The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 26

Wasn’t the point of ships to stay above the water? A little thing about not drowning? Emma shook that aside. “Whatever it is, I’m sure you’ll be able to reach some accommodation with the Emperor.”

“Or not,” said Fulton. He straightened his shoulders and ostentatiously examined his surroundings, deliberately putting an end to the discussion. “Now, where have you put the wave machine?”

“It’s back here,” said Emma, leading him down the aisle between the seats. On the stage, a number of men in tights and red bandannas cowered in various stages of abject subjection as their fearless leader exhorted them on to bigger and better piracy.

“Remember!” shouted Miss Gwen. “Always pillage before you burn! Desmoulins, that means you!”

Desmoulins toyed with his gold earring. “I just thought…”

“Don’t!” Miss Gwen snapped. “Less thinking, more plundering!”

“She does know that it’s all make-believe, doesn’t she?” whispered Fulton to Emma.

Emma looked at Miss Gwen decked out in a tunic-type costume, complete with purple sash and what Emma was fairly sure was a real rather than a pasteboard cutlass. The cutlass blade flashed dangerously close to the ropes holding up the scenery for Act II.

“I do hope so,” Emma said. She led Mr. Fulton through the door at the side of the stage, where a confusion of props littered two long tables, none of them in their proper places. The wave machine was still in pieces on the floor, although someone had moved the pieces to one side, jumbling them any which way in the process. “There’s your machine, all in bits still, I’m afraid.”

“I have the plans in my room,” said Mr. Fulton. He began rolling up his sleeves. “But I believe I can manage this from memory.”

“You’re very kind,” said Emma, and stepped back to let him pass.

The room looked very different in daylight. Dust motes danced in the sleepy sunlight, giving the space a hazy air. Last night, it had seemed endless, an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, filled with dark alleys and treacherous corners, a mysterious and slightly dangerous place. Now it was simply itself, a reasonably large storage room, blocked off into bits by tottering piles of old scenery.

In the corner, Mr. Fulton began sorting busily through bits and pieces of machinery, muttering to himself and wiping off stray parts on the tail of his coat. Emma left him to it and wandered in the direction of the painted backdrop of Venice behind which she and Augustus had sat last night. She felt uneasy and slightly sick, the way she had when that first letter had arrived from her parents after the elopement, knowing that steps had been taken that couldn’t be untaken, that there was no way to smooth everything over and make it all pleasant again.

What was said couldn’t be unsaid.

“Emma?”

Venice undulated, the houses collapsing in on themselves.

As Emma caught her breath, Jane ducked neatly beneath the canvas, Venice bunched up in one hand, a script in the other.

“You scared me,” Emma said. “I didn’t realize anyone was there.”

Jane indicated her script. “I was going over my lines while Miss Gwen puts her pirates through their paces. It’s much quieter in here than out there.”

Emma couldn’t argue with the wisdom of that. Through the partition, she could hear Miss Gwen’s voice, raised in harangue. Behind Jane, she could see the rowboat she and Augustus had shared last night, mundane now in the afternoon light, nothing but a rowboat.

Jane let Venice fall. It swung back into place, shrouding the boat once again in obscurity. The Campanile looked down its bell tower at Emma.

“Is something wrong?”

Emma made a face. “I had a row with Mr. Whittlesby.”

“About the masque?”

“What else?”

“He can be rather flighty, can’t he?”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Not in so many words, at any rate. She thought back over their long association. “We met nearly every day for over a month and he was never once late. Not once.”

In fact, for a man who couldn’t be trusted to wear a waistcoat, he had been remarkably reliable. Reliable, patient, hardworking.…Oh, for heaven’s sake, Emma told herself. Enough. Just because she was feeling guilty was no reason to canonize the man.

“The poetry does get to one after a while,” said Jane in commiserating tones. “All that rhyme and metaphor and so forth. You’ve been very good to put up with him for as long as you have.”

Put up with him? She and Jane had happily mocked Augustus before, laughing over his exaggerated rhymes, his melodramatic airs. But he hadn’t been Augustus then. He had been Mr. Whittlesby. And it seemed, somehow, unkind for Jane to be standing there, serene in white muslin, casting judgment on Augustus when she had so recently crushed his hopes. Callous, even. Emma hadn’t thought her friend could be callous.

Emma wordlessly shook her head.

For a moment, Jane was silent too. She said, with unaccustomed hesitation, “Was it anything to do with me?”

“Why should it be about you? You don’t want him anyway.”

The horrible words came out before she could stop them. Emma pressed a hand to her lips. She could feel her fingers trembling.

“Emma?” said Jane. She didn’t stare—Jane would never do anything so graceless as stare—but her attention fixed on Emma with a great deal of concern. “What is this?”

Oh, what was the use?

“I know about yesterday,” Emma said despairingly. “I know about the two of you.”

“About the two of—” For a moment, Jane looked as near to perturbed as Emma had ever seen her. “About what?”

“Your conversation,” said Emma, which was just another way of saying the same thing without saying anything at all. “Augustus told me he had—”

“He had what?” Jane’s face was entirely remote. She might have been a stranger, rather than the woman with whom Emma had gossiped and laughed and compared bonnets.

“You knew how he felt about you,” said Emma wretchedly. “Couldn’t you have been a little kinder about it? Not that it’s all your fault. I didn’t mean to imply that. I know we all made fun—and he did make such a show of it—but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t real emotion there. Of some sort.”

Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t Jane’s reaction. Jane’s face relaxed. She seemed almost amused. “Is that all this is about?”

“All?” Emma’s voice was sharper than she had intended. “I know this may seem comical to you, but you didn’t see him last night, Jane. He was hurt, genuinely hurt.”

“Hmm,” said Jane. “I’m sure he’ll get over it. A few cantos, and he’ll feel quite the thing again.”

Emma bristled. It didn’t matter that she had said much the same thing, and crueler. She wasn’t the one he had been in love with.

“One doesn’t just get over a broken heart.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Jane simply. “Matters of the heart aren’t my area of expertise.”

For a moment, Emma was distracted from the question of Augustus. She looked at her friend, so sought after, so feted, and yet, in her own way, so very alone.

“Don’t you miss it?” Emma said. “Being in love is—” How to explain it? Terrible and wonderful all at once. Messy, unpredictable, occasionally dreadful, and yet so incredibly vital.

Jane brushed the question aside. “Whatever it is that Mr. Whittlesby might have wanted or needed of me,” she said matter-of-factly, “I doubt love was at the heart of it.”

Memories of breath against her cheek, hands in her hair, lips against her neck, two feet away and a century removed.

“You don’t mean to imply—not Augustus!”

It took Jane a moment to catch Emma’s meaning. When she did, her eyebrows shot up so high, they nearly touched her hairline. “Heavens, no! Mr. Whittlesby is no Marston.” Completely oblivious to any implications that might have for Emma, she went blithely on. “I simply meant that Mr. Whittlesby’s interest in me is primarily”—she considered for a moment before settling on the appropriate word—“professional.”

“Professional?”

“His poetry,” Jane specified, in case Emma needed specification. “Every poet needs a muse.”

“That doesn’t mean he might not fancy himself in love with his muse,” said Emma. She felt, suddenly, very weary.

What a tangle. Jane couldn’t help not being in love with Augustus any more than he could have helped fancying himself in love with Jane, or Emma could have helped—

No. Emma pushed the thought from her mind. What was the use of adding another hopeless passion to the pile?

“Nonsense,” said Jane firmly, so firmly that Emma wondered, fleetingly, whether Jane really had been quite so unaware of Augustus’s intentions. “If it is a fancy, it’s a passing one. I imagine sculptors fancy themselves in love with their statues, but that doesn’t mean they expect the marble to reciprocate.”

“But you’re not marble,” said Emma. “And neither is he.”

“Why this sudden interest in Mr. Whittlesby’s emotions?” Jane’s voice changed as she looked at Emma’s face. “You’re not— Emma?”

Emma pressed her lips together, not trusting herself to say anything. “We’re friends,” she said. “We had a row.”

“You always said it was only the breeches,” Jane said softly. “Pure aesthetics, you said.”

“That was before I knew him,” said Emma, in a very small voice.

Jane set down her script very carefully, tapping the pages into order. “Are you sure you know him now?”

“What do you mean?’

Jane didn’t meet Emma’s eyes. “I mean,” she said carefully, “that Mr. Whittlesby is a very attractive man. And he can be a very charming one. But he isn’t…”

“Isn’t what?”

“Exactly steady,” said Jane, with the air of one navigating choppy waters. She reached out a hand to touch Emma’s sleeve. “There are better places to trust your heart.”

Emma twitched away. “I thought matters of the heart weren’t your expertise.”

“No, but I do know Mr. Whittlesby,” said Jane.

“Do you?” Emma thought of all the times she had seen Augustus kneeling in tableau at Jane’s feet, all the verse he had addressed to her, all the overblown sentiments, and, far worse, the private looks of longing. Something dark and nasty unfurled in her chest. “Or are you just afraid to lose your acolyte?”

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” Jane said reasonably. “Mr. Whittlesby is all very well for a—a drawing room flirtation, but he’s not settling-down material. He’s a poet.”

“You say poet as though it were akin to pirate! It’s not a crime against society to write poetry.”

“That depends on the poetry,” snapped Miss Gwen, coming up behind them.

“I do wish people would stop doing that,” said Emma crossly.

Miss Gwen went on without paying any notice. “If you mean that Whittlesby fellow, it’s not piracy, it’s leprosy. At least piracy is a trade with a bit of dignity to it.”

Emma looked at Miss Gwen’s purple sash, broad black hat, and large gold hoop earring. Dignity wasn’t the word that came to mind. “Poetry is a noble profession,” she said, lifting her chin. “Think of Spenser. Think of Shakespeare.”

“Ha! Think Shakespeare is all it takes to win an argument? The man could turn a phrase, I’ll grant him that, but when you get down to it, he was nothing more than an actor.”

Given that Miss Gwen had just stepped off a stage, Emma wasn’t sure she saw the logic of that indictment. “Nonetheless,” Emma said coldly, “people still quote him to this day.”

“Is that what you want?” said Miss Gwen. “Immortality via Whittlesby? You won’t have much luck in that direction. Lining boots, that’s all those poems of his will be good for in ten years.”

“I’m not interested in immortality,” said Emma.

Miss Gwen’s dark eyes narrowed. “Then it’s the man you want? More fool you. You’d best go for the verse, then.”

Emma folded her arms across her chest. “What’s so very wrong with Mr. Whittlesby?”

Jane and her chaperone exchanged a look.

“Aside from the lack of waistcoat?” offered Jane.

“And jacket and cravat and hat…” enumerated Miss Gwen. “Hmph. The boy might as well appear in public in his nightshirt!”

“Our own dresses are just as revealing,” argued Emma. Well, maybe not Miss Gwen’s. Even as a scourge of the seas, the older woman was fully covered. Emma resisted the urge to cover her own chest as the chaperone looked pointedly at her décolletage. “A decade ago, we would have been wearing piles of petticoats. Who’s to say that fashion won’t shift again, making Mr. Whittlesby the forerunner of the new mode?”

“The open shirt and looking-silly style?” riposted Miss Gwen. “What next? Breeches for women?”

“It’s not so much the aesthetics of it,” Jane intervened, “as it is—well, his suitability.”

“One flirts with poets,” barked Miss Gwen. “One doesn’t fall in love with them. And one certainly doesn’t marry them.”

She made it sound like an inalterable law. Somewhere in the Napoleonic Code was buried a provision banning matrimony for all purveyors of verse, to be defined under subsection 62(a)(iii), not to be confused with subsection 62(a)(iv)—minstrels, traveling.

“I said nothing about marriage,” said Emma hotly. Or love. In fact, she had said nothing at all. It was all being assumed.

“You’re not the not-marrying kind,” said Jane. And then, before Emma could argue, “I’ve seen the way you look at Louis-Charles.”

Hortense’s baby. Emma bit down hard on her lower lip.

“You need someone reliable,” said Jane. “You need someone who can make a home with you. What about your cousin?”

“I wish everyone would stop trying to marry me off to Kort,” said Emma, so vehemently that Jane took a step back and Miss Gwen cackled, either in approval or just on general principles. “I have no interest in Kort. Kort has no interest in me. Shall I put it in verse?”

“Please don’t,” said Jane hastily. “I think we’ve had enough of that. But—Mr. Whittlesby?”

“He’s not what you think,” said Emma hotly.

“You don’t know the half of it,” muttered Miss Gwen.

Jane shot her chaperone a look.

“He’s not the dilettante he pretends to be. He’s clever, truly clever.” Too clever sometimes. She remembered the way he dealt with their poetical meanderings, precise, analytical, entirely at odds with his public persona. And then there was the rest of it. “And he’s kind.” She looked at Jane’s and Miss Gwen’s uncomprehending faces, both in their own ways so cloistered, so little acquainted with the world. “Kindness isn’t so common as you might think.”

“So the man’s neither a cretin nor a brute,” said Miss Gwen. “My faith in mankind is restored.”

“I don’t need a hero,” said Emma. She pushed aside the memory of Augustus neatly tripping Marston. “I don’t want someone who will conquer kingdoms or bestride the globe like a Colossus or whatever else heroes are supposed to do. I don’t want flowery professions.” She had had that once, from Paul, and look how that had turned out. She took a deep breath. “I can’t claim to make any sense of it, but I’m happier when I’m with Augustus than I have been since—well, for a very long time.”

It was true. When she was with him, she didn’t worry what people were thinking or whether she was going to be able to sleep at night. She didn’t brood about the past or fret about the future. She was happy simply to be, and to be with him.

At least, she had been. Emma pinched the fabric of her skirt between her fingers.

Into the silence, Jane said quietly, “People aren’t always what they seem. Are you sure this is what you want?”

If someone had asked her that nine years ago, on the eve of her elopement with Paul, she would have blithely declared yes. Now? She knew Jane was right, even if she might be right for the wrong reasons. It had taken her years to know Paul, truly know him, with all their false starts and willful misconceptions. She wouldn’t even vouch for her ability to know herself.

She had a sense of the Augustus-ness of Augustus, his quick, restless intelligence so at odds with the languid air he cultivated; his brusque displays of affection—pulling her cloak around her shoulders, taking her champagne glass from her hand—so very much the opposite of his flowery odes; the fundamental honesty that forced him to admit his own flaws and misconceptions, even when she knew he was burning to believe otherwise.

All these were Augustus, but she knew they weren’t the sum of him. She knew instincts could deceive, that perception could be warped by desire or pride or sheer stubbornness. She could feel herself being stubborn now, could feel her toes curling in her slippers, digging into the floor.

It would be so easy to say yes, to say it defiantly and wield it as a weapon.

But it would be a lie. She didn’t know what she wanted. To know what she wanted implied a degree of certainty she couldn’t claim. She had thought she knew what Paul was and what their life together would be; she had been sure, then, that she knew what she wanted. Now—she had no idea. She had no idea when she would have an idea. And where did that leave her? She could go on as she had been, cocooned in her house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, making the same rounds of parties, drinking enough champagne to get to sleep, waiting for enlightenment to strike, waiting for a divine voice to boom out and tell her to get on with it, whether getting on with it meant marrying Kort or joining Mme. Bonaparte’s household or taking up missionary work in the outer Antipodes.

Or she could take a grand gamble. There had been a rope swing over the river at Belvedere. Year after year, Emma had picked her way carefully down the bank, easing into the water bit by bit as the others went flying over her head, releasing the rope to land with a cry and a splash. No risk, no reward, said Augustus.

Emma wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she thought she knew what she needed.

“No,” Emma said honestly. “But I would rather take the chance and risk being disappointed.”

“Fools will be fools,” Miss Gwen said austerely.

“Be careful,” said Jane.

Fulton’s plans blurred in front of Augustus’s eyes.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The body of the device was almost, but not quite, cylindrical, coming to a point on one side, fitted with a curious sort of propeller on the other. There was a bump with a stick protruding out of the top, not at the middle, but all the way over to one side, and two rectangular, letter-labeled devices at the bottom. An octagonal structure of some sort billowed above the whole. It looked almost like a kite, but far too large and oddly shaped. Across the whole were additional markings and scribbling: levers, pulleys, dimensions.

Augustus turned it upside down, then sideways. It made no sense in any direction. Hell, he couldn’t tell if it was an elongated and oddly shaped form of grenade, a means of conveyance, or a perfume atomizer designed for Mme. Bonaparte’s boudoir.

Emma would know what it all meant.

Pushing away from the desk, Augustus briskly shuffled the plans back into their folder. Short of divine engineering intervention, staring at the plans wasn’t going to lead to enlightenment. He stuffed the whole beneath the coverlet of his bed. Only an idiot attempted to hide contraband beneath a mattress or a pillow. But no one ever thought to try the simple expedient of lifting up the counterpane.

He needed to get the plans back to London. It would be even better if he could deliver the inventor with the plans. Fulton had seemed less than pleased with Bonaparte that afternoon. Fulton was a native of Pennsylvania, yes, but not of the rabidly anti-English variety of colonial. Fulton had spent time in England before, trying out one of his inventions on the estate of the Duke of Bridgewater.

Augustus would deliver the plans to England. Personally. Not by courier. And once back in England… He smoothed the blankets over the folio, arranging them so that no telltale bump showed. Once back in England, he would stay there. He had overstayed his time in Paris. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. He was growing sloppy. Sloppy killed. True, Wickham would be disappointed to lose his longest-term man in Paris, but that would be more than balanced out by the delivery of the plans for Bonaparte’s secret weapon.

He didn’t want to go on as he had, caricaturing himself into the mere mockery of a human being.

Emma had been right.

Emma. There was the drawback to his plan. Grow up, she had told him—well, not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication had been clear—but to do so meant England, so near geographically, and yet so far away in every other sense. He wouldn’t miss the salons or the taverns, but he would miss those afternoons in Emma’s house, sprawled across a too-small chair in Emma’s book room.

He would miss Emma.

He could picture her as she had walked away, her back very stiff beneath the thin fabric of her dress, damped with sweat until he could practically see the skin beneath. Her arm had been threaded through Mr. Fulton’s, her head tilted at her listening angle, but he knew she had been no more listening than he had been capable of concentrating.

Was she at rehearsal? In her room? Sticking pins in a poet-shaped doll?

He had to find her and set things right.

Augustus crossed his cubbyhole of a room in two steps. The theatre was the most likely place to find her. Hadn’t Fulton said something about repairing the wave machine? They had only one more day until the masque.

If he wanted to leave with Fulton’s plans—and, preferably, Fulton—the ideal time would be tomorrow night, while everyone else was focused on the play. Which meant he had only one night and one day more with Emma. One night and one day to beg her pardon.

Quickening his pace, Augustus yanked open the door. One night and one day to—

“Oh!” said a very familiar voice.

Augustus blinked. Yes, his eyes were sore after staring at those plans, but he had never experienced a mirage before, and certainly not one so precise in every detail.

Emma stood in the open doorway, her hand poised as though to knock.

Her hair was shoved behind her ears in that way she had when she was either deep in thought or trying to work up her nerve. Her dress was wrinkled, splotched slightly with sweat stains and dusted in places with pollen from their interlude in the garden.

She stared at him, as shocked as he, her hand suspended in the air. If she continued the motion, she would hit him. If she did, he would probably deserve it.

“I am so sorry,” he said, just as Emma dropped her hand and said all in a rush, “I was just looking for you.”

“What I said before”—Augustus jumped in, anxious to say his piece before she could—“I had no right.”

Whatever she had meant to say to him, his words shocked her silent. Her eyes searched his face. Augustus felt as though he were being sized up and unconsciously drew himself up straighter.

Emma regarded him intently, her expression serious. “You had no right,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t make you less right.”

They stood on either side of the doorway, each waiting for the other to say something. Without her usual armor of frivolity, there were hollows in Emma’s cheeks that Augustus had never noticed before. She still wore her paint, but he felt, somehow, as though he were seeing her scrubbed bare.

Augustus’s throat worked. He had been on delicate missions before, missions in which life or death hinged on the turn of a phrase, but never before had he felt as though quite so much depended on the choice of a word.

“Perhaps,” he said, and watched her eyelids flicker, watched her brace herself as though for some anticipated blow.

He held out a hand, his palm turned up, his fingers relaxed. It took all his will not to let them tremble.

“Perhaps,” he said, and cleared his throat, “this might better be discussed inside?”

Emma’s hand hovered for a moment at her side. He could see her eyes slide past him, to the tiny room beyond, assessing what he had said and what he was asking. Augustus held his breath and counted the seconds. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he did know that if she dropped her hand and turned away, his life would be the poorer for it. He might have tried persuasion, patter, poetry, but some things were too important for words. He could only stand frozen, his hand outstretched.

Her lips pressed together and she dipped her chin in a movement barely recognizable as a nod.

“Yes,” she said, and placed her hand in his. “Yes, I think that would be…best.”

Closing his fingers around hers, Augustus drew her into the room, letting the door click shut behind her.