching between her breasts. There would be a storm soon, if she wasn’t much mistaken. She could feel it in the prickling of the skin below her gloves, in the frizzled hairs at the nape of her neck.

“Do you have something to say,” Emma burst out, “or would you rather just stand there?”

For a moment, she thought Augustus might choose the latter. Then he turned abruptly on one heel. “Are you marrying your cousin?”

Emma gawped at him, the minor irritants of sweat and skin forgotten. “What?”

“Livingston,” Augustus said flatly. “The younger one. Are you marrying him?”

“It would be very hard for me to marry the older one,” said Emma sharply, “given that he’s been quite happily married since 1770.”

Augustus gave her a look. “That’s not an answer.”

“I’m not sure you deserve one.” Emma clawed at the itch on her arm, thwarted by her own gloved fingers. She squinted at Augustus, the sun full in her eyes. “I thought you were dying of a mysterious disease—or at least on the verge of fleeing the country. Instead, you drag me all the way out here to ask that?”

Augustus was dark against the sun. “Horace de Lilly told me you refused the Empress’s offer of a position in her household. Is it true?”

Emma raised a hand to shield her eyes. “What is this? Let’s interrogate Emma?” She was hot and itchy and irritable and unaccountably aggravated at Augustus, for reasons she didn’t quite understand and didn’t want to. “Yes. Yes, I did.”

He looked like Cotton Mather ready to cast out a sinner. “Because you’re going back to America.”

“Don’t worry,” said Emma flippantly. “I’m not going anywhere until after the masque is done. It won’t affect you.”

“So you are—” Augustus stumbled a step back, his expression a study in confusion. “I didn’t think—I didn’t imagine you would really—”

“Ever go anywhere?”

That was her, everyone’s friend, Mme. Delagardie, always there, always available, excellent for confidences, fine to kiss when one was disappointed in love, but have a life or a love of her own? Not likely.

“You didn’t imagine I would really what? Marry? I may not be your vision of Cytherea, but that doesn’t mean that no one wants to scale my tower.”

Lies, all lies, but she was too angry to care.

Augustus’s mouth opened and closed. Twenty-two cantos and she had rendered him speechless. “I never said that. I never meant—”

“You never mean anything,” retorted Emma. “That’s just the problem. Words, words, words, all sound and fury signifying nothing. Heaven help you if you ever had to shout for help. You wouldn’t be able to put it in less than five cantos. You’d be drowned before you got out the cry.”

Augustus ignored her ramblings. “Does he love you?” he asked in a low voice.

“Who?” She wasn’t sure why she felt the need to draw this out, but she did. Revenge, perhaps. Revenge for dragging her out here, for making her worry, for peppering her with inconsequentialities, for pretending he cared who loved her and who didn’t. What did it matter? He wasn’t offering to take up the torch himself.

“Livingston.” Augustus took a step forward. “Does he love you?”

Oh, Lord, why was she doing this? Emma pressed her eyes together so she wouldn’t have to look at him. The sun made strange patterns against the lids.

“As a cousin. He loves me as a cousin. That’s all. I’m not marrying him. I’m not going to America.” She forced out the words, tasting dust on her tongue, at the back of her throat. “Everything is exactly as it was.”

Augustus drew in a deep breath, a long, rumbling breath that was a paragraph all of its own. “I’m glad,” he said softly.

Was she meant to be glad he was glad? Emma felt her stomach clench with hurt and loss and confusion, all mixed together like cheap punch, the sort that burned the back of your throat and gave you a headache the following morning.

“I’m so glad my life has been arranged for your convenience,” she said tartly.

Augustus looked at her, relief written plainly across his face. “You’ve become one of my closest friends. Hell, you are my closest friend. I would have hated to lose you.”

Emma couldn’t find it in her to respond. She knew he meant what he was saying, and meant it with all the fullness of his heart, but it scraped at the raw edges of her emotions. He pronounced it as though it were an honor to be bestowed upon her, the Order of the Most Excellent Friend, as though his feelings were all that mattered, his friendship, his loss. What about hers? What if she had wanted to marry Kort? Was his friendship alone meant to be compensation enough?

She should be glad, she knew, glad he cared, glad he counted her a friend, glad he didn’t want her to go away, but, instead, she was tired and frustrated and dangerously out of sorts.

Now that he had her life arranged to his satisfaction, Augustus was free to indulge his curiosity, “If you’re not leaving, why not join Madame Bonaparte?”

Emma didn’t want to talk about it. If she were being honest, she didn’t want to talk to him. She shrugged. “I didn’t feel like it.”

Augustus raised a brow. “You didn’t feel like it.”

“If Madame Bonaparte was satisfied with my reasons, what is it to you? I wasn’t aware that I owed you an account of my actions.”

Oblivious and undaunted, Augustus studied her face with the sort of curiosity usually reserved by naturalists for their specimens. “If you’re not marrying your cousin and you’re not joining Madame Bonaparte’s household—what are you doing?”

Emma’s lips pressed together. “I am taking a lover and moving to Italy, where I intend to join a traveling commedia dell’arte troupe. All right?”

Her voice veered dangerously high on the last word. She needed to leave. She needed to leave now, before she said something ridiculous or, even worse, started crying for no reason at all other than the sun and her aching head and the drops of sweat like slow torture, dripping, dripping, dripping between her skin and her chemise, making her itch and ache and want to stomp on something.

She turned on her heel, prepared to stomp back to the house, when Augustus said something that stopped her in her tracks.

“You’re running away,” he said.

His voice was soft and low, like the prickle of sweat against her skin, barely there, but impossible to ignore.

She should ignore it, she knew. Just ignore it and walk away. She was in a foul, foul mood and anything she said right now she would only regret later. She knew that, in the sensible, rational part of her brain.

But she turned anyway. Turned and said, incredulously, “What?”

Augustus folded his arms across his chest, looking offensively cool and comfortable in his billowing linen shirt, surveying her with all the superiority of his extra inches.

“You’re running away,” he repeated. “You won’t marry your cousin and you won’t join the court. You won’t go back to America, but you won’t settle at Carmagnac. You didn’t even want to write the masque until someone cornered you into it.”

“A pity I didn’t trust my judgment about that,” Emma shot back. “We might have been spared a great deal of bother.”

“No risk, no reward,” said Augustus coolly. “You aren’t willing to take the risks, so you forgo the rewards. You play with people and ideas, but you drop them before they get too serious—in the nicest possible way, of course. You wouldn’t want to upset anyone.”

“You might want to give that some consideration.” Emma could feel herself shaking, literally shaking, from her slippers right up to her sleeves. The buzzing of the bees had become a buzzing in her ears. “Not upsetting anyone.”

“You want everyone nice and calm and at a safe remove.” He was looking at her as though she were a butterfly pinned to a paper. It made Emma want to scratch him. “You won’t even have it out with that cretin Marston. You won’t tell him no, will you? You just placate him and put him off and hope he won’t cause a scene.”

Emma’s voice was shaky with rage. “My relationship with Georges has nothing to do with you.”

Augustus took a step forward, holding her in his gaze like a duelist with his opponent in his sights. “Your relationship with Georges has nothing to do with Georges, does it? You only picked him because you knew you wouldn’t have to keep him.”

The smug certainty in his voice made Emma want to slap him. “You know nothing about it,” she said coldly.

“I know you,” he said, and then, unforgivably, “you’re hiding.”

“Hiding?” Emma echoed. There was a red haze in front of her eyes. “I’m hiding? What about you?”

There was an old adage about hornet’s nests. Augustus had the uneasy feeling that he had just kicked one.

“This isn’t about me,” Augustus said hastily.

In fact, this wasn’t supposed to be about either of them. This was supposed to be about Mr. Fulton and his mysterious plans. For the mission, he had told himself, all for the mission. It would arouse suspicion for a man alone to be loitering by the Emperor’s summerhouse. But a man and a lady, in a rose garden…who would remark on that? Not to mention the niggling little matter of Horace de Lilly’s bombshell about Emma’s supposed betrothal.

It had been such a nice, tidy little plan: eavesdrop on the Emperor, reassure himself that this American marriage was just another nonsensical rumor.

Until it wasn’t. Tidy, that is. In fact, it was starting to feel distinctly out of control. What in the blazes had he been thinking? He hadn’t been thinking. It had just all followed, one thing after another. It had rattled him, thinking she might actually be going back to America, marrying that taciturn cousin of hers. The rest had just…come out.

“This isn’t about me,” he repeated.

“Oh, isn’t it?” said Emma. Her gloved hands were clenched into fists at her sides and there were two bright red spots in her cheeks that had nothing to do with rouge.

“You’re going to get sunburnt, standing out here like this,” said Augustus solicitously. “Perhaps we had better—”

“And whose fault would that be?” In her anger, Emma seemed to grow a good three inches. It took Augustus a moment to realize she actually had. She was standing on tiptoe in her ridiculous, frivolous, ribbon-trimmed slippers. That was going to hurt in a moment or two, but for the moment, she was buoyed up with rage. “But, no, you had to drag me out here to ask ridiculous questions and cast aspersions on my character. Heaven forbid you tear me to bits in the comfort of a shady drawing room. No. It had to be out here.”

“I wasn’t trying to tear you to bits,” Augustus said soothingly. “I just wanted—”

“I know,” said Emma viciously. “To talk. Fine. We can talk. Do you want to talk about running away? Let’s talk about you. A grown man and you don’t even own a waistcoat!”

That wasn’t fair. “I own a waistcoat,” he said defensively. “I don’t see where that—”

“Don’t you? You can’t even commit to an outer garment, much less anything else, and you talk to me about running away?”

It was time to get this conversation back where it belonged. “I was simply pointing out,” Augustus said in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “that you have managed to dodge every single commitment that’s been presented to you. If not hiding, what would you like to call it?”

Emma went off like a grenade. “You. You have the nerve to stand here and ask me that? What do you know about commitment? I’ve kept Carmagnac going all these years. I have a house. I have dependents. I have responsibilities.”

Did she want to talk about responsibilities? He’d say saving England from invasion was a jolly big responsibility. Knowing that if your messages were intercepted, people would die—that was responsibility. Knowing that lives depended on the insipidity of his poetry, on his eschewing the bloody waistcoat—that was responsibility. Knowing that he could damn himself by a chance word, by a slip, by a murmur in his sleep, that was responsibility.

He had eschewed friendships, family, outer garments, all for this, and she told him he had no sense of responsibility? If it weren’t a matter of both personal and national security, he could pin back her ears with responsibility.

But he couldn’t.

Emma was still in full spate. “And you? You live in rented lodgings. You have no friends that I’ve seen. And what about family? No wife, no children, no parents, no siblings…”

“I had a sibling. A sister.”

That got her. Emma broke off mid-rant. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—Was she— Is she—?”

“Married,” said Augustus grimly.

She had dwindled into a country housewife, counting the chickens, making soup for the poor, more interested in the pantry than poetry.

Emma settled her hands on her hips, her lips set so tightly, Augustus was amazed she could get the words through them. “That’s what normal, grown-up people do, Augustus. They don’t go around posturing from salon to salon, spouting ridiculous bits of verse. They get married. They grow up.”

He had never heard that tone from her before, not even in the most acrimonious of their debates about the final act of the masque.

“You should talk,” retorted Augustus. “Is there any ballroom that’s safe from you? When was the last time you refused an invitation? Or a glass of champagne?”

Emma’s voice rose. “Do you think I enjoy this—limbo? I was married. If Paul hadn’t died, I would still be married. I would have a nursery and children and something more to think about than the next dress and the next ball. But Paul died.”

Augustus was caught up short by the raw pain in her voice. This was an Emma he had never seen before.

He had never thought that she might have loved her Paul, not like that. She had been fond enough of him, she had made that much clear; she had missed him, that was fair enough; but with all the ups and downs and gossip and scandal, Augustus had just assumed, as everyone else had, that it couldn’t have been a terribly deep emotion. As she had said herself, she had been young.

He was an ass. A complete and utter ass.

He was also, alarmingly, bitterly jealous of a dead man.

Emma’s fingers twisted together, like snakes in a Greek sculpture. Her words tumbled out, one after the other. “He couldn’t help dying and I couldn’t stop it. Neither of us had that choice or that chance. But you do. You have every chance in the world and you chose to be what you are.”

Augustus’s lips moved with difficulty. “What am I?”

He could see Emma’s throat move as she swallowed. “A fainéant. A do-nothing.” She blinked away tears, tossing her head defiantly back. “Do you know what I think?”

Augustus had the uncomfortable feeling that he was going to.

“I think you wanted Jane because you knew she would never have you.” Her eyes glittered with a strange, fierce light. “I think you wanted her because she was safe. Cytherea is only Cytherea because she doesn’t leave the tower.”

“I—” Augustus couldn’t think of anything to say.

He didn’t have to.

The door to the summerhouse rocketed open, hinges screeching. A man stormed onto the stairs, red-faced with heat and anger.

“Can a man get no work done?” raged the Emperor.