“I can’t,” Emma blurted out. “I’m so sorry, Madame Bonaparte.”

“Can’t?” Mme. Bonaparte appeared genuinely confused. She had forgotten to shade the lamps in her usual manner. The too-bright light picked out the cracks in her rouge.

How embarrassed Uncle Monroe and cousin Robert would be by her, letting diplomacy fly to the winds like that. Two diplomats in the family and she couldn’t even muster a graceful refusal to an offer meant to shower her with honor.

Mme. Bonaparte should count herself lucky not to have Emma in her household.

Emma hastily gathered the remnants of her wits. “Please don’t think I’m not entirely sensible of the great honor you do me, Madame Bonaparte, and you do know that under most circumstances there is nothing I would rather have than the privilege of being near you, but I find myself incapable of accepting. Forgive me. Please.”

Mme. Bonaparte’s face cleared. Her lips curved in that enigmatic smile that had driven countless men wild. “Ah,” she said. “I understand.”

She did?

Mme. Bonaparte leaned forward, her eyes bright. “It’s that handsome cousin of yours.”

“Kort?” Emma had lost the thread of the conversation somewhere.

“Kort.” Mme. Bonaparte tried out the name. It sounded very strange in a French Creole lilt. Her nose wrinkled, but she brushed that small matter aside. “Whatever you call him, he is a fine figure of a man. And I imagine your parents will be so pleased.”

“They would be if we—I mean, that is…”

Mme. Bonaparte squeezed her arm. “I should have known we would lose you sooner or later.”

“But I’m not—” Emma broke off, stymied in the face of Mme. Bonaparte’s firm conviction. What could she say? Better to have Mme. Bonaparte think she was turning her down for Kort than that she was rejecting her in her own right. Hating herself for it, she hedged. “Nothing has been decided.”

So much for honest Emma.

“Of course not,” said Mme. Bonaparte knowingly. “All the same, when the time comes…You must let me be the first to congratulate you.” She looked sentimentally at Emma. “After all your troubles, it will be nice to see you settled.”

There was a lump in Emma’s throat that hadn’t been there before. She knew that charm came easily to Mme. Bonaparte, but even so, she was moved, both by the sentiment and the memories it invoked, of those difficult days when Emma had fled her marriage and taken shelter at Malmaison.

“Thank you,” Emma said feelingly. She wondered if she was making a terrible mistake. So many people would give their eyeteeth for an offer such as this. In her own way, Mme. Bonaparte did love her, Emma knew she did.

She also knew that Mme. Bonaparte’s affection, sincere though it might be, wasn’t enough to protect her if Bonaparte decided her marriage would serve his ends.

“My dear,” said Mme. Bonaparte, touching a finger lightly to her cheek. Lightly, so as not to further disarrange Emma’s rouge. “I just want to see you happy.”

“It’s not just for that that I owe you thanks,” said Emma, guilt lending her extra fervor. What would Mme. Bonaparte say when the promised betrothal to Kort never materialized? “But for all your many kindnesses to me over the years. No matter what happens, I would never want you to think me ungrateful or insensible of how much I owe you. You and Hortense and Eugene”—dimly, she was aware that she was babbling, and that, in this strange new world, such sentiments might be accounted lèse-majeste, but this was more important, this was her heart scrubbed raw—“you have been more than family to me and I will never, ever forget that.”

“How sweet,” said someone behind her.

Emma turned, slowly, to see Caroline Murat, all satin and feathers. The cloying sweetness of her smile only emphasized the acid beneath it.

Caroline. It would be.

The other woman strolled forward. “What a terribly charming sentiment, Madame Delagardie.”

Emma took a deep breath, hating herself for being caught in a moment of vulnerability before Caroline. Caroline, of all people.

Emma could feel Mme. Bonaparte stiffen, but her voice was pleasant as she said, “Good evening, Caroline. How nice of you to join us.”

“Madame.” Caroline Murat didn’t bother to hide the disdain she felt for her sister-in-law. She turned her critical gaze on Emma, taking in every aspect of Emma’s tousled appearance. “Your lip rouge is smudged. And is that straw in your hair?”

Hortense had tried to befriend Caroline when she first arrived at Mme. Campan’s. Caroline had never forgiven her for it. Emma was an enemy by extension. Caroline took her enmities very seriously. It must, Emma decided, be the Corsican in her. Vendetta was a concept that Caroline not only understood but cherished.

“I’ve been in the theatre,” said Emma defensively, “trying to sort through props.”

“Props,” repeated Caroline, looking pointedly at Emma’s smudged lip rouge. “Is that what you call them in the Americas?”

Caroline raised a gloved hand, ostensibly to toy with her cameo necklace, but really to better display her impressive figure. She looked pointedly at Emma’s comparative lack of endowment.

Yes, yes, Emma knew. Nature was kinder to some than to others. Georges had been quite clear on that front, during the period of their entanglement. Lithe, Paul had called her, with his happy facility for turning any phrase to advantage.

And then there was Augustus. She had no idea of Augustus’s thoughts on the topic or if he thought about it at all. Or if he would have fled if she hadn’t fled first.

“Yes, props,” said Emma, more sharply than she ought. “For the masque the First Consul commissioned.”

“You mean the Emperor,” Caroline said snippily, and might have said more but for the clatter of spurs against the parquet floor of the drawing room that led into the gallery.

The sound arrested Caroline’s attention. She listened for a moment, and then smiled, the slow, smug smile of the cat who got the cream. “As it happens, I’ve brought a prop of my own.”

Caroline crooked a finger imperiously at the doorway.

A man strode forward, slightly the worse for travel. His boots still bore the dust of the road, and his buttons lacked their usual sheen. But his teeth were as white as ever. He had them all bared in a smile as he crossed the room towards them.

Caroline extended a languid hand. “Whatever took you so long?” Turning back to Emma, she said, “Madame Delagardie, I don’t believe you need any introduction to Colonel Marston.”

Chapter 20

Sussex, England

May 2004


I hightailed it to the library.

I’m not sure what I had been expecting to find. Dempster and Serena in flagrante delicto? Dempster going through my notes, chortling like a stage villain? Instead, the library was as it always was, an oasis of evening calm, the setting sun streaming through the long windows, picking out the worn patches on the red and blue carpet, and highlighting the dust that collected in the long grooves of the ornamental pilasters between the bookshelves. My notebook lay where I had left it, the research books I had been using scattered around in my usual cheerful disarray. It all seemed normal enough.…

I ventured closer. Why was I walking like a member of the bomb squad from Law & Order? This was silly. I marched briskly up to my favorite table. A folio of letters from Jane to Henrietta, detailing Jane’s role in the masque at Malmaison, all present and accounted for. Copy of the masque, printed in a vanity edition with red morocco covers, check. The spiral notebook I used when I didn’t feel like lugging my laptop, check. Four assorted volumes on American history, used for background research on the Morris/Monroe/Livingston and Fulton connections, all there.

My reference books had verified what I’d found in Jane’s letters. I’d never known that Mr. Fulton, the inventor of the steamboat, had lived in France for a number of years, working on his steamboat and various other devices before teaming up with Mr. Livingston and going home to New York. But it appeared that he had. He had also come up with the first-ever panorama, which caused a rage in Paris. Theatrical equipment must have been a no-brainer for him after that.

If it was theatrical equipment, that is, and not the early-nineteenth-century equivalent of a weapon of mass destruction.

Wouldn’t that be an interesting double fake! What if Fulton were, in fact, working for the French Royalists? There were various groups floating around, often at odds with each other, seldom in sync with the English and Austrian agents who purported to be working in their interests. Someone had tried to assassinate Bonaparte on his way to the theatre in Christmas 1800—why not in his own theatre in 1804?

Because it hadn’t happened, I reminded myself. That’s the weird thing about reading history through peoples’ papers and documents. You forget that you do know how it all turned out. Charles I was beheaded, Marie Antoinette never made it past Varennes, Bonaparte wasn’t assassinated in 1804.

That didn’t mean someone might not try. Maybe Marston was a double agent.

Huh. That was weird. Not Marston—although he was peculiar enough all by himself—but the folio on the desk, next to the biography of Fulton that I hadn’t quite got around to finishing (or starting). The folio I had thought was the one I had been reading—well, it wasn’t. It had been replaced with another. They all looked the same, those folios, from the outside at least. A late Victorian member of the Selwick clan had catalogued the family papers, albeit in a rather haphazard fashion, pasting them in chronological order into large folio volumes, all of which looked alike, but for the labels on the spine. The one I was holding wasn’t the correspondence of Henrietta Dorrington (née Selwick) and Miss Jane Wooliston, 1804–1805. It was Henrietta Dorrington and Lady Frederick Staines (née Deveraux), 1803–1806.