Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

Somehow, when it happens in fiction, it sounds better. Helen and Menelaus, Iseult and Mark of Cornwall, all those beautiful women of legend bound to older men. We cheer them on when they run off with their young lover, when Helen escapes with Paris, and Tristan and Iseult quaff their potion, even though both leave chaos and tumult behind. It’s romantic. It’s dramatic. And it’s all once upon a time.

When it’s your boyfriend’s mother who’s run off with the younger relative of her husband, it’s not quite that romantic anymore. Instead, it just seems rather sordid.

That was all a matter of record. Then there was the other stuff, the emotional undercurrents I could only begin to guess at. There was no way of securing any sort of confirmation, but I would have been willing to wager a pretty high sum that Jeremy, the child of a cadet branch of the family, bitterly resented Colin for inheriting Selwick Hall.

Oh, I wouldn’t deny that Colin didn’t exactly love Jeremy either. Even if there weren’t the horrible shadow of the wrong that Jeremy had done Colin’s father, they were just fundamentally different character types. Colin was tersely polite with Jeremy, as the situation required, but he was still polite.

On Jeremy’s side, however, it was something more. I had seen him gloating over Colin’s discomfort in Paris, drinking in his distress, like a ghoul scenting blood. There had been something in Jeremy’s expression, something behind his practiced social smile, that had made my skin crawl. There was hate there, real and bitter hate. If he could make Colin unhappy, he would, even in something as petty and as simple as moving me to the other side of the table.

Despite my promise to Cate, I was sorely tempted to move a few place cards around.

I didn’t bother to check out the other names on the chart. Cate had finished with her text and was waiting patiently for her baby back.

I handed back the clipboard. “I’d better go change. Thanks.” As an afterthought, I added, “Will you be at the dinner?”

“Me?” Cate shook her head. “I’m just the clipboard girl.”

“Is that a job description? Like gaffer or best boy?” I had no idea what either of those actually meant, but I couldn’t resist throwing them out there anyway. Yes, I read the credits like anyone else.

Cate grinned at me. She had a cute, chipmunk thing going, dimples in both cheeks. “Technically, my title is intern. But that generally translates to clipboard girl. Sometimes I get to make coffee.”

“Are you doing this because you want to be in film?”

“Journalism. Political reporting, that sort of thing. But I have a friend who has a cousin who knew someone at DreamStone, so…”

“It can’t hurt to have it on the résumé,” I finished for her.

“I would have preferred CNN, but, hey, at least I get to spend some time in England. So it’s not all bad.”

“Bad plumbing, strange weather, woolly hats…” And Colin. England did have its consolations.

“I haven’t seen the hats yet,” said Cate. I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“Look, if you need anything, just let me know.” On an impulse, I added, “If you’d like, I’ll show you where we keep the secret Internet connection. Just don’t tell anyone else.”

“That would be great,” she said.

“Hey, can you do me a favor? No, nothing that major. Just, if you have a chance, let the other film people know that the West Wing and the library are off-limits? We’ve put up signs, but they don’t seem to be doing much. Someone messed around with my notes earlier today and I’d rather they didn’t. There was also a shower walk-in incident,” I added.

Cate winced. “I’ll do what I can. I can send out a memo, if that helps. That’s one of the things I get to do. Big power.”

“Excuse me!” Someone was calling down the hall. “Miss! Er…”

“Cate,” said Cate, without displaying any sign of impatience. She turned in the doorway to face whoever it was, blocking my view.

I’m lousy with faces, but I’m good with voices. This one sounded familiar. But it wasn’t a voice I’d expected to hear at Selwick Hall. In fact, I would have been willing to say it was one of the last voices I’d expect to hear at Selwick Hall.

No. I must have gotten it wrong. It had been a long day.

“Cate,” said the voice, all plummy rounded vowels, just a little too pointedly posh to be credible. “Can you tell me where I can find cocktails?”

Cate was all efficiency. “Cocktails will be in the long salon in half an hour.” She consulted her clipboard, which included, among its other amenities, a plan of Selwick Hall, floor by floor. “That’s the drawing room that runs along the far side of the house. Just go straight to the back. You won’t be able to miss it.”

“Thank you…Cate.”

The smarm was palpable even down the length of the hall. I didn’t need to crane to see over Cate to know who it was. As improbable as it was, as unlikely and unseemly and any other un one cared to contribute, he had somehow gained admission to Selwick Hall.

Even so, I felt the need to ask. Just in case. Hope springs eternal, and all that. He couldn’t be the only man with a pretentious accent in the greater Sussex area.

I poked Cate in the shoulder. “Who was that?”

“Oh, Nigel?” Cate made a face, eloquent of disapproval. “That’s Nigel Dempster. He’s our historical consultant.”

Damn.

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.