Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

Below me, I could hear someone saying in cut-glass tones, as pretentiously posh as Dempster’s, that, heavens, no, she wasn’t here with the film crew, she was the representative from Manderley; hadn’t they heard of Manderley?

I looked down and saw a perfectly coiffed blond head, not a hint of telltale roots showing, highlighted to feign a vacation in St. Barth’s, cut in a kicky sweep not unlike my last haircut, the one that had now grown out into straggles. Oh, damn. Unconsciously, I reached for the ends of my hair, too short to put up, too long for style.

Even up half a flight of stairs, Joan Plowden-Plugge still had the power to make me feel like a mugwump.

I tugged at Colin’s sleeve. “Hey. What’s Joan doing here?”

“I didn’t invite her,” he said quickly. I believed him. Not out of consideration for me and my feelings, but because Joan had made no bones about her desire to become mistress of Selwick Hall, or at least of its master. “She’s here for Manderley.”

“And you’re okay with that?” Colin had been quite clear about wanting to keep a lid on publicity, at least as it pertained to Selwick Hall. The movie itself he couldn’t do much about. That was DreamStone’s province.

Colin’s lip twisted. “I’m not okay with any of this.”

Fair point. That wasn’t what I’d meant, though, and he knew it.

He leaned a hand on the other side of the railing next to me, boxing me in. “Look, if I have to have reporters in my home, I’d rather it be Manderley than one of the tabloids.”

I wasn’t sure a periodical that looked down its nose at Town & Country as hopelessly plebeian counted as a substitute for the gossip rags. But if Colin thought doing a piece in Manderley would stave off the tits’n ass crowd, then so be it. I had my doubts. Where Micah Stone went, there went the paparazzi. And nothing would suit Jeremy better than a double-page spread of himself in front of “his” ancestral home, complete with wellies and a gun propped over his shoulder.

Colin looked down at me, his hazel eyes concerned. “I know Joan isn’t your favorite person—”

“I can’t imagine where you get these ideas,” I muttered. Just because she had all but hired a coyote to drop an Acme anvil on my head.

“But I’ve known her since we were children. I trust her not to say anything…” Colin paused, searching for the right phrase.

“Libelous?” I’m not the child of two lawyers for nothing.

Colin pushed away from the railing. “Embarrassing.”

“Right. That, too. Do you think we should go down, or shall we just stay up here and keep staring at people? I’m fine going either way.”

“Was that a hint?” Colin asked.

“It was more of a directive.” I took his arm in a proprietary grasp. Take that, Joan Plowden-Plugge! She might have two names, but I had one Colin, and, by gad, I wasn’t sharing, not for all the cupcakes in kindergarten. “I could use one of those glasses of bubbly.”

“Only one?”

“Do you really want me to get blotto and start singing show tunes?”

Colin’s lips brushed the top of my head. “You’re cute when you’re blotto,” he said.

I noticed he didn’t say anything about my singing ability.

“You’re just hoping I’ll lose it and say horrible things to Jeremy so you won’t have to.” Oops. Did I say that out loud?

Colin didn’t seem too perturbed by the prospect. “That would be a plus, yes.”

I poked Colin in the arm. “There’s Dempster.”

We weren’t the only ones who had spotted him. Joan’s carefully highlighted head turned and, with just the right words of good-bye, she excused herself and maneuvered her way through the crowd, her black dress narrow enough not to make so much as a whisper as she passed. Her heels were a modest inch and a half. Sling-backs. Unlike me, she wasn’t relying on the shoemaker’s art for lengthening and slimming.

Toad.

How did she know Dempster? The Vaughn Collection, I guessed. It made sense that the editor of a fine-arts magazine would be on more than nodding terms with the archivist of London’s answer to the Frick Collection.

But this looked like a hell of a lot more than nodding terms. Holding her champagne glass out to the side, Joan leaned in, not for the traditional air kiss but for a solid peck on the lips. As she leaned back, Dempster’s hand settled in a proprietary way just above her waist.

What?

I looked at Colin, gawping like a child catching Mommy with Santa Claus. If Santa Claus was evil, that is. And if Mommy were the wicked stepmother. “Did you—?” I said.

Colin shook his head, looking just as befuddled as I felt. “No. I—No.” He looked down at them, a man at sea. “They are colleagues.…”

“His hand is still on her ass,” I pointed out. “That’s not collegial behavior.” A little lightbulb went on in my brain. “Do you know what this means? Serena didn’t invite Dempster. Joan did.”

Colin seemed insufficiently excited by this revelation.

I tugged on his sleeve. “Don’t you get it? Serena isn’t back together with Dempster!”

Not to mention that now Joan was safely off the market, so maybe she’d stay out of our hair for five minutes. And by ours, I meant mine. It would be nice to go to the pub without Joan throwing darts at me instead of the board.

“I got that,” said Colin slowly. I followed his gaze and saw what had caught his attention. Oh, damn. There was another corollary to Serena not being back together with Dempster, one I hadn’t quite thought through.

Serena stood in the shadow of the front door, looking like someone had just run a knife straight through her heart.

Dempster had been using Serena, and the odds were that he was probably using Joan, too. He had even made a play for me. I didn’t think the man was capable of decent, disinterested affection. But I doubted that would make much of a difference to Serena right now. All that mattered was that the man who had broken her heart was in her home in the company of another woman.

I had spent months privately griping about Colin cosseting Serena, about our relationship being crowded with three when it ought to have been cozy with two. And let’s just say I hadn’t been too happy with her when she had sided with Jeremy, flinging Colin to the wolves. But now…

“Go to her.” I gave Colin a little push. “She needs you.”

Colin did his best imitation of an Easter Island statue, nothing but the finest granite.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll go.”

I started down, slipping and skidding in my inappropriate heels, only to find myself checked four steps up by Dempster.

“Eloise!” he said volubly, for all the world as though he were the host. I could see Serena over his shoulder, looking shadowed and fragile. It wasn’t lost on me that even though she had grown up in this house, it was Serena who was coming in from outside. Some people, it seemed, were doomed to be perpetual outsiders, like a moth at the far side of a lighted patio, always hovering just out of reach of the light.

I was too generally pissed off to bother with the amenities. “I see you’ve found another way of getting into Selwick Hall.”

Dempster’s chest expanded. “I’m the historical consultant for the film,” he said.

From what I’d seen, calling it a film seemed like a stretch. “I wasn’t talking about the movie. Excuse me.”

“I’m glad you’re here,” Dempster said suavely, ignoring my attempt to get around him.

“Why? So you can steal my notes?”

I had to give him this much. He put on a good show of confusion.

“What’s this?” Colin had come down behind me. We might be having our own tiff, but it was a solid front when it came to barbarians at the gate. Colin’s fingers fumbled for mine.

I slid my hand gratefully into his.

“Ask Dempster,” I said, nodding at the other man. “Ask him just what he’s looking for at Selwick Hall.”

He couldn’t shake the image of her face.

Augustus slipped away around the side of the house, moving with a stealth that had been ingrained by time and brutal training. He had good cause to be grateful for that training. It was all that was keeping him from barreling headfirst over the nearest shrub. He felt entirely disoriented, adrift, at sea. Gravel crunched beneath his feet, the only sign he was still on a path. The curtains had been drawn in the house, but enough light leached through them to provide a vague illumination, a strange echo of light, worse than no light at all.

What in the hell had just happened in there?

To his left lay Bonaparte’s dollhouse of a theatre, smug on its own patch of ground. Dark now, all dark, entirely dark, no Emma inside playing with props or rocking back on her heels to look up at him with her hair all any which way and a smudge on her face.

He could still feel the texture of her hair beneath his fingers, thicker than he would have thought, thick and sleek and straight, blunt at the ends where it had been cut short, frizzled in bits where her maid must have experimented with the curling iron and failed. He could feel the silk of her hair and the delicate shape of the scalp beneath. She had a mole behind one ear, just a little bump in the skin, but his fingers remembered it, mapping it onto the landscape of her body, familiar terrain made unfamiliar, discovered and rediscovered.