Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

There was an old adage about hornet’s nests. Augustus had the uneasy feeling that he had just kicked one.

“This isn’t about me,” Augustus said hastily.

In fact, this wasn’t supposed to be about either of them. This was supposed to be about Mr. Fulton and his mysterious plans. For the mission, he had told himself, all for the mission. It would arouse suspicion for a man alone to be loitering by the Emperor’s summerhouse. But a man and a lady, in a rose garden…who would remark on that? Not to mention the niggling little matter of Horace de Lilly’s bombshell about Emma’s supposed betrothal.

It had been such a nice, tidy little plan: eavesdrop on the Emperor, reassure himself that this American marriage was just another nonsensical rumor.

Until it wasn’t. Tidy, that is. In fact, it was starting to feel distinctly out of control. What in the blazes had he been thinking? He hadn’t been thinking. It had just all followed, one thing after another. It had rattled him, thinking she might actually be going back to America, marrying that taciturn cousin of hers. The rest had just…come out.

“This isn’t about me,” he repeated.

“Oh, isn’t it?” said Emma. Her gloved hands were clenched into fists at her sides and there were two bright red spots in her cheeks that had nothing to do with rouge.

“You’re going to get sunburnt, standing out here like this,” said Augustus solicitously. “Perhaps we had better—”

“And whose fault would that be?” In her anger, Emma seemed to grow a good three inches. It took Augustus a moment to realize she actually had. She was standing on tiptoe in her ridiculous, frivolous, ribbon-trimmed slippers. That was going to hurt in a moment or two, but for the moment, she was buoyed up with rage. “But, no, you had to drag me out here to ask ridiculous questions and cast aspersions on my character. Heaven forbid you tear me to bits in the comfort of a shady drawing room. No. It had to be out here.”

“I wasn’t trying to tear you to bits,” Augustus said soothingly. “I just wanted—”

“I know,” said Emma viciously. “To talk. Fine. We can talk. Do you want to talk about running away? Let’s talk about you. A grown man and you don’t even own a waistcoat!”

That wasn’t fair. “I own a waistcoat,” he said defensively. “I don’t see where that—”

“Don’t you? You can’t even commit to an outer garment, much less anything else, and you talk to me about running away?”

It was time to get this conversation back where it belonged. “I was simply pointing out,” Augustus said in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “that you have managed to dodge every single commitment that’s been presented to you. If not hiding, what would you like to call it?”

Emma went off like a grenade. “You. You have the nerve to stand here and ask me that? What do you know about commitment? I’ve kept Carmagnac going all these years. I have a house. I have dependents. I have responsibilities.”

Did she want to talk about responsibilities? He’d say saving England from invasion was a jolly big responsibility. Knowing that if your messages were intercepted, people would die—that was responsibility. Knowing that lives depended on the insipidity of his poetry, on his eschewing the bloody waistcoat—that was responsibility. Knowing that he could damn himself by a chance word, by a slip, by a murmur in his sleep, that was responsibility.

He had eschewed friendships, family, outer garments, all for this, and she told him he had no sense of responsibility? If it weren’t a matter of both personal and national security, he could pin back her ears with responsibility.

But he couldn’t.

Emma was still in full spate. “And you? You live in rented lodgings. You have no friends that I’ve seen. And what about family? No wife, no children, no parents, no siblings…”

“I had a sibling. A sister.”

That got her. Emma broke off mid-rant. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—Was she— Is she—?”

“Married,” said Augustus grimly.

She had dwindled into a country housewife, counting the chickens, making soup for the poor, more interested in the pantry than poetry.

Emma settled her hands on her hips, her lips set so tightly, Augustus was amazed she could get the words through them. “That’s what normal, grown-up people do, Augustus. They don’t go around posturing from salon to salon, spouting ridiculous bits of verse. They get married. They grow up.”

He had never heard that tone from her before, not even in the most acrimonious of their debates about the final act of the masque.

“You should talk,” retorted Augustus. “Is there any ballroom that’s safe from you? When was the last time you refused an invitation? Or a glass of champagne?”

Emma’s voice rose. “Do you think I enjoy this—limbo? I was married. If Paul hadn’t died, I would still be married. I would have a nursery and children and something more to think about than the next dress and the next ball. But Paul died.”

Augustus was caught up short by the raw pain in her voice. This was an Emma he had never seen before.

He had never thought that she might have loved her Paul, not like that. She had been fond enough of him, she had made that much clear; she had missed him, that was fair enough; but with all the ups and downs and gossip and scandal, Augustus had just assumed, as everyone else had, that it couldn’t have been a terribly deep emotion. As she had said herself, she had been young.

He was an ass. A complete and utter ass.

He was also, alarmingly, bitterly jealous of a dead man.

Emma’s fingers twisted together, like snakes in a Greek sculpture. Her words tumbled out, one after the other. “He couldn’t help dying and I couldn’t stop it. Neither of us had that choice or that chance. But you do. You have every chance in the world and you chose to be what you are.”

Augustus’s lips moved with difficulty. “What am I?”

He could see Emma’s throat move as she swallowed. “A fainéant. A do-nothing.” She blinked away tears, tossing her head defiantly back. “Do you know what I think?”

Augustus had the uncomfortable feeling that he was going to.

“I think you wanted Jane because you knew she would never have you.” Her eyes glittered with a strange, fierce light. “I think you wanted her because she was safe. Cytherea is only Cytherea because she doesn’t leave the tower.”

“I—” Augustus couldn’t think of anything to say.

He didn’t have to.

The door to the summerhouse rocketed open, hinges screeching. A man stormed onto the stairs, red-faced with heat and anger.

“Can a man get no work done?” raged the Emperor.

Augustus and Emma froze in the face of imperial wrath, arrested mid-argument.

Had they been speaking that loudly? From the expressions of amusement and derision, Augustus could only assume they must have been.

It wasn’t just Bonaparte on the steps but the entire flower of France’s navy ranged behind him, staring over his shoulder in varying degrees of annoyance, curiosity, and yawning indifference. Even the bees on the roses seemed to have stopped their buzzing to pause and stare.

Augustus had forgotten, at some point in their discussion, that Bonaparte was just a window away. He had forgotten about everything except Emma and the words pouring from her lips. They buffeted him like the wind and waves of Mr. Fulton’s machine, sending him racketing about as helplessly as Americanus in his ill-fated barque, his mast broken, his defenses down. He felt like a necromancer who had summoned a storm only to find it turned against him, scourged with lightning, deafened by thunder.

Metaphor again, always metaphor. If he clung to metaphor, he wouldn’t have to think about the meat of it, what Emma had actually told him.

She wasn’t the only one who knew how to hide.

Next to him, Emma sank into a deep and hasty curtsy. Augustus could see only the very top of her head, gilded by sunlight. “I beg pardon, sire. We were just…talking. About the masque.”

“Practicing the love scenes, were they?” murmured one officer to another.

Augustus could see the tips of Emma’s ears go red. It was the only bit of her he could make out. It made him feel like the worst sort of cad. Exposing himself to scorn and derision—well, he was used to that. To expose her to the amusement and censure of Bonaparte’s entourage, that was another matter entirely.

Bonaparte made a grunting noise. “The production had better be worth the trouble.”

Trying to draw attention from Emma to himself, Augustus said loudly, “We strive to amuse, sire. We trust the mellifluous meditations of our meandering marauders shall be to your certain satisfaction.”

“Yes, yes,” said Bonaparte impatiently. “Next time, confine your scenes to the theatre.”

“Sire,” said Emma, and bowed her head still farther.

“Enough, Madame Delagardie, enough.” The Emperor was inclined to be benevolent. Chucking her under the chin, he raised her to her feet. He wasn’t a large man, but she looked very small in his grasp. A moment ago, Augustus would have sworn she was the size of the Athena Nike, able to overleap buildings and shake the foundations of empires with the volume of her voice. “There’s no need for that. We were done here anyway. Weren’t we, gentlemen?”

There was a decided note of challenge in his voice.

Admiral Villeneuve opened his mouth and then closed it again.

Robert Fulton stepped forward, holding himself stiffly. “I do not imagine we can have anything more to say.”

“Come back to me when you have made the changes,” said the Emperor dismissively. He turned to Villeneuve, turning his back on Fulton. “Where did you leave the other plan?”

“In the council room, sire.”

“What are we waiting for? Come!” With a wave of his hand, Bonaparte motioned his minions onward. They surged forward, making for the house, leaving Emma, Augustus, and Fulton in their wake, the summerhouse abandoned but for the detritus of paper and one red jacket that someone had tossed carelessly across the back of a chair and forgotten in the race to the house. Mr. Fulton’s portfolio was sprawled open on the table.

Somewhere, in the back of his mind, the bit that sounded strangely like Miss Gwen, Augustus dimly remembered that this was what he was here for, that he was meant to discover what Mr. Fulton had devised and how Bonaparte meant to deploy it.

Right now, though, all that felt curiously insubstantial. Emma’s words still rang in his ears. He had been in the midst of a cannon fusillade once, caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. It had felt something like this, the explosion followed by a painful, ringing silence, with the black soot griming his face and clouding his eyes. He had felt it then, too, this curious stillness. The senses faltered before the enormity of the bombardment.

Augustus opened his mouth to speak, but the words clogged in his throat. For once in his life, he had no idea what to say.

A fainéant, she had called him. A do-nothing.

Emma’s back was to him, the line of her spine showing clearly through the thin fabric of her dress.

If Paul hadn’t died, I would still be married.

Was that what she agonized over, behind that fake, bright smile? Did she pretend that Paul was still alive, that they had a nursery of children together at that estate of his, the one with the drainage issues? Was it Paul she still dreamed of at night, Paul whose name she murmured in her sleep?

Augustus felt as though the world had just been picked up and dropped again, all his certitudes and convictions lying in pieces around him. All these weeks of working together, laughing together, being together, and he had never suspected, never even imagined. Emma was what she was, the widow Delagardie, so long a widow that her widowhood was a fact rather than an event. It had never occurred to him that to her, the late Delagardie was more than the precondition to her widowhood, or that she might, despite the time, despite the rumors, despite it all, still mourn him.

Should he offer sympathy? It was a bit late for that, and the stiff line of Emma’s back denied it.