The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 7

When Emma had given orders that Georges Marston be barred from her house, she had neglected to mention Augustus Whittlesby.

In the throng that constituted her Friday morning salon, his habitually sloppy attire hardly stood out. Morning, of course, was interpreted broadly. It was past two, but many of those present were first breaking their fast on the food set out in the octagonal salon. Friday morning at Mme. Delagardie’s had become a staple for a certain sort of Parisian. There were statesmen, artists, ladies of fashion, longtime followers of the Bonaparte ascendency, and newcomers to Paris.

Since Mr. Whittlesby had never bothered to attend one of Emma’s Fridays, she had a fairly shrewd guess as to what had drawn him here this time, and it wasn’t her chef’s pastries. He managed to make his way to her without tripping, quite the feat given the size of his sleeves and the otherworldly tilt of his head.

“Does that hurt?” she asked, in lieu of hello.

“Do you mean the endless ache of my perpetually broken heart?”

“No. I meant having your head at that angle. I’m sure the muse wouldn’t mind coming down a bit, just for the sake of your joints.”

“Ah, Madame Delagardie! It is plain you have never known the unremitting servitude of the muse! The grueling apprenticeship one must endure! Which is precisely why you are in such perilous need of my aid in penning your theatrical masterpiece.”

“I haven’t agreed to pen any such thing,” Emma said, “so I’m afraid your services shan’t be required. Do try the brioche, Mr. Whittlesby. I imagine even humble supplicants to the muse stand in need of sustenance from time to time.”

She tried to move away, but Mr. Whittlesby stepped in front of her. “We sip on the nectar of the Graces. Can’t I persuade you to join me in drinking from their cup?”

“I make it a practice to avoid all libations this early in the day.” With relief, Emma spotted her cousin Robert Livingston, the American envoy, making his way across the room. “I do beg your pardon, Mr. Whittlesby. I believe my cousin Livingston is trying to attract my attention.”

He wasn’t, but it would do. The claims of a poet had to rate below those of the American minister to Paris, the man who had negotiated the sale of Louisiana to America for a sum that would keep Mme. Bonaparte in diamonds for some time.

She left Whittlesby standing by himself, frowning after her.

Wiggling away through the throng, Emma extended a gloved hand to her cousin. They weren’t an embracing sort of family. “Welcome, cousin Robert! My humble salon is honored by your presence.”

“Impertinent child,” said cousin Robert equably. He didn’t pinch her cheek, for which Emma was deeply appreciative. Her rouge would have come off on his glove. “Do you imagine I have nothing better to do than gad about like you?”

Emma batted her eyelashes at him. “But I gad so well.”

Cousin Robert shook his head, only half jokingly. “What your parents would say…”

Emma tilted her fan to form a screen for them. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”

Like so many gentlemen of a certain age, cousin Robert rather enjoyed being flirted with by a pretty young thing. All within the bounds of propriety, of course. Paris propriety, that was. At home, manners and mores were different. Emma remembered that, as through a glass darkly. She wasn’t sure she would know how to get on there; not anymore.

“I know Mr. Fulton needs no introduction to you,” cousin Robert said, indicating the man beside him.

“Genius never needs an introduction,” said Emma, lowering her fan. Her cousin’s protégé had been in Paris nearly as long as she had. His panorama had created something of a stir several years back, making him all the rage—until the next rage, that was. “How go the plans for the ship without sails?”

“Steamboat,” Fulton corrected. He seemed to fizzle with energy, from his tightly curled hair all the way down to the bottom of his boots, which shifted impatiently on the faux marble floor. He bent a reproachful look on Emma. “I know you know better, Madame Delagardie.”

“Flattery, flattery, Mr. Fulton.” Emma sighed. “I should have thought a man of science would be above such things.”

Fulton turned to cousin Robert. “Your cousin, sir, has the most wonderful understanding of the mechanics of hydraulics.”

More hard-won than wonderful. Engineering hadn’t come easily to her. She had always been more a creature of words than of charts and figures. But hydraulics had been Paul’s passion. Don Quixote had his windmills; Paul had an expanse of marshland he was determined to transform into habitable and arable land, freeing his tenants of the crippling diseases bred by the swamps. It had been a noble project, but one that had absorbed so much of his time and attention that there had been little left over for the cosseting of a child bride, and a spoiled child bride, at that.

She had accused him of caring only for her dowry, of wooing her with lies, before storming off to Paris to slake her hurt feelings in a round of amusements.

Poor Paul. Poor both of them. It hadn’t been all a lie, although it had taken her years to see that. In is own way, Paul had loved her. Those long afternoons in the garden outside Mme. Campan’s, the poetry, the clandestine letters, he had meant them all. He had reveled as much as she in the high drama of romance. She could see that now.

Once the courtship was over, though, he had settled again into his normal life, into his estate at Carmagnac and drainage and the million and one responsibilities of land ownership, while Emma waited fruitlessly for the poetry that had gone silent. It had been easy enough to assume the worst, that he had, as everyone claimed, married her for her purse, especially as their evenings devolved from caresses into recriminations and from recriminations into full-blown fights. Later, bit by bit, she had pored over his notes and charts, puzzling over the mysterious mechanics of it all, making painstaking sense of the rough sketches of pumps and pulleys and the mathematics that went with them. Once she convinced him she was in earnest this time, that she meant to stay, he had explained it to her, Paul slowly and patiently remedying the defects of a ramshackle education, sitting hour after hour with her in his study, going over facts that must have seemed as elementary to him as the difference between Mozart and Beaumarchais was to her.

It had been a renaissance for their marriage, as well as for Paul’s beloved Carmagnac. A second chance, after so much hurt and confusion and misunderstanding.

Paul’s picture gazed blindly above her head from its position over the mantel, frozen forever at thirty-seven. He had been painted in his study at Carmagnac, surrounded by the implements of his vocation. Behind him, the treatises he had so painstakingly collected and shipped out across the marsh stood in neat rows in the bookcases behind him. The painter had caught Paul’s surroundings, but not his expression. The black eyes that had been so bright and lively in life were flat and dull on canvas, staring blankly out at the viewer. Like a death mask.

A premonition? She had commissioned the portrait as an anniversary present, shortly before he took ill, the first present she had ever bought him—and the last.

Why did he have to go and die just as they were beginning to understand each other? He had died, leaving her with Carmagnac, a great deal of abstruse knowledge about hydraulics, and a wealth of hurt and confusion.

Fulton bowed gallantly in Emma’s direction. “If I were wise, I would make it a practice to consult Madame Delagardie on all my inventions. Her observations are always invaluable.”

With an effort, Emma yanked herself back to the present. “Pooh. It takes little understanding to be shown a drawing and nod one’s head in all the appropriate places. I bow entirely to your expertise, Mr. Fulton, and can only extend my thanks. The new pump is a vast improvement.”

Cousin Robert dealt her an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “I imagine it must be hard for you to leave Carmagnac,” he said kindly. “Having put so much work into it.”

“Not really,” said Emma. “I never did spend terribly much time there, except when Paul—well. I’ll go down to visit again at harvest. Otherwise, if there are problems, Monsieur le Maire knows to send for me here. Somehow, requests for funds never get lost in the post.” She made a droll face.

Cousin Robert failed to respond in kind. “Harvest?” he said. “But how is that possible?”

Emma raised both brows. “By the grace of God and good weather? That is the usual way. Some friends were kind enough to make some suggestions for improvements, which I sent along to my steward. I’ve become quite the farmer. Mother would be so amused.”

Something was still bothering cousin Robert. His brows had drawn together over his nose. “But you won’t be here to see it, surely? Not when the ship sails in June.”

“Ship?” Emma turned back to Fulton. “Are you planning to kidnap me on your steamboat, Mr. Fulton, and bear me off to a Barbary pirate’s harem?”

“Quite amusing, my dear,” said cousin Robert, “but I meant your return to New York.”

“My—?” For once in her life, Emma found herself at a loss for easy banter. “My what?”

Cousin Robert appeared oblivious to her imminent asphyxiation. “Young Kortright told me,” he said comfortably. “I’d say I was sorry to see you go, but as I’ll be leaving, too, I’ll be glad for it. You’ll have to come visit us at Clermont once you’re settled.”

“I—what?”

“You’ll be returning to Belvedere, I take it? Much better than setting up an establishment in the city. New York isn’t like Paris, you know.”

Cousin Robert should know. He had been involved in the public life of the city for years, as recorder and then as chancellor. Emma doubted there was an official capacity in which he hadn’t served. But that was beside the point. Someone was obviously suffering from a misapprehension.

“I do beg your pardon, cousin Robert,” she said apologetically. “But I believe there must have been some mistake. I have no intention of removing from Paris.”

Cousin Robert frowned. “Young Kortright seemed quite sure of it. He said the passage was already arranged.”

“For someone else, then.” Rumor spread so quickly in Paris. “I have no intention of going anywhere at all. Other than to Malmaison with you, of course.”

“Best speak to young Kortwright, then.” Cousin Robert scanned the room, his eyes falling on someone near the door. “There he is. He seemed quite certain that you would be accompanying him back to New York in June. Said he was here at your parents’ request.”

Kort was awkwardly examining a statue of Venus, curved and dimpled and wearing little more than a wisp of marble veiling. He looked out of place in her salon.

Thirteen-year-old Emma would have desired nothing better than to be swept off her feet and onto a ship by her adored cousin.

Twenty-five-year-old Emma smelled a rat.

“Oh, really?” murmured Emma. She flashed a charming smile at cousin Robert and Mr. Fulton. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I really must have a little talk with young Kortright. We apparently have much to discuss.”

As she swept away, with the maximum swish her morning gown would afford, she heard her cousin saying confidingly to Mr. Fulton, “Past time she went home. I can’t think what she stays on for. Her mother wrote me—”

It was a conspiracy.

And it wouldn’t be quite so annoying if Emma didn’t sometimes wonder if her mother wasn’t right. She wasn’t sure what kept her in Paris. Memories? Or simply a reluctance to go home?

“Emma!” Kort seemed more happy than otherwise to see her.

Emma cut him off. “What’s all this about taking me back to New York?”

Kort blinked, but recovered quickly. Of course, that might also have been the effect of her sapphires. With the sunlight streaming through the windows, they glittered rather impressively. Pity they were paste like all the rest of her jewelry, the real jewels having been bartered off to pay for hydraulic pumps and improved roofing.

“Didn’t you read the letter I gave you?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

It was still sitting on her dressing table. She hadn’t needed to open it to know what it said. The minute she had seen her mother’s handwriting, she had been able to divine the contents. It would be the usual run of family gossip, ending, as it always did, with “come home,” as if she were an erring child being called in from a day spent too long at play.

Guilt made Emma sharp. “Why don’t you summarize it for me?”

“All right.” Her mother wasn’t the only one who thought she was twelve. Kort’s tone of long-suffering patience set her teeth on edge. “When your mother heard I was to be in Paris, she asked if I would escort you back. She seemed to think—”

“Yes?” prompted Emma.

“—that you were eager to return, but wary of traveling on your own. Since I was to be here anyway, I was happy to oblige.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have a scheming parent. Emma didn’t know whether to be furious at her mother or rather impressed. After years of increasingly insistent letters had failed to have their effect, her mother had sent out the big guns: Kort. She was too shrewd by half, her mother. She had known—as who didn’t?—of Emma’s long-ago tendre for her cousin. And she was ruthless enough to take shameless advantage of it.

As if Emma were still a thirteen-year-old trailing along after her cousin’s coattails!

“How very kind of you,” said Emma, in deceptively mild tones, “to take charge of me like that. I don’t know how I would possibly manage.”

Kort didn’t know enough to recognize danger when he heard it. “It wasn’t any bother. I had to come over here anyway. And you know I’ve always been fond of you,” he added belatedly.

“I am so very glad,” said Emma brightly, “that undertaking my conveyance wasn’t so onerous a duty for you. I should have hated to have been a chore for you. Allow me to relieve your mind. My presence in Paris has nothing to do with an inability to book my own passage or entertain myself for the course of a sea voyage. I haven’t left because I haven’t wanted to.”

“But your mother said—”

“My mother hears what she wants to hear.”

“Don’t you miss it?” Kort said sensibly. “Don’t you want to come home?”

Miss it? He didn’t know the half of it. Home.

Home to the Hudson and the changing patterns of the leaves in the fall. Home to long, lazy summer days where wild strawberries ripened beneath their fan-shaped leaves, and wasps buzzed about the trees in the orchard, sucking the sweetness of the peaches. Home to her old room with her shelves of battered books and the one-legged doll she had been too old and grand to admit she’d wanted to bring. Home to the swing by the lake and her initials carved discreetly into the base of the old apple tree: E.M. and K.L. in perpetuity. K.L. hadn’t any idea, of course. She had eaten fallen apples and tossed the peels over her shoulders, willing them to make a K or an L, a divination of future marital bliss.

There were times when she missed it all with a horrible, visceral ache. When she missed the swing and the tree and the lake, whose quirks and shadows she had once known so well, in winter and in summer, the shallows where the carp liked to hide, the dark patch in the center where the ice never quite froze hard enough for skating, except in that one winter where it was so much more than usually brutally cold and the Albany Post Road had turned as icy as the river.

She had nieces and nephews she had never seen, adorable, chubby-cheeked children running wild across the woods and fields where she and her siblings had once played, picking wild raspberries and stumbling into ponds and getting themselves scolded and hung out to dry. Somewhere in the kitchens of Belvedere, children would be sneaking bits of bread and jam, and Annetje would be dipping apples into batter for frying. Emma could still taste them in memory, the crisp, hot coating on the outside, the center disintegrating into sweetness.

The French did many things well, but they didn’t understand about fried apples.

“There are certainly many things I miss about home,” she said slowly. “But…”

“Don’t tell me you’ll miss all this,” said Kort, indicating the red-painted walls with their murals à la Pompeii; the collection of classical vases in their specially designed cupboards; the chattering guests and their selection of accoutrements. “Paris is all very well, but it isn’t where you belong.”

“You haven’t seen me since I was thirteen. What makes you quite so sure that you know where I belong?”

“But I know you,” he said. “I’ve known you as long as you’ve known you.” He raised his eyebrows at a particularly ridiculously garbed dandy, his hair combed down over his ears, his shirt points so high he couldn’t turn his head, carnelian fobs jangling beneath his waistcoat. Kort gestured in his direction. “Just look at these people.”

She might not wholly approve of all their sartorial choices, but Paris was her adopted city. “Those people, as you call them,” she said sharply, “stood by me when my family disowned me. Those people took me in and comforted me when my husband died.”

Kort’s eyes focused on her. She could see the surprise in them, and it made her angry, angrier than she had felt in a long time. Did he not think she felt hurt, too? Or that her so much reviled marriage might have mattered to her, might have been more than a family embarrassment or a stir in the international scandal sheets?

She shook off the hand he held out to her. “They stood by me. Where were you?”

“Emma…”

His pity was the last thing she wanted. “Never mind,” she said. “That wasn’t fair.”

He was still watching her, his eyes bent on her face. “No,” he said slowly, “but perhaps neither was I. I didn’t mean it as it came out. I just meant that you might be happier back among your own kind.”

Emma tugged at his sleeve. “Look at me, Kort.”

“All right,” he said mildly, humoring her.

“No,” said Emma. “Really look at me. Not at what you expect to see, or what memory provides for you, but at me, right here, right now.”

She could see herself in the pier glass behind Kort, not a girl anymore, by any means. She might not be a beautiful woman, but she had learned how to be a fashionable one. No less an authority than Mme. Bonaparte herself had taught her how to apply rouge to her lips and paint to her lids, how to darken her blond brows and add the illusion of curves to a frame too thin for fashion. She wasn’t the Emma who had left in 1794. There was no hiding or disguising that.

What would they make of her in New York? She didn’t like to think of it.

Emma shook her head, and the mirrored Emma shook her head, too, short, feathered hair bouncing. Her straight blond hair wouldn’t hold a curl, so she made a practice of threading it with ribbons or other folderol, distracting from the straightness of it.

She had tried false curls once, but disliked the sensation of wearing someone else’s hair. She might divert, but she wouldn’t deceive. One had to draw the line somewhere.

“You said as much yourself last night. I’ve changed. I’m not the girl who left all those years ago.”

“I won’t deny you’ve grown up, or that you’ve become fashionable, but—”

Emma cut him off with a quick gesture of negation.

If she went home, it would be home to other peoples’ families and other peoples’ children. Home to having her dresses and mannerisms picked over and dissected. Home to gossip and censure and those horrible hissing whispers as the good matrons of New York leaned their heads together just above their embroidery frames. “Yes, that’s the one. The one who ran off with the Frenchmen. No! Don’t look now! She’ll see you.”

She could envision it now. Neither maiden nor matron, she would be used as a cautionary tale to frighten disobedient daughters. “Watch out, or you’ll wind up like Emma Morris! She married without her parents’ permission and look what’s become of her.”

“Please do try to understand, Kort. I don’t want to be a cautionary tale.”

“All right, so you’ll have to pull up your bodices a bit. Surely that won’t be too onerous.”

Emma gave up trying to explain. How could she, when she couldn’t entirely explain to herself? She wasn’t entirely at home in Paris, but she would be even less at home in New York now. Of the two, better the devil she knew.

“Trust me about this, won’t you, Emma?” Kort wheedled. “If you’re too bored in New York, you can always catch the next boat back to Paris.”

Something about his tone set Emma’s back up. “What makes you think I can just pick up and leave like that? I have responsibilities here. I have obligations.”

“Do you?” He eyed her frivolous headdress with a decidedly skeptical expression. “Such as?”

She could have mentioned Carmagnac. She could have made flippant remarks about her close, personal relationship with her dressmaker. But, instead, in that fateful moment, her gaze chanced to fall on Augustus Whittlesby.

The idea bubbled up quick as lava, and just as quickly onto her tongue. Emma lifted her chin. “Haven’t you heard? Mr. Whittlesby and I have been commissioned by the First Consul himself to write a masque for his next party at Malmaison.”

Let him see just how much she was wanted here in Paris. Let Kort try to argue with the First Consul!

Emma extended a hand towards Mr. Whittlesby, the bracelets on her wrists clanking together in a discord like a knell as she turned her back defiantly on her cousin and the rest of the world she had left behind.

“Haven’t we, Mr. Whittlesby?”