She had tried false curls once, but disliked the sensation of wearing someone else’s hair. She might divert, but she wouldn’t deceive. One had to draw the line somewhere.
“You said as much yourself last night. I’ve changed. I’m not the girl who left all those years ago.”
“I won’t deny you’ve grown up, or that you’ve become fashionable, but—”
Emma cut him off with a quick gesture of negation.
If she went home, it would be home to other peoples’ families and other peoples’ children. Home to having her dresses and mannerisms picked over and dissected. Home to gossip and censure and those horrible hissing whispers as the good matrons of New York leaned their heads together just above their embroidery frames. “Yes, that’s the one. The one who ran off with the Frenchmen. No! Don’t look now! She’ll see you.”
She could envision it now. Neither maiden nor matron, she would be used as a cautionary tale to frighten disobedient daughters. “Watch out, or you’ll wind up like Emma Morris! She married without her parents’ permission and look what’s become of her.”
“Please do try to understand, Kort. I don’t want to be a cautionary tale.”
“All right, so you’ll have to pull up your bodices a bit. Surely that won’t be too onerous.”
Emma gave up trying to explain. How could she, when she couldn’t entirely explain to herself? She wasn’t entirely at home in Paris, but she would be even less at home in New York now. Of the two, better the devil she knew.
“Trust me about this, won’t you, Emma?” Kort wheedled. “If you’re too bored in New York, you can always catch the next boat back to Paris.”
Something about his tone set Emma’s back up. “What makes you think I can just pick up and leave like that? I have responsibilities here. I have obligations.”
“Do you?” He eyed her frivolous headdress with a decidedly skeptical expression. “Such as?”
She could have mentioned Carmagnac. She could have made flippant remarks about her close, personal relationship with her dressmaker. But, instead, in that fateful moment, her gaze chanced to fall on Augustus Whittlesby.
The idea bubbled up quick as lava, and just as quickly onto her tongue. Emma lifted her chin. “Haven’t you heard? Mr. Whittlesby and I have been commissioned by the First Consul himself to write a masque for his next party at Malmaison.”
Let him see just how much she was wanted here in Paris. Let Kort try to argue with the First Consul!
Emma extended a hand towards Mr. Whittlesby, the bracelets on her wrists clanking together in a discord like a knell as she turned her back defiantly on her cousin and the rest of the world she had left behind.
“Haven’t we, Mr. Whittlesby?”
Chapter 8
For by seeming seemed she
All that was fair,
But seeming unseemly be;
What boots it to seem,
When to seem is to show
And show deceptive be?
Augustus followed Emma Delagardie into her book room.
Downstairs, the guests were grazing among the last of the cold meats, holding their glasses out to be refilled by the omnipresent footmen, gossiping about their neighbors and slandering their friends. Mme. Delagardie had led him out of the fray, promising a quiet place where they could begin their work once the other guests had taken their leave. Not too much work, she had specified, but enough to make a start. With only a month until performance, they should at least agree upon their plot and their characters.
Which, Augustus thought cynically, most likely translated to her dictating the plot and his doing the work.
That was quite all right with him so long as it also translated into an invitation to Malmaison. An invitation to Malmaison and a chance to look for the paper that Emma Delagardie had so casually tucked into her reticule the night before.
Augustus had no proof that either Emma Delagardie or her cousin, the one with the strange name, had anything to do with Bonaparte’s mysterious device, but the coincidences were piling up, too many for comfort. It had seemed innocuous enough that Bonaparte intended to test his device during the visit of the American envoy. The presence of the Americans might be intended only as a distraction, a smoke screen. One had the impression that they were brash and not terribly bright, thus making them perfect fodder for the role of unwitting decoy.
Likewise, it would ordinarily mean little that the American envoy’s nephew had a diagram of some sort of mechanical whatnot in his waistcoat pocket. It might be nothing more than a sketch for a new patent stove or a design for an improved water closet, Yankee ingenuity once again at work. They were a strange and mercantile people, these Americans. One never knew what they might come up with next.
Last, and possibly least, it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Georges Marston might wish to rekindle an old love affair with a wealthy widow. It was commonly known that Marston had expensive tastes in clothes and cheap tastes in women, both of which were best supported by a wealthy patroness. It would be unremarkable but for the fact that Marston was also linked to the fleet at Boulogne.
Which was awaiting the arrival of a device. Presumably encapsulated in a diagram. Somehow connected to the Americans.
Put it all together, and Augustus was all too glad when Mme. Delagardie suggested she wait for him in her book room, where he might commune with the muse without interruption. He just never bothered to specify which muse was meant. There was a muse for history, for poetry, for theatre, for dance, why not one for spies?
“Please, make yourself comfortable,” Mme. Delagardie said, bustling around the room, putting books on top of other books and sweeping papers off the seat of a chair. “It will just be a moment, while the rest of that lot clear out.”
It was a book room in more than just name. The white painted walls were almost entirely covered with shelves, the shelves covered with books. Her books? This had never been a man’s study. An octagonal carpet in a pattern of yellow and pink flowers lay in the center of the floor, the shape mirroring the pattern of the parquet. Two long windows, their drapes held back by tasseled cords, let in the afternoon sunlight, providing light enough to read without the aid of the candles in their flower-patterned sconces along the walls. Most of the candles were half burnt, suggesting that they had been lit, and recently.
It was a bright, cheerful room, and obviously much used. The chair by the fireplace sagged in the middle, the seat cushion hollowed from repeated sittings, while a patch on the left arm had been rubbed almost bare, as if the user had leaned heavily on that one side, or swung her legs over it, as Augustus remembered his little sister doing long, long ago, an apple in one hand and a book in the other.
He pushed the thought away. He didn’t like to think of Polly.
Emma Delagardie’s desk was a magpie’s paradise of bits of paper and shiny objects, dented pen nibs lying discarded next to empty inkwells, books held open by other books, papers piled on papers.
Emma Delagardie lifted a cup off the desk, frowned into it, made a face, and stuck it on a shelf. “I really should get the maids in here.” Dusting her hands on her skirt, she turned back to Augustus. “It shouldn’t be long. Everyone usually leaves about this time. It’s just the good-byes that seem to stretch on forever.”
“I assure you, Madame, I shall be well entertained in the contemplation of the mutual endeavor on which we are about to embark.”
She looked a bit uneasy at that. “Consider it more a coastal jaunt than a sea voyage,” she suggested. “It’s really meant to be just a short piece.” She looked at the roll of poetry that was never far from his arm, all twenty-
