Emma was left staggering, wobbly and breathless, as he strode across the room. It felt colder, suddenly. It might be June, but the nights were cool and the theatre unheated. She hadn’t been cold a moment before.
She followed him, weaving erratically around the joints and hoists and tubes. “I think we should talk about this.”
“We have talked. What do you think we were doing just now? Dancing?”
No wonder people thought dancing was just a step away from…Well. Emma didn’t want to think about what they had just been doing. She rubbed her hands against her arms to stop them tingling.
“Not that sort of talking,” Emma said firmly. They’d known each other too well and too long now to let him distract her like that. They were well out of the lamplight now, among the rolled-up backdrops and piles of props. Emma ducked under a painted proscenium that had been used last summer for
“Don’t,” Augustus said harshly. “I was being a fool long before I knew you. Don’t flatter yourself, Madame Delagardie. Your involvement is purely incidental.”
That certainly put her in her place.
Emma hugged her arms to her chest. “There’s no need to be a cad just because—just because it didn’t go as you wished.”
Augustus raised a brow, leaning back against a painted panorama of Seville that looked strangely like Venice. “It?”
“Jane.” There. It was out. “A one-sided love isn’t love.”
“I’d forgotten.” His voice dripped with sarcasm. “You have such vast experience of the world.”
She refused to let herself be baited. She raised her chin. “I do, actually. I know what it’s like, you see. To find out that someone isn’t what you imagined him to be.”
She met his gaze frankly, an eye for an eye and a stare for a stare, refusing to let herself be embarrassed or shamed out of countenance. She might be younger than he, but she knew she was right, and, deep down, he knew it, too.
Augustus broke first.
He turned his head away, dragging in a deep, shuddering breath. She could see his chest rise and fall beneath the thin fabric of his shirt. “I’ve been in love with a mirage,” he said despairingly. “You knew it. She knew it. Everyone knew it but me. What sort of idiot does that make me?”
“A human one?”
Augustus emitted a harsh bark of laughter.
“It wasn’t entirely a mirage,” Emma said soothingly. “Whatever else she is, Jane is a lovely person. It’s not as though…it’s not as though you fancied yourself in love with Caroline!”
“Christ, Emma!” Augustus dropped down onto an overturned rowboat, his long limbs folding neatly beneath him. “Do you have to make the best of everything?”
He sat hunched over, his elbows resting on his knees. He looked like a little boy like that, for all that he was at least a few years older than she. Emma felt a rush of affection and irritation and concern, all mingled together. She wanted to draw his head to her bosom and rock him back and forth, murmuring soothing noises, to put her arms around him and cuddle the pain away.
“I try.” Her dress brushed against his boot tops as she moved next to him. “Better that than the contrary. Wouldn’t you rather a half-full glass?”
“It depends on the contents. Are you offering hemlock or foxglove?”
Emma tentatively reached out to rest a hand on his head. His curls were thick and springy beneath her fingers, so different from Paul’s short crop or her own stick-straight hair. “Surely, it’s not as bad as that.” She bumped him with her hip. “Scootch over.”
She wouldn’t call it exactly a scootch, but Augustus slid over, making room for her on the overturned raft.
He didn’t look up. “I’ve been in love with a mirage for the better part of a year.”
Emma settled herself down next to him. “What’s a year in the grand scheme of things? And at least you’ve got lots of poetry out of it.”
Augustus looked at her with dead eyes. “You think my poetry is rubbish.”
“Not all of it.” Taken individually, the words had promise. It was just strung together that they made no sense. “Other people like it.”
Augustus sighed. “You really don’t tell a lie, do you?”
“I try not to.” Tentatively, Emma slid an arm around his shoulders, cuddling him as she would Hortense, or as she had Paul once, long ago. She found the hollow above his shoulder blade and pressed down with two fingers, rubbing away the pain. “It really isn’t so bad as all that. I promise.”
She couldn’t have said whether she was talking about his romantic predicament or his poetry.
She could feel the moment he relaxed against her, letting his back slump and his head come to rest against her breast. His breath emerged in a long exhalation, almost like a sigh. He curled up against her, a tangle of dark curls hiding his face. His skin was warm through the thin muslin shirt, his body heavy against hers, curling comfortably into the hollow below her arm.
Emma stroked her fingers through his hair, focusing on the drowsy warmth of his body, the dust motes on the floor, the scents of soap and skin, as her brain turned and turned in unpleasant circles.
She wondered if she had been wrong to warn him away. He might have been happier continuing to daydream of Jane, worshipping her from an arm’s length away. But what happened when an arm’s length became too far? When he wanted more? He had been bound to find out sooner or later. Surely better sooner, before the hurt became even greater.
Emma rested her cheek against his hair and assured herself that what she had done, she had done out of friendship. And it wasn’t that she was glad that Jane had answered as she had, not really. It was simply—simply the hastening of an inevitability. That was all. There was no other reason at all.
They sat in silence for what might have been five minutes or half an hour, no sound but the rhythmic rustle of his hair beneath her fingers, the soft susurration of their breath.
Into the dusty silence, Augustus said diffidently, “Did Jane ever mention it to you? Did she know that it wasn’t—that I—”
“If she suspected, she never said anything.” Emma chose her words very carefully, stroking his hair in long, measured strokes. “I think she values you too much for that.”
“Yes, but only—” Augustus mumbled something incomprehensible.
“What?”
Augustus shifted in his seat. “Nothing.” But the mood was broken. He shook off her hold, drawing back so he could look at her, his hair brushing across her chest. “When you said you knew what it was like, what did you mean?”
Emma caught herself floundering, unsure of what to say. It was much easier being on the other side of it. She preferred eliciting confidences to making them.
“I—exactly what I said. That’s all.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Emma pressed his head back into the crook of her shoulder. “This is about you, not me, remember?”
She could feel his skepticism, from somewhere in the area of her collarbone. “Is it? It’s only fair. I confide in you; you confide in me.”
Emma peered down at the top of Augustus’s head. “Appealing to my sense of fair play, are you?”
His voice rose sepulchrally from her chest. “You brought up the topic.”
“I—oh, fine.” Was it possible to feel both very protective and very irritated at the same time? Fair enough. “I was very young when I met my husband,” she said, striving to put a sensible face on it. “I had all sorts of romantic images about him. Don’t misunderstand me! Paul was a wonderful man, really he was. He just wasn’t the person I thought he was.”
“What was he?” Augustus’s voice was a brush of breath against her bosom. She could feel the tingle of it straight down to her toes.
Emma shivered with something that wasn’t cold.
