The Garden Intrigue

by Lauren Willig

  Mme. Bonaparte swallowed the story without question. Perhaps, thought Emma, with a dull sense of surprise, because it was true. She had got herself into this state even without Augustus’s ministrations.

  Her struggles with Mr. Fulton’s machine seemed like a lifetime ago.

  “I’m so very glad you decided to abandon your labors and join us,” Mme. Bonaparte said, drawing her aside with the effortless skill of the accomplished hostess. “There’s something I’ve been wanting to ask you.”

  “Yes?” There were people coming and going, the usual gay and glittering crowd who attended on the First Consul’s wife—the Empress, now, Emma reminded herself—but no sign of Augustus.

  Perhaps, she thought gloomily, he had fled back to Paris, horrified at his own almost indiscretion. Or maybe he was up in his garret, writing long poems of pain and loss to his inconstant Cytherea.

  But why? Why inconstant Cytherea? It was Augustus who had kissed her. Inconstant Augustus, then. In fact, thought Emma, with a twinge of indignation, why was she worrying about Augustus’s feelings? Shouldn’t he be worrying about hers? She encouraged the indignation, nursing it. She was the one who had offered him comfort, just comfort, nothing more. He was the one who had taken advantage of that, seeking a sort of solace she had never offered.

  The fact that she had craved it—had welcomed it—was entirely beside the point.

  Mme. Bonaparte was looking at her expectantly. Emma realized that the other woman had stopped speaking and was waiting for her to answer.

  “I’m sorry,” she said contritely. “Forgive me. I was woolgathering.”

  Whatever Mme. Bonaparte’s other vanities, she wasn’t the sort to account inattention a sort of petty treason. “What are we to do with you?” she said fondly. “When you join us at Saint-Cloud, I hope you will pay better attention.”

  “At Saint-Cloud?”

  Mme. Bonaparte’s face lit like a child’s. “You, my dear, are to be one of my household. A lady-in-waiting! That way, I shall have you with me always.”

  “But—” Emma found herself caught, caught off guard, caught in the web of Mme. Bonaparte’s enthusiasm. “But I hadn’t—”

  “Thought to be asked?” said Mme. Bonaparte gaily. “My dear girl, how could I leave you aside? Hortense would never forgive me. When I think of the two of you playing in my paint pots and ruining my best hat…”

  Emma let the words wash over her, bringing with them a host of rosy-tinted memories of carefree school days and adolescent romps. Would it be such a very bad thing to say yes? She didn’t have anything else she wanted to do or anywhere else she wanted to be. They didn’t really need her at Carmagnac. All the improvements that needed to be made had been made; it was all progressing according to Paul’s plans and M. le Maire had matters well in hand.

  If she said yes to Mme. Bonaparte, she would have, in the space of one word, a place and a purpose. Mme. Delagardie would become lady-in-waiting to the Empress. Even Kort couldn’t sneer at that.

  Kort and who else? Emma tried not to think about poets.

  “We couldn’t possibly go on without you.” Mme. Bonaparte squeezed Emma’s hand languidly in her own. “You’re all but a daughter to me.”

  She had married her own daughter off for her own advantage, consigning Hortense to a miserable marriage with a man who despised her.

  The reminder acted on Emma like the proverbial bucket of cold water. She didn’t doubt Mme. Bonaparte meant it. But she also didn’t doubt Bonaparte had advised it, or that, while Mme. Bonaparte might be motivated by affection, there was also a sturdy dollop of policy behind it.

  Get the American girl, Bonaparte would have said. You mean my Emma, Mme. Bonaparte would have replied. Lovely. We all like Emma.

  If she said yes, it meant an end to the autonomy she had earned for herself. It meant curtsying and attending and jumping into a carriage at an hour’s notice whenever the Emperor decided on one of his impromptu migrations. It meant guarding her back and watching her tongue and never being able to know whether any profession of friendship, any amorous overture, was for her own sake or that of her proximity to power.

  If she were a daughter, Mme. Bonaparte wouldn’t hesitate to use her as she had her own. She would find herself married off for Bonaparte’s advantage, locked in a loveless marriage, forced to play go-between in the endless games between nations that had somehow supplanted their old and carefree games of prisoner’s base.

  This would be a very different sort of prison, but still a prison.

  “I can’t,” Emma blurted out. “I’m so sorry, Madame Bonaparte.”

  “Can’t?” Mme. Bonaparte appeared genuinely confused. She had forgotten to shade the lamps in her usual manner. The too-bright light picked out the cracks in her rouge.

  How embarrassed Uncle Monroe and cousin Robert would be by her, letting diplomacy fly to the winds like that. Two diplomats in the family and she couldn’t even muster a graceful refusal to an offer meant to shower her with honor.

  Mme. Bonaparte should count herself lucky not to have Emma in her household.

  Emma hastily gathered the remnants of her wits. “Please don’t think I’m not entirely sensible of the great honor you do me, Madame Bonaparte, and you do know that under most circumstances there is nothing I would rather have than the privilege of being near you, but I find myself incapable of accepting. Forgive me. Please.”

  Mme. Bonaparte’s face cleared. Her lips curved in that enigmatic smile that had driven countless men wild. “Ah,” she said. “I understand.”

  She did?

  Mme. Bonaparte leaned forward, her eyes bright. “It’s that handsome cousin of yours.”

  “Kort?” Emma had lost the thread of the conversation somewhere.

  “Kort.” Mme. Bonaparte tried out the name. It sounded very strange in a French Creole lilt. Her nose wrinkled, but she brushed that small matter aside. “Whatever you call him, he is a fine figure of a man. And I imagine your parents will be so pleased.”

  “They would be if we—I mean, that is…”

  Mme. Bonaparte squeezed her arm. “I should have known we would lose you sooner or later.”

  “But I’m not—” Emma broke off, stymied in the face of Mme. Bonaparte’s firm conviction. What could she say? Better to have Mme. Bonaparte think she was turning her down for Kort than that she was rejecting her in her own right. Hating herself for it, she hedged. “Nothing has been decided.”

  So much for honest Emma.

  “Of course not,” said Mme. Bonaparte knowingly. “All the same, when the time comes…You must let me be the first to congratulate you.” She looked sentimentally at Emma. “After all your troubles, it will be nice to see you settled.”

  There was a lump in Emma’s throat that hadn’t been there before. She knew that charm came easily to Mme. Bonaparte, but even so, she was moved, both by the sentiment and the memories it invoked, of those difficult days when Emma had fled her marriage and taken shelter at Malmaison.

  “Thank you,” Emma said feelingly. She wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. So many people would give their eyeteeth for an offer such as this. In her own way, Mme. Bonaparte did love her, Emma knew she did.

  She also knew that Mme. Bonaparte’s affection, sincere though it might be, wasn’t enough to protect her if Bonaparte decided her marriage would serve his ends.

  “My dear,” said Mme. Bonaparte, touching a finger lightly to her cheek. Lightly, so as not to further disarrange Emma’s rouge. “I just want to see you happy.”

  “It’s not just for that that I owe you thanks,” said Emma, guilt lending her extra fervor. What would Mme. Bonaparte say when the promised betrothal to Kort never materialized? “But for all your many kindnesses to me over the years. No matter what happens, I would never want you to think me ungrateful or insensible of how much I owe you. You and Hortense and Eugene”—dimly, she was aware that she was babbling, and that, in this strange new world, such sentiments might be accounted l
èse-majeste, but this was more important, this was her heart scrubbed raw—“you have been more than family to me and I will never, ever forget that.”

  “How sweet,” said someone behind her.

  Emma turned, slowly, to see Caroline Murat, all satin and feathers. The cloying sweetness of her smile only emphasized the acid beneath it.

  Caroline. It would be.

  The other woman strolled forward. “What a terribly charming sentiment, Madame Delagardie.”

  Emma took a deep breath, hating herself for being caught in a moment of vulnerability before Caroline. Caroline, of all people.

  Emma could feel Mme. Bonaparte stiffen, but her voice was pleasant as she said, “Good evening, Caroline. How nice of you to join us.”

  “Madame.” Caroline Murat didn’t bother to hide the disdain she felt for her sister-in-law. She turned her critical gaze on Emma, taking in every aspect of Emma’s tousled appearance. “Your lip rouge is smudged. And is that straw in your hair?”

  Hortense had tried to befriend Caroline when she first arrived at Mme. Campan’s. Caroline had never forgiven her for it. Emma was an enemy by extension. Caroline took her enmities very seriously. It must, Emma decided, be the Corsican in her. Vendetta was a concept that Caroline not only understood but cherished.

  “I’ve been in the theatre,” said Emma defensively, “trying to sort through props.”

  “Props,” repeated Caroline, looking pointedly at Emma’s smudged lip rouge. “Is that what you call them in the Americas?”

  Caroline raised a gloved hand, ostensibly to toy with her cameo necklace, but really to better display her impressive figure. She looked pointedly at Emma’s comparative lack of endowment.

  Yes, yes, Emma knew. Nature was kinder to some than to others. Georges had been quite clear on that front, during the period of their entanglement. Lithe, Paul had called her, with his happy facility for turning any phrase to advantage.

  And then there was Augustus. She had no idea of Augustus’s thoughts on the topic or if he thought about it at all. Or if he would have fled if she hadn’t fled first.

  “Yes, props,” said Emma, more sharply than she ought. “For the masque the First Consul commissioned.”

  “You mean the Emperor,” Caroline said snippily, and might have said more but for the clatter of spurs against the parquet floor of the drawing room that led into the gallery.

  The sound arrested Caroline’s attention. She listened for a moment, and then smiled, the slow, smug smile of the cat who got the cream. “As it happens, I’ve brought a prop of my own.”

  Caroline crooked a finger imperiously at the doorway.

  A man strode forward, slightly the worse for travel. His boots still bore the dust of the road, and his buttons lacked their usual sheen. But his teeth were as white as ever. He had them all bared in a smile as he crossed the room towards them.

  Caroline extended a languid hand. “Whatever took you so long?” Turning back to Emma, she said, “Madame Delagardie, I don’t believe you need any introduction to Colonel Marston.”

  Chapter 20

  Sussex, England

  May 2004

  I hightailed it to the library.

  I’m not sure what I had been expecting to find. Dempster and Serena in flagrante delicto? Dempster going through my notes, chortling like a stage villain? Instead, the library was as it always was, an oasis of evening calm, the setting sun streaming through the long windows, picking out the worn patches on the red and blue carpet, and highlighting the dust that collected in the long grooves of the ornamental pilasters between the bookshelves. My notebook lay where I had left it, the research books I had been using scattered around in my usual cheerful disarray. It all seemed normal enough.…

  I ventured closer. Why was I walking like a member of the bomb squad from Law & Order? This was silly. I marched briskly up to my favorite table. A folio of letters from Jane to Henrietta, detailing Jane’s role in the masque at Malmaison, all present and accounted for. Copy of the masque, printed in a vanity edition with red morocco covers, check. The spiral notebook I used when I didn’t feel like lugging my laptop, check. Four assorted volumes on American history, used for background research on the Morris/Monroe/Livingston and Fulton connections, all there.

  My reference books had verified what I’d found in Jane’s letters. I’d never known that Mr. Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, had lived in France for a number of years, working on his steamboat and various other devices before teaming up with Mr. Livingston and going home to New York. But it appeared that he had. He had also come up with the first-ever panorama, which caused a rage in Paris. Theatrical equipment must have been a no-brainer for him after that.

  If it was theatrical equipment, that is, and not the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction.

  Wouldn’t that be an interesting double fake! What if Fulton were, in fact, working for the French Royalists? There were various groups floating around, often at odds with each other, seldom in sync with the English and Austrian agents who purported to be working in their interests. Someone had tried to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the theatre in Christmas 1800—why not in his own theatre in 1804?

  Because it hadn’t happened, I reminded myself. That’s the weird thing about reading history through peoples’ papers and documents. You forget that you do know how it all turned out. Charles I was beheaded, Marie Antoinette never made it past Varennes, Bonaparte wasn’t assassinated in 1804.

  That didn’t mean someone might not try. Maybe Marston was a double agent.

  Huh. That was weird. Not Marston—although he was peculiar enough all by himself—but the folio on the desk, next to the biography of Fulton that I hadn’t quite got around to finishing (or starting). The folio I had thought was the one I had been reading—well, it wasn’t. It had been replaced with another. They all looked the same, those folios, from the outside at least. A late Victorian member of the Selwick clan had catalogued the family papers, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion, pasting them in chronological order into large folio volumes, all of which looked alike, but for the labels on the spine. The one I was holding wasn’t the correspondence of Henrietta Dorrington (née Selwick) and Miss Jane Wooliston, 1804–1805. It was Henrietta Dorrington and Lady Frederick Staines (née Deveraux), 1803–1806.

  I’d been through those papers before. They had to do with various intrigues in India, although they weren’t much use without the corresponding documentation from the archives of a now defunct Indian administrative province, fortunately preserved in the notebooks of Colin’s great-aunt, in her flat in London. In short, nothing to do with anything I was doing.

  So what was it doing on my desk?

  I lifted the folio, turning it this way and that, but it told me nothing. Not as if it was going to pipe up like an item out of a fairy tale and sing, “Folio, folio on the shelf / Dempster is an evil elf!” or something like that.

  What would Dempster want with Henrietta’s India correspondence? His interest, like mine, was in the Pink Carnation and her league. If he wanted that, the Delagardie affair was a positive gold mine. But that folio, the folio dealing with Jane’s summer sojourn at Malmaison, sat chastely on my chair where I had left it, seemingly undisturbed.

  Now that I looked for it, I could see the marks of hasty turning on the pages of my notebook, the bent paper, the tiny tears. Okay, well, maybe some of those had been me, but it still made me feel like Sherlock Holmes. And was that a smear of blood on one corner? Oh, coffee. That had been me, then. Oops.

  I closed the red plastic cover of my notebook and, defiantly, left it sitting in plain sight on the desk. No point in closing the barn door, right? I jammed my feet harder into my tottery stilettos and marched purposefully towards the library door. Dempster and I were going to have to have ourselves a little talk. I was historian, hear me roar!

  Or not.

  The library door yanked open just as I put my hand to it, causing me to wobble dang
erously on my three-inch heels.

  “Steady there,” said Colin, grabbing me just as I pitched face-first into his chest.

  There were worse places to be. “Hi,” I mumbled into his shirtfront. “Looking for me?”

  “Do you know what time it is?” he said, but I could hear the annoyance fading away even as he said it, in the softening of his tone and the way his arms wrapped around me. “I thought you had done a bunk rather than go down to dinner with me.”

  I rubbed my nose into his chest, smelling his familiar scent of detergent and deodorant. “And miss the fun?” I said. “I’m thinking of going down to dinner like this. It’s very comfy.”

  He slid a finger beneath my chin, tilting my face up. “You might have some trouble eating that way.”

  It would have been nice to just stay that way, but guilt and knowledge lay heavy upon me. By the lurching of my tum, something Dempster this way come, and Colin didn’t know it yet.

  “Hey,” I said, reluctantly peeling away. “Is Serena supposed to be here tonight?”

  Maybe that hadn’t been the best opening gambit. He let me go. I felt very wobbly without his hands on my arms, wobbly and cold, the crisp air biting into that exposed triangle at the small of my back.

  “Why?” He started down the hall to the stairs, me trailing alongside.

  I hated the shuttered look on his face. Serena was a closed topic as far as Colin was concerned. Efforts to get him to Talk About It resulted in one of two things: diversion, i.e., kissing that sensitive spot behind my ear, pointing out a rare yellow-billed redheaded warbler through the window (I still wasn’t convinced there was any such bird, but if there was, it clearly responded to the sound of Serena’s name), or simply smiling and changing the subject. Or this. Complete shutdown. No one home, admittance interdicted, beware of dog.

  There was nothing to do but blurt it out. “Dempster is here. He’s DreamStone’s historical consultant.”