The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 17

“I found someone to help me with the lid,” said Emma.

She heaved herself up off the floor, tripping on the end of her own skirt and trying not to careen into a pile of packing straw. Lifting her hands to shove her hair back behind her ears, Emma found that her bandeau had twisted itself halfway around, listing drunkenly to the side, with her hair all bunched up underneath. There was something grimy on the back of her hand, and, oh, Lord, was that straw on her skirt?

Emma backed out of the circle of lantern light, trusting to the dark to hide her burning cheeks and disheveled appearance. Not that it mattered. It was only Augustus, after all. Still, one didn’t like to be seen looking like a complete slattern—even if one was.

Emma gave a hasty tug to her bodice. “One of the nice footmen came by,” she babbled, “and pried out the nails for me. It took no time at all.”

“Good for you.” Augustus tossed the crowbar to one side, where it connected with the side of Miss Gwen’s pirate ship before clattering to the floor.

The sound echoed through the narrow room.

He wasn’t still annoyed about their little spat, was he? She might have been out of line, but they had promised each other honesty.

Honesty within limits.

“Thank you for bringing the crowbar,” Emma said hastily, her voice tinny in the dusty silence. “That was very…nice of you.”

Augustus didn’t look nice right now; he looked dangerous. He looked like the sort of man one wouldn’t want to run into in a dark theatre. Tension surrounded him like the sky before a storm, just waiting the right moment to crackle into lightning.

He prowled into the room, the lamplight picking out the shadows created by the folds in his shirt, dwelling lovingly on the hollows of collarbone, cheekbone, jaw. Among the coiled ropes and scattered props, his loose shirt and tight breeches gave him a piratical look. He only needed a gold ring in one ear and he would fit right in with Miss Gwen and her crew of merry marauders.

“I’m sorry to have sent you off on a wild goose chase,” Emma volunteered.

Augustus propped one booted foot on the lid of a faux treasure chest from which spilled gold-painted pieces of eight and ersatz ropes of pearls. His long hair curled around his face. “Does it count as a wild goose chase when it bears fowl? Foul fowl but fowl still.”

“I beg your pardon?” Fair might be foul and foul fair, but Emma didn’t have any inclination to hover through the fog and filthy air to try to figure out what he was saying.

“You were right.”

“That does happen from time to time. About what? The end of the masque? I told you and told you—”

Augustus kicked aside the treasure chest. Coins and chains rattled. “About Miss Wooliston.”

“Oh,” Emma said weakly. Of all the things she had anticipated, that wasn’t one of them. “How do—”

“I have it from the horse’s mouth. So to speak.”

As she met his eyes, Emma felt a horrible sinking feeling in her stomach. It was one thing to inflict her opinion upon him, quite another to have him act on it.

“Oh, no,” she whispered. “You didn’t—”

“Just now. In the garden. She wanted none of me. You were right.”

Emma wished he would stop saying that. The more he repeated it, the more she felt as though she were to blame. She had anticipated this, but she hadn’t wished it on him, not really.

There were times when it was less than pleasant to be able to say I told you so.

Emma bit down on her lip. “I am sorry.”

Augustus prowled forward, stepping neatly over a coil of rope and a discarded cutlass. “Why should you be?” His voice was as cold and hard as the fragments of metal at Emma’s feet. “My folly isn’t your concern.”

“It’s never foolish to care for someone.”

Augustus gave her a look that could turn Pompeii to ash. “Don’t ply me with platitudes,” he said. “Didn’t we promise honesty? You were honest before. Don’t hold back now.”

Emma swallowed hard. “What happened?”

“What do you think?”

“She does care for you, you know,” Emma said earnestly. “As much as she cares for anyone. It’s not you, really, it isn’t. She’s just not…romantically inclined.”

Augustus nudged at a bit of tubing with his toe, sending it rattling across the floor. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

Then why had he brought it up?

All right. If he didn’t want to talk about it, they didn’t have to talk about it, even though Emma wondered, with the sort of sick curiosity that drove people to attend public executions, what exactly had been said and unsaid.

“Then we can talk about something else,” she said cheerfully. “What do you think of your room in the house? You’re in one of the older servant quarters, aren’t you? There isn’t really space for everyone, even with the new additions. Just think what it will be like tomorrow when everyone else arrives!”

Without responding, Augustus strolled inexorably forward into the circle she had made for herself. The lanterns lit his face from below, casting a demonic light across his cheekbones, creating the illusion of flame in the folds of his shirt, where the light reflected red. His eyes glittered in the lantern light.

“It’s your turn,” Emma said breathlessly. “To not talk about something.”

“Tell me about your new machine.”

“Uh…” For all that she had spent the past half hour playing with pieces, Emma suddenly felt unprepared and untried.

It had something to do with the way he was staring at her, eyes never wavering, moving steadily forward, like a jungle cat approaching its prey. For all the length of his limbs, he was a graceful man; he scarcely made a sound as he prowled towards her, stepping unerringly over the obstacles scattered in his path.

She backed up a bit, glancing around at the pieces lying about on the floor. “It’s not one machine but four, all interconnected. I’ve been trying to sort out which is which.”

“Four? I thought Mr. Fulton was sending you a wave machine.” There was something hypnotic about those slow, steady movements, the fixed intensity of his eyes.

Emma backed up again. “Well, there is the wave machine, but Mr. Fulton wanted to try something new, so he, well, he made it more complicated. Ours doesn’t just do waves; it does waves, wind, thunder, and lightning.” She looked ruefully down at the debris on the floor. “At least, it will, when I figure out how to put it together.”

Augustus struck a pose, parodying Hamlet. “What a piece of work is this! The power to control the elements, all in one easy box. Once you needed witchcraft to conjure storms. Now all we need is—” Leaning down, Augustus hefted a curious circle made of brass, with curved protrusions. He frowned down at it. “What is this? It looks like a late medieval instrument of torture.”

That, at least, Emma could answer. “It’s part of an air pump.” She took the brass wheel from him, holding it up so that the lamplight slid along the curved surfaces. “It’s designed to create the illusion of wind. There are four of those circles. They sit in a frame like an artist’s easel, with a string hanging down. If we pull the string, the blades will spin, creating a rush of air.”

“Hmm.” Abandoning the air pump, Augustus prowled the circumference of the circle of lanterns, examining the detritus from Mr. Fulton’s box. Bending, he seized on another piece, a cylindrical metal drum covered with canvas. “And this?”

“That’s a drum covered with canvas,” Emma said helpfully.

Straightening, Augustus gave her a look. “That much,” he said, “I could divine on my own.”

At least he had sounded a bit more like his old self there, not the languid, versifying figure he showed to the public, but the sarcastic, short-tempered, cranky self he showed to her.

Adele was right. She really did have execrable taste in men.

“The drum is for thunder,” Emma explained. She peered around the floor. “There should be a hammer here somewhere.”

“Like this?”

“Exactly like that.” Emma nodded emphatically. “You attach the hammer to the clamp on the side of the drum and when it strikes the canvas, it creates a sound like thunder. You’ll see. It sounds surprisingly convincing.”

“Not exactly sophisticated.”

“It is,” said Emma triumphantly, “when linked to the lightning machine!”

“The lightning machine?”

“That’s the genius of it. Or it will be,” she said. “According to Mr. Fulton’s instructions, if we link the machines together the right way, the flash created by the lightning machine will be immediately followed by the rumble of thunder and a gust of wind, just like in a real storm.”

Emma dropped to her knees and began hunting around on the ground, her fingers touching and discarding various shapes. “See this?”

“The one that looks like a pistol?” Augustus leaned over her, taking advantage of his longer reach. His shadow fell across the floor in front of her, blending with her shadow to create a strange composite creature, a fantastical heraldic beast.

A beast with two backs? Emma found herself blushing, grateful for the darkness and her bowed head.

Scooping it up, he dangled it in front of her. If she stood, she would bump up against him. Emma stayed where she was, crouched on the floor like a child.

“I suppose it does look like a firearm,” she said, adding unnecessarily, “I haven’t had much to do with pistols.”

“No. I hadn’t thought you had.” The pistol-like object was whisked away.

What was that supposed to mean?

“Well, at least you don’t think I spent my entire childhood fighting off savages.” Emma pushed against the planks of the floor, levering herself up to her feet. She dusted her hands off against her dress. “You’d be amazed by the number of people who have asked me what it feels like to be scalped.”

Augustus smiled politely but didn’t take the bait. He turned over the pistol-like object in his hands. “Show me how this works.”

Emma did her best to recall Mr. Fulton’s instructions. “According to Mr. Fulton, the concept is similar to that of flame-throwing, only, in this case, the gunpowder in the pan, when struck by the hammer, creates the spark and the momentum that propels the flame.”

“So it creates a flare.”

“Yes.”

“With gunpowder.”

Emma looked at the mechanism in his hands. “I don’t really understand it,” she confessed, “but I can put the pieces together the right way and hope for the best.”

She spoke with more confidence than she felt. Sketches of hydraulic pumps for Carmagnac were one thing; putting together a flame thrower was quite another. Emma didn’t want to be the one responsible for burning down Bonaparte’s theatre.

“If worse comes to worst,” she said hopefully, “we can ask Mr. Fulton for help when he arrives. He said he wanted to see how his contrivances contrived.”

“What about your cousin?” Augustus asked, and there was something in his face that she didn’t quite understand. “He has some experience with munitions, hasn’t he?”

“Kort?” Among his other interests, Kort’s father had owned a foundry in Cold Spring, on the Hudson. Emma couldn’t remember quite what it was that it made, but she did seem to recall something about ordnance. Or was that only during the war? She couldn’t recall. “Something like that,” said Emma vaguely.

Augustus set the piece down, more carefully than the others. “What else do you have there?”

Emma turned in a slow circle. The muslin of her dress rasped against the rough wood of the crate, catching on a splinter. “That’s really all,” she said. “Just waves, wind, lightning, and thunder. Isn’t that enough?”

Augustus poked at another piece with his boot, this one a curved cylinder of metal. “What’s this for?”

Emma dipped down to free her skirt from the crate, bumping her elbow on the way up. “I—I haven’t figured that one out yet.”

“Really?” Augustus’s mouth twisted in a crooked smile. “I thought you had everything figured out. You certainly pegged me.”

Emma started to put out a hand, but Augustus’s stance didn’t invite caresses. She let it drop.

“Augustus? Are you sure you’re all right? We don’t have to do this now. The machines will wait until morning.”

Augustus folded his arms across his chest. “Of course, I’m all right. Why wouldn’t I be?”

The lantern light flickered and guttered around them, creating a kaleidoscope of shifting shadows. Augustus’s posture was as tense as a clenched fist. Emma fiddled with her favorite ring, turning it around and around and around. She could cede to his wishes and let it go. It was what she was best at, smiling and laughing and babbling on about nothing, letting uncomfortable truths evaporate like the bubbles in a glass of champagne.

Why dwell on unpleasantness when one could ignore it?

“Don’t,” she said, surprising herself. “Honesty, remember? You know exactly what I mean.”

“That little scene in the garden, you mean?” Augustus waved a hand in an entirely unconvincing show of insouciance. “Forgotten already. Muses come, muses go. From Laura one day to Beatrice the next. Any interest in serving as muse? There’s a pedestal going begging.” He looked Emma up and down with deliberate insolence.

She was meant to be offended, she knew. Instead, she felt a painful surge of remembrance and, with it, pity.

Nothing hurt more than the disillusionment of love.

“Oh, my dear,” she said softly. “You don’t mean that.”

He stiffened. “Why not? Don’t worry,” he said, “by the time I finish immortalizing you, you’ll scarcely recognize yourself. It’s all in a twist of the phrase.”

Emma’s heart ached for him. “Augustus—”

“Fair Cytherea…” he began, and broke off again, shaking his head. “No, it shouldn’t be Cytherea. We’ll have to find another name for you. Would you like to be Stella? Philip Sidney used it first, but no one remembers him anyway nowadays, and certainly not in French.” Dropping to one knee in front of her, he flung an arm into the air. “Bright star! So fine, so fair! So high above where we are!”

“Do get up,” Emma pleaded, reaching down a hand to him, “and speak sensibly.”

He clambered nimbly to his feet, ignoring her outstretched hand. “Would you rather be Cynthia, goddess of the moon? Astrea, patroness of the Earth, mother of all good and growing things? That was good enough for Queen Elizabeth, but she was a notoriously wanton jade when it came to poetry, posing as any goddess who came along. We can do better for you.”

“I never asked to be made immortal. Augustus—”

“Make me immortal, Helen, with a kiss?” It was the least convincing leer Emma had ever seen. “No. Not Helen. You don’t have that doomed look about you.”

“I don’t want to launch ships,” she said sharply. Pity only went so far. She leaned back against the crate, feeling the scrape of the wood through the thin muslin of her gown. “Can we please—”

“Aurora!” Augustus smacked a hand against the side of the crate with such force that Emma jumped. It couldn’t have done his hand much good either. “Why didn’t I see it before? I’ll make you Aurora, spreading light across the sky, bringing joy to the morning.”

It would have been a pretty sentiment if it hadn’t been spoken in tones of such concentrated sarcasm.

He struck a pose. “Rosy-fingered dawn, all flushed with light / Bringing morning out of night…”

“Why do you write such rubbish?” Emma burst out. “We both know you can do better.”

“Can I?” He braced his hands against the rim of the crate on either side of her. Emma wiggled back, but there was nowhere to go; she was pinned fast between him and the wooden slats. “Maybe I can’t. Maybe I’ve written rubbish for so long, it’s all I can write.”

“You never know until you try.” The words sounded weak and tinny on her tongue. She was sitting on the rim of the crate now, the edge digging into her buttocks. She squirmed uncomfortably. One false move and she was going to topple back inside, immured among the straw and sawdust. “I could help you!”

“Could you?”

“I could, er, listen.” The box tipped precipitately under her weight, pitching her towards him. Emma grabbed at his shoulders to keep from falling. “To your poetry.”

“So it’s all about the poetry, is it?” They were chest to chest, pinned together by the angle of the box, his breath warm in her ear. Emma’s body slid down his, muslin against linen, leg against leg, as the box rocked back into place behind them.

“What else?” Emma asked breathlessly.

“What else, indeed.” He pushed away, releasing her.

Emma was left staggering, wobbly and breathless, as he strode across the room. It felt colder, suddenly. It might be June, but the nights were cool and the theatre unheated. She hadn’t been cold a moment before.

She followed him, weaving erratically around the joints and hoists and tubes. “I think we should talk about this.”

“We have talked. What do you think we were doing just now? Dancing?”

No wonder people thought dancing was just a step away from…Well. Emma didn’t want to think about what they had just been doing. She rubbed her hands against her arms to stop them tingling.

“Not that sort of talking,” Emma said firmly. They’d known each other too well and too long now to let him distract her like that. They were well out of the lamplight now, among the rolled-up backdrops and piles of props. Emma ducked under a painted proscenium that had been used last summer for The Barber of Seville. She ran him to ground against a dead end, a false doorway painted on canvas, leading into an opulent mansion designed for a southerly clime. “If not for me—I feel responsible.”

“Don’t,” Augustus said harshly. “I was being a fool long before I knew you. Don’t flatter yourself, Madame Delagardie. Your involvement is purely incidental.”

That certainly put her in her place.

Emma hugged her arms to her chest. “There’s no need to be a cad just because—just because it didn’t go as you wished.”

Augustus raised a brow, leaning back against a painted panorama of Seville that looked strangely like Venice. “It?”

“Jane.” There. It was out. “A one-sided love isn’t love.”

“I’d forgotten.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “You have such vast experience of the world.”

She refused to let herself be baited. She raised her chin. “I do, actually. I know what it’s like, you see. To find out that someone isn’t what you imagined him to be.”

She met his gaze frankly, an eye for an eye and a stare for a stare, refusing to let herself be embarrassed or shamed out of countenance. She might be younger than he, but she knew she was right, and, deep down, he knew it, too.

Augustus broke first.

He turned his head away, dragging in a deep, shuddering breath. She could see his chest rise and fall beneath the thin fabric of his shirt. “I’ve been in love with a mirage,” he said despairingly. “You knew it. She knew it. Everyone knew it but me. What sort of idiot does that make me?”

“A human one?”

Augustus emitted a harsh bark of laughter.

“It wasn’t entirely a mirage,” Emma said soothingly. “Whatever else she is, Jane is a lovely person. It’s not as though…it’s not as though you fancied yourself in love with Caroline!”

“Christ, Emma!” Augustus dropped down onto an overturned rowboat, his long limbs folding neatly beneath him. “Do you have to make the best of everything?”

He sat hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked like a little boy like that, for all that he was at least a few years older than she. Emma felt a rush of affection and irritation and concern, all mingled together. She wanted to draw his head to her bosom and rock him back and forth, murmuring soothing noises, to put her arms around him and cuddle the pain away.

“I try.” Her dress brushed against his boot tops as she moved next to him. “Better that than the contrary. Wouldn’t you rather a half-full glass?”

“It depends on the contents. Are you offering hemlock or foxglove?”

Emma tentatively reached out to rest a hand on his head. His curls were thick and springy beneath her fingers, so different from Paul’s short crop or her own stick-straight hair. “Surely, it’s not as bad as that.” She bumped him with her hip. “Scootch over.”

She wouldn’t call it exactly a scootch, but Augustus slid over, making room for her on the overturned raft.

He didn’t look up. “I’ve been in love with a mirage for the better part of a year.”

Emma settled herself down next to him. “What’s a year in the grand scheme of things? And at least you’ve got lots of poetry out of it.”

Augustus looked at her with dead eyes. “You think my poetry is rubbish.”

“Not all of it.” Taken individually, the words had promise. It was just strung together that they made no sense. “Other people like it.”

Augustus sighed. “You really don’t tell a lie, do you?”

“I try not to.” Tentatively, Emma slid an arm around his shoulders, cuddling him as she would Hortense, or as she had Paul once, long ago. She found the hollow above his shoulder blade and pressed down with two fingers, rubbing away the pain. “It really isn’t so bad as all that. I promise.”

She couldn’t have said whether she was talking about his romantic predicament or his poetry.

She could feel the moment he relaxed against her, letting his back slump and his head come to rest against her breast. His breath emerged in a long exhalation, almost like a sigh. He curled up against her, a tangle of dark curls hiding his face. His skin was warm through the thin muslin shirt, his body heavy against hers, curling comfortably into the hollow below her arm.

Emma stroked her fingers through his hair, focusing on the drowsy warmth of his body, the dust motes on the floor, the scents of soap and skin, as her brain turned and turned in unpleasant circles.

She wondered if she had been wrong to warn him away. He might have been happier continuing to daydream of Jane, worshipping her from an arm’s length away. But what happened when an arm’s length became too far? When he wanted more? He had been bound to find out sooner or later. Surely better sooner, before the hurt became even greater.

Emma rested her cheek against his hair and assured herself that what she had done, she had done out of friendship. And it wasn’t that she was glad that Jane had answered as she had, not really. It was simply—simply the hastening of an inevitability. That was all. There was no other reason at all.

They sat in silence for what might have been five minutes or half an hour, no sound but the rhythmic rustle of his hair beneath her fingers, the soft susurration of their breath.

Into the dusty silence, Augustus said diffidently, “Did Jane ever mention it to you? Did she know that it wasn’t—that I—”

“If she suspected, she never said anything.” Emma chose her words very carefully, stroking his hair in long, measured strokes. “I think she values you too much for that.”

“Yes, but only—” Augustus mumbled something incomprehensible.

“What?”

Augustus shifted in his seat. “Nothing.” But the mood was broken. He shook off her hold, drawing back so he could look at her, his hair brushing across her chest. “When you said you knew what it was like, what did you mean?”

Emma caught herself floundering, unsure of what to say. It was much easier being on the other side of it. She preferred eliciting confidences to making them.

“I—exactly what I said. That’s all.”

“That’s not an answer.”

Emma pressed his head back into the crook of her shoulder. “This is about you, not me, remember?”

She could feel his skepticism, from somewhere in the area of her collarbone. “Is it? It’s only fair. I confide in you; you confide in me.”

Emma peered down at the top of Augustus’s head. “Appealing to my sense of fair play, are you?”

His voice rose sepulchrally from her chest. “You brought up the topic.”

“I—oh, fine.” Was it possible to feel both very protective and very irritated at the same time? Fair enough. “I was very young when I met my husband,” she said, striving to put a sensible face on it. “I had all sorts of romantic images about him. Don’t misunderstand me! Paul was a wonderful man, really he was. He just wasn’t the person I thought he was.”

“What was he?” Augustus’s voice was a brush of breath against her bosom. She could feel the tingle of it straight down to her toes.

Emma shivered with something that wasn’t cold.

“Human,” said Emma, pushing away and twitching her bodice more firmly up over her shoulders. She made a droll face. “You can’t believe what a disappointment that was.”

Augustus hoisted himself back into a sitting position. “You were fairly young, weren’t you?”

“Fifteen.”

It would have been so easy to use that as an excuse. Emma contemplated her knees, twin bumps beneath the thin lawn of her gown. Nine years. Had it really been so long? Five years with Paul, four years without him. In a few months, he would have been gone longer than they had been together. It was a curious sensation.

Her skin prickled as she felt Augustus’s hand come to rest on the small of her back, rubbing in small, discreet circles. He was offering her the same promise of comfort she had held out to him. She wanted, so very much, to let herself curl into the crook of his arm, to rest her head against his shoulder and feel his lips on her hair and allow herself the solace of touch. It would be so nice to be cuddled and comforted, all the worries of the last nine years soothed away.

If she did so, it would be under false pretenses. She might have been young, but she ought to have known better, just as she ought to know better now.

Sighing, Emma straightened. “I don’t think age has anything to do with it. We’re all prey to our emotions, whether we’re fifteen or fifty.”

“Which you know,” Augustus said drily, “because you turned fifty when?”

“When we started writing this masque,” she said and waited for him to laugh.

He didn’t. “Has it been that onerous for you?”

“Not onerous, no.” She looked at him, at the long hair curling around his thin face, at the tiny lines at the sides of his eyes, at the long, flexible mouth that could crimp into absurdity or relax into gentleness. He had become so familiar to her in the past month. Familiar and dearer than she cared to admit. “Against all my better judgment, I actually like you.”

“Just not my poetry.”

“If I were you, I would take what I can get.” The minute the words were out of her mouth, Emma realized how they sounded. “I didn’t mean—”

His brown eyes shaded to violet at the edges, warm as velvet. “I know.” His thumb rubbed against her cheekbone. “Honest Emma.”

Of all the epithets he had offered to provide her, that had to be the least flattering of the lot.

Emma grimaced. “Make me immortal, Emma, with plain-speaking? That doesn’t have much of a ring to it.”

His fingers found a bit of hair that had escaped from her bandeau. He smoothed it back behind her ear. Emma closed her eyes and let herself lean into his touch, just a little bit. Just for the moment.

“You said you didn’t want to launch ships.”

No, but that didn’t mean she didn’t want to be just a little bit of an object of romantic desire. Someday. For someone.

Oh, well.

Emma abruptly sat up, her hair tangling in his fingers. “No, I just—”

She had been about to say sit on them, and maybe make a silly comment about something to do with not launching ships, but the words caught in her throat as her nose bumped his.

She went very still.

She could feel his fingers caught in her hair, the muscles of his arm tense beneath her hand, frozen, just as she was. She should, she knew, wiggle away, move back, laugh, say something.

Her voice came out half whisper, half squeak. “Augustus?”

“Emma?” he said, and she could feel the brush of his breath like a caress against her lips.

It wasn’t, she thought, entirely reassuring that he sounded as entirely befuddled as she felt.

“I—” she began, and broke off, because she didn’t have the least idea of what she was trying to say, or why she was trying to say anything at all.

His lips brushed hers, so softly she might have imagined it.

She should open her eyes, she knew. But there was something terribly seductive about the darkness, something drugging and dreamlike.

As in a dream, her hands moved without conscious volition, threading up through his hair, as tentative as his lips, learning as they went, following the curve of his scalp like someone embarking in twilight on an unfamiliar path through winter woods, warm and cold at the same time, fascinated and hesitant, white snow and dark trees, light and shade all mixed up together.

His hands cupped her face, not coercing or forcing, not pushing or demanding, but cradling. If he had pushed or demanded, she might have pulled away.

But he didn’t.