offer is very kind, but I have no intention of writing the masque.”
“But—”
“If you’ll excuse me, my cousin wants me. Good evening, Mr. Whittlesby.”
With a vague flutter of her fan, she wafted off in a cloud of silver spangles, in the direction of an ill-dressed man with his hair clubbed back in an old-fashioned queue. It was, Augustus had to admit, very neatly done. She had cut him off so quickly, he had no time to object. He was simply left standing there, mouth open on an unvoiced argument, wondering what in the devil he had done. He had been so sure he had her where he wanted her. How hard could it be, after all? She was a silly flibbertigibbet of a society matron, easily manipulable.
Only not.
Her cousin extended a glass half full of a somewhat murky liquid. He spoke in English, or the version of the language that the colonials recognized as such. “I didn’t find your punch, but I managed to persuade someone to make some.”
Mme. Delagardie smiled fondly up at him, but made no move to take the glass. “Thank you, Kort. Would you be hideously offended if, after all your valiant efforts, I declined to drink it? All I want is to find my carriage and go home.”
“Shall I escort you back?”
“No, stay. Enjoy yourself.” She favored him with a fleeting smile. “The night is still very young by Paris standards.”
“But late by New York ones. I would be more than happy—”
“Please,” she said, cutting him off as effectively as she had done Augustus. “I intend to curl up against the squabs and nap, and you’ll only be in the way of that. Unless you’re volunteering to serve as pillow?”
“All right,” her cousin said reluctantly. “Before you go, though, I nearly forgot to give you this.”
Fishing in his waistcoat pocket, he dragged out a piece of paper, loosely folded into thirds that promptly flapped open as he offered it to Mme. Delagardie.
“Sorry. Wrong one.” He hastily stuffed it back in his pocket. Rooting about some more, he extracted a second sheet, passing it to his cousin, who accepted it with a murmur of thanks. “I’ll call on you tomorrow, once you’ve had time to read it.”
Emma Delagardie lifted a hand and touched a finger lightly to his cheek. “I shall look forward to it. Good night, Kort.”
She tucked away the second paper in her reticule too quickly for Augustus to view what was written on it. He had, however, got a fairly good view of the first document, too loosely folded for privacy. It hadn’t been a letter, but a drawing, marked out in brown ink with numbers and other scribbling along the sides.
In other words, a diagram. A diagram of some variety of mechanism.
Or device.
Chapter 6
There was a large device squatting smack in the middle of the dining room table.
I had taken my fair share of art history classes in undergrad, but it still took me a few moments to identify it as a projector. It was much larger and snazzier than the 1950s relics commonly used by undergrad art history departments, sleek and shiny. It emitted a faint humming noise, almost a purr.
In my own defense, one doesn’t generally expect to encounter a projector on a dining room table, in between the silver and the Spode. It made a rather odd centerpiece.
But, then, it was all rather odd. I’d never actually used the dining room—Colin and I ate in the comfortably shabby kitchen, with its mustard yellow fixtures and battered pine table—but I’d wandered my way through it a time or two, admiring the elegant appointments and the paired portraits of Lord and Lady Uppington that loomed on either side of the room, presiding over the long mahogany table in paint as they must once have done in the flesh. It didn’t look as it would have in their day. As Colin had informed me a while back, the house had been extensively redone in the late nineteenth century by an ancestor infatuated with the Arts and Crafts movement, which explained the heavy William Morris draperies over the windows and the Pre-Raphaelite murals on the walls— although I did wonder whether Persephone eating the pomegranate was really an appropriate scene for a dining room. What sort of message did that send? Sample the fruit plate and go straight to hell?
For tonight, that might not be so far off. Especially not with Colin and Jeremy in the same room. I didn’t like to think how Colin would react when he saw what the DreamStone people had done to his dining room.
It wasn’t just the projector plopped in the spot where the silver epergne usually presided. Bland, caterer- supplied china had supplanted the nicked and faded Spode pattern picked out by a late-nineteenth-century Selwick. Additions had been placed to turn the long table from an oval to a T, with microphones set in the central places at the top. Worst of all, a square white screen covered the portrait of Lord Uppington. Lady Uppington, hanging safely behind the head table, had been left unencumbered, but she looked distinctly put out at Lord Uppington’s plight.
These people didn’t know what trouble they were courting. I wouldn’t put it past her to come swooping down from the afterlife and rearrange them all to her personal satisfaction. And direct the movie while she was at it. That was just the sort of woman Lady Uppington was.
That’s the thing with reading peoples’ papers. You start to feel as if you’ve known them personally, even if they’ve been dead for two hundred years.
Even with an extensive library at my disposal, it had taken me several hours to track down Emma Morris Delagardie. Fortunately, at least one of Colin’s ancestors had taken an interest in American history, although books on Burr and Benedict Arnold predominated. Based on the mentions in Jane’s letters to Henrietta, I knew that Emma Delagardie was collaborating with that tedious poet, Augustus Whittlesby, on a masque to be performed at Malmaison; that she was related, in some degree, to the current American envoy, Robert Livingston; and that she had a cousin named Kortright.
It was the Kortright name that gave me the clue I needed. With a little scrounging, I found the connection. James Monroe, not yet president, had been envoy to Paris in 1794. He had taken with him his wife, Elizabeth Kortright Monroe, his daughter Eliza—and his niece, Emma.
There was only one reference to the niece, a throwaway line. Monroe had enrolled his daughter, Eliza, and his niece, Emma, in Mme. Campan’s school for young ladies, where Eliza formed a lifelong friendship with Hortense de Beauharnais, whose portrait could still be seen at the Monroe plantation, Ash Lawn.
And that was all. For everything else, I was reliant on the incomplete tidbits of gossip in Jane’s letters, the gossipy, chatty, possibly lying letters that she sent to Henrietta, designed to both convey and conceal information. Was Emma with them? Against them? What was her real connection with Georges Marston?
I’d encountered Marston before, in my original researches. He hovered on the fringes of respectable society, milking his friendship with Napoleon’s brother-in-law, Joachim Murat, for promotion, while, on the side, he had been running a lucrative little smuggling ring that might or might not have been selling secrets as well as silk and brandy.
In his use of personal relationships for his own ends, Marston reminded me a lot of Colin’s sister’s ex- boyfriend, Nigel Dempster, curator of the Vaughn Collection. Like me, Dempster was on the trail of the Pink Carnation.
And, like me, he had been willing to date a Selwick to get his hands on it.
It wasn’t the same, I told myself. Colin had been—well, an accident. I had already been granted access to a bunch of the family papers by his great-aunt Arabella before he had burst onto the scene, and the attraction between us had taken both of us very much by surprise. I already had enough material for three dissertations. I was dating Colin because I wanted to be with Colin.
But for how much longer?
I still hadn’t answered Blackburn’s e-mail about the head TF position. Damn. I chewed on the side of a nail. I
