The Garden Intrigue

His voice was soft and low, like the prickle of sweat against her skin, barely there, but impossible to ignore.

She should ignore it, she knew. Just ignore it and walk away. She was in a foul, foul mood and anything she said right now she would only regret later. She knew that, in the sensible, rational part of her brain.

But she turned anyway. Turned and said, incredulously, “What?”

Augustus folded his arms across his chest, looking offensively cool and comfortable in his billowing linen shirt, surveying her with all the superiority of his extra inches.

“You’re running away,” he repeated. “You won’t marry your cousin and you won’t join the court. You won’t go back to America, but you won’t settle at Carmagnac. You didn’t even want to write the masque until someone cornered you into it.”

“A pity I didn’t trust my judgment about that,” Emma shot back. “We might have been spared a great deal of bother.”

“No risk, no reward,” said Augustus coolly. “You aren’t willing to take the risks, so you forgo the rewards. You play with people and ideas, but you drop them before they get too serious—in the nicest possible way, of course. You wouldn’t want to upset anyone.”

“You might want to give that some consideration.” Emma could feel herself shaking, literally shaking, from her slippers right up to her sleeves. The buzzing of the bees had become a buzzing in her ears. “Not upsetting anyone.”

“You want everyone nice and calm and at a safe remove.” He was looking at her as though she were a butterfly pinned to a paper. It made Emma want to scratch him. “You won’t even have it out with that cretin Marston. You won’t tell him no, will you? You just placate him and put him off and hope he won’t cause a scene.”

Emma’s voice was shaky with rage. “My relationship with Georges has nothing to do with you.”

Augustus took a step forward, holding her in his gaze like a duelist with his opponent in his sights. “Your relationship with Georges has nothing to do with Georges, does it? You only picked him because you knew you wouldn’t have to keep him.”

The smug certainty in his voice made Emma want to slap him. “You know nothing about it,” she said coldly.

“I know you,” he said, and then, unforgivably, “you’re hiding.”

“Hiding?” Emma echoed. There was a red haze in front of her eyes. “I’m hiding? What about you?”

There was an old adage about hornet’s nests. Augustus had the uneasy feeling that he had just kicked one.

“This isn’t about me,” Augustus said hastily.

In fact, this wasn’t supposed to be about either of them. This was supposed to be about Mr. Fulton and his mysterious plans. For the mission, he had told himself, all for the mission. It would arouse suspicion for a man alone to be loitering by the Emperor’s summerhouse. But a man and a lady, in a rose garden…who would remark on that? Not to mention the niggling little matter of Horace de Lilly’s bombshell about Emma’s supposed betrothal.

It had been such a nice, tidy little plan: eavesdrop on the Emperor, reassure himself that this American marriage was just another nonsensical rumor.

Until it wasn’t. Tidy, that is. In fact, it was starting to feel distinctly out of control. What in the blazes had he been thinking? He hadn’t been thinking. It had just all followed, one thing after another. It had rattled him, thinking she might actually be going back to America, marrying that taciturn cousin of hers. The rest had just…come out.

“This isn’t about me,” he repeated.

“Oh, isn’t it?” said Emma. Her gloved hands were clenched into fists at her sides and there were two bright red spots in her cheeks that had nothing to do with rouge.

“You’re going to get sunburnt, standing out here like this,” said Augustus solicitously. “Perhaps we had better—”

“And whose fault would that be?” In her anger, Emma seemed to grow a good three inches. It took Augustus a moment to realize she actually had. She was standing on tiptoe in her ridiculous, frivolous, ribbon-trimmed slippers. That was going to hurt in a moment or two, but for the moment, she was buoyed up with rage. “But, no, you had to drag me out here to ask ridiculous questions and cast aspersions on my character. Heaven forbid you tear me to bits in the comfort of a shady drawing room. No. It had to be out here.”

“I wasn’t trying to tear you to bits,” Augustus said soothingly. “I just wanted—”

“I know,” said Emma viciously. “To talk. Fine. We can talk. Do you want to talk about running away? Let’s talk about you. A grown man and you don’t even own a waistcoat!”

That wasn’t fair. “I own a waistcoat,” he said defensively. “I don’t see where that—”

“Don’t you? You can’t even commit to an outer garment, much less anything else, and you talk to me about running away?”

It was time to get this conversation back where it belonged. “I was simply pointing out,” Augustus said in the most reasonable tone he could muster, “that you have managed to dodge every single commitment that’s been presented to you. If not hiding, what would you like to call it?”

Emma went off like a grenade. “You. You have the nerve to stand here and ask me that? What do you know about commitment? I’ve kept Carmagnac going all these years. I have a house. I have dependents. I have responsibilities.”

Did she want to talk about responsibilities? He’d say saving England from invasion was a jolly big responsibility. Knowing that if your messages were intercepted, people would die—that was responsibility. Knowing that lives depended on the insipidity of his poetry, on his eschewing the bloody waistcoat—that was responsibility. Knowing that he could damn himself by a chance word, by a slip, by a murmur in his sleep, that was responsibility.

He had eschewed friendships, family, outer garments, all for this, and she told him he had no sense of responsibility? If it weren’t a matter of both personal and national security, he could pin back her ears with responsibility.

But he couldn’t.

Emma was still in full spate. “And you? You live in rented lodgings. You have no friends that I’ve seen. And what about family? No wife, no children, no parents, no siblings…”

“I had a sibling. A sister.”

That got her. Emma broke off mid-rant. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t mean—Was she— Is she—?”

“Married,” said Augustus grimly.

She had dwindled into a country housewife, counting the chickens, making soup for the poor, more interested in the pantry than poetry.

Emma settled her hands on her hips, her lips set so tightly, Augustus was amazed she could get the words through them. “That’s what normal, grown-up people do, Augustus. They don’t go around posturing from salon to salon, spouting ridiculous bits of verse. They get married. They grow up.”

He had never heard that tone from her before, not even in the most acrimonious of their debates about the final act of the masque.

“You should talk,” retorted Augustus. “Is there any ballroom that’s safe from you? When was the last time you refused an invitation? Or a glass of champagne?”

Emma’s voice rose. “Do you think I enjoy this—limbo? I was married. If Paul hadn’t died, I would still be married. I would have a nursery and children and something more to think about than the next dress and the next ball. But Paul died.”

Augustus was caught up short by the raw pain in her voice. This was an Emma he had never seen before.

He had never thought that she might have loved her Paul, not like that. She had been fond enough of him, she had made that much clear; she had missed him, that was fair enough; but with all the ups and downs and gossip and scandal, Augustus had just assumed, as everyone else had, that it couldn’t have been a terribly deep emotion. As she had said herself, she had been young.

He was an ass. A complete and utter ass.