The Garden Intrigue

really, really hadn’t wanted to think about that.

“Excuse me.” A girl with a clipboard was hovering just inside the door to the dining room. She ventured a tentative smile, an I’m-so-sorry-but smile. “You’re not supposed to be in here. It’s registered personnel only.”

Registered personnel?

I must have given her a look, because she fidgeted with the metal bit at the top of her clipboard. “You know, production staff, caterers, people connected with the family. So I’m going to have to ask you to leave.”

Unless this was like hospital admissions, where you had to be officially engaged before anyone would tell you anything, I considered myself pretty darn connected. Besides, picking up someone’s socks and taking turns with the washing up had to count as a domestic partnership.

I peered over her shoulder at the chart. “I should be on there. I’m”—the owner’s girlfriend? Researcher in residence? Chief cook and bottle washer?—“Eloise Kelly,” I finished lamely.

She rustled efficiently through several sheets of closely printed pages, looking up apologetically as she came to the end of it. “I’m afraid I don’t see you here. Unless you spell your name some weird way?”

“Nope,” I said. “It’s just Kelly, spelled the usual way. No Qs or silent Ns or anything like that.”

She checked again and shook her head. “Sorry. Still nothing. Are you with the magazine people?”

Now there was a magazine involved, too? Colin wasn’t going to like that.

“No, I’m with Colin. The owner,” I specified when the DreamStone representative looked blank. “The one who keeps trying to make sure that no one sets the rosebushes on fire.”

Comprehension dawned. “Unhappy-looking guy in a green jacket?”

“That’s the one.”

Her face brightened. She grinned at me, girl to girl. “He’s cute.”

“Thanks.” I wasn’t sure why I was taking the credit here, since his looks weren’t something I’d had a hand in. He had his mother to thank for that, although he also had her to thank for Jeremy and the DreamStone invasion, so maybe not so much. I shrugged. “I like him.”

Which, as any woman knows, is girl-speak for “I’m ridiculously over the moon about him, but not like I’m going to tempt fate by admitting to that.”

Shoving the clipboard under one arm, the girl stuck out a hand. “I’m Cate, by the way. Cate Kartowsky. That’s Cate with a C.”

“A cate conformable to other household cates?” When she gave me a blank look, I said, “Sorry. I was having a Shakespeare moment. Isn’t this production supposed to be—?”

“I was a communications major,” said Cate. “With a minor in poli sci. Lots of Rawls and Nozick, not so much on the Shakespeare.”

“I do English history,” I said. “So the Shakespeare sort of creeps in.”

Cate nodded knowledgeably. These things happened. “I guess we’ll all be getting our Shakespeare this week, right?”

“Help me out here. Someone told me it was Much Ado About Nothing, but in Regency costume?”

“You’ve got it,” said Cate. She leaned closer, making sure no one was listening. “I know, it sounds ridiculous. But there’s the whole Austen craze, and Micah wanted to capitalize on that. He also wants cred for doing Shakespeare. There was some version of Much Ado About Nothing that made a big stir —”

“With Robert Sean Leonard,” I said. “And Kenneth Branagh. We were all in love with Robert Sean Leonard as Claudio when I was in Upper School.”

Cate looked blank. It made me feel very old. I was only twenty-seven. Should I really be feeling this ancient?

“Anyway,” she said, brushing Robert Sean Leonard aside, “Micah figured that if they were each successful on their own, he could put the two together, and, bingo! Instant box office hit.”

Or instant box office flop. “Is it true that there’s going to be singing and dancing?”

“Only in the Regency ballroom scenes,” said Cate comfortably. “Originally, there was going to be a whole rap music thing, but the execs didn’t buy the Regency rap idea.”

Thank goodness for that. I tried to picture Augustus Whittlesby rapping and, scarily, almost succeeded.

“We’ll be doing a workshop on English country dances for the extras later this week if you want me to sneak you in,” said Cate. “It should be fun.”

“Thanks. I’ll think about it.”

She gave me a lopsided grin. “Bring your boyfriend. We’re making the guys wear breeches.”

It would take something a little stronger than gin to get Colin to go along with that. “Good luck with that,” I said.

Cate brandished her clipboard. “What did you say your name was again? I’ll add you to the list.”

There’s nothing like boy-talk for creating instant friendship. We were now officially Buddies.

“Eloise,” I said. “Eloise with an E.”

“Gotcha.” Balancing the clipboard expertly on one forearm, she wrote down my name on the bottom of the list in firm, tidy letters. “Kelly, right? No Ns or Qs.”

“Right, right, and right.” As she flipped up the top page to add me to the bottom, I caught a glimpse of another document below. “Is that the seating chart for tonight?”

“What? Oh, over there? Yes. You wouldn’t believe the trouble we had working that out. There’s all sorts of weird stuff with the family. I heard that—”

Remembering who I was again, she broke off, flushing guiltily.

Trying to salvage the situation, I said, “Trust me, you just don’t want to know. This bunch makes Agamemnon and Clytemnestra look well balanced and functional.” I gestured to the seating chart. “Do you mind if I take a look?”

“Knock yourself out,” said Cate cheerfully, relinquishing the clipboard to me. “Just don’t change anything or I’m screwed.”

“That’s always annoying, isn’t it?” I said absently, scanning the minutely detailed chart. “When people move place cards around. I have some cousins who like to do that. It makes my grandmother apoplectic.”

The writing on the chart was so tiny, it was like trying to read the fine print on a postage stamp. It took a fair amount of squinting and guesswork to make out my own name. Jeremy had put me all the way down at the foot of the table, twenty people down from Colin.

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I muttered. “You’re a prince among men.”

“What?” said Cate, who was taking advantage of her temporary liberation from the clipboard to scroll through the accumulated texts on her mobile.

“Nothing! Just talking to myself. Occupational hazard of spending too much time in libraries.”

Either Jeremy was getting back at me for Paris—he hadn’t been pleased when I’d backed Colin in protesting the invitation to the film crew—or he was employing a simple divide-and-conquer technique. I haven’t said much about Colin’s family, have I? To call it complicated would be to do it a disservice. Colin’s family makes the tangled bureaucracy of late medieval Byzantium look like a model of efficiency and clarity.

Jeremy was Colin’s mother’s husband, yes (and I dare you to say that three times fast), but he was more than that. He was also Colin’s cousin. It was a tangled, messy story, and no one had been particularly eager to fill me in on the details, but the bare bones of it were that Jeremy, ten years Colin’s mother’s junior, had run off with his cousin William’s wife while William lay dying a miserable death from the cancer that was slowly eating him from the inside out.

Somehow, when it happens in fiction, it sounds better. Helen and Menelaus, Iseult and Mark of Cornwall, all those beautiful women of legend bound to older men. We cheer them on when they run off with their young lover, when Helen escapes with Paris, and Tristan and Iseult quaff their potion, even though both leave chaos and tumult behind. It’s romantic. It’s dramatic. And it’s all once upon a time.

When it’s your boyfriend’s mother who’s run off with the younger relative of her husband, it’s not quite that romantic anymore. Instead, it just seems rather sordid.

That was all a matter of record. Then there was the other stuff, the emotional undercurrents I could only begin to guess at. There was no way of securing any sort of confirmation, but I would have been willing to wager a