“You might have the dire deep,” Mme. Delagardie suggested, her American accent very much in evidence, “or the dreadful deep, but not dithery. It’s not even a proper word.”

“Your deep may be dire, but my deep is dithery. There is such a thing as poetic license, Madame Delagardie,” said Augustus grandly.

“License or laziness? Surely, another word might serve your purpose better. The deep is a rather stationary thing.”

Who had appointed Emma Delagardie the Grand Inquisitor for Poetical Excellence, Greater Paris Branch? It had been a sad, sad day for France when her uncle had been appointed American envoy to Paris and an even sadder one when she had decided to outlast his tenure and stay.

Perhaps America would like to take her back?

“The waves, Madame Delagardie, maintain a constant flow, back and forth, just so.” Augustus used the flowy fabric of his sleeves to illustrate, rocked back and forth on the bench. “And on and on they go.”

With a hey nonny nonny and a ho ho ho.

Christ, he made himself sick sometimes. You’re doing it for England, old chap, he used to tell himself, but the for-England bit had been rubbed bare over time, torn to shreds on the detritus of rhyme.

Oh, bugger. He was thinking in rhyme again. Was there no way to turn it off? To end the adjectives that infected his consciousness? That bedeviled his brain? That assaulted his…

Next time, Augustus promised himself. The next time he was recruited for a life of espionage, he was posing as a philosopher or a student of ancient languages, as someone staid and sober, someone who expressed himself in prose rather than verse, and fourth-rate verse at that.

They had warned him of this, his mentors at the War Office. Choose your persona wisely, they had said. Over time, you might just become what you pretend to be. Augustus had scoffed at it at the time. Nineteen and fearless he had been then, confident of the power of both his sword and his pen. It had seemed like such a lark, a decade ago, to couch his reports to the War Office in poetry so bad that even the Ministry of Police wouldn’t want to read it. Even fanatical devotion only went so far. For the French surveillance officers, “so far” generally ended somewhere around the thirty-ninth canto.

What a stroke of brilliance, a code no one could break—because there was no code. No count-ten-letters-and-subtract-one, no book of code words and phrases, no messy paper trails to trip one up, just the information itself couched in terms of purest absurdity, truth drowned in a sea of verbiage.

Sometimes, it felt like truth wasn’t the only one drowning. He had been doing this for too long; he felt the weariness of it to his very bones.

Augustus looked at Jane Wooliston, his buoy, his anchor, his island in a turbulent sea. Until she had arrived in Paris, he had been giving serious thought to throwing it all in.

Clasping his hands to his breast, Augustus looked meaningfully at Miss Wooliston. “What can one say about the sea? Oh, the sea! The inconstant sea! As indeterminate as a lady’s affections and as unfathomable as the female heart.”

Miss Wooliston hid her smile behind her fan. “Beautifully said, Monsieur Whittlesby, but I would urge you to credit our sex with somewhat more resoluteness of character than that.”

She managed to make her voice carry without seeming to try. What a lovely voice it was, too, a fine, clear contralto, neither too high nor too low.

Augustus clapped the back of his hand to his forehead, just managing not to gag on his own sleeve. They had played this game before, he and Miss Wooliston. “Resolute in cruelty! Obdurate in obfuscation!”

“Ornate in ormolu?” It was the American again. Of course.

“Ormolu,” Augustus repeated. “Ormolu?”

Emma Delagardie gave a little bounce that made her silver spangles scintillate. “Just helping out. You are doing Os, aren’t you? “

Augustus would have loved to tell her exactly what she could do with her As, Es and Us—in prose—but he had spent years perfecting his pose of poetic otherworldliness. He wasn’t about to ruin it for one noisy chit from the colonies. The former colonies, that was. If Emma Delagardie was a representative example, good riddance to them.

“If I may continue?” he said.

Emma Delagardie fluttered her fan. Augustus sneezed. The fan was made of feathers. Feathers with silver spangles. They had a long reach.

“Oh, do. Please do,” she said, far too enthusiastically for Augustus’s peace of mind. No one wanted to hear his poetry that badly. In fact, no one wanted to hear his poetry at all. This boded ill.

Augustus brooded. He did it quite well. He bloody well ought to. He had spent hours practicing. “My soul shies back! To flourish, the delicate blooms of poetry must be gently nurtured and watered from the well of an understanding spirit, not withered in the harsh glare of unfeeling criticism.”

“Do go on, Mr. Whittlesby,” said Miss Wooliston soothingly. “I assure you, we are all attention to hear how Cytherea comes about.”

“All thirty dithery cantos,” added her friend cheerfully.

Did she think it was easy to consistently perpetrate works of such poetic awfulness?

He could have told Emma Delagardie a thing or two about that. Years, it had taken, years of grueling practice and downright hard work. It was a hard balance to maintain, writing poetry dreadful enough to be laughable but just credible enough to be believable.

Augustus rustled his roll of papers. “Shall I go on? Or need I fear the slings and arrows of outrageous interruptions?”

“We’ll be good,” promised Emma Delagardie, in a way that signaled anything but. “Mum as church mice.”

The church mice he had known had been rather noisy, actually, in the walls of the vicarage of his youth, but that was beside the point. He wasn’t going to let himself be drawn into yet another pointless argument.

“In that case…” Augustus made a show of scrolling down his page, searching his place. The gilded doors to the music room racketed open and someone skidded into the room, dressed inappropriately for an evening of entertainment, in boots with the mud of travel still on them. He was a young man, cheeks flushed, hair mussed, cravat askew. He was dressed in the glorified riding dress that the upper classes had made their common clothing, a tightly fitted coat over a bright waistcoat, tight pantaloons tucked into Hessian boots. The difference was, these clothes had obviously been used for riding, and recently.

A few of the ladies whispered and giggled behind their fans. The dowager made a snorting noise in her sleep and burrowed deeper into her chair.

What in the hell was Horace de Lilly doing here? As a very junior sort of agent, employed for the sole purpose of his aristocratic connections, de Lilly was meant to be at Saint-Cloud, hanging about the fringes of Bonaparte’s semi-regal court, not in Paris, attending a ball at the Hotel de Balcourt.

This did not bode well.

With a wary eye on his young associate, Augustus returned to his poetry. “For in the lady’s youth was told / A tale of prophecies ancient and old—”

Horace began to bounce on the balls of his feet, striving to be seen over Mme. Delagardie’s plumes. He mouthed something.

Augustus frowned in his general direction. Raising his voice, he proclaimed, “That once in Triton’s court did dwell / And ring a nasty watery knell, / With a clangety clang and an awesome—”

“Yell?” suggested Emma Delagardie, in something that strove to be, but was not quite, sotto voce. “Knell? Mell?”

If Augustus had been holding a book, he would have slammed it. Instead, he jammed the roll of poetry under his arm. “No more! My sensitive soul can endure no further interruptions! The muse has fled. The Graces have left the building.”

He jumped down off the settee, landing with a thump on the parquet floor, and had the satisfaction of seeing Mme. Delagardie take a step back. He had landed rather close to her feet, inadequately shod in Grecian sandals that showed off the diamond rings on her toes.

Augustus wafted a trembling hand in the air. “I beg you, good people! Do not attempt to follow! I must soothe myself and my muse in the only way available to one of my delicate temperament, with a spell of solitude and solitary reflection, making humble homage to the muses in the hopes that they will once again heed my call after so brutal and rude a series of interruptions of their delicate endeavors.”

The excess fabric in his sleeves made a highly gratifying swishing noise as he swept towards the door.

As he passed de Lilly, he murmured, “In the study. Five minutes.”

He didn’t wait to see if de Lilly would answer. Casting a lingering backwards glance at Miss Wooliston—exaggerated yearning with just a hint of lustful smolder—he paused only long enough to give the footmen time to open the doors before swanning out into the throng in the next room, where refreshments had been set out among Balcourt’s collection of faux Egyptological artifacts. At least, Augustus hoped they were faux. A selection of pastries had been set out on a sarcophagus that served as sideboard, while uniformed footmen scooped champagne punch from bowls constructed of Canopic jars.

Augustus was no antiquarian, but he did recall hearing somewhere that those jars had been used to contain the internal organs of the deceased. He made a mental note to stay away from the punch.

The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the company. The punch was flowing freely, the party the sort that would be termed in England “a sad crush,” fashionable people jostling one against the other, doing their best to see and be seen. Balcourt might not be admired, but he was known to set a lavish table and he was not without his contacts at court.

It was easy enough to waft his way through the crowd, the eccentric poet in his own private fog, with the occasional murmur of “The muse! I must set it down!”

No one would think anything of finding him in Balcourt’s study. When the muse demanded…

Augustus closed the door of Balcourt’s study behind him, shutting out the revelry without. It was quiet here, the drapes closed, the only light the candles that had been left burning, as a matter of course, in the sconces above the hearth. Balcourt was no scholar. The only thing in the room that didn’t show a fine film of dust was the decanter.

The man couldn’t be more different from his cousin, Miss Jane Wooliston.

The Pink Carnation.

The door racketed open as Horace de Lilly came charging in as though all the hounds of hell were behind him, the nasty, yippy ones with particularly pointy teeth.

Augustus slammed the door behind him, turning the key in the lock. “What in the blazes was that all about? Aren’t you supposed to be in Saint-Cloud?”

“It is of the most urgent!” Horace declared importantly.

It had bloody well better be. Junior agents weren’t meant to make direct contact with their seniors. Especially not in such an exuberant and noisy fashion. If Horace had something to report to him, there were channels for that. Quiet channels. Discreet channels. Unfortunately, to ignore the other man now would serve nothing. Whatever damage had been done was done.

“If anyone asks, you’re here to commission a poem. You, lover. Me, Cyrano. Understood? You’re mad with love for—someone. You can pick the girl; I won’t dictate that part—”

For how can one dictate the dictates of the heart? whispered the poet in Augustus’s head.

Shut up, Augustus told it.

“—but you’d better make a good show of being lovelorn. That will explain your”—Augustus looked pointedly at Horace’s muddy boots, his inappropriate attire—“exuberant arrival. Everyone understands young love.”

For a moment, Horace looked as though he might argue. Augustus Whittlesby was universally agreed to be the worst poet in Paris, and, like so many young men, Horace harbored vague poetic aspirations of his own. But sacrifices must be made from time to time.

“So it will be,” he said manfully. “I’m here to commission a verse. Now, wait until you hear—”

“Did anyone follow you?” Augustus cut him off.

Horace shook his head. “No one suspects me.”

Augustus wished that he could share the younger man’s assurance. Ever since a plot to assassinate the First Consul had been uncovered last month, Bonaparte’s police force had been working overtime, cracking down on threats anywhere they found them, and sometimes even where they hadn’t.