She left Whittlesby standing by himself, frowning after her.
Wiggling away through the throng, Emma extended a gloved hand to her cousin. They weren’t an embracing sort of family. “Welcome, cousin Robert! My humble salon is honored by your presence.”
“Impertinent child,” said cousin Robert equably. He didn’t pinch her cheek, for which Emma was deeply appreciative. Her rouge would have come off on his glove. “Do you imagine I have nothing better to do than gad about like you?”
Emma batted her eyelashes at him. “But I gad so well.”
Cousin Robert shook his head, only half jokingly. “What your parents would say…”
Emma tilted her fan to form a screen for them. “I won’t tell if you won’t.”
Like so many gentlemen of a certain age, cousin Robert rather enjoyed being flirted with by a pretty young thing. All within the bounds of propriety, of course. Paris propriety, that was. At home, manners and mores were different. Emma remembered that, as through a glass darkly. She wasn’t sure she would know how to get on there; not anymore.
“I know Mr. Fulton needs no introduction to you,” cousin Robert said, indicating the man beside him.
“Genius never needs an introduction,” said Emma, lowering her fan. Her cousin’s protégé had been in Paris nearly as long as she had. His panorama had created something of a stir several years back, making him all the rage—until the next rage, that was. “How go the plans for the ship without sails?”
“Steamboat,” Fulton corrected. He seemed to fizzle with energy, from his tightly curled hair all the way down to the bottom of his boots, which shifted impatiently on the faux marble floor. He bent a reproachful look on Emma. “I know
“Flattery, flattery, Mr. Fulton.” Emma sighed. “I should have thought a man of science would be above such things.”
Fulton turned to cousin Robert. “Your cousin, sir, has the most wonderful understanding of the mechanics of hydraulics.”
More hard-won than wonderful. Engineering hadn’t come easily to her. She had always been more a creature of words than of charts and figures. But hydraulics had been Paul’s passion. Don Quixote had his windmills; Paul had an expanse of marshland he was determined to transform into habitable and arable land, freeing his tenants of the crippling diseases bred by the swamps. It had been a noble project, but one that had absorbed so much of his time and attention that there had been little left over for the cosseting of a child bride, and a spoiled child bride, at that.
She had accused him of caring only for her dowry, of wooing her with lies, before storming off to Paris to slake her hurt feelings in a round of amusements.
Poor Paul. Poor both of them. It hadn’t been all a lie, although it had taken her years to see that. In is own way, Paul had loved her. Those long afternoons in the garden outside Mme. Campan’s, the poetry, the clandestine letters, he had meant them all. He had reveled as much as she in the high drama of romance. She could see that now.
Once the courtship was over, though, he had settled again into his normal life, into his estate at Carmagnac and drainage and the million and one responsibilities of land ownership, while Emma waited fruitlessly for the poetry that had gone silent. It had been easy enough to assume the worst, that he had, as everyone claimed, married her for her purse, especially as their evenings devolved from caresses into recriminations and from recriminations into full-blown fights. Later, bit by bit, she had pored over his notes and charts, puzzling over the mysterious mechanics of it all, making painstaking sense of the rough sketches of pumps and pulleys and the mathematics that went with them. Once she convinced him she was in earnest this time, that she meant to stay, he had explained it to her, Paul slowly and patiently remedying the defects of a ramshackle education, sitting hour after hour with her in his study, going over facts that must have seemed as elementary to him as the difference between Mozart and Beaumarchais was to her.
It had been a renaissance for their marriage, as well as for Paul’s beloved Carmagnac. A second chance, after so much hurt and confusion and misunderstanding.
Paul’s picture gazed blindly above her head from its position over the mantel, frozen forever at thirty-seven. He had been painted in his study at Carmagnac, surrounded by the implements of his vocation. Behind him, the treatises he had so painstakingly collected and shipped out across the marsh stood in neat rows in the bookcases behind him. The painter had caught Paul’s surroundings, but not his expression. The black eyes that had been so bright and lively in life were flat and dull on canvas, staring blankly out at the viewer. Like a death mask.
A premonition? She had commissioned the portrait as an anniversary present, shortly before he took ill, the first present she had ever bought him—and the last.
Why did he have to go and die just as they were beginning to understand each other? He had died, leaving her with Carmagnac, a great deal of abstruse knowledge about hydraulics, and a wealth of hurt and confusion.
Fulton bowed gallantly in Emma’s direction. “If I were wise, I would make it a practice to consult Madame Delagardie on all my inventions. Her observations are always invaluable.”
With an effort, Emma yanked herself back to the present. “Pooh. It takes little understanding to be shown a drawing and nod one’s head in all the appropriate places. I bow entirely to your expertise, Mr. Fulton, and can only extend my thanks. The new pump is a vast improvement.”
Cousin Robert dealt her an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “I imagine it must be hard for you to leave Carmagnac,” he said kindly. “Having put so much work into it.”
“Not really,” said Emma. “I never did spend terribly much time there, except when Paul—well. I’ll go down to visit again at harvest. Otherwise, if there are problems, Monsieur le Maire knows to send for me here. Somehow, requests for funds never get lost in the post.” She made a droll face.
Cousin Robert failed to respond in kind. “Harvest?” he said. “But how is that possible?”
Emma raised both brows. “By the grace of God and good weather? That is the usual way. Some friends were kind enough to make some suggestions for improvements, which I sent along to my steward. I’ve become quite the farmer. Mother would be so amused.”
Something was still bothering cousin Robert. His brows had drawn together over his nose. “But you won’t be here to see it, surely? Not when the ship sails in June.”
“Ship?” Emma turned back to Fulton. “Are you planning to kidnap me on your steamboat, Mr. Fulton, and bear me off to a Barbary pirate’s harem?”
“Quite amusing, my dear,” said cousin Robert, “but I meant your return to New York.”
“My—?” For once in her life, Emma found herself at a loss for easy banter. “My what?”
Cousin Robert appeared oblivious to her imminent asphyxiation. “Young Kortright told me,” he said comfortably. “I’d say I was sorry to see you go, but as I’ll be leaving, too, I’ll be glad for it. You’ll have to come visit us at Clermont once you’re settled.”
“I—what?”
“You’ll be returning to Belvedere, I take it? Much better than setting up an establishment in the city. New York isn’t like Paris, you know.”
Cousin Robert should know. He had been involved in the public life of the city for years, as recorder and then as chancellor. Emma doubted there was an official capacity in which he hadn’t served. But that was beside the point. Someone was obviously suffering from a misapprehension.
“I do beg your pardon, cousin Robert,” she said apologetically. “But I believe there must have been some mistake. I have no intention of removing from Paris.”
Cousin Robert frowned. “Young Kortright seemed quite sure of it. He said the passage was already arranged.”
“For someone else, then.” Rumor spread so quickly in Paris. “I have no intention of going anywhere at all. Other than to Malmaison with you, of course.”
“Best speak to young Kortwright, then.” Cousin Robert scanned the room, his eyes falling on someone near the door. “There he is. He seemed quite certain that you would be accompanying him back to New York in June. Said he was here at your parents’ request.”
Kort was awkwardly examining a statue of Venus, curved and dimpled and wearing little more than a wisp of marble veiling. He looked out of place in her salon.
Thirteen-year-old Emma would have desired nothing better than to be swept off her feet and onto a ship by her adored cousin.
