Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

No matter how honorable Augustus’s intentions might be at this particular moment, there were no guarantees.

It had hurt enough last time, watching love crumble to dust, picking up the pieces of her life and trying to go on, and that had been with the love and support of her old schoolfellows. She wasn’t sure she could do it again.

No matter how tempting.

“I…can’t,” Emma said, and watched Augustus’s face fall.

“Can’t?” he said carefully. “Or won’t?”

“What difference does it make?” asked Emma despairingly. “Can’t, won’t. I am willing to believe”—Emma glanced down at his waistcoat, fighting with the words—“that you might actually care for me. That you might even think you love me.” She hurried on before he could interject. “But how can I know? What if this is only another matter of policy, too deep for me to understand?”

Augustus tucked a stray lock of hair behind her ear. “What policy would be served by taking you with me?”

“That’s just the problem,” said Emma. “I don’t know. I know nothing of this whole world of yours. I can’t imagine the rules by which you play, or the goals for which you scheme. It’s all foreign to me. Until yesterday, I had no idea any of this even existed. It’s all unfathomable.”

“You don’t have to fathom it,” said Augustus determinedly. “I’m getting out. There’ll be no more of this. No more lies. We’ll even make peace with my father. He’s a clergyman, you know. You can’t get much more straight and narrow than that.”

“So you say,” said Emma. “But how do I know what’s truth and what’s lies? How do I know even that?”

“Those are strong words,” he said slowly.

Emma tilted her head up to him. Tears blurred her vision, presenting him to her as through a glass darkly, the outlines and details vague and uncertain. “What you ask of me is no small thing.”

“Trust,” he said.

Emma nodded wordlessly. She didn’t need to enumerate his deceptions. They stood between them like a palpable thing.

“I have never,” he said, his voice low, “lied to you in anything to do with you. Nor about how I feel for you. The pretext might have been a lie, but the substance never was.”

“Say I believe you,” she said, and her voice wobbled. She forced herself to rush onward before she lost her ability to speak entirely. “Say I believe that you mean it, that you believe it to be true, what if you wake up two months from now to find you mistook your feelings? It’s happened before.”

With Jane. She didn’t say it and neither did he. She didn’t need to. He knew exactly what she meant.

“It is,” she said, “a great deal you ask of me.”

“What assurances can I give you?” His eyes searched her face. “What can I say to you that will make you believe?”

Emma bit down on her lower lip, caught in a struggle between common sense and desire. Nothing, her mind declared, there was nothing Augustus Whittlesby could say that could reassure her. How could there be? He was a proven liar, a deceiver by trade.

And yet.…Foolish as it was, stupid as she knew it to be, deep down, she believed him.

Did she believe him enough to stake her future on it? Emma’s teeth worried at her lower lip as she stared at him, torn, a storm of contradictory arguments whipping her now this way, now that.

Augustus took pity on her confusion. He touched his knuckle gently to her cheek, a gesture that almost undid her.

“After the masque,” he said. “We’ll talk after the masque.”

After the masque. Everything had been about the masque, until the masque, plans for the masque, and now the masque was upon them, and Emma felt as though she had reached the very end of the earth, the bit guarded by sea monsters, where the land ended in an abrupt drop.

“Will it make a difference?” she asked.

“That,” said Augustus, “is up to you.”

He stepped back, honoring their bargain, leaving her free to go.

His every instinct clamored to him to stop. Fool, he called himself. Fool, to embrace a belated and costly honor. How much more effective it would be to embrace away her indecision. He could quell her misgivings with caresses and stop her doubts with kisses. She wanted to be persuaded, his lesser self argued. She was practically begging for it. Why not take the decision out of her hands? It would be a kindness.

“Enjoy the performance,” he said, and reached past her to push open the back door of the theatre for her.

“Our performance,” Emma said, her voice low. Ducking her head, she hurried past him into the theatre.

Their performance. No matter what, they would always have that. Augustus stared at the closed door. Three acts of mediocre verse and a month of memories.

Damn.

Augustus kicked the wall of the theatre and succeeded only in stubbing his toe. They had made it so much easier for Americanus, he and Emma. All Americanus had to do was rescue his lady from a band of rascally pirates. It wasn’t his persuasions that won her from her tower, but a chance abduction.

Augustus doubted that a band of pirates was going to come marauding through Malmaison just for his convenience.

In this version, he couldn’t prove his devotion with pretty speeches or daring feats of rescue. Instead, he had no choice but to wait for his Cytherea to come to him, flawed and false though she knew him to be. He had to trust to the strength of the strange rapport between them to overcome all the objections of reason and all the fears that came with making oneself vulnerable to another. No tricks, no gimmicks, no deceptions. All he could was hope that love would prove stronger than reason.

It was not a very comforting thought.

“Mr. Whittlesby!” Someone was bouncing towards him around the side of the theatre. It was Horace de Lilly, pink of face and green of waistcoat, looking disgustingly healthy and happy and far too eager to see Augustus. “What luck! I was hoping to have a chance to speak to you.”

“Now is really not the time,” said Augustus quellingly.

The last thing he needed right now was another round of “I want to be just like you when I grow up.” Hell, he didn’t want to be just like him when he grew up. Horace de Lilly could just find another agent to idolize. He was done.

Horace, unfortunately, wasn’t. He bounced to a stop in front of Augustus, quivering with excitement. “You’ve done it! You’ve done it, haven’t you?”

“Shouldn’t you be reserving your seat for the masque?” Augustus said shortly. “I hear it’s to be the theatrical event of the summer.”

Horace wasn’t to be deterred. His boyish face shone with excitement. “You have them, don’t you? The plans? I knew you would do it!”

“Your confidence overwhelms me,” said Augustus. “Not now.”

Of all the ill-chosen agents, de Lilly was about as subtle as a cartload of monkeys. The concept of “not in public” appeared to have passed him by. At least after this week, he would no longer be Augustus’s problem.

But he would still be someone else’s.

Augustus took a deep breath. “A word of advice, de Lilly. Curb your enthusiasm. I know you’re terribly excited about the poetry you commissioned from me,” he placed heavy emphasis on the words, “but unless you want to tip your lady off to your purpose, I would advise a modicum of discretion. Hell hath no fury.” Like an Emperor betrayed.

De Lilly’s brow wrinkled. “Er, right. But you do have the, um, poetry? Where is it? Was it what we thought it was? Can I do anything to help?”

Augustus kept a careful rein on his temper. “If you want to make yourself useful, look into fast carriages. I look to leave in three days’ time.”

In fact, he looked to leave in one. It didn’t matter whether de Lilly’s erratic behavior was simply youth or something else; either way, he was a danger. Better to send him off on a useless errand, believing himself to have time to spare. If he were a double agent, he would wait to pounce until the last minute. They generally did. If he weren’t, his energies would be safely and uselessly expended examining horseflesh and racing curricles. Either way, by the time de Lilly moved, Augustus would be gone.

With or without Emma.

That was all he had. One day. One day to convince Emma of his good intentions and persuade her to leave behind everything she knew for an uncertain future in an unfamiliar country, all for love of him.

Put that way, it sounded pretty damn improbable. Improbable? Try impossible.

From inside the theatre, thunder rumbled.

“For I shall bring you crimson leaves.”

On the stage, Kort was doing a credible, if not an inspired job as Americanus. From her tower, all that could be seen of Cytherea was her long blond wig as Kort declaimed to her the list of wonders that awaited her in the new world.

“And rippling wheat in golden sheaves.”

It wasn’t Kort’s fault that he sounded like he was reading off a ship’s inventory—which, when one came down to it, was rather what he was. Not everyone could take those words and make of them what Augustus had, imbuing them with magic far beyond their basic form. He had taken them and turned them from an inventory into an incantation.

Just as he had now. Emma’s fingers tightened on her fan, so hard she could feel the delicate wood slats begin to crack beneath the strain. Crowns of daisies and beds of violets. Warm fires on cold days. Apprentices skidding on the frozen Thames. Like Americanus’s leaves and berries, they were humble and homey items, a far cry from the usual enticements of jewels and money, position and power.

Emma ached for that simple hearth as she never had for diamonds or status.

On the stage, Kort held up his hands to Cytherea, bearing in them a bowl laden with crimson fruit. “A cache of berries, red and sweet…”

Like pomegranate seeds. In the myth, the fruit lured Persephone to Hades. In their masque, Americanus dangled them in front of Cytherea to entice her to the new world, that new world that was Emma’s old world, so familiar and rich and well loved.

If she went with Augustus, it would be only to the other side of the Channel. There was no threat of strange diseases or Indian attack or any of the other fears that might have bedeviled her ancestors going from the Old World to the New.

No, the only risk was to her heart.

Mme. de Rémusat’s shrill voice broke into Emma’s thoughts. She twisted in her seat to look back at Emma. “How wonderfully rustic!” she gushed. “Is that what they all wear back where you’re from?”

It took Emma a moment to realize that she was referring to Kort, all tricked out in buckskins and ragged shirt. To Emma, the ensemble looked palpably like the costume it was. The closest Kort had ever come to the frontier was Albany.

“Oh, all the time,” said Emma. “I used to sew my own skirts from skins. It was the scraping them that was so tedious.”

Mme. de Rémusat’s mouth pursed. “There’s no need to make fun,” she said, and settled back in a huff.

Next to her, Mme. Junot cast Emma a quick grin. Part of the Bonapartes’ old Corsican connection, Mme. Junot felt that Mme. de Rémusat put on airs.

“Is silence too much to ask?” demanded the Emperor loudly.

The chorus on stage abruptly stopped singing.

“Not you!” barked the Emperor.

The chorus resumed, somewhat raggedly, having lost their note in the interim. Talma, veteran of the Comédie-Française, buried his head in his hands. In her tower, Jane continued to look ethereal and lovely, the only one unperturbed.

Emma could only be grateful that the Emperor’s interruption hadn’t occurred during Miss Gwen’s pirate chorus. There was no telling what might have happened.

Bristling, Mme. de Rémusat sent an “I told you so” look over her shoulder at Emma. All too aware of the Emperor sitting two rows ahead, Emma found herself in the annoying position of being unable to point out that she had started it.

Good heavens, they were all behaving like five-year-olds.

This, thought Emma, sinking down in her seat in the back of the imperial box, was what she had to look forward to if she stayed in Paris. The Emperor and his wife sat in the front, with cousin Robert in the place of honor at the Emperor’s right. It helped to be the envoy of a foreign power, even a not so very powerful power. Behind them, in a phalanx armored in feathers and jewels, sat Mme. Bonaparte’s ladies-in-waiting. The Emperor’s aides, less privileged, were left to crouch on stools along the sides, casting glances at the ladies and occasionally the stage. Guards—once consular guards, now imperial—ranged themselves at the entrance to the box, controlling access to the Emperor.