The Garden Intrigue

Chapter 6

Sussex, England

May 2004

There was a large device squatting smack in the middle of the dining room table.

I had taken my fair share of art history classes in undergrad, but it still took me a few moments to identify it as a projector. It was much larger and snazzier than the 1950s relics commonly used by undergrad art history departments, sleek and shiny. It emitted a faint humming noise, almost a purr.

In my own defense, one doesn’t generally expect to encounter a projector on a dining room table, in between the silver and the Spode. It made a rather odd centerpiece.

But, then, it was all rather odd. I’d never actually used the dining room—Colin and I ate in the comfortably shabby kitchen, with its mustard yellow fixtures and battered pine table—but I’d wandered my way through it a time or two, admiring the elegant appointments and the paired portraits of Lord and Lady Uppington that loomed on either side of the room, presiding over the long mahogany table in paint as they must once have done in the flesh. It didn’t look as it would have in their day. As Colin had informed me a while back, the house had been extensively redone in the late nineteenth century by an ancestor infatuated with the Arts and Crafts movement, which explained the heavy William Morris draperies over the windows and the Pre-Raphaelite murals on the walls—although I did wonder whether Persephone eating the pomegranate was really an appropriate scene for a dining room. What sort of message did that send? Sample the fruit plate and go straight to hell?

For tonight, that might not be so far off. Especially not with Colin and Jeremy in the same room. I didn’t like to think how Colin would react when he saw what the DreamStone people had done to his dining room.

It wasn’t just the projector plopped in the spot where the silver epergne usually presided. Bland, caterer-supplied china had supplanted the nicked and faded Spode pattern picked out by a late-nineteenth-century Selwick. Additions had been placed to turn the long table from an oval to a T, with microphones set in the central places at the top. Worst of all, a square white screen covered the portrait of Lord Uppington. Lady Uppington, hanging safely behind the head table, had been left unencumbered, but she looked distinctly put out at Lord Uppington’s plight.

These people didn’t know what trouble they were courting. I wouldn’t put it past her to come swooping down from the afterlife and rearrange them all to her personal satisfaction. And direct the movie while she was at it. That was just the sort of woman Lady Uppington was.

That’s the thing with reading peoples’ papers. You start to feel as if you’ve known them personally, even if they’ve been dead for two hundred years.

Even with an extensive library at my disposal, it had taken me several hours to track down Emma Morris Delagardie. Fortunately, at least one of Colin’s ancestors had taken an interest in American history, although books on Burr and Benedict Arnold predominated. Based on the mentions in Jane’s letters to Henrietta, I knew that Emma Delagardie was collaborating with that tedious poet, Augustus Whittlesby, on a masque to be performed at Malmaison; that she was related, in some degree, to the current American envoy, Robert Livingston; and that she had a cousin named Kortright.

It was the Kortright name that gave me the clue I needed. With a little scrounging, I found the connection. James Monroe, not yet president, had been envoy to Paris in 1794. He had taken with him his wife, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, his daughter Eliza—and his niece, Emma.

There was only one reference to the niece, a throwaway line. Monroe had enrolled his daughter, Eliza, and his niece, Emma, in Mme. Campan’s school for young ladies, where Eliza formed a lifelong friendship with Hortense de Beauharnais, whose portrait could still be seen at the Monroe plantation, Ash Lawn.

And that was all. For everything else, I was reliant on the incomplete tidbits of gossip in Jane’s letters, the gossipy, chatty, possibly lying letters that she sent to Henrietta, designed to both convey and conceal information. Was Emma with them? Against them? What was her real connection with Georges Marston?

I’d encountered Marston before, in my original researches. He hovered on the fringes of respectable society, milking his friendship with Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, for promotion, while, on the side, he had been running a lucrative little smuggling ring that might or might not have been selling secrets as well as silk and brandy.

In his use of personal relationships for his own ends, Marston reminded me a lot of Colin’s sister’s ex-boyfriend, Nigel Dempster, curator of the Vaughn Collection. Like me, Dempster was on the trail of the Pink Carnation.

And, like me, he had been willing to date a Selwick to get his hands on it.

It wasn’t the same, I told myself. Colin had been—well, an accident. I had already been granted access to a bunch of the family papers by his great-aunt Arabella before he had burst onto the scene, and the attraction between us had taken both of us very much by surprise. I already had enough material for three dissertations. I was dating Colin because I wanted to be with Colin.

But for how much longer?

I still hadn’t answered Blackburn’s e-mail about the head TF position. Damn. I chewed on the side of a nail. I really, really hadn’t wanted to think about that.

“Excuse me.” A girl with a clipboard was hovering just inside the door to the dining room. She ventured a tentative smile, an I’m-so-sorry-but smile. “You’re not supposed to be in here. It’s registered personnel only.”

Registered personnel?

I must have given her a look, because she fidgeted with the metal bit at the top of her clipboard. “You know, production staff, caterers, people connected with the family. So I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Unless this was like hospital admissions, where you had to be officially engaged before anyone would tell you anything, I considered myself pretty darn connected. Besides, picking up someone’s socks and taking turns with the washing up had to count as a domestic partnership.

I peered over her shoulder at the chart. “I should be on there. I’m”—the owner’s girlfriend? Researcher in residence? Chief cook and bottle washer?—“Eloise Kelly,” I finished lamely.

She rustled efficiently through several sheets of closely printed pages, looking up apologetically as she came to the end of it. “I’m afraid I don’t see you here. Unless you spell your name some weird way?”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s just Kelly, spelled the usual way. No Qs or silent Ns or anything like that.”

She checked again and shook her head. “Sorry. Still nothing. Are you with the magazine people?”

Now there was a magazine involved, too? Colin wasn’t going to like that.

“No, I’m with Colin. The owner,” I specified when the DreamStone representative looked blank. “The one who keeps trying to make sure that no one sets the rosebushes on fire.”

Comprehension dawned. “Unhappy-looking guy in a green jacket?”

“That’s the one.”

Her face brightened. She grinned at me, girl to girl. “He’s cute.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure why I was taking the credit here, since his looks weren’t something I’d had a hand in. He had his mother to thank for that, although he also had her to thank for Jeremy and the DreamStone invasion, so maybe not so much. I shrugged. “I like him.”

Which, as any woman knows, is girl-speak for “I’m ridiculously over the moon about him, but not like I’m going to tempt fate by admitting to that.”

Shoving the clipboard under one arm, the girl stuck out a hand. “I’m Cate, by the way. Cate Kartowsky. That’s Cate with a C.”

“A cate conformable to other household cates?” When she gave me a blank look, I said, “Sorry. I was having a Shakespeare moment. Isn’t this production supposed to be—?”

“I was a communications major,” said Cate. “With a minor in poli sci. Lots of Rawls and Nozick, not so much on the Shakespeare.”

“I do English history,” I said. “So the Shakespeare sort of creeps in.”

Cate nodded knowledgeably. These things happened. “I guess we’ll all be getting our Shakespeare this week, right?”

“Help me out here. Someone told me it was Much Ado About Nothing, but in Regency costume?”

“You’ve got it,” said Cate. She leaned closer, making sure no one was listening. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. But there’s the whole Austen craze, and Micah wanted to capitalize on that. He also wants cred for doing Shakespeare. There was some version of Much Ado About Nothing that made a big stir—”

“With Robert Sean Leonard,” I said. “And Kenneth Branagh. We were all in love with Robert Sean Leonard as Claudio when I was in Upper School.”

Cate looked blank. It made me feel very old. I was only twenty-seven. Should I really be feeling this ancient?

“Anyway,” she said, brushing Robert Sean Leonard aside, “Micah figured that if they were each successful on their own, he could put the two together, and, bingo! Instant box office hit.”

Or instant box office flop. “Is it true that there’s going to be singing and dancing?”

“Only in the Regency ballroom scenes,” said Cate comfortably. “Originally, there was going to be a whole rap music thing, but the execs didn’t buy the Regency rap idea.”

Thank goodness for that. I tried to picture Augustus Whittlesby rapping and, scarily, almost succeeded.

“We’ll be doing a workshop on English country dances for the extras later this week if you want me to sneak you in,” said Cate. “It should be fun.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

She gave me a lopsided grin. “Bring your boyfriend. We’re making the guys wear breeches.”

It would take something a little stronger than gin to get Colin to go along with that. “Good luck with that,” I said.

Cate brandished her clipboard. “What did you say your name was again? I’ll add you to the list.”

There’s nothing like boy-talk for creating instant friendship. We were now officially Buddies.

“Eloise,” I said. “Eloise with an E.”

“Gotcha.” Balancing the clipboard expertly on one forearm, she wrote down my name on the bottom of the list in firm, tidy letters. “Kelly, right? No Ns or Qs.”

“Right, right, and right.” As she flipped up the top page to add me to the bottom, I caught a glimpse of another document below. “Is that the seating chart for tonight?”

“What? Oh, over there? Yes. You wouldn’t believe the trouble we had working that out. There’s all sorts of weird stuff with the family. I heard that—”

Remembering who I was again, she broke off, flushing guiltily.

Trying to salvage the situation, I said, “Trust me, you just don’t want to know. This bunch makes Agamemnon and Clytemnestra look well balanced and functional.” I gestured to the seating chart. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Knock yourself out,” said Cate cheerfully, relinquishing the clipboard to me. “Just don’t change anything or I’m screwed.”

“That’s always annoying, isn’t it?” I said absently, scanning the minutely detailed chart. “When people move place cards around. I have some cousins who like to do that. It makes my grandmother apoplectic.”

The writing on the chart was so tiny, it was like trying to read the fine print on a postage stamp. It took a fair amount of squinting and guesswork to make out my own name. Jeremy had put me all the way down at the foot of the table, twenty people down from Colin.

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I muttered. “You’re a prince among men.”

“What?” said Cate, who was taking advantage of her temporary liberation from the clipboard to scroll through the accumulated texts on her mobile.

“Nothing! Just talking to myself. Occupational hazard of spending too much time in libraries.”

Either Jeremy was getting back at me for Paris—he hadn’t been pleased when I’d backed Colin in protesting the invitation to the film crew—or he was employing a simple divide-and-conquer technique. I haven’t said much about Colin’s family, have I? To call it complicated would be to do it a disservice. Colin’s family makes the tangled bureaucracy of late medieval Byzantium look like a model of efficiency and clarity.

Jeremy was Colin’s mother’s husband, yes (and I dare you to say that three times fast), but he was more than that. He was also Colin’s cousin. It was a tangled, messy story, and no one had been particularly eager to fill me in on the details, but the bare bones of it were that Jeremy, ten years Colin’s mother’s junior, had run off with his cousin William’s wife while William lay dying a miserable death from the cancer that was slowly eating him from the inside out.

Somehow, when it happens in fiction, it sounds better. Helen and Menelaus, Iseult and Mark of Cornwall, all those beautiful women of legend bound to older men. We cheer them on when they run off with their young lover, when Helen escapes with Paris, and Tristan and Iseult quaff their potion, even though both leave chaos and tumult behind. It’s romantic. It’s dramatic. And it’s all once upon a time.

When it’s your boyfriend’s mother who’s run off with the younger relative of her husband, it’s not quite that romantic anymore. Instead, it just seems rather sordid.

That was all a matter of record. Then there was the other stuff, the emotional undercurrents I could only begin to guess at. There was no way of securing any sort of confirmation, but I would have been willing to wager a pretty high sum that Jeremy, the child of a cadet branch of the family, bitterly resented Colin for inheriting Selwick Hall.

Oh, I wouldn’t deny that Colin didn’t exactly love Jeremy either. Even if there weren’t the horrible shadow of the wrong that Jeremy had done Colin’s father, they were just fundamentally different character types. Colin was tersely polite with Jeremy, as the situation required, but he was still polite.

On Jeremy’s side, however, it was something more. I had seen him gloating over Colin’s discomfort in Paris, drinking in his distress, like a ghoul scenting blood. There had been something in Jeremy’s expression, something behind his practiced social smile, that had made my skin crawl. There was hate there, real and bitter hate. If he could make Colin unhappy, he would, even in something as petty and as simple as moving me to the other side of the table.

Despite my promise to Cate, I was sorely tempted to move a few place cards around.

I didn’t bother to check out the other names on the chart. Cate had finished with her text and was waiting patiently for her baby back.

I handed back the clipboard. “I’d better go change. Thanks.” As an afterthought, I added, “Will you be at the dinner?”

“Me?” Cate shook her head. “I’m just the clipboard girl.”

“Is that a job description? Like gaffer or best boy?” I had no idea what either of those actually meant, but I couldn’t resist throwing them out there anyway. Yes, I read the credits like anyone else.

Cate grinned at me. She had a cute, chipmunk thing going, dimples in both cheeks. “Technically, my title is intern. But that generally translates to clipboard girl. Sometimes I get to make coffee.”

“Are you doing this because you want to be in film?”

“Journalism. Political reporting, that sort of thing. But I have a friend who has a cousin who knew someone at DreamStone, so…”

“It can’t hurt to have it on the résumé,” I finished for her.

“I would have preferred CNN, but, hey, at least I get to spend some time in England. So it’s not all bad.”

“Bad plumbing, strange weather, woolly hats…” And Colin. England did have its consolations.

“I haven’t seen the hats yet,” said Cate. I couldn’t tell if she was joking.

“Look, if you need anything, just let me know.” On an impulse, I added, “If you’d like, I’ll show you where we keep the secret Internet connection. Just don’t tell anyone else.”

“That would be great,” she said.

“Hey, can you do me a favor? No, nothing that major. Just, if you have a chance, let the other film people know that the West Wing and the library are off-limits? We’ve put up signs, but they don’t seem to be doing much. Someone messed around with my notes earlier today and I’d rather they didn’t. There was also a shower walk-in incident,” I added.

Cate winced. “I’ll do what I can. I can send out a memo, if that helps. That’s one of the things I get to do. Big power.”

“Excuse me!” Someone was calling down the hall. “Miss! Er…”

“Cate,” said Cate, without displaying any sign of impatience. She turned in the doorway to face whoever it was, blocking my view.

I’m lousy with faces, but I’m good with voices. This one sounded familiar. But it wasn’t a voice I’d expected to hear at Selwick Hall. In fact, I would have been willing to say it was one of the last voices I’d expect to hear at Selwick Hall.

No. I must have gotten it wrong. It had been a long day.

“Cate,” said the voice, all plummy rounded vowels, just a little too pointedly posh to be credible. “Can you tell me where I can find cocktails?”

Cate was all efficiency. “Cocktails will be in the long salon in half an hour.” She consulted her clipboard, which included, among its other amenities, a plan of Selwick Hall, floor by floor. “That’s the drawing room that runs along the far side of the house. Just go straight to the back. You won’t be able to miss it.”

“Thank you…Cate.”

The smarm was palpable even down the length of the hall. I didn’t need to crane to see over Cate to know who it was. As improbable as it was, as unlikely and unseemly and any other un one cared to contribute, he had somehow gained admission to Selwick Hall.

Even so, I felt the need to ask. Just in case. Hope springs eternal, and all that. He couldn’t be the only man with a pretentious accent in the greater Sussex area.

I poked Cate in the shoulder. “Who was that?”

“Oh, Nigel?” Cate made a face, eloquent of disapproval. “That’s Nigel Dempster. He’s our historical consultant.”

Damn.