Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

She didn’t want to talk about Marston with Augustus Whittlesby. She didn’t want to talk about Marston at all.

Behind Whittlesby’s shoulder, a young man was hovering, dressed richly in a deep green jacket with a waistcoat in stripes of pink and green.

“Oh, look,” she babbled, waving enthusiastically, “there’s dear Monsieur—”

What was his name? There had been so many people come to Paris recently, so many members of the old aristocratic families returned from exile in England and elsewhere. It was impossible to keep them all straight.

“De Lilly?” Whittlesby frowned over his shoulder at the young man.

“Yes?” At the sound of his name, the young man hastened forward. It hadn’t been meant as an invitation, but he took it as such. He bowed enthusiastically over Emma’s hand. “Madame Delagardie! It is a pleasure.”

At least someone thought so. Emma tried to send a meaningful look at Mr. Whittlesby, but Mr. Whittlesby wasn’t paying the slightest bit of attention.

De Lilly was probably roughly her own age, but he seemed like a boy, all pink-cheeked and eager to please. He made Emma feel ancient.

“Do you know Mr. Whittlesby?” Emma asked de Lilly, mostly to needle the poet. She missed her fan. It was so much less effective gesticulating without one.

De Lilly glanced sideways at Mr. Whittlesby and went pink about the cheekbones. “Mr. Whittlesby and I are somewhat acquainted.”

Emma looked inquisitively at Mr. Whittlesby, but the poet had assumed his most otherworldly expression.

“The muses lead many to my door,” he intoned.

De Lilly dropped his gaze to his boot tops, looking sheepish and very, very young. “Mr. Whittlesby was kind enough to undertake a small commission for me.”

Emma glanced archly at the poet. “Service à la Cyrano?”

Mr. Whittlesby sniffed. “If you insist on calling it that. I prefer to think of it as wooing for the romantically impaired.”

De Lilly went an even deeper red.

Oh, the poor thing. Emma felt guilty for having pushed the topic. If only her mouth wouldn’t run ahead of her brain! There was nothing more painful than puppy love. Emma wondered who he might be in love with. There were so many candidates.

“It’s always useful to have a poet about,” she said to the young man. “Everyone is hiring them these days.”

“Er, yes.” He dragged his eyes up from his boots, clearly eager to change the topic. “Have you heard the news?”

“News?” Emma lifted a hand in response as her friend Adele de Treville waved at her from across the room. “Oh, do you mean that story about Mademoiselle George and the tenor? Or was it a flautist? I’ve heard it was vastly exaggerated, especially the bit about his being tossed into the Seine naked.”

M. de Lilly shook his head vigorously. “Oh, no. It wasn’t the Seine, it was the fishpond at Saint-Cloud.” There was a strange snorting sound from Mr. Whittlesby’s general direction. M. de Lilly glanced cautiously in his direction before going on. “But that’s not what I meant. Didn’t you hear?”

“Hear what?” asked Emma. If it was better than the flautist in the fish pond, it was bound to be good.

De Lilly drew himself up. “The senate has voted.”

As an attempted grand pronouncement, it fell rather flat.

“How nice for them,” said Emma. Didn’t they do that sort of thing rather frequently? “On what?”

Both men stared at her, united, for the moment, in mutual disbelief.

Mr. Whittlesby cleared his throat, shocked out of his offended silence. “Do you read anything except the fashion papers, Madame Delagardie?”

“Of course. I read Le Moniteur every day.” More like every month, but who was counting. She batted her lashes up at the poet. “How else would I know what my friends are doing?”

Bursting with his news, de Lilly ignored their byplay. “The senate voted,” he said loudly, “and Bonaparte accepted.”

His words were ostensibly directed at Emma, but his eyes were on Whittlesby.

“Should you like me to compose an ode for the occasion?” drawled Whittlesby, just as Emma demanded, “Accepted what?”

De Lilly turned to her, his eyes bright with excitement. “It’s official! Bonaparte is Emperor of the French!”

What in the devil was de Lilly playing at?

Augustus tried to signal his young colleague, but it was no use. Ignorant pup, thought Augustus, too busy capering for a lady’s attention to weigh the risks. Fuming inwardly, Augustus pretended insouciance and mentally began composing a memo to Wickham, listing the various reasons why Horace de Lilly was unsuitable for assignment in the field.

Whatever reaction de Lilly had hoped to elicit, he didn’t get it. Mme. Delagardie blinked. And blinked again. “Emperor? As in…Emperor?”

Avoiding Augustus’s eye, Horace de Lilly nodded vigorously, focusing all his attention on Mme. Delagardie. “I hear you’re to be a lady-in-waiting, Madame Delagardie.”

“A—”

“Lady-in-waiting. It’s a great honor,” said de Lilly earnestly.

Mme. Delagardie didn’t look honored. She just looked stunned.

“My mother was a lady-in-waiting to the former Queen,” de Lilly said importantly, before hastily correcting himself. “I mean, the widow Capet. You’ll probably have an apartment in the palace. And another at Saint-Cloud.”

“Lucky me,” said Mme. Delagardie, with something like her usual frivolity. “What a pity I have a home already.”

Horace looked mildly horrified. “But it’s not about that,” he said. “It’s so you can be at court. It’s—oh, you’re joking, aren’t you, Madame Delagardie?”

“Mmm,” said Madame Delagardie.

“Darling!” Adele de Treville breezed past in a wave of perfume and burgundy silk. Like Mme. Delagardie, she was a widow about town, intimately connected with the Bonapartes and their circle. “I’ve been waving and waving to you from the other side of the room, but you’ve been too busy with this handsome thing to pay me any notice.”

She batted her lashes at Horace de Lilly, who shifted from foot to foot in half pleasure, half embarrassment.

“Do you know Monsieur de Lilly?” Mme. Delagardie said, but it came out by rote, without her usual sparkle.

“Of course, I do.” Mme. de Treville sent a perfunctory smolder in de Lilly’s direction before turning back to Mme. Delagardie. “You’ve heard? We’re to be ladies-in-waiting together. Once Mme. Bonaparte asks us,” she added, as an afterthought. “Won’t it be splendid? Quite like old times. Although we do have nicer dresses now and Mme. Campan doesn’t supervise our gentlemen callers.” She looked up at de Lilly from under her lashes. “You will call on us, won’t you?”

“I couldn’t imagine anything I’d like better!” de Lilly declared gallantly.

For a man supposedly dedicated to the cause of restoring the Bourbon monarchy, de Lilly appeared to be adapting rather well to the new regime. Augustus looked lofty and poetical and kept an eye on his colleague. The sort of incompetence de Lilly had betrayed might merely be incompetence—or something more sinister.

Assessing the younger man blushing under Mme. de Treville’s attentions, Augustus was inclined to go with the former. It wasn’t because of the blush—a man could blush and still be a villain—but because de Lilly had been promised the return of his family’s estates should the Bourbon monarchy be restored to the throne. Bonaparte, while he had invited back the various émigré aristocrats, had made no such promises regarding their property, save for a few special instances.

Even so, if it was merely incompetence, incompetence could kill. They would have to have another little word. In the meantime, though, Augustus had other fish to fry.

Next to him, Mme. de Treville squeezed Mme. Delagardie’s arm. “I’m so glad I found you. But I must dash. I’m dying to call on Hortense. Do you think this makes her a princess now? Or a duchess? What do you call the daughter of an emperor?”

“Hortense?” ventured Mme. Delagardie.

“Oh, you,” said Mme. de Treville. She pressed Mme. Delagardie’s hand. “Call on me soon. We need to coordinate our wardrobes for Malmaison. There’s some heavenly new fabric at Madame Bertin’s. Come shopping with me tomorrow? Without you, I won’t be able to decide on a thing. You will escort me to my carriage, won’t you, Monsieur de Lilly?”

She didn’t wait for him to finish stuttering his consent. With a waft of perfume and a whisper of muslin, Mme. de Treville was gone, towing a bemused Horace in her wake.

“Is she always like that?” Augustus asked.

“Almost,” said Mme. Delagardie apologetically, adding, as though it explained something, “We went to Madame Campan’s together.”

“Did you go to school with everyone in Paris?” Augustus asked. Forget infiltrating the government, all they needed to do was infiltrate Mme. Campan’s school for girls and the entirety of Paris would be at their disposal.

“Sometimes it feels like it.” Mme. Delagardie stared unseeingly at a statue of Apollo. “It doesn’t seem possible, does it? Emperor. Emperor?”

“You didn’t know?”

Augustus bent nearly double to try to get a view of her face. He could only be thankful that her tastes didn’t run to the sort of bonnets Jane favored, the sort with broad, deep brims that shadowed the face. The confection perched on Mme. Delagardie’s head left her entire face bare to scrutiny, exposing her every emotion for those who chose to see it.

“You truly didn’t know?”

Mme. Delagardie shook her head, setting her feathers and ribbons quivering. “I do read Le Moniteur from time to time. I knew the senate had discussed such a measure. But…Emperor?”

“An emperor and an empress,” said Augustus. “And a whole imperial court to go with them.”

As lady-in-waiting to an empress, Mme. Delagardie would be the object of admiration and adulation; sycophants would cluster around her, basking in the reflection of her reflected glory, using her as a conduit to the imperial ear. Knowing Bonaparte, he would probably do his best to arrange a marriage for her, pairing her off with one of the more successful of his generals or one of his captive European princelings.

Pauline Bonaparte had become Princess Borghese. What might the former Emma Morris become?

She ought to have been delighted.

Mme. Delagardie turned in a slow circle, her gown whispering around her ankles, her eyes drifting over statues and bits of columns. Imagining her glorious future? Planning her gown for the coronation? There would be a coronation, Augustus had no doubt of it. Bonaparte didn’t miss a trick. If Charlemagne had one, so would he.

Mme. Delagardie sounded very far away when she spoke, the sound of her voice distorted by the vast marble walls of the former palace of kings. “It sounds so antique, not something for the modern age at all.”

“That is part of the idea,” said Augustus. “A return to the grandeur of Rome, with Bonaparte as our Caesar.”

Mme. Delagardie’s skirts tangled around her ankles as she came to a halt, fixing her gaze on him. For a future lady-in-waiting, she didn’t appear to be particularly exultant. Her blue eyes looked like a cloud had come over them and there were twin lines between her brows. “Didn’t Caesar come to a bad end? I seem to recall knives being involved.”

“That was March, not May,” pointed out Augustus. “And his dynasty lived on long after him.”

He wasn’t sure whether she heard him. Lost in her own thoughts, Mme. Delagardie glanced away. “I thought he meant to refuse.”

“Refuse?” Augustus wasn’t sure he had heard quite right.

“If they offered,” she said. “I had thought he meant to refuse.”

In profile, the delicacy of her features was even more pronounced. She was too thin, Augustus thought, even for her narrow frame. From the side, the hollows beneath her cheekbones showed like gashes.

“Whatever gave you that idea?” asked Augustus, with genuine curiosity.

“It has been done before,” Mme. Delagardie said defensively. “Like General Washington. He might have been made a king if he liked, but he refused, out of principle.”