Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

In the meantime, we were both trying to go on pretty much as usual, Colin working on the spy novel he claimed he was writing, me making my way through his collection of family papers, taking notes for a dissertation that was turning out to be much more detailed than I could ever have dreamed.

With the threat of imminent return to America hanging over me, though, I had to force myself to focus. With all the rich resources available via Colin, I had let myself meander down some pretty random byways, researching rogue French spies, plots and schemes in India, and even an attempt to kidnap George III. It was time to get back to basics, i.e., the Pink Carnation. I knew she had been in operation in Paris in 1804. There was evidence that she had been involved—albeit peripherally—in the famous plot to assassinate Napoleon that had resulted in the execution of the duc d’Enghien in the spring of 1804.

But what had happened after?

The hallway was mercifully empty, all the crew members outside, making mincemeat of Colin’s ancestral shrubbery. Someone, however, had been inside. The door to the library, with its hand-lettered sign reading “No Admittance,” was ajar.

I had closed it when I left. I knew I had.

My notebook wasn’t on my favorite desk anymore. Instead, it was on the chair, and the folio I had taken out to look at before taking my e-mail break was open, when I was pretty sure I had left it closed.

Weird.

One of the film guys must have been looking for a spare sheet of paper, I decided, rearranging my materials the way I liked them. If any of them had torn out one of the precious documents in the folio and used it for scrap, I would personally tear out his masculine bits and feed them to the dogs.

Colin didn’t have any dogs, but I was sure we could find some in the neighborhood.

Nope. I flipped quickly through. No sign of tearing. The neighborhood dogs were safe. And so, thank goodness, was the correspondence of Lady Henrietta Dorrington with her cousin by marriage, Miss Jane Wooliston, aka the Pink Carnation. The two ladies had constructed an ingenious code, devised around just the sort of frivolous goings-on designed to make the eyes of your average Ministry of Police employee—aka your average male—glaze over, ranging from the new cut of bonnets to the refreshments at the Venetian breakfast. Each of these terms was carefully calibrated to a double meaning designed to convey information back to the authorities in England.

Jane, the mastermind of the piece, collected her information in Paris and sent it back to Henrietta under the guise of frivolity. Henrietta passed it on to her husband, Miles, who in turn saw that it made it to the authorities at the War Office.

I had an advantage the French Ministry of Police lacked. No, not just a reliable coffeemaker. I had Henrietta’s code book. I had been steadily working my way through Jane’s reports through the spring of 1804, the spring of the duc d’Enghien’s execution, the spring Napoleon declared himself Emperor, and the spring when invasion of England seemed imminent.

Stuck among the papers was a fragment of poetry in a surprisingly tidy hand, addressed to Jane but forwarded to Henrietta. I shook out the page and read.

“For, lo!” proclaimed Augustus Whittlesby from his perch on top of a bench supported by two scowling sphinxes. “In Cytherea’s perfumed sleep / Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…”

“Dithery? How can the deep be dithery?” A female voice, lightly accented, cut into Augustus’s stirring rendition of Canto XII of The Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes.

Among the smattering of people who had left the dancing in the ballroom to admire, mock, gossip, or, in the case of an elderly dowager snoring in a chair by the far wall, nap, stood two young women.

One was tall and graceful, garbed simply but elegantly in a white dress that fell in the required classical lines from a pair of admirably shaped shoulders. Her pale brown hair was gathered in a simple twist, her only jewelry a golden locket strung on a ribbon of sky blue silk.

Jane Wooliston was, thought Augustus, all that was finest in womanly charm. He had said so quite frequently in verse, but it held true in prose as well. Not even his execrable effusions could mask her inestimable worth.

She wasn’t the one who had spoken.

It had been the other one. Next to her. Half a head down.

What Emma Delagardie lacked in height, she made up for in the exuberantly curled plumes that rose from her silver spangled headdress. The tall plumes jutted a good foot into the air, bouncing up and down—like great, annoying bouncing things. In Augustus’s annoyance, metaphor failed him. Her dress was white, but it wasn’t the white of innocent maidens and virtuous dreams. It was of silk, sinuous and shiny, overlain with some sort of shimmery stuff that sparkled when she moved, creating the sensation of a constant disturbance in the air around her.

Emma Delagardie was slight, fine-boned, and small-featured, the top of her head barely level with Miss Wooliston’s elegantly curved shoulder, but she took up far more room than her small stature would warrant.

“You might have the dire deep,” Mme. Delagardie suggested, her American accent very much in evidence, “or the dreadful deep, but not dithery. It’s not even a proper word.”

“Your deep may be dire, but my deep is dithery. There is such a thing as poetic license, Madame Delagardie,” said Augustus grandly.

“License or laziness? Surely, another word might serve your purpose better. The deep is a rather stationary thing.”

Who had appointed Emma Delagardie the Grand Inquisitor for Poetical Excellence, Greater Paris Branch? It had been a sad, sad day for France when her uncle had been appointed American envoy to Paris and an even sadder one when she had decided to outlast his tenure and stay.

Perhaps America would like to take her back?

“The waves, Madame Delagardie, maintain a constant flow, back and forth, just so.” Augustus used the flowy fabric of his sleeves to illustrate, rocked back and forth on the bench. “And on and on they go.”

With a hey nonny nonny and a ho ho ho.

Christ, he made himself sick sometimes. You’re doing it for England, old chap, he used to tell himself, but the for-England bit had been rubbed bare over time, torn to shreds on the detritus of rhyme.

Oh, bugger. He was thinking in rhyme again. Was there no way to turn it off? To end the adjectives that infected his consciousness? That bedeviled his brain? That assaulted his…

Next time, Augustus promised himself. The next time he was recruited for a life of espionage, he was posing as a philosopher or a student of ancient languages, as someone staid and sober, someone who expressed himself in prose rather than verse, and fourth-rate verse at that.

They had warned him of this, his mentors at the War Office. Choose your persona wisely, they had said. Over time, you might just become what you pretend to be. Augustus had scoffed at it at the time. Nineteen and fearless he had been then, confident of the power of both his sword and his pen. It had seemed like such a lark, a decade ago, to couch his reports to the War Office in poetry so bad that even the Ministry of Police wouldn’t want to read it. Even fanatical devotion only went so far. For the French surveillance officers, “so far” generally ended somewhere around the thirty-ninth canto.

What a stroke of brilliance, a code no one could break—because there was no code. No count-ten-letters-and-subtract-one, no book of code words and phrases, no messy paper trails to trip one up, just the information itself couched in terms of purest absurdity, truth drowned in a sea of verbiage.

Sometimes, it felt like truth wasn’t the only one drowning. He had been doing this for too long; he felt the weariness of it to his very bones.

Augustus looked at Jane Wooliston, his buoy, his anchor, his island in a turbulent sea. Until she had arrived in Paris, he had been giving serious thought to throwing it all in.

Clasping his hands to his breast, Augustus looked meaningfully at Miss Wooliston. “What can one say about the sea? Oh, the sea! The inconstant sea! As indeterminate as a lady’s affections and as unfathomable as the female heart.”

Miss Wooliston hid her smile behind her fan. “Beautifully said, Monsieur Whittlesby, but I would urge you to credit our sex with somewhat more resoluteness of character than that.”

She managed to make her voice carry without seeming to try. What a lovely voice it was, too, a fine, clear contralto, neither too high nor too low.

Augustus clapped the back of his hand to his forehead, just managing not to gag on his own sleeve. They had played this game before, he and Miss Wooliston. “Resolute in cruelty! Obdurate in obfuscation!”

“Ornate in ormolu?” It was the American again. Of course.

“Ormolu,” Augustus repeated. “Ormolu?”

Emma Delagardie gave a little bounce that made her silver spangles scintillate. “Just helping out. You are doing Os, aren’t you? “