her fingers trembling.
“Emma?” said Jane. She didn’t stare—Jane would never do anything so graceless as stare—but her attention fixed on Emma with a great deal of concern. “What is this?”
Oh, what was the use?
“I know about yesterday,” Emma said despairingly. “I know about the two of you.”
“About the two of—” For a moment, Jane looked as near to perturbed as Emma had ever seen her. “About what?”
“Your conversation,” said Emma, which was just another way of saying the same thing without saying anything at all. “Augustus told me he had—”
“He had what?” Jane’s face was entirely remote. She might have been a stranger, rather than the woman with whom Emma had gossiped and laughed and compared bonnets.
“You knew how he felt about you,” said Emma wretchedly. “Couldn’t you have been a little kinder about it? Not that it’s all your fault. I didn’t mean to imply that. I know we all made fun—and he did make such a show of it —but that doesn’t mean there wasn’t real emotion there. Of some sort.”
Whatever she had expected, it wasn’t Jane’s reaction. Jane’s face relaxed. She seemed almost amused. “Is that all this is about?”
“All?” Emma’s voice was sharper than she had intended. “I know this may seem comical to you, but you didn’t see him last night, Jane. He was hurt, genuinely hurt.”
“Hmm,” said Jane. “I’m sure he’ll get over it. A few cantos, and he’ll feel quite the thing again.”
Emma bristled. It didn’t matter that she had said much the same thing, and crueler. She wasn’t the one he had been in love with.
“One doesn’t just get over a broken heart.”
“I wouldn’t know,” said Jane simply. “Matters of the heart aren’t my area of expertise.”
For a moment, Emma was distracted from the question of Augustus. She looked at her friend, so sought after, so feted, and yet, in her own way, so very alone.
“Don’t you miss it?” Emma said. “Being in love is—” How to explain it? Terrible and wonderful all at once. Messy, unpredictable, occasionally dreadful, and yet so incredibly vital.
Jane brushed the question aside. “Whatever it is that Mr. Whittlesby might have wanted or needed of me,” she said matter-of-factly, “I doubt love was at the heart of it.”
Memories of breath against her cheek, hands in her hair, lips against her neck, two feet away and a century removed.
“You don’t mean to imply—not Augustus!”
It took Jane a moment to catch Emma’s meaning. When she did, her eyebrows shot up so high, they nearly touched her hairline. “Heavens, no! Mr. Whittlesby is no Marston.” Completely oblivious to any implications that might have for Emma, she went blithely on. “I simply meant that Mr. Whittlesby’s interest in me is primarily”—she considered for a moment before settling on the appropriate word—“professional.”
“Professional?”
“His poetry,” Jane specified, in case Emma needed specification. “Every poet needs a muse.”
“That doesn’t mean he might not fancy himself in love with his muse,” said Emma. She felt, suddenly, very weary.
What a tangle. Jane couldn’t help not being in love with Augustus any more than he could have helped fancying himself in love with Jane, or Emma could have helped—
No. Emma pushed the thought from her mind. What was the use of adding another hopeless passion to the pile?
“Nonsense,” said Jane firmly, so firmly that Emma wondered, fleetingly, whether Jane really had been quite so unaware of Augustus’s intentions. “If it is a fancy, it’s a passing one. I imagine sculptors fancy themselves in love with their statues, but that doesn’t mean they expect the marble to reciprocate.”
“But you’re not marble,” said Emma. “And neither is he.”
“Why this sudden interest in Mr. Whittlesby’s emotions?” Jane’s voice changed as she looked at Emma’s face. “You’re not— Emma?”
Emma pressed her lips together, not trusting herself to say anything. “We’re friends,” she said. “We had a row.”
“You always said it was only the breeches,” Jane said softly. “Pure aesthetics, you said.”
“That was before I knew him,” said Emma, in a very small voice.
Jane set down her script very carefully, tapping the pages into order. “Are you sure you know him now?”
“What do you mean?’
Jane didn’t meet Emma’s eyes. “I mean,” she said carefully, “that Mr. Whittlesby is a very attractive man. And he can be a very charming one. But he isn’t…”
“Isn’t what?”
“Exactly steady,” said Jane, with the air of one navigating choppy waters. She reached out a hand to touch Emma’s sleeve. “There are better places to trust your heart.”
Emma twitched away. “I thought matters of the heart weren’t your expertise.”
“No, but I do know Mr. Whittlesby,” said Jane.
“Do you?” Emma thought of all the times she had seen Augustus kneeling in tableau at Jane’s feet, all the verse he had addressed to her, all the overblown sentiments, and, far worse, the private looks of longing. Something dark and nasty unfurled in her chest. “Or are you just afraid to lose your acolyte?”
“I just don’t want you to be disappointed,” Jane said reasonably. “Mr. Whittlesby is all very well for a—a drawing room flirtation, but he’s not settling-down material. He’s a poet.”
“You say
“That depends on the poetry,” snapped Miss Gwen, coming up behind them.
“I do wish people would stop doing that,” said Emma crossly.
Miss Gwen went on without paying any notice. “If you mean that Whittlesby fellow, it’s not piracy, it’s leprosy. At least piracy is a trade with a bit of dignity to it.”
Emma looked at Miss Gwen’s purple sash, broad black hat, and large gold hoop earring. Dignity wasn’t the word that came to mind. “Poetry is a noble profession,” she said, lifting her chin. “Think of Spenser. Think of Shakespeare.”
“Ha! Think Shakespeare is all it takes to win an argument? The man could turn a phrase, I’ll grant him that, but when you get down to it, he was nothing more than an actor.”
Given that Miss Gwen had just stepped off a stage, Emma wasn’t sure she saw the logic of that indictment. “Nonetheless,” Emma said coldly, “people still quote him to this day.”
“Is that what you want?” said Miss Gwen. “Immortality via Whittlesby? You won’t have much luck in that direction. Lining boots, that’s all those poems of his will be good for in ten years.”
“I’m not interested in immortality,” said Emma.
Miss Gwen’s dark eyes narrowed. “Then it’s the man you want? More fool you. You’d best go for the verse, then.”
Emma folded her arms across her chest. “What’s so very wrong with Mr. Whittlesby?”
Jane and her chaperone exchanged a look.
“Aside from the lack of waistcoat?” offered Jane.
“And jacket and cravat and hat…” enumerated Miss Gwen. “Hmph. The boy might as well appear in public in his nightshirt!”
“Our own dresses are just as revealing,” argued Emma. Well, maybe not Miss Gwen’s. Even as a scourge of the seas, the older woman was fully covered. Emma resisted the urge to cover her own chest as the chaperone looked pointedly at her décolletage. “A decade ago, we would have been wearing piles of petticoats. Who’s to say that fashion won’t shift again, making Mr. Whittlesby the forerunner of the new mode?”
“The open shirt and looking-silly style?” riposted Miss Gwen. “What next? Breeches for women?”
“It’s not so much the aesthetics of it,” Jane intervened, “as it is—well, his suitability.”
“One flirts with poets,” barked Miss Gwen. “One doesn’t fall in love with them. And one certainly doesn’t marry them.”
