“I have the plans in my room,” said Mr. Fulton. He began rolling up his sleeves. “But I believe I can manage this from memory.”

“You’re very kind,” said Emma, and stepped back to let him pass.

The room looked very different in daylight. Dust motes danced in the sleepy sunlight, giving the space a hazy air. Last night, it had seemed endless, an Aladdin’s cave of treasures, filled with dark alleys and treacherous corners, a mysterious and slightly dangerous place. Now it was simply itself, a reasonably large storage room, blocked off into bits by tottering piles of old scenery.

In the corner, Mr. Fulton began sorting busily through bits and pieces of machinery, muttering to himself and wiping off stray parts on the tail of his coat. Emma left him to it and wandered in the direction of the painted backdrop of Venice behind which she and Augustus had sat last night. She felt uneasy and slightly sick, the way she had when that first letter had arrived from her parents after the elopement, knowing that steps had been taken that couldn’t be untaken, that there was no way to smooth everything over and make it all pleasant again.

What was said couldn’t be unsaid.

“Emma?”

Venice undulated, the houses collapsing in on themselves.

As Emma caught her breath, Jane ducked neatly beneath the canvas, Venice bunched up in one hand, a script in the other.

“You scared me,” Emma said. “I didn’t realize anyone was there.”

Jane indicated her script. “I was going over my lines while Miss Gwen puts her pirates through their paces. It’s much quieter in here than out there.”

Emma couldn’t argue with the wisdom of that. Through the partition, she could hear Miss Gwen’s voice, raised in harangue. Behind Jane, she could see the rowboat she and Augustus had shared last night, mundane now in the afternoon light, nothing but a rowboat.

Jane let Venice fall. It swung back into place, shrouding the boat once again in obscurity. The Campanile looked down its bell tower at Emma.

“Is something wrong?”

Emma made a face. “I had a row with Mr. Whittlesby.”

“About the masque?”

“What else?”

“He can be rather flighty, can’t he?”

“I wouldn’t say that.” Not in so many words, at any rate. She thought back over their long association. “We met nearly every day for over a month and he was never once late. Not once.”

In fact, for a man who couldn’t be trusted to wear a waistcoat, he had been remarkably reliable. Reliable, patient, hardworking.…Oh, for heaven’s sake, Emma told herself. Enough. Just because she was feeling guilty was no reason to canonize the man.

“The poetry does get to one after a while,” said Jane in commiserating tones. “All that rhyme and metaphor and so forth. You’ve been very good to put up with him for as long as you have.”

Put up with him? She and Jane had happily mocked Augustus before, laughing over his exaggerated rhymes, his melodramatic airs. But he hadn’t been Augustus then. He had been Mr. Whittlesby. And it seemed, somehow, unkind for Jane to be standing there, serene in white muslin, casting judgment on Augustus when she had so recently crushed his hopes. Callous, even. Emma hadn’t thought her friend could be callous.

Emma wordlessly shook her head.

For a moment, Jane was silent too. She said, with unaccustomed hesitation, “Was it anything to do with me?”

“Why should it be about you? You don’t want him anyway.”

The horrible words came out before she could stop them. Emma pressed a hand to her lips. She could feel her fingers trembling.

“Emma?” said Jane. She didn’t stare—Jane would never do anything so graceless as stare—but her attention fixed on Emma with a great deal of concern. “What is this?”

Oh, what was the use?

“I know about yesterday,” Emma said despairingly. “I know about the two of you.”

“About the two of—” For a moment, Jane looked as near to perturbed as Emma had ever seen her. “About what?”

“Your conversation,” said Emma, which was just another way of saying the same thing without saying anything at all. “Augustus told me he had—”

“He had what?” Jane’s face was entirely remote. She might have been a stranger, rather than the woman with whom Emma had gossiped and laughed and compared bonnets.

“You knew how he felt about you,” said Emma wretchedly. “Couldn’t you have been a little kinder about it? Not that it’s all your fault. I didn’t mean to imply that. I know we all made fun—and he did make such a show of it—but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t real emotion there. Of some sort.”

Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t Jane’s reaction. Jane’s face relaxed. She seemed almost amused. “Is that all this is about?”

“All?” Emma’s voice was sharper than she had intended. “I know this may seem comical to you, but you didn’t see him last night, Jane. He was hurt, genuinely hurt.”

“Hmm,” said Jane. “I’m sure he’ll get over it. A few cantos, and he’ll feel quite the thing again.”

Emma bristled. It didn’t matter that she had said much the same thing, and crueler. She wasn’t the one he had been in love with.

“One doesn’t just get over a broken heart.”

“I wouldn’t know,” said Jane simply. “Matters of the heart aren’t my area of expertise.”

For a moment, Emma was distracted from the question of Augustus. She looked at her friend, so sought after, so feted, and yet, in her own way, so very alone.

“Don’t you miss it?” Emma said. “Being in love is—” How to explain it? Terrible and wonderful all at once. Messy, unpredictable, occasionally dreadful, and yet so incredibly vital.

Jane brushed the question aside. “Whatever it is that Mr. Whittlesby might have wanted or needed of me,” she said matter-of-factly, “I doubt love was at the heart of it.”

Memories of breath against her cheek, hands in her hair, lips against her neck, two feet away and a century removed.

“You don’t mean to imply—not Augustus!”

It took Jane a moment to catch Emma’s meaning. When she did, her eyebrows shot up so high, they nearly touched her hairline. “Heavens, no! Mr. Whittlesby is no Marston.” Completely oblivious to any implications that might have for Emma, she went blithely on. “I simply meant that Mr. Whittlesby’s interest in me is primarily”—she considered for a moment before settling on the appropriate word—“professional.”

“Professional?”

“His poetry,” Jane specified, in case Emma needed specification. “Every poet needs a muse.”

“That doesn’t mean he might not fancy himself in love with his muse,” said Emma. She felt, suddenly, very weary.

What a tangle. Jane couldn’t help not being in love with Augustus any more than he could have helped fancying himself in love with Jane, or Emma could have helped—

No. Emma pushed the thought from her mind. What was the use of adding another hopeless passion to the pile?

“Nonsense,” said Jane firmly, so firmly that Emma wondered, fleetingly, whether Jane really had been quite so unaware of Augustus’s intentions. “If it is a fancy, it’s a passing one. I imagine sculptors fancy themselves in love with their statues, but that doesn’t mean they expect the marble to reciprocate.”

“But you’re not marble,” said Emma. “And neither is he.”

“Why this sudden interest in Mr. Whittlesby’s emotions?” Jane’s voice changed as she looked at Emma’s face. “You’re not— Emma?”

Emma pressed her lips together, not trusting herself to say anything. “We’re friends,” she said. “We had a row.”

“You always said it was only the breeches,” Jane said softly. “Pure aesthetics, you said.”

“That was before I knew him,” said Emma, in a very small voice.

Jane set down her script very carefully, tapping the pages into order. “Are you sure you know him now?”

“What do you mean?’

Jane didn’t meet Emma’s eyes. “I mean,” she said carefully, “that Mr. Whittlesby is a very attractive man. And he can be a very charming one. But he isn’t…”

“Isn’t what?”

“Exactly steady,” said Jane, with the air of one navigating choppy waters. She reached out a hand to touch Emma’s sleeve. “There are better places to trust your heart.”

Emma twitched away. “I thought matters of the heart weren’t your expertise.”

“No, but I do know Mr. Whittlesby,” said Jane.

“Do you?” Emma thought of all the times she had seen Augustus kneeling in tableau at Jane’s feet, all the verse he had addressed to her, all the overblown sentiments, and, far worse, the private looks of longing. Something dark and nasty unfurled in her chest. “Or are you just afraid to lose your acolyte?”

“I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” Jane said reasonably. “Mr. Whittlesby is all very well for a—a drawing room flirtation, but he’s not settling-down material. He’s a poet.”

“You say poet as though it were akin to pirate! It’s not a crime against society to write poetry.”

“That depends on the poetry,” snapped Miss Gwen, coming up behind them.

“I do wish people would stop doing that,” said Emma crossly.

Miss Gwen went on without paying any notice. “If you mean that Whittlesby fellow, it’s not piracy, it’s leprosy. At least piracy is a trade with a bit of dignity to it.”

Emma looked at Miss Gwen’s purple sash, broad black hat, and large gold hoop earring. Dignity wasn’t the word that came to mind. “Poetry is a noble profession,” she said, lifting her chin. “Think of Spenser. Think of Shakespeare.”

“Ha! Think Shakespeare is all it takes to win an argument? The man could turn a phrase, I’ll grant him that, but when you get down to it, he was nothing more than an actor.”

Given that Miss Gwen had just stepped off a stage, Emma wasn’t sure she saw the logic of that indictment. “Nonetheless,” Emma said coldly, “people still quote him to this day.”

“Is that what you want?” said Miss Gwen. “Immortality via Whittlesby? You won’t have much luck in that direction. Lining boots, that’s all those poems of his will be good for in ten years.”

“I’m not interested in immortality,” said Emma.

Miss Gwen’s dark eyes narrowed. “Then it’s the man you want? More fool you. You’d best go for the verse, then.”

Emma folded her arms across her chest. “What’s so very wrong with Mr. Whittlesby?”

Jane and her chaperone exchanged a look.

“Aside from the lack of waistcoat?” offered Jane.

“And jacket and cravat and hat…” enumerated Miss Gwen. “Hmph. The boy might as well appear in public in his nightshirt!”

“Our own dresses are just as revealing,” argued Emma. Well, maybe not Miss Gwen’s. Even as a scourge of the seas, the older woman was fully covered. Emma resisted the urge to cover her own chest as the chaperone looked pointedly at her décolletage. “A decade ago, we would have been wearing piles of petticoats. Who’s to say that fashion won’t shift again, making Mr. Whittlesby the forerunner of the new mode?”

“The open shirt and looking-silly style?” riposted Miss Gwen. “What next? Breeches for women?”

“It’s not so much the aesthetics of it,” Jane intervened, “as it is—well, his suitability.”

“One flirts with poets,” barked Miss Gwen. “One doesn’t fall in love with them. And one certainly doesn’t marry them.”

She made it sound like an inalterable law. Somewhere in the Napoleonic Code was buried a provision banning matrimony for all purveyors of verse, to be defined under subsection 62(a)(iii), not to be confused with subsection 62(a)(iv)—minstrels, traveling.

“I said nothing about marriage,” said Emma hotly. Or love. In fact, she had said nothing at all. It was all being assumed.

“You’re not the not-marrying kind,” said Jane. And then, before Emma could argue, “I’ve seen the way you look at Louis-Charles.”

Hortense’s baby. Emma bit down hard on her lower lip.

“You need someone reliable,” said Jane. “You need someone who can make a home with you. What about your cousin?”

“I wish everyone would stop trying to marry me off to Kort,” said Emma, so vehemently that Jane took a step back and Miss Gwen cackled, either in approval or just on general principles. “I have no interest in Kort. Kort has no interest in me. Shall I put it in verse?”

“Please don’t,” said Jane hastily. “I think we’ve had enough of that. But—Mr. Whittlesby?”

“He’s not what you think,” said Emma hotly.

“You don’t know the half of it,” muttered Miss Gwen.

Jane shot her chaperone a look.

“He’s not the dilettante he pretends to be. He’s clever, truly clever.” Too clever sometimes. She remembered the way he dealt with their poetical meanderings, precise, analytical, entirely at odds with his public persona. And then there was the rest of it. “And he’s kind.” She looked at Jane’s and Miss Gwen’s uncomprehending faces, both in their own ways so cloistered, so little acquainted with the world. “Kindness isn’t so common as you might think.”