Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

“But your mother said—”

“My mother hears what she wants to hear.”

“Don’t you miss it?” Kort said sensibly. “Don’t you want to come home?”

Miss it? He didn’t know the half of it. Home.

Home to the Hudson and the changing patterns of the leaves in the fall. Home to long, lazy summer days where wild strawberries ripened beneath their fan-shaped leaves, and wasps buzzed about the trees in the orchard, sucking the sweetness of the peaches. Home to her old room with her shelves of battered books and the one-legged doll she had been too old and grand to admit she’d wanted to bring. Home to the swing by the lake and her initials carved discreetly into the base of the old apple tree: E.M. and K.L. in perpetuity. K.L. hadn’t any idea, of course. She had eaten fallen apples and tossed the peels over her shoulders, willing them to make a K or an L, a divination of future marital bliss.

There were times when she missed it all with a horrible, visceral ache. When she missed the swing and the tree and the lake, whose quirks and shadows she had once known so well, in winter and in summer, the shallows where the carp liked to hide, the dark patch in the center where the ice never quite froze hard enough for skating, except in that one winter where it was so much more than usually brutally cold and the Albany Post Road had turned as icy as the river.

She had nieces and nephews she had never seen, adorable, chubby-cheeked children running wild across the woods and fields where she and her siblings had once played, picking wild raspberries and stumbling into ponds and getting themselves scolded and hung out to dry. Somewhere in the kitchens of Belvedere, children would be sneaking bits of bread and jam, and Annetje would be dipping apples into batter for frying. Emma could still taste them in memory, the crisp, hot coating on the outside, the center disintegrating into sweetness.

The French did many things well, but they didn’t understand about fried apples.

“There are certainly many things I miss about home,” she said slowly. “But…”

“Don’t tell me you’ll miss all this,” said Kort, indicating the red-painted walls with their murals à la Pompeii; the collection of classical vases in their specially designed cupboards; the chattering guests and their selection of accoutrements. “Paris is all very well, but it isn’t where you belong.”

“You haven’t seen me since I was thirteen. What makes you quite so sure that you know where I belong?”

“But I know you,” he said. “I’ve known you as long as you’ve known you.” He raised his eyebrows at a particularly ridiculously garbed dandy, his hair combed down over his ears, his shirt points so high he couldn’t turn his head, carnelian fobs jangling beneath his waistcoat. Kort gestured in his direction. “Just look at these people.”

She might not wholly approve of all their sartorial choices, but Paris was her adopted city. “Those people, as you call them,” she said sharply, “stood by me when my family disowned me. Those people took me in and comforted me when my husband died.”

Kort’s eyes focused on her. She could see the surprise in them, and it made her angry, angrier than she had felt in a long time. Did he not think she felt hurt, too? Or that her so much reviled marriage might have mattered to her, might have been more than a family embarrassment or a stir in the international scandal sheets?

She shook off the hand he held out to her. “They stood by me. Where were you?”

“Emma…”

His pity was the last thing she wanted. “Never mind,” she said. “That wasn’t fair.”

He was still watching her, his eyes bent on her face. “No,” he said slowly, “but perhaps neither was I. I didn’t mean it as it came out. I just meant that you might be happier back among your own kind.”

Emma tugged at his sleeve. “Look at me, Kort.”

“All right,” he said mildly, humoring her.

“No,” said Emma. “Really look at me. Not at what you expect to see, or what memory provides for you, but at me, right here, right now.”

She could see herself in the pier glass behind Kort, not a girl anymore, by any means. She might not be a beautiful woman, but she had learned how to be a fashionable one. No less an authority than Mme. Bonaparte herself had taught her how to apply rouge to her lips and paint to her lids, how to darken her blond brows and add the illusion of curves to a frame too thin for fashion. She wasn’t the Emma who had left in 1794. There was no hiding or disguising that.

What would they make of her in New York? She didn’t like to think of it.

Emma shook her head, and the mirrored Emma shook her head, too, short, feathered hair bouncing. Her straight blond hair wouldn’t hold a curl, so she made a practice of threading it with ribbons or other folderol, distracting from the straightness of it.

She had tried false curls once, but disliked the sensation of wearing someone else’s hair. She might divert, but she wouldn’t deceive. One had to draw the line somewhere.

“You said as much yourself last night. I’ve changed. I’m not the girl who left all those years ago.”

“I won’t deny you’ve grown up, or that you’ve become fashionable, but—”

Emma cut him off with a quick gesture of negation.

If she went home, it would be home to other peoples’ families and other peoples’ children. Home to having her dresses and mannerisms picked over and dissected. Home to gossip and censure and those horrible hissing whispers as the good matrons of New York leaned their heads together just above their embroidery frames. “Yes, that’s the one. The one who ran off with the Frenchmen. No! Don’t look now! She’ll see you.”

She could envision it now. Neither maiden nor matron, she would be used as a cautionary tale to frighten disobedient daughters. “Watch out, or you’ll wind up like Emma Morris! She married without her parents’ permission and look what’s become of her.”

“Please do try to understand, Kort. I don’t want to be a cautionary tale.”

“All right, so you’ll have to pull up your bodices a bit. Surely that won’t be too onerous.”

Emma gave up trying to explain. How could she, when she couldn’t entirely explain to herself? She wasn’t entirely at home in Paris, but she would be even less at home in New York now. Of the two, better the devil she knew.

“Trust me about this, won’t you, Emma?” Kort wheedled. “If you’re too bored in New York, you can always catch the next boat back to Paris.”

Something about his tone set Emma’s back up. “What makes you think I can just pick up and leave like that? I have responsibilities here. I have obligations.”

“Do you?” He eyed her frivolous headdress with a decidedly skeptical expression. “Such as?”

She could have mentioned Carmagnac. She could have made flippant remarks about her close, personal relationship with her dressmaker. But, instead, in that fateful moment, her gaze chanced to fall on Augustus Whittlesby.

The idea bubbled up quick as lava, and just as quickly onto her tongue. Emma lifted her chin. “Haven’t you heard? Mr. Whittlesby and I have been commissioned by the First Consul himself to write a masque for his next party at Malmaison.”

Let him see just how much she was wanted here in Paris. Let Kort try to argue with the First Consul!

Emma extended a hand towards Mr. Whittlesby, the bracelets on her wrists clanking together in a discord like a knell as she turned her back defiantly on her cousin and the rest of the world she had left behind.

“Haven’t we, Mr. Whittlesby?”

Augustus followed Emma Delagardie into her book room.

Downstairs, the guests were grazing among the last of the cold meats, holding their glasses out to be refilled by the omnipresent footmen, gossiping about their neighbors and slandering their friends. Mme. Delagardie had led him out of the fray, promising a quiet place where they could begin their work once the other guests had taken their leave. Not too much work, she had specified, but enough to make a start. With only a month until performance, they should at least agree upon their plot and their characters.

Which, Augustus thought cynically, most likely translated to her dictating the plot and his doing the work.

That was quite all right with him so long as it also translated into an invitation to Malmaison. An invitation to Malmaison and a chance to look for the paper that Emma Delagardie had so casually tucked into her reticule the night before.

Augustus had no proof that either Emma Delagardie or her cousin, the one with the strange name, had anything to do with Bonaparte’s mysterious device, but the coincidences were piling up, too many for comfort. It had seemed innocuous enough that Bonaparte intended to test his device during the visit of the American envoy. The presence of the Americans might be intended only as a distraction, a smoke screen. One had the impression that they were brash and not terribly bright, thus making them perfect fodder for the role of unwitting decoy.

Likewise, it would ordinarily mean little that the American envoy’s nephew had a diagram of some sort of mechanical whatnot in his waistcoat pocket. It might be nothing more than a sketch for a new patent stove or a design for an improved water closet, Yankee ingenuity once again at work. They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.