Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

If only real life actually worked like that. In fiction, the hero’s declaration always comes in just the nick of time; the heroine doesn’t have to scrounge and maneuver for it.

My friend Alex, who had been in a functional relationship longer than anyone I knew, claimed that it didn’t have to do with their not caring; it was just the way they were wired. Men, that is. According to Alex, when they were least communicative was often when they were most content, happy, in ways we were not, just to take a good thing as a good thing and let it meander along its own course. In other words, the ultimate exposition of “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it.” We fretted about what they were feeling; they were wondering about dinner.

In this case, that was probably literally true.

Crap. How was it ten to seven already? Cocktails started on the dot and I was still in jeans and a ratty old button-down shirt. I kicked back out of Colin’s chair.

Dinner and Dempster first, major relationship issues later. Fortunately, Colin’s study was just down the hall from the bedroom we now shared, at least on weekends. My jeans and sweaters were slowly making inroads into the drawers, and my brush, earring collection, and deodorant had colonized a corner of the dresser.

Colin had already come and gone, judging from the clothing on the floor and the toothbrush dripping next to the sink. Damn. I had hoped to catch him while he was changing, in that intimate never-never land of shirt studs and tie loops, breaking the Dempster news to him while he was still in dishabille. Whispering it under the curious eyes of Colin’s evil stepfather and assorted Hollywood luminaries was going to put distinct limits on our ability to discuss.

I glanced at the door, but it didn’t obligingly open with a Colin on the other side of it. Okay, I’d just have to dress like the wind and catch him downstairs. At least I didn’t have much wardrobe to dither over.

I yanked my two cocktail dresses out of the closet. A life spent among the documents of dead people did not exactly prepare one for dinner with Hollywood’s finest. My wardrobe choices were distinctly limited. If I had thought ahead, I could have hit up my friend Pammy for an outfit. As a PR person—and an unabashed trust-fund baby—Pammy’s closet made Madonna’s look tame. Don’t even ask me about the hot pink yak-skin corset.

As it was, I had two choices: black or beige.

I reached for the beige. It was the closest to a designer article of clothing that I owned, made of soft mock suede with a fringed neck and hem, embroidered with a smattering of turquoise beads. A flap across the back tied at a diagonal angle, leaving a triangle of skin bare. It was a little bit Flintstones, but if all the guys I knew who had crushes on Wilma were anything to go by, that wasn’t a bad thing. Plus, it had certain sentimental associations. I had worn the same dress to a certain absurd party thrown by Pammy the night I learned that Colin was, in fact, single, available, and most likely flirting.

That had been one fun night, despite having to hold his sister Serena’s head over a toilet bowl when some dodgy prawns caught up with her.

I twisted my arms behind my back, struggling with the tie, which had the dual disadvantage of being leather and at an odd angle.

That had been the first night I had spent real time with Serena, who had also, because my world was that small, gone to school with my old friend Pammy. It had been the night Pammy had dropped the bombshell that Serena wasn’t, as I had erroneously presumed, Colin’s girlfriend but his sister, and that his solicitous attention to her was the result of her having just gone through a particularly nasty—

Oh, God.

I froze, my arms bowed out behind my back. Breakup. She had just gone through a nasty breakup with Nigel Dempster. That had been back in October. Dempster had broken up with her in September. He had made a play for me in November. Serena and Colin had functionally stopped speaking in March, when Serena threw in her vote with Jeremy in exchange for a junior partnership in the gallery where she currently worked. In the past two months, all we’d heard about her had come, piecemeal, from Pammy or from Colin’s aunt Arabella, who, while disapproving, had chosen not to kick the erring ewe from the fold. But those snippets hadn’t been much; Colin tended to get tight-lipped and walk away when Serena came up. He had even done that to me a time or two. Her betrayal had cut deep.

We knew she was alive and sentient and still working at the gallery, but we didn’t know anything else about her. We didn’t know if she was eating or sleeping or seeing a therapist. Or dating.

Serena had leaned on Colin like a crutch after her breakup. But what happened when that crutch was taken away? What happened if Dempster had decided he wanted her back? Serena was a sweet-natured girl, but she had all the spine of a bowl of tapioca pudding.

Cate had said that Dempster wrangled his job through a personal connection with the family.

Dempster had, as far as I knew, only one connection with the Selwick family, or, at least, only one I would refer to as personal, in the most personal of possible senses.

Serena.

I could hear Cate’s cheerful voice, the words distinct in memory as they hadn’t been in the moment. “The crew guys said that was how he got the job, through his girlfriend.”

Ex-girlfriend? Or current?

This dinner party was shaping up to be even more fraught with treachery than a masque at Malmaison.

“Although the waves beset me sore, / No force shall keep me from thy door.…” Dropping his pose, Kort squinted at his script. “It says here that I’m supposed to be beset by waves. Where are they?”

The cast of Americanus had at last convened for their first full rehearsal in the theatre at Malmaison. They had arrived that morning in their several conveyances, converging on the small town of Rueil with its modest chateau, and had been sorted into their respective lodgings by those members of the staff who remained in readiness for the First Consul’s impromptu visits.

Not the First Consul, Emma reminded herself. The Emperor.

Horace de Lilly hadn’t lied. It was, indeed, official, voted by the senate and ratified by referendum. Modest Malmaison had become, improbably, an imperial residence. Hortense wasn’t just Hortense anymore, but Princess Hortense, an imperial highness, mother of the official heir to the throne. Pushy, annoying Caroline, Caroline who had been voted least popular pupil at Mme. Campan’s, was an imperial highness as well, her husband elevated to the rank of Marshal of France. The honors were descending thick and fast, all with a decidedly monarchical tang. The coins might bear the word “Republic” on one side, but they had Napoleon’s head on the other.

With Francia’s tower still in pieces backstage, Jane stood on a chair appropriated from the main house. With the red and gold striped cushion bowing in under her ribbon-tied slippers, and the back of the chair serving as in impromptu armrest, she looked out over the tiered seats of the theatre, largely empty except for a smattering of cast members, an abandoned script here, a discarded shawl there. So far, Jane had been a remarkably good sport about being stuck up there for the better part of half an hour. She claimed she enjoyed the view.

That was a good thing, decided Emma, because it looked like Jane was going to be on that chair for some time.

They had done a read-through of the script in Emma’s house in Paris, with Hortense as audience, dandling Louis-Charles on her knee and cheering them on, but this was their first rehearsal in situ. The machinery hadn’t arrived yet and the actors were discovering all sorts of problems they hadn’t encountered the first time around. They weren’t being shy about voicing their opinions.

At the rate they were going, theirs wouldn’t be a production fit for an emperor. They’d be lucky if they had a production at all.

Kort glanced down at his feet, set slightly apart as befitted a seasoned mariner on a storm-tossed sea. The floor remained still in a very un-sealike way. “I must say, I’m not feeling particularly beset.”

“Don’t worry! We’ll have the waves soon!” Emma called out from the prompt box. Dropping her voice, she muttered, “At least, I hope we will.”

Mr. Fulton had faithfully promised a wave machine that would make the Comédie-Française’s puny efforts look like puddles in comparison. So far, however, there had been little sign of one. She had called upon him before leaving Paris. He had another commission, he said, which had set him back slightly, but the wave machine was at the very top of his list and he would be sure she had it by Tuesday.

Today was Wednesday.

A very nice man, Mr. Fulton, but he did tend to be consumed by his work. If this other project proved as engrossing as it seemed, they might be forced to resort to having footmen on either side of the stage waving bits of blue cloth, an amateurism to which Emma had sworn they would not stoop.

Augustus stooped down next to the prompt box. “Shall I get the blue cloth?” he murmured.

“No!” Emma exclaimed, as though she hadn’t been thinking the exact same thing. With more confidence than she felt, she said, “Don’t be silly. It’s just a slight delay. You know what the roads are.”

“Roadlike?”

“Rutted. Why, at this very moment, a couple of sturdy stable boys might be tugging the crate down the road.”

“Or your friend might have forgotten.” Turning back to the stage, Augustus called out, “Lift your imagination with the lofty spirit of invention, Mr. Livingston. The absence of the baser realities should be no obstruction to the flight of fancy.”

Kort folded his arms across his chest, showing off the fact that his tailoring had improved considerably since his arrival in Paris, a fact for which Emma took full credit. “In a language I can understand?”

“Try rocking back and forth,” translated Emma. “And stagger a bit.”

Kort obligingly staggered. “Good?”

“Excellent!” cheered Emma.

Both men gave her a look.

That made a nice change, thought Emma. Finally, they agreed on something. Emma consulted her script, even though, by now, she knew it by heart. “Americanus, you’ve just arrived at Francia’s shores.”

“Is that what they’re calling them now?” whispered one of the spare pirates, one of Napoleon’s younger generals.

Someone near him snickered.

Emma raised her voice. “You’ve come bearing all sorts of gifts for her from your native land. Shall we pick up with ‘in my hand’?”

Kort consulted his script. “In my hand I hold for thee the peach, the pear, the blooming tree— How can I hold a tree in my hand?”

Emma resisted the urge to bang her head against the polished wood of the music stand she had borrowed from the main house to hold her script.

How had she forgotten how staggeringly literal-minded her cousin could be? This was the same man who told her that acorn caps couldn’t be fairy teacups because they would leak.

“It’s a metaphor! Oh, fine, if that makes you uncomfortable, change it to ‘In my ship’s hold, I hold for thee.’ Better?”

“Slightly.” Emma made a note of it on her master copy, and Kort returned to his script. “For I shall bring you crimson leaves, and rippling wheat in golden sheaves, a cache of berries, red and sweet, and dappled deer on silent feet.”

Instead of the seductive litany Emma had envisioned, his reading sounded like a merchant ticking off items on an inventory.

“At least he has the American accent down,” murmured Augustus, settling himself on the edge of the prompt box, his long legs dangling down next to her.

Emma whacked him in the ankle and poked her head out of the prompt box. “You’re not inviting her to the theatre, Kort. You’re trying to get her to run away with you and be your love. Surely, you can show a little more feeling than that.”

“In fact,” said Jane, shifting a bit from one foot to the other. The cushion beneath her feet made an unhappy squelching noise. “I am perfectly happy in my tower. I need proper inducement to entice me to leave.”