Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

“Two days down!” I said with forced cheerfulness. If I smiled any wider, my face would probably crack in two.

Colin grimaced. “How many more does that leave?”

I tucked my legs up under me in the chair, making the ancient springs creak. “Don’t make me do math.”

“That’s because you know I won’t like the number.”

Too true. The director—via Jeremy—had estimated two weeks on location. I wouldn’t have put money on Colin making it through one. It was a good thing he lived a healthy, outdoor life, because his arteries were doing overtime.

I peered at him over the computer screen. “Would you—I don’t know—like to go somewhere? Away? We could stay at my flat for a couple of days.”

True, my basement flat was small even by London standards and Colin banged his head on the sloping bathroom ceiling every time he washed his hands, but even a week’s worth of lumps on the noggin was preferable to his going into cardiac arrest every time one of the film crew wandered through the wrong door. Forget his nerves; I wasn’t sure mine could stand another week of this.

Colin’s hand rose reflexively to the back of his head. “Not your flat.”

“Your aunt Arabella’s, then. Or we could take a mini-break somewhere.” It would have to be somewhere cheap, since neither of us was exactly flush with funds, but there had to be some moldering seaside resort that had seen better days and would be willing to take us in for the price of a large London dinner. Or we could go to one of the old Regency watering holes and I could drag Colin to Jane Austen re-enactments. “It could be fun.”

A loud crash and a curse resonated from the flagstone path below. At least, I was assuming there was still a flagstone path below.

Our eyes met over the computer monitor.

I sighed. “Or we could stay here and keep an eye on the film crew.”

One side of Colin’s mouth pulled up in something that wanted to be a smile but didn’t quite make it. “Thanks. You’re a brick.”

I would have preferred to be something more decorative, but I appreciated the sentiment. “Look, it will all be fine. It’s only two weeks and you can charge them double for every shrub they squish.”

Colin didn’t look convinced. He nodded towards the computer. “Anything interesting?” he asked, with forced heartiness.

I hastily moved the monitor. “Oh, just this and that.”

“What is it?” Colin was way too sharp sometimes.

“Nothing!” I staggered clumsily to my feet. My legs had gone numb from sitting on them. “But I probably should get back to work if I don’t want to be one of those five-thousand-year-old grad students.”

Colin smoothed my hair back, turning my face this way and that as he examined it for lines and wrinkles. “You still have a ways to go yet.”

Another crash. I could feel the muscles in Colin’s arm stiffen under my hand. “I’m aging rapidly,” I said.

Colin raised an eyebrow. “Best gather your rosebuds while you may, then.”

“Smooth,” I managed to say, and then his lips touched mine, and speech became a decidedly uninteresting commodity. Rosebuds, on the other hand…They weren’t in bloom yet, and yet I could have sworn I smelled their heady scent wafting up from the garden, as much of a cliché as the stereotypical violins.

“Oh, sorry,” someone said, and I realized that I did smell rosebuds, preserved in alcohol and condensed into perfume. One of the film crew was standing in the doorway, younger than me at a guess and inappropriately attired for an English spring, in tight jeans and tighter shirt. “I was just looking for the computer. It’s in here, right?”

I came down to earth with a crash. Literally. Colin is a fair bit taller than I am. My heels hit carpet with a jarring thump.

“This computer is off-limits,” I said, since Colin seemed incapable of saying anything at all. “This whole wing is off-limits.”

“But the computer…”

Why does whining sound worse in an American accent?

“Is not available,” I said. “Please close the door on your way out.”

I’ll say this for her, she did take direction. She pulled the door smartly shut behind her.

I leaned back against Colin. “We’re going to hear about this from Jeremy, aren’t we?”

“Bugger that,” said Colin elegantly. “They’re supposed to have their own Internet connection set up. Since when does Private mean ‘Hey! Come on in!’?” Colin’s voice shifted on the last words into a parody of the film people.

His fake American accent was truly atrocious. I wondered if my fake English accent sounded as awful to him. Probably. Huh.

Colin glowered at the door, as if it had personally offended him by allowing itself to be opened. “What do we have to do, put up an electric fence?”

I decided that this was not a good time to tell Colin that amusing story about the guy who had blundered into our bathroom while I was showering. Picture Psycho, only without the axe and with more Herbal Essences.

“I was thinking buckets of water on the doorjamb,” I said. “If I could figure out how to rig it without getting soaked.”

“Pots and pans,” contributed Colin. “For them to trip over.”

We exchanged rueful smiles.

I stood on my tiptoes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “Are you going to be okay in here?”

Colin’s eyes drifted to the window. “I’ll put my headphones on,” he promised. “If I can’t hear it, it’s not happening.”

“That’s the spirit!” I cheered. I paused with one hand on the doorknob. “If you get to the point where you can’t take it anymore, you know where to find me. We can drop water balloons on the film crew from the library windows. Or not.”

“Hmph,” said Colin, and pulled his headphones firmly down over his ears. They made him look a bit like Princess Leia.

I decided not to share that observation.

I grinned and waved and drew the door shut behind me, making my way back down the corridor, past the door to the master bedroom, over to the center of the house and the wing that housed the library. We’d taped signs that said “Private” on the door of the master bedroom, the bathroom, Colin’s study, and the library, but, so far, those signs had been just about as effective as the paper they were printed on, when it came to keeping people out.

It was going to be even worse starting this evening.

The high mucky-mucks were first showing up tonight and we were all going to have a great big get-to-know-one-another shindig in the dining room, catered courtesy of DreamStone. With big names to be found, Jeremy had condescended to come out to the wilds of Sussex for it.

Lucky us.

I only hoped that whoever did the seating chart had the sense to place Jeremy and Colin at opposite ends of the table. Not that I really thought Colin was going to go after Jeremy with his fish knife…but, hey, why take unnecessary risks? I’d been tempted to go after Jeremy with something sharp a time or two myself.

In the meantime, we were both trying to go on pretty much as usual, Colin working on the spy novel he claimed he was writing, me making my way through his collection of family papers, taking notes for a dissertation that was turning out to be much more detailed than I could ever have dreamed.

With the threat of imminent return to America hanging over me, though, I had to force myself to focus. With all the rich resources available via Colin, I had let myself meander down some pretty random byways, researching rogue French spies, plots and schemes in India, and even an attempt to kidnap George III. It was time to get back to basics, i.e., the Pink Carnation. I knew she had been in operation in Paris in 1804. There was evidence that she had been involved—albeit peripherally—in the famous plot to assassinate Napoleon that had resulted in the execution of the duc d’Enghien in the spring of 1804.

But what had happened after?

The hallway was mercifully empty, all the crew members outside, making mincemeat of Colin’s ancestral shrubbery. Someone, however, had been inside. The door to the library, with its hand-lettered sign reading “No Admittance,” was ajar.

I had closed it when I left. I knew I had.

My notebook wasn’t on my favorite desk anymore. Instead, it was on the chair, and the folio I had taken out to look at before taking my e-mail break was open, when I was pretty sure I had left it closed.

Weird.

One of the film guys must have been looking for a spare sheet of paper, I decided, rearranging my materials the way I liked them. If any of them had torn out one of the precious documents in the folio and used it for scrap, I would personally tear out his masculine bits and feed them to the dogs.

Colin didn’t have any dogs, but I was sure we could find some in the neighborhood.

Nope. I flipped quickly through. No sign of tearing. The neighborhood dogs were safe. And so, thank goodness, was the correspondence of Lady Henrietta Dorrington with her cousin by marriage, Miss Jane Wooliston, aka the Pink Carnation. The two ladies had constructed an ingenious code, devised around just the sort of frivolous goings-on designed to make the eyes of your average Ministry of Police employee—aka your average male—glaze over, ranging from the new cut of bonnets to the refreshments at the Venetian breakfast. Each of these terms was carefully calibrated to a double meaning designed to convey information back to the authorities in England.

Jane, the mastermind of the piece, collected her information in Paris and sent it back to Henrietta under the guise of frivolity. Henrietta passed it on to her husband, Miles, who in turn saw that it made it to the authorities at the War Office.

I had an advantage the French Ministry of Police lacked. No, not just a reliable coffeemaker. I had Henrietta’s code book. I had been steadily working my way through Jane’s reports through the spring of 1804, the spring of the duc d’Enghien’s execution, the spring Napoleon declared himself Emperor, and the spring when invasion of England seemed imminent.

Stuck among the papers was a fragment of poetry in a surprisingly tidy hand, addressed to Jane but forwarded to Henrietta. I shook out the page and read.

For, lo, in Cytherea’s perfumed sleep

Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…

“For, lo!” proclaimed Augustus Whittlesby from his perch on top of a bench supported by two scowling sphinxes. “In Cytherea’s perfumed sleep / Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…”

“Dithery? How can the deep be dithery?” A female voice, lightly accented, cut into Augustus’s stirring rendition of Canto XII of The Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes.

Among the smattering of people who had left the dancing in the ballroom to admire, mock, gossip, or, in the case of an elderly dowager snoring in a chair by the far wall, nap, stood two young women.

One was tall and graceful, garbed simply but elegantly in a white dress that fell in the required classical lines from a pair of admirably shaped shoulders. Her pale brown hair was gathered in a simple twist, her only jewelry a golden locket strung on a ribbon of sky blue silk.

Jane Wooliston was, thought Augustus, all that was finest in womanly charm. He had said so quite frequently in verse, but it held true in prose as well. Not even his execrable effusions could mask her inestimable worth.

She wasn’t the one who had spoken.

It had been the other one. Next to her. Half a head down.

What Emma Delagardie lacked in height, she made up for in the exuberantly curled plumes that rose from her silver spangled headdress. The tall plumes jutted a good foot into the air, bouncing up and down—like great, annoying bouncing things. In Augustus’s annoyance, metaphor failed him. Her dress was white, but it wasn’t the white of innocent maidens and virtuous dreams. It was of silk, sinuous and shiny, overlain with some sort of shimmery stuff that sparkled when she moved, creating the sensation of a constant disturbance in the air around her.

Emma Delagardie was slight, fine-boned, and small-featured, the top of her head barely level with Miss Wooliston’s elegantly curved shoulder, but she took up far more room than her small stature would warrant.