used to play prisoner’s base at Malmaison, and Hortense would sing in the evenings. There was no court and no curtsying and no protocol or precedence. Even after Paul—” She broke off.
“Even after?” Augustus prompted. After Paul what?
“They were very kind to me” was all she said. With a sigh, she admitted, “I miss it. I miss the informality and the camaraderie. I miss the simplicity of it all.”
“Nothing can stay simple forever,” Augustus said.
Unbidden, memories of the vicarage of his youth rose up before him, a churchyard and an oak tree and vines twining along the side of a house, red brick warm in the sunlight. His little sister skipped in the sunlight, twirling to make her skirts billow as she danced.
He had visited once, after the house had already passed into different hands. Polly had married, and his father had retired to Tunbridge Wells to do whatever it was that retired clergymen did. He had known it would be a bad idea, and it was. The tree had been cut down, the vines pruned away. There were fresh curtains in the window and rosebushes, scraggly with youth, planted by the door. It was a pleasant, prosperous place, but it wasn’t his. Not anymore. He had gone away without going inside.
It was for the better, he told himself. “We all grow up, whether we like it or not.”
“Perhaps.” Mme. Delagardie didn’t sound convinced. “But is there any need to make it more complicated than it needs to be? When I see what they did to Hortense, marrying her off to that—”
She broke off, catching herself before she could say whatever she had intended.
“Ambition,” said Augustus softly, “can be a very powerful force.”
This time, Mme. Delagardie didn’t take the bait.
She fluttered a hand in an unconvincing facsimile of her usual insouciant style. “Forgive me. I’m being horrible and selfish, babbling on at you like this. What you must think of me! I scarcely know what I’m saying.” Rubbing two fingers across her eyes, she said, with obvious sincerity, “I didn’t sleep as well as I ought last night.”
“Out carousing?”
She flashed him a too-bright smile. “Oh, naturally.”
She was lying. They both knew it. But it was, in its way, a gallant lie.
Her lilac paint had smeared next to her eyes when she rubbed them. It gave her the look of a small girl caught playing in her mother’s paint box, with her rouge too bright for her cheeks and a feather hanging crookedly from her hat. For the first time, he noticed how small she really was, narrow-shouldered and fine-boned, dwarfed by her own finery. She held herself as though she were ready to ward off an army with a smile, balanced forward on the balls of her feet, head up, shoulders back, best feather forward. An act, but a brave one.
Despite himself, Augustus felt a dangerous stirring of pity. He had discounted her before as frivolous and vapid—and perhaps she was still those things. He had suspected her of scheming, or at least of playing the role of go-between—and there was nothing to say that one couldn’t look lost and vulnerable and still be a villain. Fundamentally, though, he didn’t know what to make of her. Attached to the Bonapartes, yes, but not to Bonaparte. Or was that, too, just an act? And what about Paul Delagardie? The gossip had been quite clear; she had left him, possibly cuckolded him, then taken up with Marston after his death. Yet, when she spoke of him, it was with something that sounded very akin to grief.
None of it made any sense at all.
He looked up to find her watching him. “Do you know,” she said slowly, “I’ve noticed something.”
“What?”
“For quite some time, you’ve forgotten to rhyme.”
Augustus sucked in air through his nose, feeling as though he’d just been punched in the gut. Not just any sort of punch. A punch thrown with killing force. His stomach muscles tensed, his kidneys contracted, he could feel the cold prickle of sweat below his arms. His breath jammed in his throat as panic coursed through his body. The surprise of it had him gasping. She had walloped him good and he had never ever seen it coming.
She stood in front of him still, looking small and harmless and innocent, all frills and rouge, lilac paint smeared around her eyes, one earring caught in her hair, twisted at an odd angle.
Had all of it—the confidences about her youth, the feigned dismay, her friend’s interruption—been nothing more than a trap? If so, it was cleverer by far than anything Napoleon’s Ministry of Police had tossed at him before.
Augustus blessed the training that enabled him to maintain a calm mask, even as his skin prickled with goose bumps, and his heart thrummed beneath his shirt.
“Madame?” he said coolly, because he didn’t trust himself to say anything more.
“It’s all an act, isn’t it?” Mme. Delagardie was examining him as though he were a butterfly on a naturalist’s table. “You’re much more sensible than you sound.”
He had two choices. He could launch rapidly into a stream of inanities in an attempt to convince her that his seeming lucidity was an aberration. If she were the feather wit she appeared, that might have worked. But she wasn’t a feather wit, was she? She had certainly sussed him out neatly enough.
Augustus chose to go with the second option.
“And what if I am?” he said.
Mme. Delagardie shook her head. “Nothing. I just wondered…why?”
“People expect their poets to sound a certain way.” Augustus dropped his voice and shortened his vowels, reverting to his natural voice. He lifted his shoulders in a shrug. “I satisfy their preconceptions. They commission poems. Everyone gets what they want.”
Sometimes, a false admission worked better than a denial.
Mme. Delagardie looked at him with curiosity, but without suspicion, her blue eyes as guileless as a child’s. “Don’t you mind it? The dissembling?”
Step one: false admission. Step two: shift attention. Augustus took a shot in the dark.
“Do you?” he shot back.
“I don’t—I don’t know what you mean.” Her words were bold enough, but her hands betrayed her, fidgeting with the ruffle on her reticule.
He had hit home. What was it Jane had said?
Trust Jane to get it right. Again.
Augustus folded his arms across his chest, squishing down the folds of excess fabric. He took in the kohl that darkened her lashes, the rouge that lent color to her cheeks, the powder that hid the circles beneath her eyes. “You play the merry widow very nicely. You manage to sound nearly as vapid as Madame de Treville. But it isn’t true, is it?”
He had her on the defensive now, just where he wanted her, her attention focused on herself rather than on him.
“It isn’t all an act,” she said defensively. “I can be quite silly at times. And I do like parties and shiny things.”
He cocked an eyebrow. “Made of paste?”
“I should never have told you that,” she muttered. She looked up at him. “Shall we make a deal? A bargain? For the duration of our collaboration?”
Talk of deals made Augustus wary. “What kind of bargain?”
She raised her chin. “No pretenses.”
“None at all?” Augustus regarded her quizzically. “Even lovers keep secrets, Madame Delagardie.”
“Do you think I don’t know that?” In a more moderate tone, she said, “All I meant was that we can speak sensibly to one another, rather than, oh, I don’t know, trying to maintain some sort of absurd role.”
“In other words,” said Augustus slowly, “it will be easier to work together if I eschew some of the abverbs.”
“Not all of them, but…yes.” She favored him with a whimsical smile, the sort of smile that made one want to smile back. She did have her own charm, the little Delagardie. “It will certainly save us time. We only have three weeks until the performance.”
“Ah, yes,” said Augustus. “A performance fit for an emperor.”
Mme. Delagardie wrinkled her nose. “I wish you wouldn’t say that. It might be rumor yet,” she added hopefully.
