The Garden Intrigue

Twenty-five-year-old Emma smelled a rat.

“Oh, really?” murmured Emma. She flashed a charming smile at cousin Robert and Mr. Fulton. “If you will excuse me, gentlemen, I really must have a little talk with young Kortright. We apparently have much to discuss.”

As she swept away, with the maximum swish her morning gown would afford, she heard her cousin saying confidingly to Mr. Fulton, “Past time she went home. I can’t think what she stays on for. Her mother wrote me —”

It was a conspiracy.

And it wouldn’t be quite so annoying if Emma didn’t sometimes wonder if her mother wasn’t right. She wasn’t sure what kept her in Paris. Memories? Or simply a reluctance to go home?

“Emma!” Kort seemed more happy than otherwise to see her.

Emma cut him off. “What’s all this about taking me back to New York?”

Kort blinked, but recovered quickly. Of course, that might also have been the effect of her sapphires. With the sunlight streaming through the windows, they glittered rather impressively. Pity they were paste like all the rest of her jewelry, the real jewels having been bartered off to pay for hydraulic pumps and improved roofing.

“Didn’t you read the letter I gave you?” he asked.

“Not yet.”

It was still sitting on her dressing table. She hadn’t needed to open it to know what it said. The minute she had seen her mother’s handwriting, she had been able to divine the contents. It would be the usual run of family gossip, ending, as it always did, with “come home,” as if she were an erring child being called in from a day spent too long at play.

Guilt made Emma sharp. “Why don’t you summarize it for me?”

“All right.” Her mother wasn’t the only one who thought she was twelve. Kort’s tone of long-suffering patience set her teeth on edge. “When your mother heard I was to be in Paris, she asked if I would escort you back. She seemed to think—”

“Yes?” prompted Emma.

“—that you were eager to return, but wary of traveling on your own. Since I was to be here anyway, I was happy to oblige.”

Sharper than a serpent’s tooth it was to have a scheming parent. Emma didn’t know whether to be furious at her mother or rather impressed. After years of increasingly insistent letters had failed to have their effect, her mother had sent out the big guns: Kort. She was too shrewd by half, her mother. She had known—as who didn’t? —of Emma’s long-ago tendre for her cousin. And she was ruthless enough to take shameless advantage of it.

As if Emma were still a thirteen-year-old trailing along after her cousin’s coattails!

“How very kind of you,” said Emma, in deceptively mild tones, “to take charge of me like that. I don’t know how I would possibly manage.”

Kort didn’t know enough to recognize danger when he heard it. “It wasn’t any bother. I had to come over here anyway. And you know I’ve always been fond of you,” he added belatedly.

“I am so very glad,” said Emma brightly, “that undertaking my conveyance wasn’t so onerous a duty for you. I should have hated to have been a chore for you. Allow me to relieve your mind. My presence in Paris has nothing to do with an inability to book my own passage or entertain myself for the course of a sea voyage. I haven’t left because I haven’t wanted to.”

“But your mother said—”

“My mother hears what she wants to hear.”

“Don’t you miss it?” Kort said sensibly. “Don’t you want to come home?”

Miss it? He didn’t know the half of it. Home.

Home to the Hudson and the changing patterns of the leaves in the fall. Home to long, lazy summer days where wild strawberries ripened beneath their fan-shaped leaves, and wasps buzzed about the trees in the orchard, sucking the sweetness of the peaches. Home to her old room with her shelves of battered books and the one- legged doll she had been too old and grand to admit she’d wanted to bring. Home to the swing by the lake and her initials carved discreetly into the base of the old apple tree: E.M. and K.L. in perpetuity. K.L. hadn’t any idea, of course. She had eaten fallen apples and tossed the peels over her shoulders, willing them to make a K or an L, a divination of future marital bliss.

There were times when she missed it all with a horrible, visceral ache. When she missed the swing and the tree and the lake, whose quirks and shadows she had once known so well, in winter and in summer, the shallows where the carp liked to hide, the dark patch in the center where the ice never quite froze hard enough for skating, except in that one winter where it was so much more than usually brutally cold and the Albany Post Road had turned as icy as the river.

She had nieces and nephews she had never seen, adorable, chubby-cheeked children running wild across the woods and fields where she and her siblings had once played, picking wild raspberries and stumbling into ponds and getting themselves scolded and hung out to dry. Somewhere in the kitchens of Belvedere, children would be sneaking bits of bread and jam, and Annetje would be dipping apples into batter for frying. Emma could still taste them in memory, the crisp, hot coating on the outside, the center disintegrating into sweetness.

The French did many things well, but they didn’t understand about fried apples.

“There are certainly many things I miss about home,” she said slowly. “But…”

“Don’t tell me you’ll miss all this,” said Kort, indicating the red-painted walls with their murals à la Pompeii; the collection of classical vases in their specially designed cupboards; the chattering guests and their selection of accoutrements. “Paris is all very well, but it isn’t where you belong.”

“You haven’t seen me since I was thirteen. What makes you quite so sure that you know where I belong?”

“But I know you,” he said. “I’ve known you as long as you’ve known you.” He raised his eyebrows at a particularly ridiculously garbed dandy, his hair combed down over his ears, his shirt points so high he couldn’t turn his head, carnelian fobs jangling beneath his waistcoat. Kort gestured in his direction. “Just look at these people.”

She might not wholly approve of all their sartorial choices, but Paris was her adopted city. “Those people, as you call them,” she said sharply, “stood by me when my family disowned me. Those people took me in and comforted me when my husband died.”

Kort’s eyes focused on her. She could see the surprise in them, and it made her angry, angrier than she had felt in a long time. Did he not think she felt hurt, too? Or that her so much reviled marriage might have mattered to her, might have been more than a family embarrassment or a stir in the international scandal sheets?

She shook off the hand he held out to her. “They stood by me. Where were you?”

“Emma…”

His pity was the last thing she wanted. “Never mind,” she said. “That wasn’t fair.”

He was still watching her, his eyes bent on her face. “No,” he said slowly, “but perhaps neither was I. I didn’t mean it as it came out. I just meant that you might be happier back among your own kind.”

Emma tugged at his sleeve. “Look at me, Kort.”

“All right,” he said mildly, humoring her.

“No,” said Emma. “Really look at me. Not at what you expect to see, or what memory provides for you, but at me, right here, right now.”

She could see herself in the pier glass behind Kort, not a girl anymore, by any means. She might not be a beautiful woman, but she had learned how to be a fashionable one. No less an authority than Mme. Bonaparte herself had taught her how to apply rouge to her lips and paint to her lids, how to darken her blond brows and add the illusion of curves to a frame too thin for fashion. She wasn’t the Emma who had left in 1794. There was no hiding or disguising that.

What would they make of her in New York? She didn’t like to think of it.

Emma shook her head, and the mirrored Emma shook her head, too, short, feathered hair bouncing. Her straight blond hair wouldn’t hold a curl, so she made a practice of threading it with ribbons or other folderol, distracting from the straightness of it.