Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

He didn’t want to go on as he had, caricaturing himself into the mere mockery of a human being.

Emma had been right.

Emma. There was the drawback to his plan. Grow up, she had told him—well, not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication had been clear—but to do so meant England, so near geographically, and yet so far away in every other sense. He wouldn’t miss the salons or the taverns, but he would miss those afternoons in Emma’s house, sprawled across a too-small chair in Emma’s book room.

He would miss Emma.

He could picture her as she had walked away, her back very stiff beneath the thin fabric of her dress, damped with sweat until he could practically see the skin beneath. Her arm had been threaded through Mr. Fulton’s, her head tilted at her listening angle, but he knew she had been no more listening than he had been capable of concentrating.

Was she at rehearsal? In her room? Sticking pins in a poet-shaped doll?

He had to find her and set things right.

Augustus crossed his cubbyhole of a room in two steps. The theatre was the most likely place to find her. Hadn’t Fulton said something about repairing the wave machine? They had only one more day until the masque.

If he wanted to leave with Fulton’s plans—and, preferably, Fulton—the ideal time would be tomorrow night, while everyone else was focused on the play. Which meant he had only one night and one day more with Emma. One night and one day to beg her pardon.

Quickening his pace, Augustus yanked open the door. One night and one day to—

“Oh!” said a very familiar voice.

Augustus blinked. Yes, his eyes were sore after staring at those plans, but he had never experienced a mirage before, and certainly not one so precise in every detail.

Emma stood in the open doorway, her hand poised as though to knock.

Her hair was shoved behind her ears in that way she had when she was either deep in thought or trying to work up her nerve. Her dress was wrinkled, splotched slightly with sweat stains and dusted in places with pollen from their interlude in the garden.

She stared at him, as shocked as he, her hand suspended in the air. If she continued the motion, she would hit him. If she did, he would probably deserve it.

“I am so sorry,” he said, just as Emma dropped her hand and said all in a rush, “I was just looking for you.”

“What I said before”—Augustus jumped in, anxious to say his piece before she could—“I had no right.”

Whatever she had meant to say to him, his words shocked her silent. Her eyes searched his face. Augustus felt as though he were being sized up and unconsciously drew himself up straighter.

Emma regarded him intently, her expression serious. “You had no right,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t make you less right.”

They stood on either side of the doorway, each waiting for the other to say something. Without her usual armor of frivolity, there were hollows in Emma’s cheeks that Augustus had never noticed before. She still wore her paint, but he felt, somehow, as though he were seeing her scrubbed bare.

Augustus’s throat worked. He had been on delicate missions before, missions in which life or death hinged on the turn of a phrase, but never before had he felt as though quite so much depended on the choice of a word.

“Perhaps,” he said, and watched her eyelids flicker, watched her brace herself as though for some anticipated blow.

He held out a hand, his palm turned up, his fingers relaxed. It took all his will not to let them tremble.

“Perhaps,” he said, and cleared his throat, “this might better be discussed inside?”

Emma’s hand hovered for a moment at her side. He could see her eyes slide past him, to the tiny room beyond, assessing what he had said and what he was asking. Augustus held his breath and counted the seconds. He didn’t know what he wanted, but he did know that if she dropped her hand and turned away, his life would be the poorer for it. He might have tried persuasion, patter, poetry, but some things were too important for words. He could only stand frozen, his hand outstretched.

Her lips pressed together and she dipped her chin in a movement barely recognizable as a nod.

“Yes,” she said, and placed her hand in his. “Yes, I think that would be…best.”

Closing his fingers around hers, Augustus drew her into the room, letting the door click shut behind her.

His room was much smaller than hers.

It was scarcely large enough to contain a narrow bed, a spindly writing table, and a dressing stand with basin, ewer, and the mysterious accoutrements deemed necessary for the male toilette. The walls had been whitewashed rather than papered and there was no covering on the floor. A former dressing room or servant’s room, it had only the smallest pretense of a window, allowing in just enough natural light to expose the dinginess of it all. Her own room, a floor down, was petite to say the least, but boasted fresh, patterned paper and a vaguely Pompeii-esque border along the ceiling.

Emma stepped inside, forcing herself to concentrate on the spindly legs of the writing desk, the graying white of the walls.

Behind her, she heard the door swing shut. It made the small room seem even smaller. The four walls closed in around them, boxing her and Augustus together, too close for comfort, the bed blocking them on one side, the dressing stand on the other. The heat of the day shimmered around her, trapped beneath the attic roof. She could feel the warmth of it in her cheeks, in her breast, in her hand. There was nowhere else to lead her. Why hadn’t he let go?

Emma wriggled her wrist and Augustus released her hand, taking a step back, a movement that pressed him almost flush to the writing table. The chair wobbled on its narrow legs.

Emma made a show of looking about. “So this is how the bachelors lodge,” she said.

The words sounded tinny in the expectant silence. Augustus accorded them all the attention they deserved. None.

“I was on my way to find you. To apologize.”

Emma locked her hands loosely at her waist. “It seems we were on the same mission, then.”

She would have liked to sit down, but the only options were the chair, which would have required wiggling past Augustus, or the bed.

The bed was far too much a bed.

“You? You have no need to apologize.” Augustus rested a hand against the back of the chair, bracing himself. “Under the law, truth is always a defense to an accusation of defamation of character.”

“In that case,” Emma said, “you have no cause to apologize either. Everything you said about me, it was true.” She hated saying it, but she forced the words out anyway. “You were right. I don’t know what I want or where I want to be. I only know what I don’t want.”

“Marston?” suggested Augustus. His tone was light, but his eyes were intent.

“You were right about that, too. When it comes down to it, what do I have to say for myself?” The words tore up out of her chest, giving voice to truths she hadn’t wanted to acknowledge, the sorts of truths that kept one up at four in the morning and took headache-inducing amounts of champagne to drown into slumber. “I have no useful function in anyone’s life, least of all my own.”

“Don’t say that.” Augustus took a step forward. His voice was low and urgent. “If anything I said made you think that you have no worth—then I deserve to be horsewhipped. Never, ever say that. Don’t even think it. Don’t you know—”

“It’s not you, really,” Emma said quickly, before he could blame himself further. “It’s me. It wouldn’t have hurt so much if I didn’t already know it for myself.” She made a face. “I know what I am.”

“No,” said Augustus flatly. “You don’t.” Somehow, he was holding her hands. Emma hadn’t been aware of his taking them. “Shall I tell you what you are?’

“A flibbertigibbet?” volunteered Emma.

“A comet,” he countered, his eyes burning as brightly as any flaming star. “Whatever you do, you make it blaze. You have more energy, more joy, than anyone else I know. What sort of function would you like to have? Do you want to meddle in politics, like Madame Murat? Have a brood of babies, like the younger Madame Bonaparte? What do they add that you don’t? You can take even a third-rate masque and make it sparkle.”

The passion in his voice unnerved her, made her warm in some places and wobbly in others and thoroughly disconcerted in all of them.

“I think that was Mr. Fulton’s lightning machine,” Emma said. “The sparkle, I mean.”

Augustus gave her a quelling look. “Haven’t you noticed the way people gather around you? Everywhere we go, everyone clamors for Madame Delagardie, to join in a game, to judge a contest, to read a poem. The only way to get you by yourself is to find you in your book room, and even then, the notes and flowers keep coming. You need an army of footmen to keep your acquaintances at bay.”

Emma wordlessly shook her head. She was a habit with people, that was all. They knew her. She was convenient.

“You don’t think so? You don’t realize how much joy you give simply by being yourself?”

“So does a statue,” said Emma stubbornly. “Or cut flowers in a vase.”