“Damn,” muttered Augustus.
Fulton made a beeline for the older Mr. Livingston. “I wish to make a formal complaint,” he announced.
With his jowls jowly and his coat pleasantly creased, Livingston looked like an affable country squire, but the warning look he gave Fulton belied his easygoing air. “Let’s just discuss this ourselves, shall we?” he said comfortingly. “Have a cup of coffee, Robert. Or would you prefer chocolate?”
“I don’t want coffee, or chocolate. My plans.” The word came out as a lament, Hecuba crying for Troy. “My plans. They’re gone.”
Emma sat silently, her head down over her coffee cup, her face hidden. Horace de Lilly paused in his game of cards. Marston drifted closer.
“I call this a travesty,” said Fulton, refusing the chair Livingston offered him. “Our negotiations may have come to a standstill, but simply to appropriate the fruits of a man’s labor— Not that it should surprise anyone! The very art on the walls—”
Livingston neatly cut him off before he could say anything that might cause an international incident. “Are you sure they’re gone, Robert?” he said soothingly. “Might you not have misplaced them?”
“No,” said Fulton firmly. “I know where they were and they’re not there anymore.”
Emma lifted her head. “I have them,” she said flatly.
Both men turned to look at her in surprise.
“You?” said Mr. Livingston.
Emma set down her coffee cup with a distinct clink. She had missed the center of the saucer. Augustus could hear it rattling as it rocked back and forth.
“Yes,” she said.
Having made her decision, she wasn’t going to do it by halves. Her back straightened and her eyes fixed on her cousin, wide and blue and guileless. She didn’t look at Augustus, but Augustus knew she was aware of him, as he was of her.
As Augustus watched, she went on, “I am so sorry, cousin Robert, Mr. Fulton. You must have left them backstage when you helped me with the wave machine. I stumbled upon them and put them away for you.” She made a self-deprecating face. “And then I forgot to give them to you. I feel so terribly foolish.”
It wasn’t a brilliant performance. She was too stiff, too self-conscious, but Livingston and Fulton were too caught up in their relief over the safe return of the plans to notice. Did anyone else? Jane, certainly. Her eyes flickered from Augustus to Emma and back again, her expression assessing. But other than she…No. Augustus didn’t think so. They were safe. Because of Emma.
“In that case…” said Mr. Livingston, obviously relieved. It was no small thing to have to accuse an emperor of appropriating other peoples’ property, even if he had and did. “Crisis averted, I believe, Robert?”
“Hardly a crisis.” Slightly red about the ears, Mr. Fulton tucked his chin into his cravat. “I shouldn’t have reacted so strongly. But it is a relief to know they haven’t gone astray. I spent a great deal of time on that project.”
“I could get them for you now if you like.…” Emma pushed back her chair and made as though to rise.
Mr. Fulton put out a hand to forestall her. “There’s no urgency. I know you have a great deal to do in the theatre before tonight.”
“Don’t you mean
“And drown out my thunder, clap by clap?” protested Mr. Fulton. As an attempt at banter, it was weak. Mr. Fulton’s mind was clearly elsewhere.
“Yes,” murmured Augustus to Jane, intuiting her unspoken question. “I’ll speak to him.”
“Good,” said Jane.
“Thank you for retrieving my documents,” Mr. Fulton was saying to Emma. “I really should be—” He wafted vaguely at the door, the one that led through the billiard room to the entrance hall.
“Yes, and so should I,” agreed Emma, standing. “I have actors to herd. They’re worse than cats.”
“We look forward to the fruits of your labors,” said Mr. Livingston kindly.
“Don’t look forward too much,” warned Emma.
With that parting sally, she set off in the opposite direction, towards the long gallery and the side door that opened to the theatre. Augustus looked from Fulton to Emma and back again—Fulton moving one way, Emma the other.
Drawing a deep breath, he moved to follow Fulton.
Emma managed to make it across the drawing room into the gallery before tripping over her own feet.
Everything felt strangely out of shape, her perspective skewed, her own perceptions no longer to be trusted. The edges of objects softened and twisted; shadows masqueraded as substance, and substance as shadow; and there was no way of being sure that anyone was what he or she seemed.
She wasn’t even sure about herself.
Why had she done that just now? She might have kept her head down and let events play themselves out. They probably wouldn’t have traced the plans to Augustus. Mr. Fulton was an inventor and everyone knew that inventors were crazy anyway, nearly as crazy as poets. She had done her bit—and more!—in the name of their former friendship by the simple act of not betraying him. He, after all, had betrayed her. He had betrayed her and he had used her—or was it the other way around? Not that it mattered. She had been over it from every angle, tossing and thrashing in her bed, knowing that no amount of champagne would ever put her to sleep this time.
He had betrayed her. She kept having to remind herself of that, like a child’s lesson learned by rote. It should hurt more, shouldn’t it? She should be angry, angry as she had been at Paul. Instead, she felt curiously numb.
Emma pushed open the door that led out of the gallery to the side of the house, the narrow path along which Augustus had pursued her only two nights ago, wanting to talk about the kiss. How mammoth that had loomed then and how insignificant it seemed now. She had been fussing and fretting over a kiss while Augustus played with the affairs of nations.
Had she been nothing more than that to him? Something small and insignificant, a pin on a map?
This much is true, he had said. But how could she believe him? She had lost all faith in her ability to distinguish between truth and illusion.
“Emma!” A hand closed over her shoulder, hard, jerking her to a halt. “There’s no need to run away like that.”
Emma blinked up at Georges Marston. His ruddy face was bent towards hers as he oozed self-satisfaction out of every pore.
“Surely,” he said smugly, “there’s no need to be shy now. I knew you weren’t indifferent. I knew you were just playing coy.” He gave her shoulder an affectionate squeeze.
Emma wriggled out from under his hand. “I beg your pardon?”
“Just now. Covering for me like that. Just playing hard to get, weren’t you, you clever thing, you?”
Emma wondered when the world had gone mad. Had it always been this way, and she just hadn’t noticed? “I don’t understand.”
“Come now, Emma,” Georges said exuberantly. “You can drop the act now. I know why you did it. And you won’t regret it. Once I sell them, you’ll be set up like a queen—no! Like an empress. Not this empress,” he amended. He gave a derisive laugh. “She’s not going to last long.”
Emma gaped at him. Georges, being Georges, took it for admiration.
Leaving aside the obvious insult to Mme. Bonaparte…“Just what are you talking about?” Emma demanded.
“The plans!” said Georges. “The plans! Tucked safe away in my—well, you don’t need to know that.” He tapped the side of his nose. “Least said, soonest mended.”
The more he said, the less sense it made. “You have the plans.”
“I got them last night. From Fulton’s room. He didn’t even bother to hide them.” Georges’ voice was rich with contempt for people too stupid to know when they might be burgled. “They were right there in the open.”
Emma’s mind raced over the possibilities. It wasn’t entirely impossible. What if Augustus, struck by a fit of remorse—a not entirely displeasing prospect—had replaced the plans in Fulton’s room after she had left him? What
