The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 21

He couldn’t shake the image of her face.

Augustus slipped away around the side of the house, moving with a stealth that had been ingrained by time and brutal training. He had good cause to be grateful for that training. It was all that was keeping him from barreling headfirst over the nearest shrub. He felt entirely disoriented, adrift, at sea. Gravel crunched beneath his feet, the only sign he was still on a path. The curtains had been drawn in the house, but enough light leached through them to provide a vague illumination, a strange echo of light, worse than no light at all.

What in the hell had just happened in there?

To his left lay Bonaparte’s dollhouse of a theatre, smug on its own patch of ground. Dark now, all dark, entirely dark, no Emma inside playing with props or rocking back on her heels to look up at him with her hair all any which way and a smudge on her face.

He could still feel the texture of her hair beneath his fingers, thicker than he would have thought, thick and sleek and straight, blunt at the ends where it had been cut short, frizzled in bits where her maid must have experimented with the curling iron and failed. He could feel the silk of her hair and the delicate shape of the scalp beneath. She had a mole behind one ear, just a little bump in the skin, but his fingers remembered it, mapping it onto the landscape of her body, familiar terrain made unfamiliar, discovered and rediscovered.

Weeks they had spent together, bent over a desk, passing at a party, sending notes back and forth with a speed that made the messengers drag their feet and ask with palpable reluctance, “Is there a reply?” in a way that suggested they knew the answer would be yes but hoped for no.

No, no reply. Augustus had nothing to say. He was muddled, befuddled, baffled, perplexed, kerflummoxed. Confusion robbed him of the facile phrases that rose so easily to his lips, left him only with a cacophony of image and emotion, none of it reducible to the simple parameters of prose or even the lying truths of poetry.

No matter, she had told him, or something to that effect. She understood. Augustus was bloody glad someone did. Perhaps Emma might deign to explain it to him.

This was Emma. Emma! Emma of the too-low dresses and too-shiny jewels and too-bright smile and too-late parties. Emma who flitted and frolicked and sent him tea cakes and made sure he wore his cloak. Emma, who had somehow wiggled her way into his life, tucked securely next to his heart like a talisman in his coat pocket, a comfortable presence only to be noticed in its absence. One didn’t take it out and play with it or consider the purpose of its existence; it was simply there.

He couldn’t fancy Emma. She was just…Emma. Always there, always in motion, always running half an hour late. He admired the statuesque, the stately, the serene, Grecian goddesses made flesh, alabaster without the pedestal.

Then why couldn’t he stop thinking about Emma? And why in hell wouldn’t she stop to talk? She had certainly been eager enough to talk when it involved his emotions.

Augustus stubbed his toe on a bit of loose gravel and cursed. It did little to relieve his feelings.

The graveled circle in front of the house was crowded with carriages in various stages of unloading. Servants swarmed over them, disentangling the luggage that had been roped to the roofs, handing down boxes and trunks, while the aristocracy of the serving world—ladies’ maids and manservants—hovered to ensure the correct dispositions of their masters’ belongings, complaining loudly about clumsiness and protesting as trunks came tumbling down. Farther along, empty conveyances were being led down the trail to the carriage house, the horses to be unhitched and taken to the stable for grooming and feeding. It was a scene a world removed from the genteel gathering in the gallery, nosy, boisterous, busy.

Augustus paused in the lee of a miniature potted plant, watching, as from a world away, the bustle in front of him.

What if, just what if, the reason she hadn’t wanted to talk about it was because she had meant exactly what she said?

Two unpleasant facts impressed themselves upon his consciousness.

Item the first: He had kissed her. They could quibble about accidents and chance encounters and primal instincts and so forth, but when it came down to it, his lips had been the ones to seek hers.

Item the second: She was the one who had called halt. He hadn’t been thinking terribly clearly at that point. Blame it on fatigue, blame it on emotional exhaustion, blame it on the rain in Spain; whatever the cause, he would have been happy to go on kissing Emma indefinitely. And by kissing, he meant…well.

Until she had kindly but firmly put him back in his place.

Friend.

“Aaarrghh!” Augustus let out a strangled cry as a vise slammed down on his throat.

His soles scuffed against gravel as he was yanked backwards, ineffectually scrabbling for purchase against the sliding surface. His fingers fumbled at the bar hampering his breathing. He stamped down with one foot, but missed his target. Instead, his heel caught fabric.

There was a tearing sound, and the weight abruptly lifted from his throat.

“Really!” said Miss Gwen. “Was that entirely necessary?”

Augustus clutched his aching throat and turned to glare at the older woman, who was regarding her torn hem with a frown of displeasure. The instrument of torture, her parasol, dangled from one hand.

“Was that necessary?” he choked out. He was going to have bruises for a week.

Miss Gwen examined her skirt and dismissed the damage with a sniff.

Sod her skirt, what about his vocal cords? He had never so deeply regretted that his costume didn’t allow for a cravat. At least it would have provided a little extra padding.

“Shoddy, Whittlesby, shoddy,” she said smugly, tapping with her parasol against the ground for emphasis. Augustus prudently took a step back. “If I were an assassin, you would be dead by now.”

Augustus tilted back his chin. “Here’s my throat. Care to finish me off?”

Miss Gwen emitted one of her infamous “hmph” noises. “There’s no need for melodrama, Mr. Whittlesby. Just see that I don’t catch you daydreaming on the job.”

“I wasn’t—”

Oh, hell, what was the point? Just as there was no point to reminding Miss Gwen that, in point of fact, she was more likely to work for him than he for her. Augustus had his appointment directly from the War Office. Miss Gwen was a country spinster turned spy, a hobbyist who had got lucky. She had a bit of nerve lecturing him.

It didn’t help that she was right.

“Was that the sole purpose of this exercise,” Augustus asked coolly, “or did you have something you wished to say to me?”

“Hmph. Not everyone pants after a ruffled shirt, young man.” A fact for which Augustus could only be grateful. “While you were wandering about in poetic reverie, I was doing what you were meant to be doing.”

“Which is?”

“Listening!” Augustus jumped as the parasol landed dangerously near his left foot. “In case you haven’t noticed, we have a number of new arrivals, including”—Miss Gwen’s steely eyes glinted in the torchlight—“Mr. Fulton.”

“We knew he was expected,” said Augustus. “How is that news?”

“A day early?” countered Miss Gwen. She played her trump card. “He was asking after a crate.”

“Emma’s wave machine,” Augustus said shortly.

“Emma, is it?” Miss Gwen’s eyes narrowed speculatively, but she forbore to comment. For the moment. “As it happens, Mr. Whittlesby, you are wrong. Quite, quite wrong. Mr. Fulton was most specific about it. There is a second crate.”

“A second crate,” Augustus repeated. From far away, a very long time ago, he remembered the deliveryman mumbling something about the ruts. No, the rest. If he hadn’t been so busy being lovelorn, he would have noticed. He should have noticed. “Another device?”

“That would be the logical conclusion,” said Miss Gwen crisply. “Another device. One he doesn’t want anyone to see. But someone knows about it.”

“The Emperor, presumably.” And most of the naval higher-ups. Assuming this was the device they sought. Assuming such a device existed.

“Livingston,” said Miss Gwen, with relish. “The younger one. He came out asking after it.”

“What did he say?”

Miss Gwen looked mildly miffed. “I couldn’t hear,” she admitted. “There was too much noise. It’s over to you now.”

“To me?”

“Where is your brain, young man? Have you been playing the idiot for too long? Think!” Thump. “Who would know what Fulton and Livingston have been planning? Who has access to both?” With withering sarcasm, she added, “I assume this is why you’ve been frittering away your time dallying with the Delagardie chit.”

“I wasn’t—” Augustus broke off. “You, of all people, should know how important it is to win a contact’s confidence.”

Miss Gwen looked skeptical. She generally preferred more direct methods. Her interrogation techniques were of the Torquemada variety. Had Torquemada been in possession of a large collection of parasols.

She poked him with the point of her parasol, herding him beneath the striped awning at the entrance and into the house. “You’ve done with winning. From what I’ve seen, you’ve won it. Now use it.”

Not use it. Use her. Augustus had never scrupled to use any means at his disposal to get information. He had dallied, he had flirted, he had even feigned passion when the situation required it. But Miss Gwen’s blunt directive left a nasty taste in his mouth.

“What makes you think she knows?” he hedged.

“I’m not the only one,” said Miss Gwen portentously.

Her heels echoed against the black-and-white tiles of the front hall. Even with the candles lit, the room looked gloomy, the light reflecting dully off the porphyry columns, like a muddy lake by moonlight. The classical statues on either side of the glass doors onto the garden looked down their marble noses at them as they entered.

Miss Gwen looked superciliously down her nose at him, and said, in the hectoring tones of a governess, “If you don’t get the information out of her, someone else will.”

She didn’t need to specify who the “her” in question might be.

Augustus unclenched his hands, finger by finger, each one a slow, deliberate act of will. “What do you mean?”

Miss Gwen nodded towards the French windows. Augustus could see the shadows of their own reflections, his and Miss Gwen’s, like ghosts in the window. Beneath them, though, if he squinted, he could make out other forms, just beyond the French doors, on the wide bridge that spanned the moat at the back of the house.

It was the man he saw first, or rather, the gold epaulettes on his shoulders, the insignia of a colonel, glittering in the torchlight. The woman with him seemed insubstantial in comparison, the filmy material of her gown as fine as mist, barely visible around the solid bulk of her companion. He blocked her from view, like an eclipse of the moon, only the faintest glimmer revealing her presence.

That was all the view Augustus needed.

Miss Gwen spelled it out for him anyway. “If you’re not careful,” she said, “Colonel Marston will steal a march on you.”

She might have said more, but Augustus didn’t hear it. He was already halfway to the door.

“You didn’t answer my letters.” Georges took a step closer, so close that his buttons brushed her bodice.

Emma smelled a rat and she didn’t just mean Georges.

Caroline had made herself scarce. In another person, Emma might have ascribed it to tact. Given that it was Caroline, it reeked of collusion. Georges was close friends with Caroline’s husband, Joachim Murat. That was, in fact, how Emma had met him, those years and years before, at a party chez Murat, the sort of party a widow might attend but not a debutante, a party for the fashionably amoral, for widows, for bored matrons, for handsome hangers-on.

“Why are you here?” she asked flatly.

Georges attempted to exude innocence and secreted smarm instead. “Madame Murat brought me.”

Not as a lover. Caroline was too possessive to cede her property that easily.

“You asked her to, didn’t you?” said Emma wearily. This was all the day needed: a confrontation with a lover she had never loved and to whom she had ceased to make love a very long time ago. It wasn’t the sins of the fathers one had to worry about, but one’s own indiscretions.

“What else was I to do?” Georges smiled with his teeth but not his eyes. He had smiled like that often when they were together, his mind always busy, calculating his next move, his next woman. The lips would curve, but the eyes were empty. Emma hadn’t minded terribly. It hadn’t been for his mind that she had wanted him. “You’ve been avoiding me.”

“I’ve been busy,” Emma countered. What was it about early training that made her hedge, when the truth was that she had been avoiding him? She wished she could just come out and say it, but that was the problem with manners; they came back to haunt one at the most inconvenient times.

“How fortunate for me,” said Georges silkily, “to find you less busy now.”

There was an unmistakable edge of menace behind his words.

“Hardly!” Emma fluttered one hand. A mistake. Georges’ eyes followed the glitter of her rings. “I’m in the midst of producing a masque for Madame Bonaparte. There are a thousand things to be done before Saturday, not least the composition of all the ridiculous machines required for the effects.”

“Oh?” There was a speculative gleam in Georges’ eye, the sort that in many men would be accounted lust, but in Georges’ spelled profit. “Perhaps I might be of assistance.”

This from a man who deemed buttoning his own breeches unacceptable manual labor? He must truly be desperate if he thought to put actual physical effort into winning her good graces.

“No, no,” said Emma breezily. “It’s very sweet of you to offer, but I’m sure I have everything quite under control.”

“In which case,” he said, taking possession of her arm so neatly that Emma hadn’t even time to see it coming, “you will have no objection to taking a bit of a stroll with me.”

No objection? She had every objection. But it would cause more of a stir to protest than to accede. His grip on her arm wasn’t tight enough to be punitive, but it was firm enough to require a concerted yank to free herself. All around her, Mme. Bonaparte’s hangers-on whispered and gossiped, saying one thing while meaning another, eyes roaming the room, constantly searching for the latest and greatest on dit. If she created a scene, even a small one, half the room would dine out on it for a month.

Georges knew that as well as she did. She could tell. He had the smug air of a man who had his opponent’s king in check.

Part of Emma wanted, oh so badly, to make that scene, to behave like a small child in a temper tantrum, to pull free and run and run until she reached the sterile silence of her room. She was so sick of being obliging: smiling at Mme. Bonaparte, soothing Kort, telling Augustus that it didn’t matter that he had kissed her because he was in love with her friend.

Wouldn’t that surprise them all! But she wouldn’t do it. She knew herself well enough for that. She had had enough of scandal years ago.

Fine. Let Georges have his petty victory. Once out of the room, she could extricate herself as loudly and firmly as she pleased. He wasn’t really dangerous, Georges, just a bully. She would hear him out, tell him no to whatever it was he wanted, and go. All civilized and simple.

“A very brief stroll,” she said, and he smiled, a real smile, all the more terrifying in its intensity.

“You won’t regret it,” he said.

“I already have,” muttered Emma, but if Georges heard, he professed not to, leading her smilingly through the drawing room that adjoined the gallery, making light conversation about the large paintings from the poems of Ossian that leered down from the walls.

Emma nodded and smiled and wondered where Augustus had got to. Licking his wounds over Jane? Hiding from her? She was thoroughly fed up with mankind. It was a pity she wasn’t Catholic. She might have joined a nunnery.

She let Georges lead her through the billiard room and out into the marble cool of the entryway, elegant in the daytime, funereal in the dusk. When he would have led her outdoors, she balked.

“Whatever you have to say, can’t it be said here?”

“Just outside,” he urged. “We won’t go any farther. See? The night is warm.”

It wasn’t, actually. It was rather chilly.

“Fine,” said Emma, and stepped onto the bridge that led across the moat to the gardens. She wrapped her arms around herself. “What do you want, Georges?”

“You, my sweet.” He essayed a leer, but it was purely perfunctory.

“Yes, yes,” said Emma, and propped herself against the base of one of the two statues that guarded the bridge. Her dress couldn’t get any dirtier, after all. “Let’s pretend we’ve done that part. What is it you want me to do for you?”

“It’s not for me,” he said. He would have reached for her hands, but Emma planted them firmly on the plinth. “It’s for us.”

Emma could have pointed out there was no such entity, but that would only have prolonged the exercise. Somewhere in the gardens, a bird was singing. The night breeze bore the scents of June flowers: roses and hydrangea and lily of the valley and other scents her nose wasn’t sophisticated enough to identify. This was a night made for romance, a night for lovers to whisper sweet nothings and pledge their troth.

For whatever that troth was worth.

Emma felt, suddenly, entirely irritated with it all. With the birdsong, with the moon, with the false promise of the flowers, which bloomed for a season and then withered away. And with poets, like Augustus, who rolled it all up in verse and dangled it like a lure in front of unsuspecting maidens. Not that she had been a maiden for a very long time. But the principle remained the same.

“—to your cousin and that Fulton,” Georges was saying pettishly, “but neither of them would listen. But you can do it.”

Emma shifted against the cold stone. “Do what? Speak to them on your behalf?”

There was something dark and unpleasant in Georges’ countenance. “No. We’re past that. There isn’t enough time.” He laughed a nasty laugh. “It’s their loss. If they’d cut me in, they might have had a share. But you can do it. You know where he keeps them.”

“Keeps what?”

“The plans,” said Marston insistently. “The plans. I have a buyer lined up. He’ll pay dearly for them.”

Emma blinked up at him. “You want me to steal Mr. Fulton’s plans?”

“Not steal,” Marston hedged. “Borrow. Do you realize how much they’re willing to pay? I’ll be set for life. I mean, we’ll be set for life. It’s for us, my darling. For our future.”

Emma gaped at him. “You are joking.”

Marston dropped to his knees in front of her. “Would I joke about this much money? I mean, about our future? They want those plans. Badly.” His hands were crushing hers; she could feel her bones protesting the pressure. “Which means I want those plans. Badly.”

“Georges—” Emma tried to extricate her hands.

“They trust you. They’ll tell you where it is.” He levered himself up, looming over her. Emma could feel the sharp edge of the plinth biting into the backs of her legs as she strained backwards. “I know he has them. I saw them with him in the carriage. He’ll tell you.”

His hands were on her shoulders, crushing, insistent.

“One small thing, Emma,” he urged. “Just this one small thing.”

“Oh, dear,” someone drawled loudly, loudly enough that Marston cursed and let go. “Do I wander unwelcome into Eros’s amorous domain?”