delightedly. She flapped the paper at Augustus. “Mr. Fulton has even included instructions for its use.”
“Good,” said Augustus. “I hope you can figure it out, because I can’t.”
“Nonsense,” said Emma in a preoccupied tone, her head bent over Mr. Fulton’s scribblings. “If I can learn to make sense of these things, anyone can.”
Augustus propped an elbow on the sill of Francia’s tower, currently still under construction. “Why did you? I wouldn’t have thought mechanics would have been your métier.”
The lid had been very carefully nailed down. Oh, bother. She was going to need to find someone with a crowbar. And considerably more arm strength than she possessed.
“It’s not.” Maybe she didn’t need a crowbar after all. If she could find something to use to pry back those nails…Emma looked around the crowded backstage area. She saw paint, paintbrushes, lumber, and enough rope to string up an entire troupe of highwaymen, but nothing that resembled a useful tool. “But it all reduces to simple enough principles once someone explains.” She slid her fingers under the join of the lid and gave an experimental hitch. “Bother. I need something to get this lid off.”
“A crowbar,” said Augustus, in that definitive way men have when talking about tools, even men clad in decidedly effeminate costumes. “Your husband took an interest in these things, didn’t he?”
Emma picked ineffectually at one of the nails in the lid. “Yes.”
Too much of an interest. As Paul buried himself deeper and deeper in diagrams and models of mechanisms, she had accused him of wanting her dowry more than he wanted her, of marrying her merely to fund his pet project: the draining of Carmagnac.
Ironic, if that were the case, since her family had cut her off without a penny in punishment for marrying without their permission.
In retrospect, she felt distinctly sorry for Paul. He had found himself without the fortune he had been led to expect, saddled with a temperamental fifteen-year-old girl who demanded homage and went off in a huff when she didn’t receive it.
If she hadn’t idolized him so much at the start, they might have done better. But then, he had been just as guilty as she. He had been equally surprised when she had turned out to be not the goddess of his imaginings but a fifteen-year-old girl, spoiled and untried.
What a mess they had made, both of them.
Augustus hunkered down next to her. “You’re never going to get the nails off that way,” he said. “I’ll find you a crowbar.”
Looking at him, his long hair curling around his face, his attention innocently on the crate, Emma couldn’t stop thinking of his expression as he had gazed up at Jane, as rapt as if she were the Cytherea his poems proclaimed her. It had been a joke before, his devotion, but now…
“Be careful,” she warned.
“With the crowbar?” Still crouching beside the crate, Augustus arched a brow. “I assure you, Madame Delagardie, I am far more proficient with tools than this fragile frame would imply.”
“Don’t play games with me,” said Emma crossly. “I didn’t mean the crowbar. I meant Jane.”
He went still. “What about Jane?”
Emma swallowed, trying to muster the right words. “I don’t want you hurt, either of you.” She bit down on her lip, concentrating on the rough wood of the crate, the places where it had cracked and splintered. “It isn’t kind to idolize someone like that.”
Augustus pushed up and away. One minute he was next to her, the next she had a prime view of his knees. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Emma remembered the way he had looked at Jane on her chair, as though she were the most precious thing in a million kingdoms, as though he would cross storm-tossed seas for the sake of a mere glimpse of her face.
Leaning back on her haunches, Emma laughed without humor. “You have her up in a tower so high no man could possibly reach her, no matter how high the ladder. It’s not fair. It’s not fair to her and it’s not fair to you.”
Beneath the exuberant fall of his hair, his face was still, as still and stony as a winter’s day on a barren beach.
Yanking at a nail with the pads of her fingers, Emma said, “You can’t make someone into your Cytherea just by wishing it.”
“I’m not trying to make anyone into anything,” he said tightly.
Emma looked up from her shredded fingernails. “No? Then why the Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes? Why twenty-two cantos?”
But she couldn’t ask that.
“That’s not—” Augustus caught himself before he said whatever he had been about to snap out. He said shortly, “That’s poetry. Don’t you think I can tell the difference between fact and fiction?”
“No.” There. It was out. There was no going back. Softening her voice, Emma said, “It’s romantic and lovely, but none of it’s real. Jane’s not like that. She—”
“She
Emma held on to the crate with both hands. “That’s not what I meant! Do you think I would ever say anything against Jane? I love her too. It’s just that she’s not like that. She not…poetical.”
Without another word, Augustus swung away from her. His expression of contempt seemed to linger behind him, like a sun print on the surface of the eye, creating shadow images long after the object has gone.
Emma jumped up, steadying herself against the lid of the crate. “Augustus—”
His long legs made short work of the aisle between the stage and the door. Either he didn’t hear or he pretended not to. He pushed hard with both hands against the door, sending it ricocheting open. Emma held up a hand to block the sudden wash of sunlight.
For a very brief moment, Augustus turned back. Against the light, he was a dark silhouette, sinister and still.
In a hard, tight voice, he said, “I’ll find you a crowbar.”
The door swung shut behind him, blotting out the man and the light.
Picking futilely at the nails on the lid of the case, Emma would have felt better about the crowbar if she hadn’t been quite so sure Augustus was itching to use it on her.
Chapter 16
If all the world and youth were young
And truth on every sailor’s tongue,
Then these avowals might me move
To live with thee and be thy love.
But I come from a colder clime…
Idolization, indeed!
Augustus let the theatre door slam shut behind him, the crack of wood against wood a satisfying echo of his feelings.
After all these weeks, he had thought Emma, of all people, would know better.
Certainly, he played the besotted poet in public, but that was just an act, like the adverbs and the alliteration. The verbiage was mere costuming, no more a part of him than the billowing shirt he affected in public. His real feelings for Jane weren’t composed of such airy nothings; they were based on a firm foundation of mutual respect, interests, and understanding. He knew Jane for what she was, just as she knew him. Between them, there were no
