The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 34

Sussex, England

May 2004

“He’s really not half bad,” I said, without turning around.

I was standing on the veranda at the back of Selwick Hall, leaning against the stone balustrade that overlooked the gardens. Below, Micah Stone, looking rather dashing in knee breeches as a Regency era Benedick, was informing the camera that one woman was fair, yet he was well, and another wise and so on. He didn’t pretend to an English accent he didn’t have, and the overall effect was surprisingly mellifluous. He had one of those rubbery, flexible faces, nondescript in repose, expressive in role.

“Shouldn’t you be working?” said Colin.

His sleeve brushed my bare arm as he leaned against the balustrade next to me. It was one of those unseasonably warm May days, one of those days when England tried to make up for the previous nine months in a blaze of sunshine and a riot of spring flowers. In short, it was very heaven and I was definitely going to get a sunburn.

“I hit a breaking point,” I said. “Did you know that Napoleon commissioned a submarine to blow up the Channel fleet? He uncommissioned it because he claimed it leaked.”

There was also the small matter of Augustus Whittlesby running off with the plans and Bonaparte’s stepdaughter’s best friend. I’d been curious enough to look up Whittlesby in the Dictionary of National Biography. He had a whole two paragraphs, not bad for the DNB. Not one of them mentioned him as either a poet or a spy. Instead, he was known as a progressive member of Parliament—some faction of Whig, which had splintered into more factions than members—and the editor of a journal called The New Spectator, a direct challenge, one presumed, to the old Spectator.

He had a wife called Emma.

Women seldom fare well in printed history. It’s only the murderesses and adventuresses who achieve recognition in their own right. Otherwise, they seem to be remembered primarily in relation to the men in their lives, and Emma was no exception. Augustus Whittlesby was married to Emma Morris Delagardie, niece to the American president James Monroe. Of the rest of it, nothing. There was nothing to indicate what her life would have been once she followed Augustus to England.

Was she happy? I wondered. Did she regret the loss of her old school friends in France? Was she lonely without them, without the world she had built up around herself?

It wasn’t Emma Delagardie Whittlesby I was worried about, I realized. It was me. I wasn’t asking so much whether Emma had fit in, but whether I would. It made sense, I supposed. Two New Yorkers, two Englishmen, two centuries apart. The parallels were hard to ignore, especially with the question so very much on my mind: Would I be a fool to stay in England? Or would I be an even worse fool to go?

There was a major difference between me and Emma Delagardie. France was an adopted country for her, a transitory place, changing all around her. She had already left her family and home far behind. Whereas for me…

Well, maybe Cambridge was, too. Our first day of grad school, the head of the department had given us a speech, of which the most memorable—and most repeated—line was “Cambridge is a lovely place to live. It is also a lovely place to leave.” Translation: They wanted us to finish our degrees and get out, not hang around forever.

Like Emma in Paris, my Cambridge was transitory. Liz, Jenny, the whole fellowship I had built up around myself, would also depart, taking jobs in far-flung history departments across the country. Would UCLA really feel closer to home than London? California was the same six hours from the East Coast and just as culturally divorced.

Colin and I hadn’t discussed it, not since Jeremy had dropped his bombshell. There’s nothing like the rumor of buried treasure to effectively change the topic.

Jeremy swore that the Pink Carnation had somehow run off with the missing treasure of the Rajah of Berar, lost during the third Mahratta War in 1803, and hidden it in Selwick Hall. I could have told him that the Pink Carnation had never been in India, or in Berar, at least not according to my research, but Jeremy wasn’t interested in fact when legend was far more enticing. What with confronting Jeremy, herding everyone else into dinner, and apologizing to Micah Stone, there hadn’t been much time to talk about our future.

And since then…Well, let’s just say that both Colin and I are very good at avoiding things. Neither of us are what you would call “let’s talk about our feelings” types, which means lots of time spent talking around things and playing with subtext. Clever, but not precisely healthy.

On the plus side, at least Serena and Colin were speaking again. She was staying in the house for the week, having been given a very small walk-on role in the film. She looked lovely in her scoop-necked Regency frock, even if a bit bony around the collarbones.

Between the film people and Serena—not to mention having to run off all the crazies who had been attracted by the rapidly spreading rumors of buried treasure—there really hadn’t been time to talk, I rationalized to myself.

Excuses, excuses.

“They’re lucky to have such good weather for the filming,” I said, looking at my rapidly freckling arms instead of at Colin. “Isn’t it great that it didn’t rain?”

“Mmph,” said Colin. It was a very expressive “mmph.” I felt him shift uncomfortably against the balustrade. “Eloise…”

“And the flowers look so pretty!” I babbled.

“Eloise.” Colin took me by the shoulders and very gently turned me around. There was nowhere to look but at him. Or, more accurately, the second button from the top on his button-down blue shirt. “We need to talk.”

“Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” I said. “Expression of emotion, state of the relationship, that sort of thing?”

I have mentioned that I’m very good at talking around things, right?

Colin let out his breath in a long exhalation that ruffled the hair on my brow. “Do you want to go back to the States?”

I tried to jam my hands into pockets that I didn’t have. Blast this good weather. “It isn’t so much about want,” I said slowly. “My career is there. My apartment is there.” Already, it was apartment, not flat. I’d gone back to Americanisms in my head. “I can’t presume on your hospitality forever.”

“Hospitality?” Colin’s laugh had an edge to it. “Christ, Eloise. You make me sound like a bed-and-breakfast.”

I licked my dry lips. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m presuming anything. I don’t want you to feel crowded.”

There was a long moment of silence. Colin pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, the way he did when he was tired. I knew that gesture now, so well, just as I knew so many other things without knowing I knew them, like the way he tilted his head when he was thinking, or automatically removed the cushion before he sat down on the couch. I would miss him so much if I left. I would miss not just the conversations, but the essential Colin-ness of him, all those intangibles I got to take for granted, his laugh, his smell, the comfort of curling up against him at the end of the long day. No matter how good the phone plan, one could never get that back, not the same way.

“You’re welcome to stay,” Colin said, “for however long you like, in whatever capacity you like. How’s that for an invitation?”

“Can I have it engraved?” I have a very bad habit of trying to make a joke out of those things about which I feel most strongly. It’s a defense mechanism, I suppose, and sometimes an inconvenient one.

“There are silver platters, if you’d like one,” said Colin. “Although I believe they’re mostly silver plate.”

“No. Thank you.” I looked down at my feet, at the weather-pitted stone of the veranda, the stray tendrils of ivy creeping between the flags. “It’s a very generous offer. Even without the platter.”

Colin was a bright boy. He knew, even without my telling him.

“But,” he said.

“But,” I agreed. I balled my hands into fists, feeling my old class ring biting into my skin, like an anchor to my past. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer. And it’s not that I don’t want to be with you. Because I do. Really.”

Shaking back my hair, I glanced anxiously up at Colin, the breeze whipping strands of hair in front of my eyes, blurring my sight, making my eyes water. He nodded to show that he understood, although I could tell that he didn’t.

“I’m taking the job,” I said. My throat felt stiff and tight, reluctant to give voice to the words. “The one in the history department.”

Colin’s face revealed nothing. “Why?” he asked.

“It’s too soon.” I tried to make sense of it, as much for myself as for him. “I have a whole life in America. I can’t give it up on the strength of six months—no matter how wonderful those six months might have been. Might be,” I corrected myself hastily. “Might be.” It was too soon for the past tense.

When Colin spoke, his voice was very carefully controlled. “Are you breaking up with me?”

“No!” I said, so vehemently that a bird whirled out of a nearby tree, shimmying past us in a whirr of feathers. “No. I want us to stay together. If we can. I just can’t—”

How to say it? Around us, the sun was shining and the birds were chirping and the actors acting, but I was stuck in my own private Hades, sorting through my personal pile of pomegranate seeds.

I held out my hands to Colin, willing him to understand. “I can’t make myself entirely dependent on you. It’s not fair to you, either. I don’t want you to feel burdened by me or feel like you couldn’t do what you would otherwise do because I’m around.”

“What if I want you around?” he said.

It was so tempting, so incredibly tempting. Long days in the library, fall drifting into winter, cold winter nights together in the den, mulled wine and chips at the Heavy Hart, occasional trips into London to see an exhibit or get dressed up and go out with his friends or mine. I could see it all playing out before me, an entire life in a snow globe, a picture of perfect domesticity.

At least, that’s how it looked from there. But would it be? I didn’t think Colin would let me pay rent. And even if he did, what cash did I have coming in without a teaching job? I’d be dependent on him from everything from the files I was reading to the roof over my head. And if we broke up—not a happy thought, but one that had to be considered—I would have lost a year of teaching, a year of positioning myself for the job market. I would be thought of as “that girl who stayed in England for a guy,” and, even though England was where my documents were, even though I might produce a better dissertation for it, I would be taken less seriously as a scholar because of it. Such is the way of the world.

I bit down on my lower lip. “But do you want me around twenty-four seven? Twelve months a year?”

Colin’s silence was all the answer I needed. I felt something ache a little inside, but there was no going back now. This was the right decision for both of us, no matter how painful it might be in the short term.

“You see?” I said. “It’s too much too soon.”

I watched him rub his thumb against his index finger. That was another Colin gesture, another thing I would miss when I was back in my tiny apartment in Cambridge, alone, listening to the radiator clank, wondering what I had been thinking.

He didn’t argue with me. Instead, he said in a low voice, “Will you stay for the rest of the summer?”

“If you’ll still have me.”

He held out his arms to me and I went into them, leaning my head against my favorite spot on his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist in that dent that seemed to have been made just for them. Colin leaned his cheek against the top of my head.

“We’ll work it out,” he said into my hair.

“It’s only for one semester,” I said to the pocket of his shirt. “I could come back in the spring. If you still want me then.”

Colin lifted his head. I wiggled back just enough to look at him. He was thinking, the wheels turning. Tentatively, he said, “I’ve never been to Cambridge—your Cambridge.”

Something pinched in my chest. Or maybe it unpinched. I could feel the tears tickling the back of my eyes, threatening to fall, but they were the right kind of tears, the kind that happen when someone does something that touches you too deeply for mere thanks. I knew what it was to him to leave Selwick Hall, even for a little while. It was his project, his baby, his distraction from all those personal demons of which I was only just beginning have an inkling. I couldn’t imagine Colin away from England for too long, but…a visit would be nice. A visit would help bridge the gap. If he came to Cambridge in the fall and I came back to England around Christmas, between us, we might actually be able to make this work.

It was a far cry from the heady euphoria of the early days of our relationship, but, for the first time, I really believed that what we had might be real, that it might last.

I swallowed the lump at the back of my throat and smiled mistily up at him. Through the tears, I saw him wreathed in rainbows—not an image he would thank me for, my practical, down-to-earth Colin.

“I could show you around,” I offered softly. “It’s pretty nasty in winter, but you’re used to that. And there’s something nice about all that snowy brick right around Christmas.”

With a crooked finger, he moved a stray strand of hair out of my eyes, very gently, as though I might break otherwise. “You can show me your microfilm readers.”

“Everyone’s favorite tourist destination,” I agreed, and we smiled foolishly at each other, happy just to be together, with the sun beaming down on our bare heads and pots of flowers in artificial bloom all around us. In the gardens, someone was playing a harpsichord, a simple and beautiful melody.

“Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” sang Balthazar. “Men were deceivers ever.”

Some men. Not my Colin.

“Will you be okay going away?” I asked. “With Jeremy treasure hunting?”

Colin made a face. “I can deal with Jeremy.”

“Is there any truth to this whole treasure thing?” I asked.

“Honestly?” Colin looked out over the scene playing out below. “Probably not.”

Hmm. This was Colin. If the answer was no, he would have just said no.

Emboldened by our new accord, I leaned over to get a look at his face. “You think there is, don’t you?”

Colin’s face twisted. “Well…I looked for it as a boy. I didn’t find anything.”

“Yes,” I said, “but you’re older and wiser now. And you have me.”

Colin’s eyes crinkled. “Yes, and we know there’s just one thing for which I’d want you.”

I looked at him from under my lashes, aiming for sultry and missing by a mile. “We can talk about that later.”

Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. “Do you know…” he began.

I knew many things, but I didn’t think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment.

“Mmm-hmm?” I said encouragingly.

He looked to me as if for approval, half excited, half sheepish. In other words, endearingly boyish. “The best way to stop Jeremy might be to try to find it first. If it exists, that is. It probably doesn’t. But saying hypothetically that it did…”

“We might hypothetically try to find it.”

“Are you in?” He held out a hand, palm up.

I settled my hand in his and felt his fingers close around mine. “Us against Jeremy? He doesn’t have a chance.”

“With you on my side,” Colin said softly, and what I saw in his eyes made my knees feel like goo, “how can I possibly lose?”

In a few moments, I would go inside and e-mail Blackburn and tell him I was taking the head TF job. In four months, I would be back in Cambridge. But for now…It was only May. We had the entire summer before us.

With the two of us together, what couldn’t we achieve? Right then, I would have been willing to volunteer us for moving mountains.

I grinned recklessly at Colin. “Let the games begin.”