The bed rustled. “Emma. Emma, wait.” She could hear the bed ropes creak as Augustus levered himself to his feet. “There’s something else I have to tell you.”
Emma didn’t turn around. “There’s nothing else you can possibly have to say to me.”
She twisted the knob of the door. The metal was warm beneath her fingers, worn smooth with use. Time did that, they said. It smoothed off rough edges and healed wounds. Or so they said. What they didn’t talk about were the scabs it left behind.
“Wait, please,” Augustus pleaded. “Just a moment. Is that too much to ask?”
Emma didn’t wait to see if he would follow. She pulled open the door of the room. The hallway was empty, the rooms lining it deserted as their occupants frolicked in the sunshine.
“Emma—” Augustus’s voice sounded very far away. He spoke in English in his urgency. “Emma, I think I might be in love with you.”
“Too late,” she said, and sent the door swinging shut behind her.
Chapter 30
When plots we lay and plans we set,
The more we feign, the leave we get;
When first we practice to deceive,
Our lies catch us in a tangled weave.
“Mr. Whittlesby?” It took several moments for Augustus to realize that someone was speaking to him, and still more for the source of the voice to register. Jane’s serene smile was beginning to look a little ragged around the edges as she said, “You had promised me a word about my lines.”
“Of course, my pulchritudinous princess,” Augustus said mechanically. Emma was on the other side of the room, sharing a coffeepot with the soon to be former American envoy to France, the elder Mr. Livingston. She was not looking at Augustus. It had been nearly twenty hours since they had last spoken. Not that Augustus was counting. “Nothing would give me greater pleasure.”
“One would never be able to tell,” murmured Jane.
“I beg your pardon.” Augustus fluttered his sleeves in the old style, but the move felt forced. “Affairs of verse have weighed heavily upon me.”
Affairs, but not affairs of verse.
Emma had kept her word; there had been no midnight raids on his bedroom by the Ministry of Police. She had kept her word in other ways as well. With the masque rapidly approaching, she had managed to ever so subtly pretend he didn’t exist. Oh, yes, she said the right things, made the right noises about being terribly excited about the performance and so very grateful to Mr. Whittlesby for his expert assistance with the script, but she said it in her society voice, glib and meaningless, as if he were merely the hired poet the world believed him to be.
There was only an hour left until the masque. The primary members of the cast, with the exception of Jane, had already made their way to the theatre, to be outfitted and assume their roles each in their own individual style. Miss Gwen had last been seen marauding somewhere out back, a ragtag band of pirates trailing along behind her. Bonaparte was in his council chamber, closeted with the cream of the Admiralty, while the remainder of the party, those involved in neither playacting nor policy, partook of coffee and cakes in the drawing room prior to the evening’s promised spectacle. There was to be an alfresco supper served after the performance, supper and a fireworks display reputedly a secret but already known to everyone.
The younger Mr. Livingston was already in the theatre, assuming his theatrical breeches, but the elder Mr. Livingston was partaking of coffee. Marston, Augustus noticed, was also hovering near, but never quite next to, Emma. Augustus scowled. It went unnoticed by either party. Emma had her gaze resolutely fixed on her cousin Robert, as he waxed lyrical about the benefits of the territory of Louisiana, the purchase he had negotiated with Bonaparte.
Blast it all, no one was that fascinated by the Mississippi River.
Jane shook out her script, wafting it underneath Augustus’s nose. “It’s this rhyme,” she said loudly. “It doesn’t quite scan.” In a softer voice, she added, “I have promising tidings.”
“Of what?” murmured Augustus, rubbing his nose. “My dear lady, you have got the pronunciation wrong. If you simply change the stress on the last vowel, you will find it rhymes perfectly well.”
“How inventive!” exclaimed Jane, then dropped her voice. “Our inventor. He is, it seems, dangerously disaffected with the current regime.” And then, more loudly, “But doesn’t that change the meaning of the word?”
“Oh, fair one, have you not heard of the term poetic license?” Augustus bent his head over the script. Good God, they had written drivel, he and Emma. But what fun they had had doing it. Those long afternoons in her book room, laughing over a particularly ridiculous turn of phrase…Augustus yanked himself back to the present. “Will he defect?”
“I grant you no license, Mr. Whittlesby, poetic or otherwise, save those accorded by good manners,” said Jane severely. “All it will take is a word in his ear. I heard him speaking to Emma yesterday.”
Emma. Automatically, Augustus’s eyes sought her out. She was still seated by the elder Mr. Livingston, partaking of coffee from one of Mme. Bonaparte’s delicate china cups. She wore one of her extravagant costumes, white satin decorated with silver flowers embroidered around glittering diamond centers, but, for once, her demeanor failed to echo the sparkle of her costume. There was an unaccustomed fragility about her, in the delicate bones of her shoulders, in the hollows below her cheekbones.
“Yesterday,” Augustus repeated. “Yesterday?”
“Yes, in the theatre,” said Jane, frowning at him. Inattention was not acceptable. Jane preferred to say her piece only once. “He reiterated his concerns to Mr. Livingston this morning.”
Yesterday. Augustus remembered Fulton’s mutinous expression as he stormed out of the summerhouse. If he hadn’t been so rattled by Emma, if he had stopped to consider the ramifications of that then…
“Livingston,” added Jane, “counseled caution, at least until his official term as envoy is done. Mr. Fulton seemed disinclined to heed him.”
If he had had his wits about him, would there have been any need to steal the plans?
If he had spoken to Mr. Fulton then—subtly, cleverly—there would have been no need to steal the plans. There would have been no need to puzzle over them. There would have been no need to hide them beneath his coverlet. If the infernal plans hadn’t been beneath his coverlet…
Emma would have needed to be told sooner or later, Augustus argued with himself. Given his imminent departure for England, the operative word was “sooner.”
But did it have to be just then?
His body was firmly of the opinion that it had been very poor timing, indeed.
“I infer that,” said Jane, “from the fact the Mr. Fulton was already packing his baggage, even though the party does not end until tomorrow. When I saw him, he was tearing apart the summerhouse, looking for his plans.”
Augustus straightened. “Looking for his plans?”
Jane regarded him levelly. “They seem to have gone missing.”
The careful construction wasn’t wasted on Augustus. He had just been scolded, in the most imperceptible of fashions.
“No, they haven’t,” Augustus said grimly. They would have to find Fulton, find him and bring him over before he could make a scene. “But if you think he can be—”
“Insupportable!” The door to the drawing room banged open. “Utterly insupportable!”
Mr. Fulton was far from his usual dapper self. His curly hair was in disarray, his jacket misbuttoned.
“You were saying?” murmured Jane.
