Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

“So the man’s neither a cretin nor a brute,” said Miss Gwen. “My faith in mankind is restored.”

“I don’t need a hero,” said Emma. She pushed aside the memory of Augustus neatly tripping Marston. “I don’t want someone who will conquer kingdoms or bestride the globe like a Colossus or whatever else heroes are supposed to do. I don’t want flowery professions.” She had had that once, from Paul, and look how that had turned out. She took a deep breath. “I can’t claim to make any sense of it, but I’m happier when I’m with Augustus than I have been since—well, for a very long time.”

It was true. When she was with him, she didn’t worry what people were thinking or whether she was going to be able to sleep at night. She didn’t brood about the past or fret about the future. She was happy simply to be, and to be with him.

At least, she had been. Emma pinched the fabric of her skirt between her fingers.

Into the silence, Jane said quietly, “People aren’t always what they seem. Are you sure this is what you want?”

If someone had asked her that nine years ago, on the eve of her elopement with Paul, she would have blithely declared yes. Now? She knew Jane was right, even if she might be right for the wrong reasons. It had taken her years to know Paul, truly know him, with all their false starts and willful misconceptions. She wouldn’t even vouch for her ability to know herself.

She had a sense of the Augustus-ness of Augustus, his quick, restless intelligence so at odds with the languid air he cultivated; his brusque displays of affection—pulling her cloak around her shoulders, taking her champagne glass from her hand—so very much the opposite of his flowery odes; the fundamental honesty that forced him to admit his own flaws and misconceptions, even when she knew he was burning to believe otherwise.

All these were Augustus, but she knew they weren’t the sum of him. She knew instincts could deceive, that perception could be warped by desire or pride or sheer stubbornness. She could feel herself being stubborn now, could feel her toes curling in her slippers, digging into the floor.

It would be so easy to say yes, to say it defiantly and wield it as a weapon.

But it would be a lie. She didn’t know what she wanted. To know what she wanted implied a degree of certainty she couldn’t claim. She had thought she knew what Paul was and what their life together would be; she had been sure, then, that she knew what she wanted. Now—she had no idea. She had no idea when she would have an idea. And where did that leave her? She could go on as she had been, cocooned in her house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, making the same rounds of parties, drinking enough champagne to get to sleep, waiting for enlightenment to strike, waiting for a divine voice to boom out and tell her to get on with it, whether getting on with it meant marrying Kort or joining Mme. Bonaparte’s household or taking up missionary work in the outer Antipodes.

Or she could take a grand gamble. There had been a rope swing over the river at Belvedere. Year after year, Emma had picked her way carefully down the bank, easing into the water bit by bit as the others went flying over her head, releasing the rope to land with a cry and a splash. No risk, no reward, said Augustus.

Emma wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she thought she knew what she needed.

“No,” Emma said honestly. “But I would rather take the chance and risk being disappointed.”

“Fools will be fools,” Miss Gwen said austerely.

“Be careful,” said Jane.

Fulton’s plans blurred in front of Augustus’s eyes.

He couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The body of the device was almost, but not quite, cylindrical, coming to a point on one side, fitted with a curious sort of propeller on the other. There was a bump with a stick protruding out of the top, not at the middle, but all the way over to one side, and two rectangular, letter-labeled devices at the bottom. An octagonal structure of some sort billowed above the whole. It looked almost like a kite, but far too large and oddly shaped. Across the whole were additional markings and scribbling: levers, pulleys, dimensions.

Augustus turned it upside down, then sideways. It made no sense in any direction. Hell, he couldn’t tell if it was an elongated and oddly shaped form of grenade, a means of conveyance, or a perfume atomizer designed for Mme. Bonaparte’s boudoir.

Emma would know what it all meant.

Pushing away from the desk, Augustus briskly shuffled the plans back into their folder. Short of divine engineering intervention, staring at the plans wasn’t going to lead to enlightenment. He stuffed the whole beneath the coverlet of his bed. Only an idiot attempted to hide contraband beneath a mattress or a pillow. But no one ever thought to try the simple expedient of lifting up the counterpane.

He needed to get the plans back to London. It would be even better if he could deliver the inventor with the plans. Fulton had seemed less than pleased with Bonaparte that afternoon. Fulton was a native of Pennsylvania, yes, but not of the rabidly anti-English variety of colonial. Fulton had spent time in England before, trying out one of his inventions on the estate of the Duke of Bridgewater.

Augustus would deliver the plans to England. Personally. Not by courier. And once back in England… He smoothed the blankets over the folio, arranging them so that no telltale bump showed. Once back in England, he would stay there. He had overstayed his time in Paris. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. He was growing sloppy. Sloppy killed. True, Wickham would be disappointed to lose his longest-term man in Paris, but that would be more than balanced out by the delivery of the plans for Bonaparte’s secret weapon.

He didn’t want to go on as he had, caricaturing himself into the mere mockery of a human being.

Emma had been right.

Emma. There was the drawback to his plan. Grow up, she had told him—well, not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication had been clear—but to do so meant England, so near geographically, and yet so far away in every other sense. He wouldn’t miss the salons or the taverns, but he would miss those afternoons in Emma’s house, sprawled across a too-small chair in Emma’s book room.

He would miss Emma.

He could picture her as she had walked away, her back very stiff beneath the thin fabric of her dress, damped with sweat until he could practically see the skin beneath. Her arm had been threaded through Mr. Fulton’s, her head tilted at her listening angle, but he knew she had been no more listening than he had been capable of concentrating.

Was she at rehearsal? In her room? Sticking pins in a poet-shaped doll?

He had to find her and set things right.

Augustus crossed his cubbyhole of a room in two steps. The theatre was the most likely place to find her. Hadn’t Fulton said something about repairing the wave machine? They had only one more day until the masque.

If he wanted to leave with Fulton’s plans—and, preferably, Fulton—the ideal time would be tomorrow night, while everyone else was focused on the play. Which meant he had only one night and one day more with Emma. One night and one day to beg her pardon.

Quickening his pace, Augustus yanked open the door. One night and one day to—

“Oh!” said a very familiar voice.

Augustus blinked. Yes, his eyes were sore after staring at those plans, but he had never experienced a mirage before, and certainly not one so precise in every detail.

Emma stood in the open doorway, her hand poised as though to knock.

Her hair was shoved behind her ears in that way she had when she was either deep in thought or trying to work up her nerve. Her dress was wrinkled, splotched slightly with sweat stains and dusted in places with pollen from their interlude in the garden.

She stared at him, as shocked as he, her hand suspended in the air. If she continued the motion, she would hit him. If she did, he would probably deserve it.

“I am so sorry,” he said, just as Emma dropped her hand and said all in a rush, “I was just looking for you.”

“What I said before”—Augustus jumped in, anxious to say his piece before she could—“I had no right.”

Whatever she had meant to say to him, his words shocked her silent. Her eyes searched his face. Augustus felt as though he were being sized up and unconsciously drew himself up straighter.

Emma regarded him intently, her expression serious. “You had no right,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t make you less right.”

They stood on either side of the doorway, each waiting for the other to say something. Without her usual armor of frivolity, there were hollows in Emma’s cheeks that Augustus had never noticed before. She still wore her paint, but he felt, somehow, as though he were seeing her scrubbed bare.

Augustus’s throat worked. He had been on delicate missions before, missions in which life or death hinged on the turn of a phrase, but never before had he felt as though quite so much depended on the choice of a word.

“Perhaps,” he said, and watched her eyelids flicker, watched her brace herself as though for some anticipated blow.

He held out a hand, his palm turned up, his fingers relaxed. It took all his will not to let them tremble.

“Perhaps,” he said, and cleared his throat, “this might better be discussed inside?”

Emma’s hand hovered for a moment at her side. He could see her eyes slide past him, to the tiny room beyond, assessing what he had said and what he was asking. Augustus held his breath and counted the seconds. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he did know that if she dropped her hand and turned away, his life would be the poorer for it. He might have tried persuasion, patter, poetry, but some things were too important for words. He could only stand frozen, his hand outstretched.

Her lips pressed together and she dipped her chin in a movement barely recognizable as a nod.

“Yes,” she said, and placed her hand in his. “Yes, I think that would be…best.”

Closing his fingers around hers, Augustus drew her into the room, letting the door click shut behind her.

His room was much smaller than hers.

It was scarcely large enough to contain a narrow bed, a spindly writing table, and a dressing stand with basin, ewer, and the mysterious accoutrements deemed necessary for the male toilette. The walls had been whitewashed rather than papered and there was no covering on the floor. A former dressing room or servant’s room, it had only the smallest pretense of a window, allowing in just enough natural light to expose the dinginess of it all. Her own room, a floor down, was petite to say the least, but boasted fresh, patterned paper and a vaguely Pompeii-esque border along the ceiling.

Emma stepped inside, forcing herself to concentrate on the spindly legs of the writing desk, the graying white of the walls.

Behind her, she heard the door swing shut. It made the small room seem even smaller. The four walls closed in around them, boxing her and Augustus together, too close for comfort, the bed blocking them on one side, the dressing stand on the other. The heat of the day shimmered around her, trapped beneath the attic roof. She could feel the warmth of it in her cheeks, in her breast, in her hand. There was nowhere else to lead her. Why hadn’t he let go?

Emma wriggled her wrist and Augustus released her hand, taking a step back, a movement that pressed him almost flush to the writing table. The chair wobbled on its narrow legs.

Emma made a show of looking about. “So this is how the bachelors lodge,” she said.

The words sounded tinny in the expectant silence. Augustus accorded them all the attention they deserved. None.

“I was on my way to find you. To apologize.”

Emma locked her hands loosely at her waist. “It seems we were on the same mission, then.”

She would have liked to sit down, but the only options were the chair, which would have required wiggling past Augustus, or the bed.

The bed was far too much a bed.

“You? You have no need to apologize.” Augustus rested a hand against the back of the chair, bracing himself. “Under the law, truth is always a defense to an accusation of defamation of character.”