“Mmph,” said Augustus enigmatically.
Emma heard paper crinkle and realized she was crushing Mr. Fulton’s plans between her fingers.
“You’re beginning to scare me,” she said, only half jokingly.
“What I have to tell you,” Augustus said, “places the power of life or death in your hands. Not only my life,” he added, “but those of others as well.”
The words ought to have sounded melodramatic. They didn’t. He spoke them in a simple, matter-of-fact tone that sent a chill down Emma’s spine.
Pressing her lips together, she nodded to show that she understood, even though she didn’t understand, not one bit.
Augustus looked at the documents in Emma’s lap. “Those papers didn’t get there by accident. I put them there.”
“But why?” she asked.
Augustus took a deep breath and lifted his eyes to hers. “Because I am—and have been for some time—an agent for the English government.”
“An agent,” Emma repeated. Her mind scrabbled uselessly with the word. She had an agent. He managed her property for her. Somehow, she didn’t think that was the sort of agent to which Augustus referred, not given the way he was looking at her, as though he had just dragged his guts out to be pecked by particularly vicious vultures. Not just an agent. An agent for the English government. Under ordinary circumstances, that might mean any number of things. But not now, not in a time of war, with all official diplomatic and commercial communication between the two countries forbidden. “You mean a spy?”
“I prefer master of inquiries,” said Augustus.
Emma gaped at him. There he sat, his long hair curling around his face, the neck of his shirt untied where she had untied it, looking so normal, so familiar, and yet so ineffably different. It was something in his expression that had changed, something in the way he held himself.
“You’re not—this is not—” Emma floundered. “You mean it.”
“Every word,” he said.
“But—” How could that be? He was a fixture of the Parisian scene. He had been here a good ten years or more. Did that mean for ten years, he—Emma’s mind shied away from the thought. “Then, your poetry…”
“A front,” he said quietly. “And a code.”
Through a glass, darkly, she could remember standing with him in Bonaparte’s new gallery in the Louvre Palace. She could hear her own voice, in echo, saying,
“That’s why you sound one way in public and another in private. It’s not just because your patrons expect a poet to sound poetical.”
He bowed his head in acknowledgment.
“When I realized that you weren’t what you claimed to be, weren’t you afraid I might find you out?”
Augustus studied her face for a moment. “No,” he said gently.
The word hit Emma like a slap across the face.
“No?” she echoed, knowing that in it was encapsulated a worse insult than she could immediately comprehend. She forced out a laugh. “No, of course not. Why would I? Not silly Madame Delagardie? You must have thought me such a fool.”
“I don’t think you a fool.”
Didn’t he? Emma pressed back against the wall, the thin pillow bunched against her back. He had known she would never figure it out on her own. And she hadn’t. She wouldn’t have. Not even now. He might have given her a ridiculous story about the plans—no idea how they got there, part of a prank, insulation for the cold nights—she would have believed any of it, just as she had believed him before. Emma wrapped her arms around herself to stop herself from shaking.
“Why are you telling me this now?” she asked shrilly.
“Because we promised each other honesty,” Augustus said simply.
Honesty? Emma stared at him, at his familiar-strange face, at the deep brown eyes regarding her so steadily and so sadly, and felt a burning rage boil up inside her. He had lied to her. He had lied to her about everything and he dared to speak to her about honesty?
Nothing, nothing at all was as she had thought it to be. Her life, her life as she had known and experienced it, wasn’t what she had believed it to be. It was all upside down and inside out and all because this man, this treacherous, lying, treacherous—she had already used “treacherous,” hadn’t she? It didn’t matter. The outcome was the same, whatever she called it. She had been deliberately deceived, deceived and misled.
Seen through this new lens, seemingly innocuous events took on a sinister hue. She remembered Augustus, uninvited, offering his services with the masque. Augustus, again uninvited, invading her salon. Augustus, always attentive, always solicitous, hinting that their best work would be done if he was to accompany her to this salon or that party.
“You were the one who sought me out about the masque,” she said, her voice shaking. “Not the other way around. You were the one who insisted we needed to work together. Why?”
He didn’t even try to deny it. “I had been told that Bonaparte had a new weapon he was testing. Here. This weekend.”
“I see,” said Emma, and for the first time she finally did. “You needed me to get to Malmaison.”
Augustus nodded.
Emma’s voice went up. “All of this”—the weeks of work, the cozy téte-à-tétes in her study, his supposed concern for her health and well-being—“you did all of this for an invitation to Malmaison.”
“Not all,” said Augustus, and his voice was so low she could hardly hear it.
“You used me,” Emma said wonderingly. “You used me and I didn’t even know it.” It would be amusing if it weren’t so awful, so awful and so painful. She lifted her chin and said, conversationally, “You’re much better at it than Georges.”
Augustus flinched. “It’s not like that, Emma. I promise—”
“
Augustus leaned forward. “You have every right to be angry. But at least hear me out. There were reasons —”
She held up a hand to forestall him, her mind working furiously. “You wanted Mr. Fulton’s plans. You knew they would be in the summerhouse. That’s why you wanted to talk to me today, wasn’t it? Not because you were worried I might be marrying Kort. You just needed me to get to the summerhouse.”
The guilt on his face was all the answer she needed.
Emma felt tears stinging her eyes and blinked them fiercely away. She wouldn’t cry for him. He wasn’t worth crying for.
“I’m right, aren’t I?”
“That was part of the reason.” There were lines on Augustus’s face that hadn’t been there before. “I shouldn’t have involved you. I know that. At the beginning, yes. That was different. But now, once I—” He broke off, seemingly at a loss. “I shouldn’t have done it. It wasn’t fair to you. It wasn’t fair to us.”
Us? What us? There was no us. “I wouldn’t have wanted our friendship to get in the way of your plans,” said Emma politely.
“It’s not—” Augustus pressed his palms against his eyes. She had him on the defensive now. Shouldn’t that make her feel better? There was a lump in Emma’s throat that wouldn’t go away when she swallowed. Augustus drew in a deep breath. “Today at the summerhouse, you had me turned so topsy-turvy that I completely forgot why I was meant to be there. I forgot the plans. I forgot everything but you.”
Emma drew her legs up under her. “How very inconvenient for you.”
“I didn’t want to deceive you,” he said. “Trust me that far, at least. There were things I couldn’t tell you, things I wasn’t allowed to tell you. But everything else—everything we’ve done together, everything I’ve said to you—Emma, that much is real.”
