The Garden Intrigue

by Lauren Willig

  “Isn’t that supposed to be my line?” I said. “Expression of emotion, state of the relationship, that sort of thing?”

  I have mentioned that I’m very good at talking around things, right?

  Colin let out his breath in a long exhalation that ruffled the hair on my brow. “Do you want to go back to the States?”

  I tried to jam my hands into pockets that I didn’t have. Blast this good weather. “It isn’t so much about want,” I said slowly. “My career is there. My apartment is there.” Already, it was apartment, not flat. I’d gone back to Americanisms in my head. “I can’t presume on your hospitality forever.”

  “Hospitality?” Colin’s laugh had an edge to it. “Christ, Eloise. You make me sound like a bed-and-breakfast.”

  I licked my dry lips. “I don’t want you to feel like I’m presuming anything. I don’t want you to feel crowded.”

  There was a long moment of silence. Colin pressed two fingers to the bridge of his nose, the way he did when he was tired. I knew that gesture now, so well, just as I knew so many other things without knowing I knew them, like the way he tilted his head when he was thinking, or automatically removed the cushion before he sat down on the couch. I would miss him so much if I left. I would miss not just the conversations, but the essential Colin-ness of him, all those intangibles I got to take for granted, his laugh, his smell, the comfort of curling up against him at the end of the long day. No matter how good the phone plan, one could never get that back, not the same way.

  “You’re welcome to stay,” Colin said, “for however long you like, in whatever capacity you like. How’s that for an invitation?”

  “Can I have it engraved?” I have a very bad habit of trying to make a joke out of those things about which I feel most strongly. It’s a defense mechanism, I suppose, and sometimes an inconvenient one.

  “There are silver platters, if you’d like one,” said Colin. “Although I believe they’re mostly silver plate.”

  “No. Thank you.” I looked down at my feet, at the weather-pitted stone of the veranda, the stray tendrils of ivy creeping between the flags. “It’s a very generous offer. Even without the platter.”

  Colin was a bright boy. He knew, even without my telling him.

  “But,” he said.

  “But,” I agreed. I balled my hands into fists, feeling my old class ring biting into my skin, like an anchor to my past. “It’s not that I don’t appreciate the offer. And it’s not that I don’t want to be with you. Because I do. Really.”

  Shaking back my hair, I glanced anxiously up at Colin, the breeze whipping strands of hair in front of my eyes, blurring my sight, making my eyes water. He nodded to show that he understood, although I could tell that he didn’t.

  “I’m taking the job,” I said. My throat felt stiff and tight, reluctant to give voice to the words. “The one in the history department.”

  Colin’s face revealed nothing. “Why?” he asked.

  “It’s too soon.” I tried to make sense of it, as much for myself as for him. “I have a whole life in America. I can’t give it up on the strength of six months—no matter how wonderful those six months might have been. Might be,” I corrected myself hastily. “Might be.” It was too soon for the past tense.

  When Colin spoke, his voice was very carefully controlled. “Are you breaking up with me?”

  “No!” I said, so vehemently that a bird whirled out of a nearby tree, shimmying past us in a whirr of feathers. “No. I want us to stay together. If we can. I just can’t—”

  How to say it? Around us, the sun was shining and the birds were chirping and the actors acting, but I was stuck in my own private Hades, sorting through my personal pile of pomegranate seeds.

  I held out my hands to Colin, willing him to understand. “I can’t make myself entirely dependent on you. It’s not fair to you, either. I don’t want you to feel burdened by me or feel like you couldn’t do what you would otherwise do because I’m around.”

  “What if I want you around?” he said.

  It was so tempting, so incredibly tempting. Long days in the library, fall drifting into winter, cold winter nights together in the den, mulled wine and chips at the Heavy Hart, occasional trips into London to see an exhibit or get dressed up and go out with his friends or mine. I could see it all playing out before me, an entire life in a snow globe, a picture of perfect domesticity.

  At least, that’s how it looked from there. But would it be? I didn’t think Colin would let me pay rent. And even if he did, what cash did I have coming in without a teaching job? I’d be dependent on him from everything from the files I was reading to the roof over my head. And if we broke up—not a happy thought, but one that had to be considered—I would have lost a year of teaching, a year of positioning myself for the job market. I would be thought of as “that girl who stayed in England for a guy,” and, even though England was where my documents were, even though I might produce a better dissertation for it, I would be taken less seriously as a scholar because of it. Such is the way of the world.

  I bit down on my lower lip. “But do you want me around twenty-four seven? Twelve months a year?”

  Colin’s silence was all the answer I needed. I felt something ache a little inside, but there was no going back now. This was the right decision for both of us, no matter how painful it might be in the short term.

  “You see?” I said. “It’s too much too soon.”

  I watched him rub his thumb against his index finger. That was another Colin gesture, another thing I would miss when I was back in my tiny apartment in Cambridge, alone, listening to the radiator clank, wondering what I had been thinking.

  He didn’t argue with me. Instead, he said in a low voice, “Will you stay for the rest of the summer?”

  “If you’ll still have me.”

  He held out his arms to me and I went into them, leaning my head against my favorite spot on his chest, wrapping my arms around his waist in that dent that seemed to have been made just for them. Colin leaned his cheek against the top of my head.

  “We’ll work it out,” he said into my hair.

  “It’s only for one semester,” I said to the pocket of his shirt. “I could come back in the spring. If you still want me then.”

  Colin lifted his head. I wiggled back just enough to look at him. He was thinking, the wheels turning. Tentatively, he said, “I’ve never been to Cambridge—your Cambridge.”

  Something pinched in my chest. Or maybe it unpinched. I could feel the tears tickling the back of my eyes, threatening to fall, but they were the right kind of tears, the kind that happen when someone does something that touches you too deeply for mere thanks. I knew what it was to him to leave Selwick Hall, even for a little while. It was his project, his baby, his distraction from all those personal demons of which I was only just beginning have an inkling. I couldn’t imagine Colin away from England for too long, but…a visit would be nice. A visit would help bridge the gap. If he came to Cambridge in the fall and I came back to England around Christmas, between us, we might actually be able to make this work.

  It was a far cry from the heady euphoria of the early days of our relationship, but, for the first time, I really believed that what we had might be real, that it might last.

  I swallowed the lump at the back of my throat and smiled mistily up at him. Through the tears, I saw him wreathed in rainbows—not an image he would thank me for, my practical, down-to-earth Colin.

  “I could show you around,” I offered softly. “It’s pretty nasty in winter, but you’re used to that. And there’s something nice about all that snowy brick right around Christmas.”

  With a crooked finger, he moved a stray strand of hair out of my eyes, very gently, as though I might break otherwise. “You can show me your microfilm readers.”

  “Everyone’s favorite tourist destination,” I agreed, and we smiled foolishly at each other, happy just to be together, with the sun beaming down on our bare heads and pots of
flowers in artificial bloom all around us. In the gardens, someone was playing a harpsichord, a simple and beautiful melody.

  “Sigh no more, ladies, sigh no more,” sang Balthazar. “Men were deceivers ever.”

  Some men. Not my Colin.

  “Will you be okay going away?” I asked. “With Jeremy treasure hunting?”

  Colin made a face. “I can deal with Jeremy.”

  “Is there any truth to this whole treasure thing?” I asked.

  “Honestly?” Colin looked out over the scene playing out below. “Probably not.”

  Hmm. This was Colin. If the answer was no, he would have just said no.

  Emboldened by our new accord, I leaned over to get a look at his face. “You think there is, don’t you?”

  Colin’s face twisted. “Well…I looked for it as a boy. I didn’t find anything.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but you’re older and wiser now. And you have me.”

  Colin’s eyes crinkled. “Yes, and we know there’s just one thing for which I’d want you.”

  I looked at him from under my lashes, aiming for sultry and missing by a mile. “We can talk about that later.”

  Colin mustered a perfunctory leer, but his mind was obviously elsewhere. “Do you know…” he began.

  I knew many things, but I didn’t think he needed to hear the entirety of the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales right at just this moment.

  “Mmm-hmm?” I said encouragingly.

  He looked to me as if for approval, half excited, half sheepish. In other words, endearingly boyish. “The best way to stop Jeremy might be to try to find it first. If it exists, that is. It probably doesn’t. But saying hypothetically that it did…”

  “We might hypothetically try to find it.”

  “Are you in?” He held out a hand, palm up.

  I settled my hand in his and felt his fingers close around mine. “Us against Jeremy? He doesn’t have a chance.”

  “With you on my side,” Colin said softly, and what I saw in his eyes made my knees feel like goo, “how can I possibly lose?”

  In a few moments, I would go inside and e-mail Blackburn and tell him I was taking the head TF job. In four months, I would be back in Cambridge. But for now…It was only May. We had the entire summer before us.

  With the two of us together, what couldn’t we achieve? Right then, I would have been willing to volunteer us for moving mountains.

  I grinned recklessly at Colin. “Let the games begin.”

  Historical Note

  The best part about writing historical fiction is that the strangest bits are usually true. Submarines in the Napoleonic Wars might sound like something straight out of Jules Verne, but, in fact, Robert Fulton (primarily recognizable from grade school textbooks as the inventor of the steamboat) did do his best to hawk a submarine, named the Nautilus, to the French government. Born in Philadelphia, Fulton spent time in both England and France in the 1790s. After moving to France in 1797, he pitched his plans for an underwater naval craft to the government in power at the time, the Directory. They weren’t interested. Bonaparte, who came to power in 1799, proved more receptive.

  Conquering bits of Europe might be fun, but Bonaparte had his heart set on invading England. There was a slight problem: the English navy. Bonaparte, an army man by training, had no idea how naval warfare worked. Some of his plans for the invasion of England would have been laughable if Bonaparte’s admirals had the nerve to laugh in his presence. One of his favorite schemes involved launching two thousand flat-bottomed ferry boats containing 114,000 troops and 7,000 horses, all on a single tide, within six hours, from a port where there wasn’t yet a port. His advisors were forced, reluctantly, to explain that flat-bottomed boats swamped; it would take several tides; and that it would take far more than six hours, within which time the English ships guarding the Channel would undoubtedly take defensive action. Impervious, Napoleon nonetheless founded new shipyards to build his fleet and designed a whole new port and set of fortifications at Boulogne, the harbor from which the invasion was to launch. For the details of Napoleon’s disastrous naval plans, I recommend the relevant chapters in Alan Schom’s Napoleon Bonaparte.

  How could Bonaparte possibly resist the prospect of an easy way to undermine the English Channel fleet? With the go-ahead from the French government, models of the Nautilus were built and tested in the waters outside Le Havre in 1800 and 1801. The ship came complete with what Fulton euphemistically referred to as a “carcass,” otherwise known as underwater mines. Fulton’s carcass successfully demolished a forty-foot sloop in the trials in 1801. Although Fulton was able to sustain several crew members below water for as long as four and a half hours, the ship leaked. Fulton dismantled it, leaving him without a model when Bonaparte demanded a demonstration in September 1801. Although various officials reported favorably on the earlier trials of the Nautilus, Bonaparte decided it was a hoax and a swindle and refused to consider it further. Miffed, Fulton responded to British persuasion (in the form of an £800 bribe) and took himself and his plans for a subterranean naval vessel off to England, where he conducted trials of Nautilus II in 1805.

  As you can tell, I played around with the timeline a bit, moving Fulton’s submarine trials up from 1801 to 1804, the height of Napoleon’s invasion plans. The rest—the submarine itself and Bonaparte’s reaction—are taken from the historical record. For those wishing to know more about Fulton and his submarine, you can read about it in Cynthia Philip’s Robert Fulton: A Biography and Kirkpatrick Sale’s The Fire of his Genius: Robert Fulton and the American Dream. During his time in France, Fulton met Robert Livingston (Emma’s “cousin”), a New Yorker of some distinction, who served as the United States Minister to France between 1801 and 1804. As described in the novel, Fulton and Livingston teamed up to produce the steamboat, which they tested, not at Malmaison in 1804 but on the Seine in 1803. For more on Livingston, who also negotiated the Louisiana Purchase during his tenure as Minister to France, you can read about him in Frank Brecher’s Negotiating the Louisiana Purchase: Robert Livingston’s Mission to France, 1801–1804.

  American feelings towards France, as demonstrated by Emma’s cousin Kort, were decidedly equivocal. Although supposedly united by republican values, Americans found the French dissolute and eyed the increasingly regal rise of Napoleon with mixed feelings. As William Chew puts it in his article, Life Before Fodor and Frommer: Americans in Paris from Thomas Jefferson to John Quincy Adams, “to the American eye, evidence of Parisian immorality appeared at every turn.” An American visiting France in 1795, a year after Emma’s arrival, referred to it as the “seat of luxury and dissipation.” They disapproved of both the Frenchwomen’s scanty attire and their tendency to meddle in politics. As always, biographies and letters provide the truest sense of opinion at the time, including those of that quintessential New York Knickerbocker Washington Irving, who wrote vividly of his travels in France.

  My own New York heroine, Emma Morris Delagardie, was inspired by two very different historical characters (both of whom happened to be named Eliza): Eliza Monroe and Eliza de Feuillide. Eliza Monroe came over to France with her father, James Monroe, during his tenure as American Minister to France (1794–1796). Enrolled by her parents in Mme. Campan’s school for young ladies, Eliza became lifelong friends with Hortense de Beauharnais, daughter of Josephine Bonaparte by her first marriage. Portraits of Hortense and her brother Eugene still hang at the Monroe house, Ash Lawn.

  If Eliza Monroe provided the beginning of Emma’s story, Eliza de Feuillide gave me the next step. Jane Austen’s first cousin, Eliza Hancock, married a French “nobleman” (the title was dodgy), Jean Francois de Feuillide, whose primary passion turned out to be the drainage of his estate near Nerac. Like my Emma, Eliza de Feuillide was fashionable and witty—and was left in Paris while her husband focused his attention and her dowry on the drainage of Le Marais. My information on de Feuillide comes from Deirdre Le Faye’s Jane Austen’s Outlandish Cousin: The Life
and Letters of Eliza de Feuillide.

  While that particular house party at Malmaison was my own invention, Josephine’s country house and the tensions within the Bonaparte clan were very real. As described in the novel, Hortense, Josephine’s daughter by her first marriage, had been married off to Napoleon’s younger brother, Louis, in the hopes of providing an heir to the Bonaparte dynasty. The marriage was a disaster. By the summer of 1804, when Napoleon seized the imperial crown, it was becoming increasingly possible that Hortense’s matrimonial sacrifice had been for nothing, as Napoleon’s family urged him to set the barren Josephine aside and take a younger and better-connected wife. For more on the Bonapartes’ private lives, at Malmaison and elsewhere, there are a host of books to choose from, including Theo Aronson’s Napoleon and Josephine: A Love Story, Evangeline Bruce’s Napoleon and Josephine: The Improbable Marriage, Andre Castelot’s Napoleon, and Christopher Hibbert’s Napoleon: His Wives and Women. For more on my favorite of the Bonaparte clan, Hortense de Beauharnais, you can read about Hortense in her own words in her memoirs or in Constance Wright’s biography, Daughter to Napoleon.

  While the specific masque performed in this novel may have been a fiction, amateur theatricals were very much a part of life at Malmaison. The Bonapartes were all theatre mad, so much so that Napoleon had a complete theatre erected on the grounds of Malmaison in 1802 for the family’s amateur theatricals. The inaugural performance was Barber of Seville, with Hortense as Rosina. As Peter Hicks describes in his Napoleon and the Theatre, Napoleon commissioned plays for his pet theatre and brought in the famous actor Talma to direct them—although one imagines that nothing quite like Whittlesby’s masque ever graced the stage.

  Acknowledgments

  This book goes out to Jenny Davis and Liz Mellyn, the other two thirds of the Triumvirate of Terror. Thank you for being my friends, as well as Eloise’s, and for always giving the very best advice. Cambridge wouldn’t have been Cambridge without you.