by Лорен Уиллиг
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?”
Chapter 22
These sails I spy upon the main
Might offer succor, risk or pain;
Are they mirage or do I see
What my eyes are offering me?
—Emma Delagardie and Augustus Whittlesby, Americanus: A Masque in Three Parts
“Yes, you bloody well do,” snarled Georges.
Augustus lounged in the doorway, picking at the lace on his cuffs as though the entire matter were one of extreme indifference to him. Emma felt her chest contract with a dangerous combination of relief and confusion and irritation.
“No,” she said firmly, and stepped around Georges. “Colonel Marston was just going. Weren’t you, Georges?”
Augustus’s eyes narrowed at her use of Georges’ first name, but he didn’t let it spoil his act. Gazing vaguely into the air, he declaimed, “Far be it from a humble votary of the muses to disturb the worship of Venus, but that the pressing concerns of Thespis demand Madame Delagardie’s prompt and immediate assistance.”
Georges cracked his knuckles. “I’ll tell you what you can do with your thespian.…”
Emma felt an absurd bubble of laughter rising in her throat. Naturally, Georges would think it had to with a prostitute. “Not a thespian, Georges. Thespis. The muse of the theatre.”
Augustus looked pained. “Dear lady, much as it pains me to contradict one so fair, I must not, I cannot, be silent when the honor of the magnificent muses rests upon the witness of my humble tongue. Thespis, although a prime mover in the origin of our art, was a mere mortal, an actor. The muses with whom the playwright pleads are Thalia, the queen of comedy, and Melpomene, the dark lord of tragedy, spring and winter, the Persephone and Hades of our theatrical scheme.”
He paused, either because he had said his piece, or because he had run out of breath.
Emma jumped in before Georges decided to end the agony by throttling him. “Mr. Whittlesby requires my help with the masque,” she translated.
“With the burning urgency of a thousand suns,” Augustus assured her solemnly. His eyes met hers. He quirked an eyebrow in unspoken question. Beneath the vapid mask, she could see the concern in his eyes.
Emma shook her head slightly, although what he was asking and what she was answering, she wasn’t quite sure. Part of her wanted to take him by his artfully disarranged collar and shake him. It wasn’t fair. Why did he have to come barging in, being all heroic and concerned, just when she most wanted to resent him?
Georges was brooding over his own wrongs. “If that’s the case, why didn’t he just say so?” He turned imperiously to Emma, dismissing Augustus with a shrug of the shoulder. “Whatever it is, it can wait.”
Emma touched her fingers to Georges’ sleeve, tilting her head coquettishly up towards him, ignoring Augustus for all she was worth. He wasn’t the only one who could play a role.
“I’m afraid it can’t,” she said with false regret. “One would hate to have the Emperor disappointed in our entertainment, don’t you agree?”
No one could argue with the Emperor. It was the trump card to trump all trump cards.
Georges looked at the hand resting on his sleeve, eyes narrowed. Emma wished she were wearing gloves; she felt strangely vulnerable without them, her fingers bare and very pale in the cold, making her rings loose on her fingers.
His other hand closed over hers, tightly. Not so tight as to be punitive, but tight enough to send a message. Emma could feel Augustus shift on the balls of his feet.
“Another time, then.” Georges raised his hand to her lips, deliberately reversing her hand so that his lips touched her palm. “Think about what I told you.”
Turning on his heel, he strode towards the door, only to go sprawling in a most undignified fashion as his shin connected with Augustus’s calf. He let out a bellow of shock and rage as he stumbled, arms flailing, catching himself just before he crashed into Mme. Bonaparte’s French windows.
“Oh, dear,” said Augustus, the malicious glint in his eye belying his vague tone. “Was I in your way?”
Georges didn’t bother to answer. Favoring Augustus with a look of extreme dislike, he wrenched open the door to the hall. He looked back over his shoulder at Emma.
“Remember,” he said, and was gone.
He didn’t slam the door. It might have been less disconcerting if he had.
Bother, bother, bother.
“You shouldn’t have made him angry,” she said shortly, watching Georges’ distorted form in the glass as he made an abrupt turn towards the billiards room, ostentatiously favoring his left leg.
Behind him, in reflection, she could see Augustus, his white shirt misty pale against dark panels.
Instead of responding, he asked, “Are you all right?”
That was all. Are you all right? But something about the way he said it, his voice low and serious, his eyes intent on hers in the glass, tore right through to the depths of her composure. There was no doubting the genuineness of his concern. Conversely, that almost made it worse. It would be easier to brush off if there were no caring there, if she could dismiss him as just another acquaintance, another chance meeting, another accidental kiss.
To know that someone did care, really cared, but just didn’t care enough…That was worst of all.
Emma took a deep breath, tucking up the ragged ends of her pride. “Perfectly all right,” she said tartly, turning away from the glass.
It was almost a shock to see him in the flesh rather than in reflection, startlingly, corporeally real. Too real. She knew the texture of his cheek, the shape of his scalp, the scent of his skin, so close and yet so far.
“It was very kind of you to intervene,” she said primly. “But there was no need.”
“That’s not the way it looked to me.”
“Georges wouldn’t hurt me. He just wants what he wants.” She added pettishly, “There was no need to come charging in like that. Now he’ll only seek me out and we’ll have to have the whole tiresome conversation all over again.”
Augustus folded his arms over his chest, looking as forbidding as a man in a ruffled shirt could look. “And what if you were in the way of what he wanted?”
“He would be too loath to get blood on his uniform to do anything violent,” Emma said lightly. “Really, Augustus, there’s no need to worry. I can take care of myself.”
“You’re a third of his size.”
Emma self-consciously straightened her spine. “There’s no need to harp on my height.”
Just because Jane was tall…Emma banished the unworthy thought. This wasn’t a competition.
If it was, she wouldn’t win.
Augustus scowled. “It’s not about height; it’s bulk. He could squash you with one hand.”
“Give me some credit,” she said. “It would take two hands at least. Though I be small, I be fierce. How does that line go?”
“Though she be but little, she is fierce.” He looked over his shoulder, frowning, more serious than she had ever seen him. “This isn’t a joke, Emma.”
Emma’s eyes stung. With fatigue, that was all. “No,” she said quietly. “It’s not. Nor is it any of your concern.”
He stood entirely still, the stillness of a dark pond on a dark night, uncanny in its silence, strange things moving beneath the surface. “You are my concern,” he said in a low voice.
Fine words, and she was sure he meant them, too.
As a friend.
“Don’t worry,” said Emma flippantly. “If Georges murders me and drops my body in the river, I’m sure you can find another collaborator.”
He stared at her as though trying to divine whether she meant it. She could see his fingers curl into his palms. It was a good thing his nails were short, or they would leave marks. “That’s not what I meant.”
If he wasn’t going to explain, she wasn’t going to ask. She held his gaze until he broke. He turned abruptly away, swinging towards the glass doors through which Georges had exited.
“How did you ever come to take up with that cretin?” he demanded.
Half a dozen excuses bubbled to Emma’s tongue, the same ones she had trotted out before in half a dozen imaginary conversations. It had been a difficult time.…She hadn’t been happy.…
What was she doing? Emma pulled herself to an abrupt halt. What right had he to ask? Or to judge. It was none of his concern. She was under no obligation to explain herself to him or anyone else.
