She made it sound like an inalterable law. Somewhere in the Napoleonic Code was buried a provision banning matrimony for all purveyors of verse, to be defined under subsection 62(a)(iii), not to be confused with subsection 62(a)(iv)—minstrels, traveling.
“I said nothing about marriage,” said Emma hotly. Or love. In fact, she had said nothing at all. It was all being assumed.
“You’re not the not-marrying kind,” said Jane. And then, before Emma could argue, “I’ve seen the way you look at Louis-Charles.”
Hortense’s baby. Emma bit down hard on her lower lip.
“You need someone reliable,” said Jane. “You need someone who can make a home with you. What about your cousin?”
“I wish everyone would stop trying to marry me off to Kort,” said Emma, so vehemently that Jane took a step back and Miss Gwen cackled, either in approval or just on general principles. “I have no interest in Kort. Kort has no interest in me. Shall I put it in verse?”
“Please don’t,” said Jane hastily. “I think we’ve had enough of that. But—Mr. Whittlesby?”
“He’s not what you think,” said Emma hotly.
“You don’t know the half of it,” muttered Miss Gwen.
Jane shot her chaperone a look.
“He’s not the dilettante he pretends to be. He’s clever, truly clever.” Too clever sometimes. She remembered the way he dealt with their poetical meanderings, precise, analytical, entirely at odds with his public persona. And then there was the rest of it. “And he’s kind.” She looked at Jane’s and Miss Gwen’s uncomprehending faces, both in their own ways so cloistered, so little acquainted with the world. “Kindness isn’t so common as you might think.”
“So the man’s neither a cretin nor a brute,” said Miss Gwen. “My faith in mankind is restored.”
“I don’t need a hero,” said Emma. She pushed aside the memory of Augustus neatly tripping Marston. “I don’t want someone who will conquer kingdoms or bestride the globe like a Colossus or whatever else heroes are supposed to do. I don’t want flowery professions.” She had had that once, from Paul, and look how that had turned out. She took a deep breath. “I can’t claim to make any sense of it, but I’m happier when I’m with Augustus than I have been since—well, for a very long time.”
It was true. When she was with him, she didn’t worry what people were thinking or whether she was going to be able to sleep at night. She didn’t brood about the past or fret about the future. She was happy simply to be, and to be with him.
At least, she had been. Emma pinched the fabric of her skirt between her fingers.
Into the silence, Jane said quietly, “People aren’t always what they seem. Are you sure this is what you want?”
If someone had asked her that nine years ago, on the eve of her elopement with Paul, she would have blithely declared yes. Now? She knew Jane was right, even if she might be right for the wrong reasons. It had taken her years to know Paul, truly know him, with all their false starts and willful misconceptions. She wouldn’t even vouch for her ability to know herself.
She had a sense of the Augustus-ness of Augustus, his quick, restless intelligence so at odds with the languid air he cultivated; his brusque displays of affection—pulling her cloak around her shoulders, taking her champagne glass from her hand—so very much the opposite of his flowery odes; the fundamental honesty that forced him to admit his own flaws and misconceptions, even when she knew he was burning to believe otherwise.
All these were Augustus, but she knew they weren’t the sum of him. She knew instincts could deceive, that perception could be warped by desire or pride or sheer stubbornness. She could feel herself being stubborn now, could feel her toes curling in her slippers, digging into the floor.
It would be so easy to say yes, to say it defiantly and wield it as a weapon.
But it would be a lie. She didn’t know what she wanted. To know what she wanted implied a degree of certainty she couldn’t claim. She had thought she knew what Paul was and what their life together would be; she had been sure, then, that she knew what she wanted. Now—she had no idea. She had no idea when she would have an idea. And where did that leave her? She could go on as she had been, cocooned in her house in the Faubourg Saint-Germain, making the same rounds of parties, drinking enough champagne to get to sleep, waiting for enlightenment to strike, waiting for a divine voice to boom out and tell her to get on with it, whether getting on with it meant marrying Kort or joining Mme. Bonaparte’s household or taking up missionary work in the outer Antipodes.
Or she could take a grand gamble. There had been a rope swing over the river at Belvedere. Year after year, Emma had picked her way carefully down the bank, easing into the water bit by bit as the others went flying over her head, releasing the rope to land with a cry and a splash.
Emma wasn’t sure what she wanted, but she thought she knew what she needed.
“No,” Emma said honestly. “But I would rather take the chance and risk being disappointed.”
“Fools will be fools,” Miss Gwen said austerely.
“Be careful,” said Jane.
Fulton’s plans blurred in front of Augustus’s eyes.
He couldn’t make heads or tails of them. The body of the device was almost, but not quite, cylindrical, coming to a point on one side, fitted with a curious sort of propeller on the other. There was a bump with a stick protruding out of the top, not at the middle, but all the way over to one side, and two rectangular, letter-labeled devices at the bottom. An octagonal structure of some sort billowed above the whole. It looked almost like a kite, but far too large and oddly shaped. Across the whole were additional markings and scribbling: levers, pulleys, dimensions.
Augustus turned it upside down, then sideways. It made no sense in any direction. Hell, he couldn’t tell if it was an elongated and oddly shaped form of grenade, a means of conveyance, or a perfume atomizer designed for Mme. Bonaparte’s boudoir.
Emma would know what it all meant.
Pushing away from the desk, Augustus briskly shuffled the plans back into their folder. Short of divine engineering intervention, staring at the plans wasn’t going to lead to enlightenment. He stuffed the whole beneath the coverlet of his bed. Only an idiot attempted to hide contraband beneath a mattress or a pillow. But no one ever thought to try the simple expedient of lifting up the counterpane.
He needed to get the plans back to London. It would be even better if he could deliver the inventor with the plans. Fulton had seemed less than pleased with Bonaparte that afternoon. Fulton was a native of Pennsylvania, yes, but not of the rabidly anti-English variety of colonial. Fulton had spent time in England before, trying out one of his inventions on the estate of the Duke of Bridgewater.
Augustus would deliver the plans to England. Personally. Not by courier. And once back in England… He smoothed the blankets over the folio, arranging them so that no telltale bump showed. Once back in England, he would stay there. He had overstayed his time in Paris. His heart wasn’t in it anymore. He was growing sloppy. Sloppy killed. True, Wickham would be disappointed to lose his longest-term man in Paris, but that would be more than balanced out by the delivery of the plans for Bonaparte’s secret weapon.
He didn’t want to go on as he had, caricaturing himself into the mere mockery of a human being.
Emma had been right.
Emma. There was the drawback to his plan. Grow up, she had told him—well, not in so many words, perhaps, but the implication had been clear—but to do so meant England, so near geographically, and yet so far away in every other sense. He wouldn’t miss the salons or the taverns, but he would miss those afternoons in Emma’s house, sprawled across a too-small chair in Emma’s book room.
He would miss Emma.
He could picture her as she had walked away, her back very stiff beneath the thin fabric of her dress, damped with sweat until he could practically see the skin beneath. Her arm had been threaded through Mr. Fulton’s, her head tilted at her listening angle, but he knew she had been no more listening than he had been capable of concentrating.
Was she at rehearsal? In her room? Sticking pins in a poet-shaped doll?
He had to find her and set things right.
