The Garden Intrigue (22 page)

It was Miss Gwen who broke the silence.

“Not bad,” she said grudgingly.

Not bad? That had been extraordinary. Beyond extraordinary. Emma’s overtaxed senses abandoned the search for adjectives. Already it was slipping away, normality encroaching. Augustus clambered to his feet, the scuff of his shoes against the boards a homely, workaday sort of noise. At the back of the theatre, the young officers resumed their whispered conversations; the birds outside dared to chirp again, and the gardeners to garden.

Had it been only a moment? It had felt like longer.

“Are you sure you shouldn’t take the role?” said Kort wryly, and Emma felt a surge of affection for her cousin.

Augustus offered Kort his script back. “The poet to turn player! Never! Not for the humble scrivener the clamor of the audience’s acclaim or the sweaty work of making words turn flesh.” His voice was a good half-octave higher than it had been a moment before, nasal and slightly drawling. So much for not acting, thought Emma wryly. Turning to Jane, Augustus added, “Madame. As always, I am honored to declare my affections to so worthy an object.”

The words were sheer absurdity; the look that accompanied them was in dead earnest.

There was acting, and then there was…not.

Emma cleared her throat. “I think we’ve all done enough for now, don’t you? We can resume tomorrow morning.”

Talking, laughing, complaining about their costumes, the others filed out in clusters of twos and threes. Jane went with them, her head tilted attentively
towards one of the naval officers who would be playing a naval officer. Emma didn’t miss the way Augustus’s gaze followed them out through the door, into the last harsh glow of late afternoon sunlight.

“Well,” she said, too loudly, “that went well.”

The door closed, shutting out the light and Jane. Casually, too casually, Augustus clasped his hands lightly behind his back and strolled back between the rows of seats, towards the stage and Emma.

“That,” he said, “is taking optimism too far. Even for you.”

He offered her a hand to help her up out of the prompt box. Emma accepted it gratefully. His hand closed around hers, surprisingly strong for someone who spent the day wielding a pen, hauling her up with as little effort as though she were nothing more than a roll of paper.

“Thank you. I’m fine now.” Emma self-consciously extracted her hand, making a show of shaking out her skirts and stretching her stiff limbs. “I am still worried about the ending, though.”

Augustus took a step back. “Haven’t we had this discussion already?”

“Yes, but that doesn’t make you any more right.”

“It doesn’t make me any less right, either,” he said mildly. “We only have a week; there’s no time to start changing things around now.”

“The actors haven’t rehearsed that bit yet,” said Emma hopefully. “And if we got them a new script by tomorrow—”

The theatre door opened and they both turned. It was a strange, hunched silhouette framed in the doorway before it resolved itself into a man in a rough cotton smock lugging behind him a large crate on a wheeled cart.

Tipping the cart, he let the crate slide with a distinct thump to the ground next to Emma, in direct contravention of the words painted on the side, advising all comers to handle with care.

Emma didn’t recognize the crate and she certainly didn’t know the man, but she knew that writing.

“You Madame Delagardie?” the man demanded.

Emma flung herself at the crate. “The wave machine!” She beamed at
Augustus. “See? I told you Mr. Fulton hadn’t forgotten.” Turning to the deliveryman, she said confidingly, “It was the ruts, wasn’t it?”

The man puffed out his chest, as though preparing for a fight. “We put the ruts just where we was told to,” he said, “in the other place. Did you want’em both over here? Because that’ll cost extra.”

“Pardon?” said Emma. She glanced back over at her crate. “There’s only supposed to be the one.…”

Unless Mr. Fulton had felt guilty for the delay and tossed in an extra mechanism to make up for it?

“Here.” The man thrust out a four-times-folded note, secured with a blob of sealing wax without a seal. It looked as though it had been dunked in a puddle a few times along the way.

The hand remained outthrust even after Emma took the note from it.

As Emma eagerly broke the wax, Augustus dug into his pocket, extracted a coin, and pressed it into the man’s palm. “For your troubles,” he said. “With all the ruts.”

Over the top of the letter, Emma gave Augustus a look.

Having been remunerated for his pains, the deliveryman ambled off, convinced they were all crazy.

Emma bent her blond head over the letter. “It
is
the wave machine,” she said delightedly. She flapped the paper at Augustus. “Mr. Fulton has even included instructions for its use.”

“Good,” said Augustus. “I hope you can figure it out, because I can’t.”

“Nonsense,” said Emma in a preoccupied tone, her head bent over Mr. Fulton’s scribblings. “If I can learn to make sense of these things, anyone can.”

Augustus propped an elbow on the sill of Francia’s tower, currently still under construction. “Why did you? I wouldn’t have thought mechanics would have been your métier.”

The lid had been very carefully nailed down. Oh, bother. She was going to need to find someone with a crowbar. And considerably more arm strength than she possessed.

“It’s not.” Maybe she didn’t need a crowbar after all. If she could find something to use to pry back those nails…Emma looked around the crowded backstage area. She saw paint, paintbrushes, lumber, and enough rope to string up an entire troupe of highwaymen, but nothing that resembled a useful tool. “But it all reduces to simple enough principles once someone explains.” She slid her fingers under the join of the lid and gave an experimental hitch. “Bother. I need something to get this lid off.”

“A crowbar,” said Augustus, in that definitive way men have when talking about tools, even men clad in decidedly effeminate costumes. “Your husband took an interest in these things, didn’t he?”

Emma picked ineffectually at one of the nails in the lid. “Yes.”

Too much of an interest. As Paul buried himself deeper and deeper in diagrams and models of mechanisms, she had accused him of wanting her dowry more than he wanted her, of marrying her merely to fund his pet project: the draining of Carmagnac.

Ironic, if that were the case, since her family had cut her off without a penny in punishment for marrying without their permission.

In retrospect, she felt distinctly sorry for Paul. He had found himself without the fortune he had been led to expect, saddled with a temperamental fifteen-year-old girl who demanded homage and went off in a huff when she didn’t receive it.

If she hadn’t idolized him so much at the start, they might have done better. But then, he had been just as guilty as she. He had been equally surprised when she had turned out to be not the goddess of his imaginings but a fifteen-year-old girl, spoiled and untried.

What a mess they had made, both of them.

Augustus hunkered down next to her. “You’re never going to get the nails off that way,” he said. “I’ll find you a crowbar.”

Looking at him, his long hair curling around his face, his attention innocently on the crate, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of his expression as he had gazed up at Jane, as rapt as if she were the Cytherea his poems proclaimed her. It had been a joke before, his devotion, but now…

“Be careful,” she warned.

“With the crowbar?” Still crouching beside the crate, Augustus arched a brow. “I assure you, Madame Delagardie, I am far more proficient with tools than this fragile frame would imply.”

“Don’t play games with me,” said Emma crossly. “I didn’t mean the crowbar. I meant Jane.”

He went still. “What about Jane?”

Emma swallowed, trying to muster the right words. “I don’t want you hurt, either of you.” She bit down on her lip, concentrating on the rough wood of the crate, the places where it had cracked and splintered. “It isn’t kind to idolize someone like that.”

Augustus pushed up and away. One minute he was next to her, the next she had a prime view of his knees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emma remembered the way he had looked at Jane on her chair, as though she were the most precious thing in a million kingdoms, as though he would cross storm-tossed seas for the sake of a mere glimpse of her face.

Leaning back on her haunches, Emma laughed without humor. “You have her up in a tower so high no man could possibly reach her, no matter how high the ladder. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you.”

Beneath the exuberant fall of his hair, his face was still, as still and stony as a winter’s day on a barren beach.

Yanking at a nail with the pads of her fingers, Emma said, “You can’t make someone into your Cytherea just by wishing it.”

“I’m not trying to make anyone into anything,” he said tightly.

Emma looked up from her shredded fingernails. “No? Then why the Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes? Why twenty-two cantos?”

Why do you look at her the way you do?

But she couldn’t ask that.

“That’s not—” Augustus caught himself before he said whatever he had been about to snap out. He said shortly, “That’s poetry. Don’t you think I can tell the difference between fact and fiction?”

“No.” There. It was out. There was no going back. Softening her voice,
Emma said, “It’s romantic and lovely, but none of it’s real. Jane’s not like that. She—”

“She
what
?” He stepped forward, his hands planted combatively on his hips. “I know Miss Wooliston a damned sight better than you do.”

Emma held on to the crate with both hands. “That’s not what I meant! Do you think I would ever say anything against Jane? I love her too. It’s just that she’s not like that. She not…poetical.”

Without another word, Augustus swung away from her. His expression of contempt seemed to linger behind him, like a sun print on the surface of the eye, creating shadow images long after the object has gone.

Emma jumped up, steadying herself against the lid of the crate. “Augustus—”

His long legs made short work of the aisle between the stage and the door. Either he didn’t hear or he pretended not to. He pushed hard with both hands against the door, sending it ricocheting open. Emma held up a hand to block the sudden wash of sunlight.

For a very brief moment, Augustus turned back. Against the light, he was a dark silhouette, sinister and still.

In a hard, tight voice, he said, “I’ll find you a crowbar.”

The door swung shut behind him, blotting out the man and the light.

Picking futilely at the nails on the lid of the case, Emma would have felt better about the crowbar if she hadn’t been quite so sure Augustus was itching to use it on her.

I
dolization, indeed!

Augustus let the theatre door slam shut behind him, the crack of wood against wood a satisfying echo of his feelings.

After all these weeks, he had thought Emma, of all people, would know better.

Certainly, he played the besotted poet in public, but that was just an act, like the adverbs and the alliteration. The verbiage was mere costuming, no more a part of him than the billowing shirt he affected in public. His real feelings for Jane weren’t composed of such airy nothings; they were based on a firm foundation of mutual respect, interests, and understanding. He knew Jane for what she was, just as she knew him. Between them, there were no pretenses, no roles, no acts.

He wasn’t trying to make Jane into his Cytherea; the very idea was absurd.
Cytherea was the role she played in public, the princess in the tower, accepting the homage of admirers from twenty feet up, encased in a tower to protect her from elements beyond her control. If anything, he sought to liberate her from the tower, to bring her down to earth and into his arms, in a safe, protected space where they could both be what they were without the threat of prying eyes or tattling tongues.

Emma might not know the whole of it—the whole double-identity bit did make for rather a large gap—but she ought to know him better than that by now. After three weeks of working in such proximity, he had thought they had built up an understanding of sorts, even a friendship. They were frank with each other. He was blunt with her in a way he was with no one but Jane.

No. If he was being honest with himself, he was blunt with Emma in a way he wasn’t with Jane. With Jane, his tongue was curbed by the vast respect he bore her, his manner softened by admiration, their interactions tinged—although not tainted!—by the echoes of their respective roles. They never knew when someone might be listening. He played the besotted poet in private as in public, half in mockery, half in earnest.

With Emma, there was no need for any of that. He could be curt, he could be blunt, he could even be crude.

That, Augustus told himself, was precisely why her absurd accusations ate at him so. There was no truth to them, of course.

Idolization, ha!

Augustus cut around the side of the theatre, toward the confusion of gardens that stretched out behind the house. Mme. Bonaparte had designed her grounds in the English manner, carefully cultivated to maintain the illusion of natural serendipity, with irregular paths circling among copses of trees, meandering over rustic bridges, wending their way past bits of artfully artless statuary, planted to look like the decaying relics of a prior civilization.

Surely, somewhere in the grounds, there must be the equivalent of a garden shed. A gardener would have served equally well, but, like the shoemaker’s
elves, they had done their work in the morning while the house lay sleeping, scurrying out of sight by day so that the inhabitants of the house might enjoy their illusion of lonesome wilderness unimpeded by reminders of the effort that went into maintaining it.