Лорен Уиллиг - The Garden Intrigue

Goodness, she’d forgotten that apple tree. She had created quite the fuss by tumbling out of it and breaking her arm. She could still feel the twinge in it when the wind blew in the wrong direction.

“Cousin Robert told me I would most likely find you here. I just hadn’t expected—” Kort’s eyes dipped from the plumes on her headdress to the diamonds glittering at her ears, her arms, her breast.

“To see quite so much of me?” Emma quipped, and her cousin’s gaze hastily snapped upwards again.

Oops. She hadn’t meant to make him squirm. She had forgotten. They were less frank at home, at least about certain things. It felt odd to be speaking English again; the once familiar syllables came uncomfortably to her tongue, although not as uncomfortably as Kort’s labored French.

“Something like that,” Kort admitted, carefully avoiding the general direction of her bodice. He shook his head again. “I would never have known you.”

It would have been nice if the statement had sounded a little bit more like a compliment.

“That’s not surprising,” she said, striving for sangfroid. She resisted the urge to tug at her décolletage. Her dress might be low by New York standards, but it was positively modest by Parisian ones, largely because she didn’t have terribly much to display. “It’s been over ten years since you last saw me. It would be more surprising if I hadn’t changed.”

“You’ve become so…French.”

The comment surprised her into a laugh. “The French find me very American. Or so I’ve been told.”

Refreshing, they had called her. Natural. Fruitlessly, Emma had tried to explain that her parents’ home in New York was as sophisticated as anything to be found in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the only savages on their property were her brothers, but such protestations had been unpopular with her audience. They preferred to cherish Rousseauian notions of noble savages clad in loincloths and adorned with feathers.

“When did you arrive?” she asked. “Have you been in Paris long?”

“Tuesday,” he said. “Whenever I mention your name, I hear only effusions. Everyone adores Madame Delagardie.”

Mme. Delagardie had made a great effort to be adored. As for Emma…well, it was what it was and that was all. She was Mme. Delagardie now and had been for some time.

“Almost everyone. Not everyone has come to a full and proper appreciation of my inestimable worth, but they will in time. What brings you to Paris after all these years? Surely, you could have spared a visit to your favorite cousin before this. It’s just a little sea voyage. It’s only a few months at sea, and I have it on the very best authorities that sea monsters have gone out of fashion.”

He didn’t respond to her raillery in kind. A shadow passed across his face. He paused for a moment before saying, “You will have heard about Sarah, I expect.”

Oh, Lord. Emma felt like the scrapings off his boots, if he had been wearing boots. She was the lowest level of Paris gutter slime, heartless and unfeeling. She had heard. But it had been how long ago now? A year? Two? Time moved strangely in Paris, and the Atlantic divide meant that news was no longer news by the time of arrival.

“I had heard.” She touched a gloved hand fleetingly to his arm. “I’m sorry, Kort.”

His lips twisted with dark humor. Bitterness sat strangely on his clean-cut face. “So am I.”

She had hated Sarah once. She had hated her for being older, for being taller, for catching Kort’s eye. Emma had wished warts on her, or hives, with all the petty desperation of her wounded adolescent soul. She had fantasized about Sarah, always so competent and complacent, tripping on the way to the altar or ripping her wedding dress or spilling punch down her front in some humiliating and public occasion.

But not this. Never this. Emma’s heart winced away from the image of Sarah and her babies, still and cold.

Sarah was the sort of woman her mother was, the sort of woman her mother had wanted to be. She ought to be running a bustling household with a brood of children around her, all good housewifery and Dutch thrift. They had had three children, Emma had been told. She had learned of them one by one, when her mother and brothers had gradually begun writing to her again, slowly resuming the flow of family news and gossip. Two girls and a boy, all dead of the influenza, and Sarah with them, a whole family gone in one cruel blow.

“If you need distraction,” said Emma, “Paris is the place to be. It’s very good at helping one to forget.”

Or, at least, at keeping one so busy one failed to remember. Either way, the result was the same, except in those wee, dark hours of the morning, the ones not filled with balls and the chatter of sophisticated people, when memories, regrets, and doubts came crowding in, one on top of the other, murdering sleep and shattering repose.

She had tried laudanum once, but hated the grogginess that came after. It made her feel less herself, less energetic, less alive. She was left with no recourse but to keep as busy as possible, careening from event to event in the hope that by the time the morning came, she would be tired enough to sleep.

Sometimes it even worked.

There were lines next to Kort’s eyes and circles under them, attributes foreign to the carefree boy Emma had known. He looked at her soberly. “I had forgotten. You know what it is. To lose someone.”

Emma shrugged, toying with the silver fringe of her shawl. It was a flimsy thing, designed more for ornament than warmth. “It was a long time ago.” She didn’t want to talk about Paul, especially not with Kort. It was all too complicated. She slid an arm through her cousin’s, forcing herself to speak cheerfully, “I am being horrid monopolizing you like this, when there are so many fascinating people for you to meet. Shall I introduce you to the reigning beauties of Paris? Or would you rather a poet or philosopher?”

“You sound like you’re offering them up for sale,” said Kort bemusedly.

“Everything in Paris is for sale, in some way or another,” said Emma cynically. “If it bothers you, consider it more a loan. A loan to a favorite cousin.”

Emma cast about for something else to cheer him up. There was her old friend Adele de Treville in the corner, a widow, too, and a merry one. Her husband had died on the expedition to Haiti, along with Pauline Bonaparte’s spouse, victim of the yellow fever that had done more to decimate the French ranks than all the efforts of the rebel army.

Adele had been part of the fellowship at Mme. Campan’s, but Emma wasn’t sure Kort was quite ready for her yet. Adele was a darling, but she couldn’t be called anything but fast. If her conversation made Emma blush, it would horrify Kort. Right now she was talking to—

No. Oh, no.

“You haven’t met our host yet, have you?” Emma babbled, taking Kort by the arm and towing him ungently away from Adele and her companion. There were some things about her life since New York that Kort just didn’t need to know. “I’ve been hideously remiss. I ought to have introduced you straightaway.”

“No, not at all,” said Kort, submitting to being tugged along, like a sturdy vessel in the grip of a particularly determined tug. “I have messages from home I’ve been pledged to deliver. May I call on you tomorrow?”

“You may call on me at any time,” Emma promised him extravagantly, yanking him along behind her. Of all the nights for her past indiscretions to catch up with her, why did it need to be tonight? “My door is open to you at any hour of the day or night. Not literally, of course. There’s a concierge for that. He opens and closes it. The door, I mean. He gets very upset when other people try to do it for him. He takes great pride in his door. I mean, his work.”

Kort looked at her with concern. “Are you feeling quite well?”

“I am merely overwhelmed with the joy of your visit,” Emma lied. “And champagne. Have you had any? It’s really quite excellent. Here, do.”

She thrust a glass at him, looking frantically for a means of escape. If there was anyone she didn’t need Kort to meet…

“Madame Delagardie.”

Too late.

Georges Marston took her hand without it being offered, took it with an assumption of intimacy that made Emma wince and Kort lower his glass of champagne.

“Madame Delagardie,” he said. “It has been too long.”

“Emma Delagardie?” repeated Augustus. “Oh, right. Your American friend. The noisy one.”

“Emma is the obvious solution,” Jane said calmly.

In the dusky light, the white fabric of Jane’s skirts blended with the marble of the bench, making her look even farther removed from the mortal realm than usual, a goddess on her pedestal, perfect and pure.

It was hard enough to argue with a goddess, harder when one was mute with love, tongue-tied with infatuation.

It had crept up on him slowly, over the course of months. At first, he had been aware only of admiration, admiration for her calm under pressure, for her endless serenity, for the cool, Grecian good looks that had won her a place in Bonaparte’s court, and the rigorous self-discipline with which she played her chosen role. Augustus had seen so many agents come and go over the years. Some lost their nerve at the first hint of danger; others cracked through boredom, unable to sustain the pretense needed to maintain an alias over an extended period of time.