Augustus felt his heart leap with an answering fire.

“Well met by sunset, fair Miss Wooliston!” he called out. “You don’t know how glad I am to see you.”

Was there ever such a proof of fate as this? A bridge in sunset, a romantic copse of woods…the lady of his heart.

“Mr. Whittlesby!” Jane caught at the rustic railing as he bounded towards her, making the planks of the bridge tremble with his enthusiasm. Her eyes were bright with welcome—or perhaps merely the reflection of the setting sun. “Has there been some new development?”

“Other than my getting lost in the woods? No.” Augustus thought about Dante in the middle of his life, lost in a dark wood. Then he found Beatrice, a shining figure in white, who led him forth to paradise.

Admittedly, Jane’s white muslin gown was hardly the stuff of the heavenly spheres, and Augustus doubted even the most fashionable angels sported white gloves and wide-brimmed bonnets, but he liked the metaphorical resonance of it, all the same.

“These are hardly woods,” Jane said practically, surveying the carefully landscaped disorder. Beneath their bridge, the swans billed the water, calling to one another in their strange, cracked voices, so at odds with their graceful facade. “If you want woods, you keep following the path to the left. This is just a wilderness.”

“Is there a difference between the two?” Augustus asked, not because he wanted to know but just to keep her talking, to savor the image of a beautiful woman in a white gown against a frame of weeping willows.

“The one is designed to look wild, the other actually is.”

Leaning his elbows against the rail next to her, Augustus gazed out across the brilliantly tinted waters. “So we ape nature with art and, in doing so, lose the best of both,” he murmured, “just as we play at love and lose the heart of it.”

Jane gave him a sideways look. “I am glad you wandered along,” she said, pushing away from the railing. “I’ve been wanting to speak to you.”

“I, too.” Augustus gazed at her, trying to think how to begin. Not poetical? Emma had no idea what she was talking about. He blurted, “Have you noticed the sunset?”

“The sunset?” Jane looked more than a little perplexed. “Is that a code?”

“Of a sort,” Augustus hedged. Bracing one hand against the rail, he fell back on the words of a better poet than he. “How sweet the moonlight sleeps upon this bank! Here will we sit and let the sounds of music / Creep in our ears: soft stillness and the night / Become the touches of sweet harmony.”

He looked meaningfully at Jane.

“You should put that in the masque,” she said blandly. “It might work quite nicely for Americanus.”

Had she not recognized it for what it was? He couldn’t tell whether she was serious or not. Sometimes, Jane’s humor eluded him.

“Jane—” There was no poetic way to say it. The words were wrenched out of him. “I’ve had enough of this. I’m sick of masks.”

Jane pursed her lips judiciously. “I understand your feelings, but it is only a week more and then you’ll be done with it. Except for the commemorative volume, of course.” She arched a brow, waiting for a response. When none was forthcoming, she said kindly, “Given the time constraints, your masque isn’t half bad.”

“No. It’s fully bad,” said Augustus bluntly. “But that’s not the point. The point is—”

“That it got you to Malmaison.” Jane nodded approvingly. “If there’s any truth to your source’s claims, you should be able to verify it.”

“It got us to Malmaison,” Augustus corrected. He added, more quietly, “I hadn’t realized how beautiful it is here.”

Emma hadn’t exaggerated. It was a landscape made for lovers, all full of secluded alcoves and picturesque vistas. Even the sun was complicit, lighting the sky with the sort of sunset one never saw in Paris.

“Yes, as to that.” Jane held up a hand to shield her eyes against the last glare of the sun, frowning against the purple and red magnificence of the sky, the brilliant glitter of the water. “It isn’t the way I would have planned it.”

“The gardens?” He could see where Jane was more of a formal parterre sort of person, but there was something about the wildness of the landscape that called to him.

Jane shook her head. “Our mutual presence at Malmaison.”

“What do you mean?” Augustus recalled their prior conversation in the Balcourt garden. They spent a great deal of time in gardens, he and Jane. At the time, she had been concerned about appearances. “Are you worried about arousing suspicion? There should be no fear of that. Bonaparte’s daughter herself mandated your inclusion, not I.”

“Hortense didn’t do us any favors.” Clasping her hands behind her back, Jane glanced back towards the house, faintly visible between the fronds of the willow trees. “The party is small enough that one could effectively conduct surveillance on one’s own. There’s no need for both of us here.”

“Maybe it’s not about need,” said Augustus desperately. “Maybe it’s just about…nice. It’s nice to be here together. In the gardens. In the sunset.”

Jane shook her head. “We could be much more effective apart.”

“Effective,” Augustus repeated.

The sunset wasn’t effective; the swans on the lake weren’t, either. They were because they were, because they were beautiful, because they moved a man’s soul.

He could hear Emma’s voice in his head, saying apologetically, She’s not like that. She’s not…poetical.

Hush, he told her. Hush. I will not hear you.

The phantom Emma put her tongue out at him.

He looked at Jane, framed by weeping willows, silhouetted against the water, an objet d’art in her own right. He could imagine her with her pale brown hair streaming down her back, straight and shining as water, darker than honey, lighter than oak, defying definition, always slipping just out of reach. She was like a moonbeam, a faint gleam of light across the sky, making the throat grow dry and the heart constrict, beautiful to contemplate, impossible to hold.

No. It wasn’t right. He wouldn’t give up this easily.

Yes, she was beautiful. Yes, she was clever. Yes—he would admit it—she might be more than a little reserved. But there was more there. He had seen it. He had seen it in the quirk of her lip, the glint in her eye, the suppressed amusement that seemed, on more than one occasion, to be for him and him alone. They had worked together for more than a year now, and he had been sure, more than once, that he had sensed something more than a professional interest.

She was so used to his flummery by now that she probably thought it was nothing more than that, just another verse in an old poem.

“Is there nothing more to which to aspire than to efficacy?” he demanded. “What about—”

He was going to say love. He meant to say love. But his tongue refused to form the word.

“—poetry?” he finished lamely.

Jane clapped a hand to her bosom, fluttering her lashes coquettishly. “Why, Mr. Whittlesby! As always, you flatter me.” Her voice dropped. “Where is he?”

Augustus’s gaze immediately skittered to the side, scanning for intruders. “Who?”

Jane slowly straightened, giving him a perplexed look. “You went into role. I assumed there was someone there.”

“I see,” he said slowly.

And he did see. He had been right. He couldn’t hide behind flowery language; she would only read it as part of the masquerade, never realizing that below his silly shirt beat a heart that beat only for her. Well, partly for her.

“What if it wasn’t an act? What if I meant it?”

Jane narrowed her eyes at him. She didn’t look alarmed so much as bemused. “Really, what has got into you this evening?”

It wasn’t so much what had got into him as what had got away. He felt like he was clinging to the edge of a waterfall, trying, desperately, to push the water back.

“It’s not this evening,” he said. “It’s been a long time coming. It cannot come as a surprise to you to know that I have the deepest respect and admiration for you.”

“Thank you. The praise of an agent of your caliber is always a mark of honor.”

Agent. The word settled on his chest like the slabs once used to crush condemned men, one stone at a time.

“I don’t speak just as an agent,” he said, fighting against a growing sense of doom. “I know the circumstances are inconvenient. The circumstances are always inconvenient. But if you found yourself moved…”

Jane’s spine stiffened until she stood as upright as Miss Gwen. “We have a job to do, Mr. Whittlesby,” she said crisply. “An important job.”

“I know that,” he said. “Don’t you think I know that? I’ve been doing this since you were in pinafores. But there’s a time for work and a time for—”

She turned her back on him, stepping rapidly away from the rail. “I made some inquiries about Mr. Livingston,” she said quickly. “And about his financial interests. You were right.”

“I was?” Augustus felt slow and stupid. His mouth formed the words without connection to his brain.

She stayed a careful arm’s length away. Her voice had the determined cheerfulness of someone delegated to convey bad news. Cheerful voice, watchful eyes. “Your suspicions seem to have some basis in fact. I ought to have trusted your instincts on this.”

On this. Only this.

Jane’s mouth continued to move, conveying information that fell around him like leaves in autumn, dry and dead and brown, tainted with the scent of decay. Munitions manufactory, he heard, and controlling interest, and business concerns, but the rest ebbed and flowed against his ears with no discernible effect. The sky was darkening all around them. Behind Jane, the pale circle of the moon rose above the trees, crowning her head like a saint’s on a painted panel.