Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

Whatever the paper was that Kortright Livingston had passed on to his cousin, it wasn’t on her desk.

Augustus cursed, and was surprised to hear his own curse come back at him in echo, relayed at considerable volume.

“Devil take it!” someone bellowed from a long way below. “That can’t be right.”

The noise was coming from the window. Dropping the paper, Augustus made his way to one of the long windows and looked down. Georges Marston stood below, his hat jammed under one arm, his curly hair glistening with pomade in the sunlight.

He was not a happy man.

“What do you mean she won’t receive me?” He muscled his way aggressively forward. “Let me in! At once!”

Augustus couldn’t see the footman, but he could hear him. “Forgive me, sir,” he said, “but Madame Delagardie has given orders that you not be admitted.”

Augustus leaned both elbows on the sill. So Mme. Delagardie had banned Marston from her house?

“That’s poppycock, sheer poppycock, do you hear?” Marston shouted, in a voice that could be heard in Boulogne. “There must be some mistake.”

“No mistake, sir.”

For a moment, Augustus thought Marston intended to strike the hapless servant. His hands balled into fists at his sides, and his muscles strained against the tightly tailored seams of his coat. Augustus waited for something to pop.

With an effort, Marston regained control of himself. His expression changed, an ingratiating smile replacing his previous snarl. “Women, eh?” he said, with false heartiness. “They never know their own minds. What if I were to make it worth your while?”

Marston dug in his waistcoat pocket and held out his hand, palm up, revealing the glitter of something silver and shiny.

The footman was spared the test of his morals—or deprived the chance to earn an extra sou. Someone else emerged from the house. The footman stood aside and a man stepped down, his boots dull against the stone of the steps. Both his hat and his jacket were an unfashionable brown, his cravat simply tied. His head turned curiously towards Marston as he passed, but he didn’t stop.

Marston, however, was galvanized into action. He sprang forward. “Mr. Livingston! Georges Marston. Your cousin introduced us. Last night.”

Augustus wondered how much of the previous altercation Kortright Livingston had heard or whether he knew his cousin had banned Marston from the house.

Tipping his head, he said coolly, “Mr. Marston.”

Marston hastily moved to get ahead of him, blocking his way down the street. “Madame Delagardie and I are good friends. Very good friends.”

Kortright Livingston kept moving. “I understand my cousin has a very broad circle of acquaintance in Paris.”

Marston scrambled along after him. “Paris can be confusing to those new to it. A chap doesn’t know who to trust.”

“I do not intend to stay long in Paris,” Livingston said shortly.

“Ah,” said Marston, undeterred. “Just until the business is concluded?”

Livingston stopped. He looked Marston up and down, from his champagne-blacked boots to his curly-brimmed hat. “I do not understand you, Mr. Marston.”

Marston grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. It was all teeth and red lips, like the wolf in a tale by Charles Perrault. “I think you do, Mr. Livingston. I think you do.”

Augustus’s forehead hit glass. Damn. They were moving out of sight and out of earshot. He could lift the sash, but a man leaning head and shoulders out of the window was the sort of thing not likely to escape the attention of those one most wanted to avoid. Leaping down fifteen feet and running after them was equally impractical.

The door squeaked.

Augustus jumped away from the window, doing his best to strike a nonchalant pose.

“Thank goodness, that’s the last of them.” Emma Delagardie whirled into the room in a flurry of feathers. Fortunately, she had matters of her own to distract her. There were two red spots high in either cheek that owed nothing to rouge. “My apologies, Mr. Whittlesby, for keeping you so long.”

“No matter, Madame.” Augustus inclined his head towards the window. Audacity always worked better than evasion. “I was just admiring the view.”

Mme. Delagardie’s flush deepened, but she otherwise kept her composure. “And the wildlife?” she said tartly.

“The mating calls of certain birds are particularly strident,” said Augustus blandly.

Turning abruptly away, Mme. Delagardie crossed to the desk, her skirts bouncing around her ankles. “Consider that more of a swan song,” she said, her hands moving rapidly among the papers, sifting, sorting, searching. “That particular bird will just have to find a different pond. This pool is no longer open.”

“They are very pretty creatures, swans,” commented Augustus.

“Yes, from a distance.” Emma Delagardie pulled a blank sheet of paper from among the debris, clearing an open surface on the desk by dint of pushing everything else to the sides. Paper crumpled against paper and the inkwell teetered perilously on the edge. She shoved at the stack. “If you let them too close, they peck.”

Augustus caught the inkwell just before it went over. Fortunately, it was empty. Inside the open container, the congealed brown ink looked like blood, like a handkerchief after a consumptive’s cough, covered with matted brown stains. Augustus set the bowl gingerly aside, next to the diagram of the incomprehensible machine.

He lifted the diagram from the desk, regarding it with a studied show of indifference. “What art is this?” Augustus dangled the paper languidly in front of her. “Are you a draftsman as well as a fledgling mistress of verse, fair Madame?”

“Hmm?’ Mme. Delagardie glanced up from her work, her expression abstracted. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on it. She waved a dismissive hand, setting her sapphires sparkling. “Oh, that. It’s all pumps and that sort of thing. Drainage was my husband’s idée fixe.”

She scrambled through the welter of papers for a pen with a working nib.

“You might have heard of him,” she added, testing a nib against the pad of one finger, her head bowed over her work. “His experiments in drainage were much talked of at the time. The directors were very pleased with his efforts in expanding the arable land available to provide grain to the republic. They gave him a commendation for it.”

Augustus had heard. Everyone had. Society had shaken its head over the spectacle of poor Paul Delagardie slaving away among the marshes while his young bride cut a dash in Paris. Opinion had been divided. Some said it was no more than he deserved, neglecting a young wife to grub in the mud. Others put the blame on his bride. Either way, the impression had been that there was little love lost in the match and little interest on Mme. Delagardie’s part for her husband’s besetting passion.

“A touching memento to his memory,” intoned Augustus, “to preserve his papers for so long?”

“How many acts shall we have?” Mme. Delagardie twisted the lid off a new pot of ink with more than necessary vigor. “It shouldn’t be a long production, but it must have some plot to it.”

The discussion of drainage was officially over.

“Three?” Augustus suggested at random. “It is more than two but less than four.”

To his surprise, Mme. Delagardie accepted his advice without question. “And it corresponds so nicely to the three unities.” When Augustus looked at her in surprise, she said mildly, “I do patronize the theatre, you know.”

Yes, but he hadn’t expected theory from her, especially not neoclassical Aristotelian derivations. “Are we to pattern ourselves on Racine, then?” he asked.

“I don’t believe Racine had any singing parts,” she said, “and I’ve been told quite explicitly that I’m meant to have one for Hortense. As for the rest, I don’t see why not.”

“Unity of action, time, and place?” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to push the point, but he did. It was a test, he told himself. A test of what, he couldn’t quite say.

“The unity of place certainly saves money on sets,” Mme. Delagardie said practically. “Although the point of a masque, generally, is to make the sets as elaborate as possible. The one is story, the other is spectacle.”

It was an interesting concept, this distinction between spectacle and story. Was it a question of entertainment versus edification? The animal senses versus the more intelligent faculties? There was an argument to be made that it was a false distinction, that spectacle was a means of conveyance rather than—

Augustus pulled himself up short. He wasn’t meant to be debating drama. He was meant to be insinuating himself into Mme. Delagardie’s confidence, assuring his invitation to Malmaison, discerning whether she was an active player in this game or merely a pawn.

She had made one point, though, whether she intended to or not. Whatever spectacle might convey, it was also very good at concealing.

He looked at Mme. Delagardie, her fine hair topped with an absurd confection of ribbon and feather, sapphires dazzling at her neck, her wrists, her fingers, silver thread entwined with the blue embroidery on her dress, so that she shimmered when she moved.

For the first time, he wondered whether the spectacle might not, in this case, be the illusion.

Nonsense. He had masques on the mind. A bit of Aristotle and a moment of lucid conversation meant little. Emma Delagardie was a conduit, not a source.

Augustus adopted his most vapid expression. “Shall we carry on, dear lady? The muses’ clamor to be heard! Our audience awaits!”

“A fair point.” Mme. Delagardie dipped her pen in the inkwell, tapping the nib professionally against the side.

“Act the First,” she wrote across the top of the page, in ink that was neither brown nor black but a very feminine violet. She looked up at Augustus, her long earrings swinging on their silver-gilt chains. “The scene…What shall the scene be?”

She was looking up, but Augustus was looking down, at the upside-down writing in front of him, at Act the First.

Her handwriting wasn’t what he had expected. There were no girlish loops or feminine frills. It was an almost angular hand, impatient around the edges. He had seen it before, just a few moments ago, although not on any of the notes on the desk. Those had been correspondence directed to her, not from her.

All it took was a glance to confirm.

The hand that had written Act the First was the same that had made the notes in the margin of the mechanical diagram.

Madame Bonaparte asked that our theme be nautical in nature, but other than that, we can write whatever we like. Within reason,” Emma amended.

She looked expectantly at Mr. Whittlesby.

Nothing.

Emma tried again. “We can even use your Cytherea. She lives in a casement by the sea. Doesn’t she? Mr. Whittlesby?”

Mr. Whittlesby didn’t answer. Eyes glazed, he was lost in poetic reverie. At least, Emma hoped it was poetic reverie. She had heard rumors about the sorts of aids to invention applied by those of artistic temperament, strange, oriental smokes and potions that dulled the mind but awakened the senses, or so they claimed.

That was all she needed, partnership with an opium eater.

It was all Emma could do not to drop her forehead to her desk and just stay there. She could burrow down among the papers and hide, hide until Kort gave up and cousin Robert went away and tangles of brambles climbed along the walls of her Paris house, leaving only a whisper and a rumor of the crazy American lady who had once lived there.

What had she gotten herself into? She didn’t know the first thing about constructing a theatrical production. She didn’t want to be coaxing a poet into coherence. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to be, but it wasn’t here. Or New York.

Perhaps she ought to find a casement by the sea somewhere.

“Mr. Whittlesby?” Emma waggled her fingers at the poet. “Hello?”

It was all Kort’s fault, Emma decided. Well, maybe not all Kort’s fault. Some of the blame went to Jane. If Jane hadn’t set Whittlesby on her…If Kort hadn’t gotten on her nerves like that…