Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

Ironic, if that were the case, since her family had cut her off without a penny in punishment for marrying without their permission.

In retrospect, she felt distinctly sorry for Paul. He had found himself without the fortune he had been led to expect, saddled with a temperamental fifteen-year-old girl who demanded homage and went off in a huff when she didn’t receive it.

If she hadn’t idolized him so much at the start, they might have done better. But then, he had been just as guilty as she. He had been equally surprised when she had turned out to be not the goddess of his imaginings but a fifteen-year-old girl, spoiled and untried.

What a mess they had made, both of them.

Augustus hunkered down next to her. “You’re never going to get the nails off that way,” he said. “I’ll find you a crowbar.”

Looking at him, his long hair curling around his face, his attention innocently on the crate, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of his expression as he had gazed up at Jane, as rapt as if she were the Cytherea his poems proclaimed her. It had been a joke before, his devotion, but now…

“Be careful,” she warned.

“With the crowbar?” Still crouching beside the crate, Augustus arched a brow. “I assure you, Madame Delagardie, I am far more proficient with tools than this fragile frame would imply.”

“Don’t play games with me,” said Emma crossly. “I didn’t mean the crowbar. I meant Jane.”

He went still. “What about Jane?”

Emma swallowed, trying to muster the right words. “I don’t want you hurt, either of you.” She bit down on her lip, concentrating on the rough wood of the crate, the places where it had cracked and splintered. “It isn’t kind to idolize someone like that.”

Augustus pushed up and away. One minute he was next to her, the next she had a prime view of his knees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Emma remembered the way he had looked at Jane on her chair, as though she were the most precious thing in a million kingdoms, as though he would cross storm-tossed seas for the sake of a mere glimpse of her face.

Leaning back on her haunches, Emma laughed without humor. “You have her up in a tower so high no man could possibly reach her, no matter how high the ladder. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you.”

Beneath the exuberant fall of his hair, his face was still, as still and stony as a winter’s day on a barren beach.

Yanking at a nail with the pads of her fingers, Emma said, “You can’t make someone into your Cytherea just by wishing it.”

“I’m not trying to make anyone into anything,” he said tightly.

Emma looked up from her shredded fingernails. “No? Then why the Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes? Why twenty-two cantos?”

Why do you look at her the way you do?

But she couldn’t ask that.

“That’s not—” Augustus caught himself before he said whatever he had been about to snap out. He said shortly, “That’s poetry. Don’t you think I can tell the difference between fact and fiction?”

“No.” There. It was out. There was no going back. Softening her voice, Emma said, “It’s romantic and lovely, but none of it’s real. Jane’s not like that. She—”

“She what?” He stepped forward, his hands planted combatively on his hips. “I know Miss Wooliston a damned sight better than you do.”

Emma held on to the crate with both hands. “That’s not what I meant! Do you think I would ever say anything against Jane? I love her too. It’s just that she’s not like that. She not…poetical.”

Without another word, Augustus swung away from her. His expression of contempt seemed to linger behind him, like a sun print on the surface of the eye, creating shadow images long after the object has gone.

Emma jumped up, steadying herself against the lid of the crate. “Augustus—”

His long legs made short work of the aisle between the stage and the door. Either he didn’t hear or he pretended not to. He pushed hard with both hands against the door, sending it ricocheting open. Emma held up a hand to block the sudden wash of sunlight.

For a very brief moment, Augustus turned back. Against the light, he was a dark silhouette, sinister and still.

In a hard, tight voice, he said, “I’ll find you a crowbar.”

The door swung shut behind him, blotting out the man and the light.

Picking futilely at the nails on the lid of the case, Emma would have felt better about the crowbar if she hadn’t been quite so sure Augustus was itching to use it on her.

Idolization, indeed!

Augustus let the theatre door slam shut behind him, the crack of wood against wood a satisfying echo of his feelings.

After all these weeks, he had thought Emma, of all people, would know better.

Certainly, he played the besotted poet in public, but that was just an act, like the adverbs and the alliteration. The verbiage was mere costuming, no more a part of him than the billowing shirt he affected in public. His real feelings for Jane weren’t composed of such airy nothings; they were based on a firm foundation of mutual respect, interests, and understanding. He knew Jane for what she was, just as she knew him. Between them, there were no pretenses, no roles, no acts.

He wasn’t trying to make Jane into his Cytherea; the very idea was absurd. Cytherea was the role she played in public, the princess in the tower, accepting the homage of admirers from twenty feet up, encased in a tower to protect her from elements beyond her control. If anything, he sought to liberate her from the tower, to bring her down to earth and into his arms, in a safe, protected space where they could both be what they were without the threat of prying eyes or tattling tongues.

Emma might not know the whole of it—the whole double-identity bit did make for rather a large gap—but she ought to know him better than that by now. After three weeks of working in such proximity, he had thought they had built up an understanding of sorts, even a friendship. They were frank with each other. He was blunt with her in a way he was with no one but Jane.

No. If he was being honest with himself, he was blunt with Emma in a way he wasn’t with Jane. With Jane, his tongue was curbed by the vast respect he bore her, his manner softened by admiration, their interactions tinged—although not tainted!—by the echoes of their respective roles. They never knew when someone might be listening. He played the besotted poet in private as in public, half in mockery, half in earnest.

With Emma, there was no need for any of that. He could be curt, he could be blunt, he could even be crude.

That, Augustus told himself, was precisely why her absurd accusations ate at him so. There was no truth to them, of course.

Idolization, ha!

Augustus cut around the side of the theatre, toward the confusion of gardens that stretched out behind the house. Mme. Bonaparte had designed her grounds in the English manner, carefully cultivated to maintain the illusion of natural serendipity, with irregular paths circling among copses of trees, meandering over rustic bridges, wending their way past bits of artfully artless statuary, planted to look like the decaying relics of a prior civilization.

Surely, somewhere in the grounds, there must be the equivalent of a garden shed. A gardener would have served equally well, but, like the shoemaker’s elves, they had done their work in the morning while the house lay sleeping, scurrying out of sight by day so that the inhabitants of the house might enjoy their illusion of lonesome wilderness unimpeded by reminders of the effort that went into maintaining it.

Augustus struck out along the path to the left, past the tree Bonaparte had planted to commemorate his victory at Marengo. That information came courtesy of Emma, who had taken him on a cursory tour upon their arrival, pointing out such personal landmarks as the Best Place to Read, the Best Place to Play Prisoner’s Base, and All Those New Bits That Weren’t There Before.

He probably ought to have asked her where to go to find garden implements, Augustus acknowledged to himself. On the other hand, that would have ruined his exit. It was very hard to storm out and then turn meekly back around and ask for directions. It sapped all the moral force from the departure.

He would, Augustus decided generously, freely acknowledge Emma to be the authority on the estate of Malmaison and its grounds. When it came to Jane, however, she was wrong, quite wrong, and he would prove it to her.

Eventually.

The path he had chosen looped and then looped again, bringing him along the banks of a river too perfect to be entirely natural. Above the trees, the sun was beginning to set, reflecting red-gold streaks in the clear water below. Beneath the trees, though, it was already dusk. Weeping willows bent their fronds towards the banks, and swans drifted in the chill of the waters. The scene was almost eerie in its beauty, a wistful, haunted place.

Against the fronds of the willows, the woman drifting towards the bridge seemed almost a specter herself, her long gown a whisper of white in the shadow of the trees. She stepped up onto the blue-painted bridge, and the last rays of the setting sun lit upon her, embracing her with the ardor of a lover.