Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

“Don’t play games with me,” said Emma crossly. “I didn’t mean the crowbar. I meant Jane.”

He went still. “What about Jane?”

Emma swallowed, trying to muster the right words. “I don’t want you hurt, either of you.” She bit down on her lip, concentrating on the rough wood of the crate, the places where it had cracked and splintered. “It isn’t kind to idolize someone like that.”

Augustus pushed up and away. One minute he was next to her, the next she had a prime view of his knees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emma remembered the way he had looked at Jane on her chair, as though she were the most precious thing in a million kingdoms, as though he would cross storm-tossed seas for the sake of a mere glimpse of her face.

Leaning back on her haunches, Emma laughed without humor. “You have her up in a tower so high no man could possibly reach her, no matter how high the ladder. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you.”

Beneath the exuberant fall of his hair, his face was still, as still and stony as a winter’s day on a barren beach.

Yanking at a nail with the pads of her fingers, Emma said, “You can’t make someone into your Cytherea just by wishing it.”

“I’m not trying to make anyone into anything,” he said tightly.

Emma looked up from her shredded fingernails. “No? Then why the Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes? Why twenty-two cantos?”

Why do you look at her the way you do?

But she couldn’t ask that.

“That’s not—” Augustus caught himself before he said whatever he had been about to snap out. He said shortly, “That’s poetry. Don’t you think I can tell the difference between fact and fiction?”

“No.” There. It was out. There was no going back. Softening her voice, Emma said, “It’s romantic and lovely, but none of it’s real. Jane’s not like that. She—”

“She what?” He stepped forward, his hands planted combatively on his hips. “I know Miss Wooliston a damned sight better than you do.”

Emma held on to the crate with both hands. “That’s not what I meant! Do you think I would ever say anything against Jane? I love her too. It’s just that she’s not like that. She not…poetical.”

Without another word, Augustus swung away from her. His expression of contempt seemed to linger behind him, like a sun print on the surface of the eye, creating shadow images long after the object has gone.

Emma jumped up, steadying herself against the lid of the crate. “Augustus—”

His long legs made short work of the aisle between the stage and the door. Either he didn’t hear or he pretended not to. He pushed hard with both hands against the door, sending it ricocheting open. Emma held up a hand to block the sudden wash of sunlight.

For a very brief moment, Augustus turned back. Against the light, he was a dark silhouette, sinister and still.

In a hard, tight voice, he said, “I’ll find you a crowbar.”

The door swung shut behind him, blotting out the man and the light.

Picking futilely at the nails on the lid of the case, Emma would have felt better about the crowbar if she hadn’t been quite so sure Augustus was itching to use it on her.

Idolization, indeed!

Augustus let the theatre door slam shut behind him, the crack of wood against wood a satisfying echo of his feelings.

After all these weeks, he had thought Emma, of all people, would know better.

Certainly, he played the besotted poet in public, but that was just an act, like the adverbs and the alliteration. The verbiage was mere costuming, no more a part of him than the billowing shirt he affected in public. His real feelings for Jane weren’t composed of such airy nothings; they were based on a firm foundation of mutual respect, interests, and understanding. He knew Jane for what she was, just as she knew him. Between them, there were no pretenses, no roles, no acts.

He wasn’t trying to make Jane into his Cytherea; the very idea was absurd. Cytherea was the role she played in public, the princess in the tower, accepting the homage of admirers from twenty feet up, encased in a tower to protect her from elements beyond her control. If anything, he sought to liberate her from the tower, to bring her down to earth and into his arms, in a safe, protected space where they could both be what they were without the threat of prying eyes or tattling tongues.

Emma might not know the whole of it—the whole double-identity bit did make for rather a large gap—but she ought to know him better than that by now. After three weeks of working in such proximity, he had thought they had built up an understanding of sorts, even a friendship. They were frank with each other. He was blunt with her in a way he was with no one but Jane.

No. If he was being honest with himself, he was blunt with Emma in a way he wasn’t with Jane. With Jane, his tongue was curbed by the vast respect he bore her, his manner softened by admiration, their interactions tinged—although not tainted!—by the echoes of their respective roles. They never knew when someone might be listening. He played the besotted poet in private as in public, half in mockery, half in earnest.

With Emma, there was no need for any of that. He could be curt, he could be blunt, he could even be crude.

That, Augustus told himself, was precisely why her absurd accusations ate at him so. There was no truth to them, of course.

Idolization, ha!

Augustus cut around the side of the theatre, toward the confusion of gardens that stretched out behind the house. Mme. Bonaparte had designed her grounds in the English manner, carefully cultivated to maintain the illusion of natural serendipity, with irregular paths circling among copses of trees, meandering over rustic bridges, wending their way past bits of artfully artless statuary, planted to look like the decaying relics of a prior civilization.

Surely, somewhere in the grounds, there must be the equivalent of a garden shed. A gardener would have served equally well, but, like the shoemaker’s elves, they had done their work in the morning while the house lay sleeping, scurrying out of sight by day so that the inhabitants of the house might enjoy their illusion of lonesome wilderness unimpeded by reminders of the effort that went into maintaining it.

Augustus struck out along the path to the left, past the tree Bonaparte had planted to commemorate his victory at Marengo. That information came courtesy of Emma, who had taken him on a cursory tour upon their arrival, pointing out such personal landmarks as the Best Place to Read, the Best Place to Play Prisoner’s Base, and All Those New Bits That Weren’t There Before.

He probably ought to have asked her where to go to find garden implements, Augustus acknowledged to himself. On the other hand, that would have ruined his exit. It was very hard to storm out and then turn meekly back around and ask for directions. It sapped all the moral force from the departure.

He would, Augustus decided generously, freely acknowledge Emma to be the authority on the estate of Malmaison and its grounds. When it came to Jane, however, she was wrong, quite wrong, and he would prove it to her.

Eventually.

The path he had chosen looped and then looped again, bringing him along the banks of a river too perfect to be entirely natural. Above the trees, the sun was beginning to set, reflecting red-gold streaks in the clear water below. Beneath the trees, though, it was already dusk. Weeping willows bent their fronds towards the banks, and swans drifted in the chill of the waters. The scene was almost eerie in its beauty, a wistful, haunted place.

Against the fronds of the willows, the woman drifting towards the bridge seemed almost a specter herself, her long gown a whisper of white in the shadow of the trees. She stepped up onto the blue-painted bridge, and the last rays of the setting sun lit upon her, embracing her with the ardor of a lover.

Augustus felt his heart leap with an answering fire.

“Well met by sunset, fair Miss Wooliston!” he called out. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

Was there ever such a proof of fate as this? A bridge in sunset, a romantic copse of woods…the lady of his heart.

“Mr. Whittlesby!” Jane caught at the rustic railing as he bounded towards her, making the planks of the bridge tremble with his enthusiasm. Her eyes were bright with welcome—or perhaps merely the reflection of the setting sun. “Has there been some new development?”

“Other than my getting lost in the woods? No.” Augustus thought about Dante in the middle of his life, lost in a dark wood. Then he found Beatrice, a shining figure in white, who led him forth to paradise.

Admittedly, Jane’s white muslin gown was hardly the stuff of the heavenly spheres, and Augustus doubted even the most fashionable angels sported white gloves and wide-brimmed bonnets, but he liked the metaphorical resonance of it, all the same.

“These are hardly woods,” Jane said practically, surveying the carefully landscaped disorder. Beneath their bridge, the swans billed the water, calling to one another in their strange, cracked voices, so at odds with their graceful facade. “If you want woods, you keep following the path to the left. This is just a wilderness.”

“Is there a difference between the two?” Augustus asked, not because he wanted to know but just to keep her talking, to savor the image of a beautiful woman in a white gown against a frame of weeping willows.

“The one is designed to look wild, the other actually is.”

Leaning his elbows against the rail next to her, Augustus gazed out across the brilliantly tinted waters. “So we ape nature with art and, in doing so, lose the best of both,” he murmured, “just as we play at love and lose the heart of it.”

Jane gave him a sideways look. “I am glad you wandered along,” she said, pushing away from the railing. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you.”

“I, too.” Augustus gazed at her, trying to think how to begin. Not poetical? Emma had no idea what she was talking about. He blurted, “Have you noticed the sunset?”

“The sunset?” Jane looked more than a little perplexed. “Is that a code?”

“Of a sort,” Augustus hedged. Bracing one hand against the rail, he fell back on the words of a better poet than he. “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.”

He looked meaningfully at Jane.

“You should put that in the masque,” she said blandly. “It might work quite nicely for Americanus.”

Had she not recognized it for what it was? He couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. Sometimes, Jane’s humor eluded him.

“Jane—” There was no poetic way to say it. The words were wrenched out of him. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m sick of masks.”

Jane pursed her lips judiciously. “I understand your feelings, but it is only a week more and then you’ll be done with it. Except for the commemorative volume, of course.” She arched a brow, waiting for a response. When none was forthcoming, she said kindly, “Given the time constraints, your masque isn’t half bad.”

“No. It’s fully bad,” said Augustus bluntly. “But that’s not the point. The point is—”

“That it got you to Malmaison.” Jane nodded approvingly. “If there’s any truth to your source’s claims, you should be able to verify it.”

“It got us to Malmaison,” Augustus corrected. He added, more quietly, “I hadn’t realized how beautiful it is here.”

Emma hadn’t exaggerated. It was a landscape made for lovers, all full of secluded alcoves and picturesque vistas. Even the sun was complicit, lighting the sky with the sort of sunset one never saw in Paris.

“Yes, as to that.” Jane held up a hand to shield her eyes against the last glare of the sun, frowning against the purple and red magnificence of the sky, the brilliant glitter of the water. “It isn’t the way I would have planned it.”

“The gardens?” He could see where Jane was more of a formal parterre sort of person, but there was something about the wildness of the landscape that called to him.