two bulging cantos of
Having gotten this far, he wasn’t inclined to press his luck. “A distillation!” Augustus exclaimed. “The brandy wine of the overflowing tap of verse, refined into its purest form.”
“Something like that.” Mme. Delagardie cast a last look around the room. Checking the amenities? Or dispensing of incriminating materials? “There are paper and ink on the desk if you need them—not that well, that’s gone dry. It was a particularly ugly color, anyway, like mud. I never cared for it. There should be another one on the other side.…There it is! Under that pile of papers.”
Augustus could hear the clock ticking in the back of his head, precious moments wasted. As she rambled on, the guests were leaving, and, with them, Augustus’s chance to examine her study unmolested.
Augustus herded her towards the door. “When the muse does command, the materials will come to hand. Forgive my impertinence, Madame, but will your guests not miss your gracious presence amongst them?”
Emma Delagardie looked back over one shoulder. Her eyes were several shades lighter than her sapphires, more aquamarine than anything else, the pale blue of sailors after long sea voyages, bleached by staring into the sun.
“That,” she said, with a flash of wry humor, “is eminently debatable. But I’d best go say my good-byes. I’ll be back before you know I’m gone.”
Having exhausted his usual conversational effusions, Augustus limited himself to a deep bow. “Madame,” he intoned.
Mme. Delagardie’s heavily embroidered hem dragged behind her over the lintel. The white paneled door clicked softly shut.
Abandoning his pose, Augustus let out a long breath of relief. Alone at last. Now he could—
The door cracked open again. A blue feather poked through the gap, followed by a small, narrow-bridged nose.
“Would you like some refreshment while you wait? Coffee? Wine?”
Augustus juggled his scroll of poetry, trying futilely to maintain his grip. “Nothing,” he said shortly. “Er, that is, those of us who sip from the font of poetry need no other sustenance.”
“If you find yourself thirsting for anything more mundane, just tell one of the servants. They’ll bring you anything you like. Well, almost anything. Just don’t ask for an elephant.”
The door closed again before Augustus could ask what he might want with an elephant. Augustus watched it suspiciously for several minutes, but this time it stayed closed. Apparently, Mme. Delagardie’s charitable urges didn’t extend to meat pies or pastries or the offer of pillow and blanket in case he felt like a short nap.
He could use a nap, at that. He had tailed Kortright Livingston last night, all the way back to the house currently occupied by the American envoy to France. All he had discovered, after several uncomfortable hours perched in a tree, was that Livingston liked his brandy neat and scorned the use of nightcaps.
Not exactly the stuff to set the War Office buzzing.
There was a connection there, though; Augustus could feel it in his bones. (Although that might have been the cramp from perching in a tree; he wasn’t as young as he used to be.) Discreet inquiries had elicited the information that Livingston had an interest in the foundries in a town called Cold Spring. Foundries, in Augustus’s experience, generally made munitions. Munitions might be ingeniously combined into something one might call a device.
But what sort of device? A multi-firing cannon, designed to knock out the ships guarding the Channel? A mine of some sort, to be planted beneath the water and triggered from above? An experiment in rockets? Any might be de Lilly’s mysterious device. Any might have been in that folded paper Kortright Livingston had almost handed his cousin the night before.
What had he given her? And where was it?
Augustus surveyed Mme. Delagardie’s book room. If there was an attempt at concealment being made, it was of the same variety as his poetry, burying the wheat in the midst of a profusion of chaff. There were papers everywhere. Bills, letters, reminders, drawings.
The bills, Augustus had expected. They were the usual stuff of a lady of fashion, shoes, fans, gloves. Ditto the hastily scribbled notes, some still bearing the trace of a seal, arranging who was to meet whom at which box in the theatre, setting up expeditions to the dressmaker, canceling a carriage ride.
What he didn’t expect were the sketches. They weren’t the usual stuff of a lady’s sketchbook. There were no landscapes or bowls of fruit. Augustus reached for one paper, dangling perilously off the edge of the desk. Instead, it was a diagram, a picture of a mechanism of some kind, with notes in the margins marking off size and scale.
Turn the paper though he might, he couldn’t figure out what the blasted thing was meant to be.
It was at times like this that Augustus wished he had spent less time on Ovid and more time on engineering.
Was this the missing paper Livingston had handed Delagardie last night? No. That much, at least, he could determine by common sense alone. This paper was the wrong size, too long and too broad. It had also obviously never been folded, whereas the paper last night had been neatly folded into thirds and then folded again, small enough to tuck into a waistcoat pocket. Even among the profusion of debris on the desk, he could see nothing that matched those creases.
Whatever the paper was that Kortright Livingston had passed on to his cousin, it wasn’t on her desk.
Augustus cursed, and was surprised to hear his own curse come back at him in echo, relayed at considerable volume.
“Devil take it!” someone bellowed from a long way below. “That can’t be right.”
The noise was coming from the window. Dropping the paper, Augustus made his way to one of the long windows and looked down. Georges Marston stood below, his hat jammed under one arm, his curly hair glistening with pomade in the sunlight.
He was not a happy man.
“What do you mean she won’t receive me?” He muscled his way aggressively forward. “Let me in! At once!”
Augustus couldn’t see the footman, but he could hear him. “Forgive me, sir,” he said, “but Madame Delagardie has given orders that you not be admitted.”
Augustus leaned both elbows on the sill. So Mme. Delagardie had banned Marston from her house?
“That’s poppycock, sheer poppycock, do you hear?” Marston shouted, in a voice that could be heard in Boulogne. “There must be some mistake.”
“No mistake, sir.”
For a moment, Augustus thought Marston intended to strike the hapless servant. His hands balled into fists at his sides, and his muscles strained against the tightly tailored seams of his coat. Augustus waited for something to pop.
With an effort, Marston regained control of himself. His expression changed, an ingratiating smile replacing his previous snarl. “Women, eh?” he said, with false heartiness. “They never know their own minds. What if I were to make it worth your while?”
Marston dug in his waistcoat pocket and held out his hand, palm up, revealing the glitter of something silver and shiny.
The footman was spared the test of his morals—or deprived the chance to earn an extra sou. Someone else emerged from the house. The footman stood aside and a man stepped down, his boots dull against the stone of the steps. Both his hat and his jacket were an unfashionable brown, his cravat simply tied. His head turned curiously towards Marston as he passed, but he didn’t stop.
Marston, however, was galvanized into action. He sprang forward. “Mr. Livingston! Georges Marston. Your cousin introduced us. Last night.”
Augustus wondered how much of the previous altercation Kortright Livingston had heard or whether he knew his cousin had banned Marston from the house.
Tipping his head, he said coolly, “Mr. Marston.”
Marston hastily moved to get ahead of him, blocking his way down the street. “Madame Delagardie and I are good friends. Very good friends.”
Kortright Livingston kept moving. “I understand my cousin has a very broad circle of acquaintance in Paris.”
