Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

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?”

Augustus followed Emma Delagardie into her book room.

Downstairs, the guests were grazing among the last of the cold meats, holding their glasses out to be refilled by the omnipresent footmen, gossiping about their neighbors and slandering their friends. Mme. Delagardie had led him out of the fray, promising a quiet place where they could begin their work once the other guests had taken their leave. Not too much work, she had specified, but enough to make a start. With only a month until performance, they should at least agree upon their plot and their characters.

Which, Augustus thought cynically, most likely translated to her dictating the plot and his doing the work.

That was quite all right with him so long as it also translated into an invitation to Malmaison. An invitation to Malmaison and a chance to look for the paper that Emma Delagardie had so casually tucked into her reticule the night before.

Augustus had no proof that either Emma Delagardie or her cousin, the one with the strange name, had anything to do with Bonaparte’s mysterious device, but the coincidences were piling up, too many for comfort. It had seemed innocuous enough that Bonaparte intended to test his device during the visit of the American envoy. The presence of the Americans might be intended only as a distraction, a smoke screen. One had the impression that they were brash and not terribly bright, thus making them perfect fodder for the role of unwitting decoy.

Likewise, it would ordinarily mean little that the American envoy’s nephew had a diagram of some sort of mechanical whatnot in his waistcoat pocket. It might be nothing more than a sketch for a new patent stove or a design for an improved water closet, Yankee ingenuity once again at work. They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.

Last, and possibly least, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Georges Marston might wish to rekindle an old love affair with a wealthy widow. It was commonly known that Marston had expensive tastes in clothes and cheap tastes in women, both of which were best supported by a wealthy patroness. It would be unremarkable but for the fact that Marston was also linked to the fleet at Boulogne.

Which was awaiting the arrival of a device. Presumably encapsulated in a diagram. Somehow connected to the Americans.

Put it all together, and Augustus was all too glad when Mme. Delagardie suggested she wait for him in her book room, where he might commune with the muse without interruption. He just never bothered to specify which muse was meant. There was a muse for history, for poetry, for theatre, for dance, why not one for spies?

“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Mme. Delagardie said, bustling around the room, putting books on top of other books and sweeping papers off the seat of a chair. “It will just be a moment, while the rest of that lot clear out.”

It was a book room in more than just name. The white painted walls were almost entirely covered with shelves, the shelves covered with books. Her books? This had never been a man’s study. An octagonal carpet in a pattern of yellow and pink flowers lay in the center of the floor, the shape mirroring the pattern of the parquet. Two long windows, their drapes held back by tasseled cords, let in the afternoon sunlight, providing light enough to read without the aid of the candles in their flower-patterned sconces along the walls. Most of the candles were half burnt, suggesting that they had been lit, and recently.

It was a bright, cheerful room, and obviously much used. The chair by the fireplace sagged in the middle, the seat cushion hollowed from repeated sittings, while a patch on the left arm had been rubbed almost bare, as if the user had leaned heavily on that one side, or swung her legs over it, as Augustus remembered his little sister doing long, long ago, an apple in one hand and a book in the other.

He pushed the thought away. He didn’t like to think of Polly.

Emma Delagardie’s desk was a magpie’s paradise of bits of paper and shiny objects, dented pen nibs lying discarded next to empty inkwells, books held open by other books, papers piled on papers.

Emma Delagardie lifted a cup off the desk, frowned into it, made a face, and stuck it on a shelf. “I really should get the maids in here.” Dusting her hands on her skirt, she turned back to Augustus. “It shouldn’t be long. Everyone usually leaves about this time. It’s just the good-byes that seem to stretch on forever.”

“I assure you, Madame, I shall be well entertained in the contemplation of the mutual endeavor on which we are about to embark.”

She looked a bit uneasy at that. “Consider it more a coastal jaunt than a sea voyage,” she suggested. “It’s really meant to be just a short piece.” She looked at the roll of poetry that was never far from his arm, all twenty-two bulging cantos of The Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes. “Very short.”

Having gotten this far, he wasn’t inclined to press his luck. “A distillation!” Augustus exclaimed. “The brandy wine of the overflowing tap of verse, refined into its purest form.”

“Something like that.” Mme. Delagardie cast a last look around the room. Checking the amenities? Or dispensing of incriminating materials? “There are paper and ink on the desk if you need them—not that well, that’s gone dry. It was a particularly ugly color, anyway, like mud. I never cared for it. There should be another one on the other side.…There it is! Under that pile of papers.”

Augustus could hear the clock ticking in the back of his head, precious moments wasted. As she rambled on, the guests were leaving, and, with them, Augustus’s chance to examine her study unmolested.

Augustus herded her towards the door. “When the muse does command, the materials will come to hand. Forgive my impertinence, Madame, but will your guests not miss your gracious presence amongst them?”

Emma Delagardie looked back over one shoulder. Her eyes were several shades lighter than her sapphires, more aquamarine than anything else, the pale blue of sailors after long sea voyages, bleached by staring into the sun.

“That,” she said, with a flash of wry humor, “is eminently debatable. But I’d best go say my good-byes. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.”

Having exhausted his usual conversational effusions, Augustus limited himself to a deep bow. “Madame,” he intoned.

Mme. Delagardie’s heavily embroidered hem dragged behind her over the lintel. The white paneled door clicked softly shut.

Abandoning his pose, Augustus let out a long breath of relief. Alone at last. Now he could—

The door cracked open again. A blue feather poked through the gap, followed by a small, narrow-bridged nose.

“Would you like some refreshment while you wait? Coffee? Wine?”

Augustus juggled his scroll of poetry, trying futilely to maintain his grip. “Nothing,” he said shortly. “Er, that is, those of us who sip from the font of poetry need no other sustenance.”

“If you find yourself thirsting for anything more mundane, just tell one of the servants. They’ll bring you anything you like. Well, almost anything. Just don’t ask for an elephant.”

The door closed again before Augustus could ask what he might want with an elephant. Augustus watched it suspiciously for several minutes, but this time it stayed closed. Apparently, Mme. Delagardie’s charitable urges didn’t extend to meat pies or pastries or the offer of pillow and blanket in case he felt like a short nap.

He could use a nap, at that. He had tailed Kortright Livingston last night, all the way back to the house currently occupied by the American envoy to France. All he had discovered, after several uncomfortable hours perched in a tree, was that Livingston liked his brandy neat and scorned the use of nightcaps.

Not exactly the stuff to set the War Office buzzing.

There was a connection there, though; Augustus could feel it in his bones. (Although that might have been the cramp from perching in a tree; he wasn’t as young as he used to be.) Discreet inquiries had elicited the information that Livingston had an interest in the foundries in a town called Cold Spring. Foundries, in Augustus’s experience, generally made munitions. Munitions might be ingeniously combined into something one might call a device.

But what sort of device? A multi-firing cannon, designed to knock out the ships guarding the Channel? A mine of some sort, to be planted beneath the water and triggered from above? An experiment in rockets? Any might be de Lilly’s mysterious device. Any might have been in that folded paper Kortright Livingston had almost handed his cousin the night before.

What had he given her? And where was it?

Augustus surveyed Mme. Delagardie’s book room. If there was an attempt at concealment being made, it was of the same variety as his poetry, burying the wheat in the midst of a profusion of chaff. There were papers everywhere. Bills, letters, reminders, drawings.

The bills, Augustus had expected. They were the usual stuff of a lady of fashion, shoes, fans, gloves. Ditto the hastily scribbled notes, some still bearing the trace of a seal, arranging who was to meet whom at which box in the theatre, setting up expeditions to the dressmaker, canceling a carriage ride.

What he didn’t expect were the sketches. They weren’t the usual stuff of a lady’s sketchbook. There were no landscapes or bowls of fruit. Augustus reached for one paper, dangling perilously off the edge of the desk. Instead, it was a diagram, a picture of a mechanism of some kind, with notes in the margins marking off size and scale.

Turn the paper though he might, he couldn’t figure out what the blasted thing was meant to be.

It was at times like this that Augustus wished he had spent less time on Ovid and more time on engineering.

Was this the missing paper Livingston had handed Delagardie last night? No. That much, at least, he could determine by common sense alone. This paper was the wrong size, too long and too broad. It had also obviously never been folded, whereas the paper last night had been neatly folded into thirds and then folded again, small enough to tuck into a waistcoat pocket. Even among the profusion of debris on the desk, he could see nothing that matched those creases.