The Garden Intrigue (13 page)

The footman was spared the test of his morals—or deprived the chance to earn an extra sou. Someone else emerged from the house. The footman stood aside and a man stepped down, his boots dull against the stone of the steps. Both his hat and his jacket were an unfashionable brown, his cravat simply tied. His head turned curiously towards Marston as he passed, but he didn’t stop.

Marston, however, was galvanized into action. He sprang forward. “Mr. Livingston! Georges Marston. Your cousin introduced us. Last night.”

Augustus wondered how much of the previous altercation Kortright
Livingston had heard or whether he knew his cousin had banned Marston from the house.

Tipping his head, he said coolly, “Mr. Marston.”

Marston hastily moved to get ahead of him, blocking his way down the street. “Madame Delagardie and I are good friends. Very good friends.”

Kortright Livingston kept moving. “I understand my cousin has a very broad circle of acquaintance in Paris.”

Marston scrambled along after him. “Paris can be confusing to those new to it. A chap doesn’t know who to trust.”

“I do not intend to stay long in Paris,” Livingston said shortly.

“Ah,” said Marston, undeterred. “Just until the business is concluded?”

Livingston stopped. He looked Marston up and down, from his champagne-blacked boots to his curly-brimmed hat. “I do not understand you, Mr. Marston.”

Marston grinned. It wasn’t a pleasant expression. It was all teeth and red lips, like the wolf in a tale by Charles Perrault. “I think you do, Mr. Livingston. I think you do.”

Augustus’s forehead hit glass. Damn. They were moving out of sight and out of earshot. He could lift the sash, but a man leaning head and shoulders out of the window was the sort of thing not likely to escape the attention of those one most wanted to avoid. Leaping down fifteen feet and running after them was equally impractical.

The door squeaked.

Augustus jumped away from the window, doing his best to strike a nonchalant pose.

“Thank goodness, that’s the last of them.” Emma Delagardie whirled into the room in a flurry of feathers. Fortunately, she had matters of her own to distract her. There were two red spots high in either cheek that owed nothing to rouge. “My apologies, Mr. Whittlesby, for keeping you so long.”

“No matter, Madame.” Augustus inclined his head towards the window. Audacity always worked better than evasion. “I was just admiring the view.”

Mme. Delagardie’s flush deepened, but she otherwise kept her composure. “And the wildlife?” she said tartly.

“The mating calls of certain birds are particularly strident,” said Augustus blandly.

Turning abruptly away, Mme. Delagardie crossed to the desk, her skirts bouncing around her ankles. “Consider that more of a swan song,” she said, her hands moving rapidly among the papers, sifting, sorting, searching. “That particular bird will just have to find a different pond. This pool is no longer open.”

“They are very pretty creatures, swans,” commented Augustus.

“Yes, from a distance.” Emma Delagardie pulled a blank sheet of paper from among the debris, clearing an open surface on the desk by dint of pushing everything else to the sides. Paper crumpled against paper and the inkwell teetered perilously on the edge. She shoved at the stack. “If you let them too close, they peck.”

Augustus caught the inkwell just before it went over. Fortunately, it was empty. Inside the open container, the congealed brown ink looked like blood, like a handkerchief after a consumptive’s cough, covered with matted brown stains. Augustus set the bowl gingerly aside, next to the diagram of the incomprehensible machine.

He lifted the diagram from the desk, regarding it with a studied show of indifference. “What art is this?” Augustus dangled the paper languidly in front of her. “Are you a draftsman as well as a fledgling mistress of verse, fair Madame?”

“Hmm?’ Mme. Delagardie glanced up from her work, her expression abstracted. It took a moment for her eyes to focus on it. She waved a dismissive hand, setting her sapphires sparkling. “Oh, that. It’s all pumps and that sort of thing. Drainage was my husband’s idée fixe.”

She scrambled through the welter of papers for a pen with a working nib.

“You might have heard of him,” she added, testing a nib against the pad of one finger, her head bowed over her work. “His experiments in drainage were much talked of at the time. The directors were very pleased with his
efforts in expanding the arable land available to provide grain to the republic. They gave him a commendation for it.”

Augustus had heard. Everyone had. Society had shaken its head over the spectacle of poor Paul Delagardie slaving away among the marshes while his young bride cut a dash in Paris. Opinion had been divided. Some said it was no more than he deserved, neglecting a young wife to grub in the mud. Others put the blame on his bride. Either way, the impression had been that there was little love lost in the match and little interest on Mme. Delagardie’s part for her husband’s besetting passion.

“A touching memento to his memory,” intoned Augustus, “to preserve his papers for so long?”

“How many acts shall we have?” Mme. Delagardie twisted the lid off a new pot of ink with more than necessary vigor. “It shouldn’t be a long production, but it must have some plot to it.”

The discussion of drainage was officially over.

“Three?” Augustus suggested at random. “It is more than two but less than four.”

To his surprise, Mme. Delagardie accepted his advice without question. “And it corresponds so nicely to the three unities.” When Augustus looked at her in surprise, she said mildly, “I do patronize the theatre, you know.”

Yes, but he hadn’t expected theory from her, especially not neoclassical Aristotelian derivations. “Are we to pattern ourselves on Racine, then?” he asked.

“I don’t believe Racine had any singing parts,” she said, “and I’ve been told quite explicitly that I’m meant to have one for Hortense. As for the rest, I don’t see why not.”

“Unity of action, time, and place?” He wasn’t sure why he felt the need to push the point, but he did. It was a test, he told himself. A test of what, he couldn’t quite say.

“The unity of place certainly saves money on sets,” Mme. Delagardie said practically. “Although the point of a masque, generally, is to make the sets as elaborate as possible. The one is story, the other is spectacle.”

It was an interesting concept, this distinction between spectacle and story. Was it a question of entertainment versus edification? The animal senses versus the more intelligent faculties? There was an argument to be made that it was a false distinction, that spectacle was a means of conveyance rather than—

Augustus pulled himself up short. He wasn’t meant to be debating drama. He was meant to be insinuating himself into Mme. Delagardie’s confidence, assuring his invitation to Malmaison, discerning whether she was an active player in this game or merely a pawn.

She had made one point, though, whether she intended to or not. Whatever spectacle might convey, it was also very good at concealing.

He looked at Mme. Delagardie, her fine hair topped with an absurd confection of ribbon and feather, sapphires dazzling at her neck, her wrists, her fingers, silver thread entwined with the blue embroidery on her dress, so that she shimmered when she moved.

For the first time, he wondered whether the spectacle might not, in this case, be the illusion.

Nonsense. He had masques on the mind. A bit of Aristotle and a moment of lucid conversation meant little. Emma Delagardie was a conduit, not a source.

Augustus adopted his most vapid expression. “Shall we carry on, dear lady? The muses’ clamor to be heard! Our audience awaits!”

“A fair point.” Mme. Delagardie dipped her pen in the inkwell, tapping the nib professionally against the side.

“
Act the First
,” she wrote across the top of the page, in ink that was neither brown nor black but a very feminine violet. She looked up at Augustus, her long earrings swinging on their silver-gilt chains. “The scene…What shall the scene be?”

She was looking up, but Augustus was looking down, at the upside-down writing in front of him, at
Act the First
.

Her handwriting wasn’t what he had expected. There were no girlish loops or feminine frills. It was an almost angular hand, impatient around
the edges. He had seen it before, just a few moments ago, although not on any of the notes on the desk. Those had been correspondence directed to her, not from her.

All it took was a glance to confirm.

The hand that had written
Act the First
was the same that had made the notes in the margin of the mechanical diagram.

M
adame Bonaparte asked that our theme be nautical in nature, but other than that, we can write whatever we like. Within reason,” Emma amended.

She looked expectantly at Mr. Whittlesby.

Nothing.

Emma tried again. “We can even use your Cytherea. She lives in a casement by the sea. Doesn’t she? Mr. Whittlesby?”

Mr. Whittlesby didn’t answer. Eyes glazed, he was lost in poetic reverie. At least, Emma hoped it was poetic reverie. She had heard rumors about the sorts of aids to invention applied by those of artistic temperament, strange, oriental smokes and potions that dulled the mind but awakened the senses, or so they claimed.

That was all she needed, partnership with an opium eater.

It was all Emma could do not to drop her forehead to her desk and just
stay there. She could burrow down among the papers and hide, hide until Kort gave up and cousin Robert went away and tangles of brambles climbed along the walls of her Paris house, leaving only a whisper and a rumor of the crazy American lady who had once lived there.

What had she gotten herself into? She didn’t know the first thing about constructing a theatrical production. She didn’t want to be coaxing a poet into coherence. She wasn’t sure where she wanted to be, but it wasn’t here. Or New York.

Perhaps she ought to find a casement by the sea somewhere.

“Mr. Whittlesby?” Emma waggled her fingers at the poet. “Hello?”

It was all Kort’s fault, Emma decided. Well, maybe not all Kort’s fault. Some of the blame went to Jane. If Jane hadn’t set Whittlesby on her…If Kort hadn’t gotten on her nerves like that…

If, just once, she had been able to curb her own impulsive tongue.

That was what really lay at the crux of it, not Kort, not Jane, not Mr. Whittlesby in his loose shirts and tight breeches, but her own silly tongue, flap, flap, flapping without any reference to rational thought, ruled always by her heart rather than her head. Something would set her off and off she would go, off to Paris, away with Paul, away
from
Paul, into the arms of Marston, and now this, ricocheting from one drama to the next, with never a moment to catch her breath in between.

Think, Emma
, her mother used to say. Emma could hear her voice now, affection and exasperation, all rolled into one.
Think before you speak
.

Take a deep breath, people suggested. Count to ten. Count sheep. Oh, wait, that was for sleeping. Even in her own head, her tongue ran ahead of her brain. It propelled her into all sorts of absurd situations. Elopements. Scandals. This.

On the plus side, over the years, she had gotten very good at making the best out of bad situations. There was no cloud without a substantial silver lining—even if that lining did more often tend to be silver plate than solid sterling.

All that mattered was that it glitter.

Emma brightened at the thought. Glitter, she understood. She could make this masque glitter. She might not be a Racine or a Corneille, but she could put on a grand and gaudy spectacle with enough fireworks and mechanical effects to make the audience clap and exclaim and ignore the fact that at the core it was all fundamentally hollow.

It shouldn’t be that hard, after all. People would be predisposed to like whatever they set before them, especially with Hortense playing the heroine, and the entire spectacle dedicated to cousin Robert. In fact, she thought, spirits rising, she could send everyone up on stage costumed as dancing aardvarks and this particular audience would still applaud. It didn’t matter what they performed, just that they performed something. It was a very reassuring thought.

“Hark! I heard my name?” Mr. Whittlesby’s words were daft, but his eyes were clear. Not, Emma decided, the eyes of an opium eater. Not that she had ever met an opium eater, but she had the idea that they were meant to be bleary-eyed and vague.

“One word about Cytherea and you were away with the fairies. Love struck?”

“Horror struck! My Cytherea to peddle her wares on the common stage?”

“It’s a very exclusive stage,” said Emma. They could do this. Really, they could. It might even be good, especially if she avoided the extraneous use of aardvarks. “Quite uncommon. Have you been to Malmaison?”

“The deities have yet to invite me to their fair Olympus,” intoned Mr. Whittlesby.

Emma took that as a no. “There’s a lovely little dollhouse of a theatre, right near the main house. It’s quite new, only built the year before last.”

Before that, they used to put on their plays in the house or out in the open in the field outside the house, risking rain and stormy weather. Emma tilted her head, listening to lines long since recited, songs long since sung. It boggled the memory to try to recall how many productions she had seen,
how many bit roles she had acted, the laughter, the mishaps, the camaraderie. They had had such splendid times.

The new theatre might have all the conveniences, but it would never be quite the same.

“Madame Delagardie?”

Emma gave a brisk shake of her head. “If not Cytherea, who shall we press into service for our plot?”