by Лорен Уиллиг
The Garden Intrigue
( Pink Carnation - 9 )
Лорен Уиллиг
In the ninth installment of Lauren Willig's bestselling Pink Carnation series, an atrocious poet teams up with an American widow to prevent Napoleon's invasion of England.
Secret agent Augustus Whittlesby has spent a decade undercover in France, posing as an insufferably bad poet. The French surveillance officers can't bear to read his work closely enough to recognize the information drowned in a sea of verbiage.
New York-born Emma Morris Delagardie is a thorn in Augustus's side. An old school friend of Napoleon's stepdaughter, she came to France with her uncle, the American envoy; eloped with a Frenchman; and has been rattling around the salons of Paris ever since. Widowed for four years, she entertains herself by drinking too much champagne, holding a weekly salon, and loudly critiquing Augustus's poetry.
As Napoleon pursues his plans for the invasion of England, Whittlesby hears of a top-secret device to be demonstrated at a house party at Malmaison. The catch? The only way in is with Emma, who has been asked to write a masque for the weekend's entertainment.
Emma is at a crossroads: Should she return to the States or remain in France? She'll do anything to postpone the decision-even if it means teaming up with that silly poet Whittlesby to write a masque for Bonaparte's house party. But each soon learns that surface appearances are misleading. In this complicated masque within a masque, nothing goes quite as scripted- especially Augustus's feelings for Emma.
Lauren Willig
The Garden Intrigue
To Jenny Davis and Liz Mellyn,
for coffee, Cosmos, and Cayman.
We’ll always have Charlemagne.
Prologue
Sussex, England
May 2004
“A little to the left.…A little to the…No!”
Crash.
Below me, in the gardens of Selwick Hall, someone was trying to maneuver a large black metal contraption down an alleyway of elderly shrubs. From the sound of it, the score was shrubs: 1, cameramen: 0. Like its owner, the grounds of Selwick Hall were putting up a fight against the invasion of an American film crew.
I was one of those barbarian Americans, too, but I fell into a protected category: I was the owner’s girlfriend.
It hadn’t always been that way. There had been a time when Colin regarded me with nearly as much mistrust as he did the members of the DreamStone film team. As I kicked back in Colin’s desk chair, watching the dust motes dance in the May sunshine filtering through the sash window, those grim days of October felt like an entire universe ago, in a galaxy far, far away.
In October, I had been just another bedraggled American grad student in London, desperately combing the archives for the materials I needed to turn my dissertation from a vague outline into a heartbreaking work of staggering scholarship.
We had been told to go forth and find a gap in the historiography, and that’s just what I had done, smugly certain that I would put together pieces no one else had been able to connect, patting myself on the back for my cleverness in picking as my field of study a country in which the language was my own. One of my best friends was immured in the basement of an Austrian monastery, puzzling out Carolingian charters in a version of Latin that would make a classics professor cry; another was in Brazil, in an archive where the air-conditioning regularly broke down and all the women on the beach were waxed in improbable ways.
But me? I was going to England. The mother country. Home of scones, clotted cream, and BBC costume dramas. England, where they speak English better than we do. England, where no one waxes anything because everyone is draped in tweed. It would be just like being home in New York, only with cuter accents. I was going to the land of Mr. Darcy (and Mr. Bean, but, hey, every ointment comes with its flies) to research a dissertation topic that thrilled me down to the polish on my toenails.
Aristocratic espionage during the wars with France: 1789–1815.
Does it get any better than that? There could be little more thrilling than men in knee breeches meeting for huddled conferences in the back rooms of inns from Paris to Calais, smuggling aristocrats out of the clutches of the guillotine, while exchanging terse notes ending with the directive “Burn this letter.”
It didn’t occur to me until later that there might be a slight problem. Historians are dependent on documentary evidence for the reconstruction of the past. When the people involved routinely burn the documents in question, there isn’t a lot left to go on. In fact, there was nothing left to go on. I combed through the collections of the British Library, nagged the archivists at the Public Record Office, and tramped through an infinite number of country records offices, all with the same dispiriting result.
All I had were rumors and legend, garbled and inconsistent stories about the exploits of a spy called the Pink Carnation, who, if the London papers and the records of the French Ministry of Police were to be believed, had been a greater thorn in the flesh of the French than anyone with the possible exception of Wellington. And, of the two, the Pink Carnation had been in operation longer. Or so the stories claimed. On the theory that there ain’t no smoke without fire, I had confidently set out for material to verify that. And found nothing.
Until I met Colin. His family archives were the academic equivalent of the Holy Grail.
He wasn’t so bad himself.
Right now, he wasn’t exactly a happy camper. I could hear the snick of rubber-soled shoes on flagstones, and Colin’s voice below, raised over the sound of smashing shrubbery. The word “damage” seemed to figure prominently. The scents of spring wafted through the open window, fresh-cut grass and wildflowers and stale tobacco.
Perched safely above the fray, two stories up, I leaned sideways in Colin’s desk chair, craning my neck to try to see out the window. From my current vantage point, all I could see was a confusion of tree branches, exuberant in their spring foliage, and, if I tried really hard, something long, black, and metallic that I assumed was part of the scaffolding for lighting. Either that or a missing piece of the Death Star.
I hadn’t been in the gardens since the crew had arrived, but with the noises coming from that direction with earsplitting regularity, I feared the worst. The crew had been on location for two days now, setting up equipment and running light tests and doing whatever else it was that film people do. I had resisted the urge to hover and gawk. After all, I was a mature and responsible academic; we weren’t supposed to go all wide-eyed at the sight of things like movie cameras, nor wonder whether anyone would notice if we waved at the camera and mouthed “Hi, Mom!”
Besides, given Colin’s feelings about the proceedings, showing too much interest smacked of disloyalty. To say Colin hadn’t been thrilled about renting out Selwick Hall to American film star Micah Stone for his latest blockbuster would be like saying that Cookie Monster had a slight thing for baked goods. Colin had been presented with the situation as a fait accompli at his mother’s birthday party in Paris two months before, in public, with the cameras flashing. It had not been a good time.
Colin had only just started speaking to his mother again. He still wasn’t speaking to his sister, Serena, the weak link, the deciding one-third vote that had enabled his stepfather, Jeremy, to get away with inviting DreamStone to film at Selwick Hall. It was Serena’s defection that hurt Colin the most, even more than seeing his beloved home, the one he had gone to such trouble to restore and maintain, trampled under the feet of Micah Stone and his merry men.
Both Colin’s great-aunt Arabella and I had made tentative gestures towards a reconciliation with Serena, but Colin had shot down all of our attempts. I wasn’t pushing it. My own position in his life was too
new and too tenuous to risk.
Tenuous and possibly about to end.
Abandoning the window, I turned back reluctantly to the computer screen. The e-mail was still there. It hadn’t obligingly zapped itself back into cyberspace in the past five minutes.
Damn.
On the face of it, there was nothing about the e-mail to occasion forebodings of dread and gloom. No threats, no dire warnings, no offers to make my manhood throb more manfully or share a bank account in Rwanda. It was a perfectly pleasant e-mail from the Modern Germany professor offering me two sections and the position of head teaching fellow for his Modern Europe course.
Not entirely my area of expertise, but still better than that semester I had wound up teaching Charlemagne, unable to tell my Carolingians from my Carolinas. I wasn’t exactly thrilled with the twentieth century, but I had done a field in it, so I could teach it, and the head TF position came with an extra financial incentive, payback for being the one in the unenviable position of playing middleman between a busy professor, demanding students, angsty teaching staff, and the entire administrative panoply involved in booking rooms, scheduling sections, printing course packets, and making nice to the A/V people.
My fellowship, the one that had sent me to England, would run out in June. Two sections and the head TF post meant my rent would be paid. It also meant I wouldn’t be piecing together teaching jobs in different courses, a section here, a section there, which meant triple the effort learning the material and keeping up with the coursework. All in all, it was an exceedingly handsome offer.
So why did it make me feel like I’d swallowed a bucket of lead?
I rested my head on my balled-up hands, letting my hair swing around my face. It was growing out, I thought inconsequentially. Yet another sign of just how long I had been in England. It had been more than eight months now, September to May. It had seemed like plenty of time, back in Cambridge. The other Cambridge. Ten months in England. I would get my material and go back to America to write it up, proceeding smoothly through the paces like a good little academic in training.
I hadn’t factored in the addition of another person. I hadn’t counted on Colin.
Ten months. What was that? Nothing but a whisper in time, over before it had begun. I hadn’t met Colin until I was two months in. Then there had been this and that and suddenly we were down to a month and a half and it just wasn’t enough. I didn’t want to go back. I didn’t want to go back to my studio apartment in Cambridge, with all its accoutrements for one: one twin bed, one dresser, one desk. It didn’t matter that I liked my apartment, that it had my books, my pictures, my coffeemaker. It didn’t matter that just five months ago I had been yearning for Cambridge with homesick fervor, for the smell of Peet’s Coffee and the peculiar slant of late afternoon light across the floor of the history department library, for the cranberry muffins at Broadway Market and the smell of sweat and suntan lotion on the banks of the Charles on a sunny day.
It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back ever. My life was there, I knew that. I just wasn’t ready yet.
I’d successfully avoided thinking about it or talking about it. I had dodged questions from my parents about summer plans and from my colleagues about finishing fellowships and fall teaching. Colin and I had never discussed the fact that my fellowship was finite. We had never talked about the future at all. Most of the time I was too busy living in the past—his past.
If I didn’t want the head TF job, it was only fair to give Blackburn time to offer it to someone else.
What was I thinking? If I told my friends or my parents that I was planning to stay in England and that I was planning to stay not for professional reasons but because of a guy…
I could already hear the howls of outrage coming down the transatlantic pipeline. Changing my plans for a man went against everything I had been raised to believe. Professional women weren’t supposed to do that sort of thing. We were supposed to be strong and independent and make our own decisions without reference to the opposite sex. I could come up with a plausible excuse to stay in England through August, especially if I were able to give up my flat and live rent-free with Colin. I could make noises about needing the extra time to tie up loose ends and follow up on crucial research. But August was as far as I could push it.
Besides, Colin hadn’t invited me to stay.
There was a squeak of old hinges and the brush of swollen wood against wool as the door pushed against the stained carpet.
I looked up to see the man in question standing in the doorframe. It was warm outside, so he had rolled up the sleeves of his shirt, revealing a pair of arms already sun-browned from outdoor activity. His dark blond hair was wind tousled, and he brought with him the scent of the outdoors, garden loam and fresh-cut grass and rich new soil. It was his study, but he paused in the doorway as though waiting for me to give the okay for him to come in.
“Hey,” he said, that universal male greeting that can mean anything from “hi” to “didn’t see you there” to “thank you for last night.” This was a decidedly dispirited “hey.”
Which was a shame, because last night really had been pretty good.
“Hey,” I responded in kind, trying to infuse as much sympathy as possible into the one syllable. I pushed aside my own worries about next year. We could deal with that later. Colin had enough on his plate right now. “So, um, how are things going down there?”
Colin pulled a face and jerked two thumbs downward.
“That good, huh?” Let’s pretend I hadn’t been listening at the window.
“The idiots wanted to cut down a three-hundred-year-old oak because it was in the way of their shot.” His voice dripped with disgust. “Then they wanted to know if we could move the folly. It’s only been there since 1732.”
“Two days down!” I said with forced cheerfulness. If I smiled any wider, my face would probably crack in two.
Colin grimaced. “How many more does that leave?”
I tucked my legs up under me in the chair, making the ancient springs creak. “Don’t make me do math.”
“That’s because you know I won’t like the number.”
Too true. The director—via Jeremy—had estimated two weeks on location. I wouldn’t have put money on Colin making it through one. It was a good thing he lived a healthy, outdoor life, because his arteries were doing overtime.
I peered at him over the computer screen. “Would you—I don’t know—like to go somewhere? Away? We could stay at my flat for a couple of days.”
True, my basement flat was small even by London standards and Colin banged his head on the sloping bathroom ceiling every time he washed his hands, but even a week’s worth of lumps on the noggin was preferable to his going into cardiac arrest every time one of the film crew wandered through the wrong door. Forget his nerves; I wasn’t sure mine could stand another week of this.
Colin’s hand rose reflexively to the back of his head. “Not your flat.”
“Your aunt Arabella’s, then. Or we could take a mini-break somewhere.” It would have to be somewhere cheap, since neither of us was exactly flush with funds, but there had to be some moldering seaside resort that had seen better days and would be willing to take us in for the price of a large London dinner. Or we could go to one of the old Regency watering holes and I could drag Colin to Jane Austen re-enactments. “It could be fun.”
A loud crash and a curse resonated from the flagstone path below. At least, I was assuming there was still a flagstone path below.
Our eyes met over the computer monitor.
I sighed. “Or we could stay here and keep an eye on the film crew.”
One side of Colin’s mouth pulled up in something that wanted to be a smile but didn’t quite make it. “Thanks. You’re a brick.”
I would have preferred to be something more decorative, but I appreciated the sentiment. “Look, it will all be fine. It’s only two weeks and you can charge them double for every shrub they squish.”
I hastily moved the monitor. “Oh, just this and that.”
“What is it?” Colin was way too sharp sometimes.
“Nothing!” I staggered clumsily to my feet. My legs had gone numb from sitting on them. “But I probably should get back to work if I don’t want to be one of those five-thousand-year-old grad students.”
Colin smoothed my hair back, turning my face this way and that as he examined it for lines and wrinkles. “You still have a ways to go yet.”
Another crash. I could feel the muscles in Colin’s arm stiffen under my hand. “I’m aging rapidly,” I said.
Colin raised an eyebrow. “Best gather your rosebuds while you may, then.”
“Smooth,” I managed to say, and then his lips touched mine, and speech became a decidedly uninteresting commodity. Rosebuds, on the other hand…They weren’t in bloom yet, and yet I could have sworn I smelled their heady scent wafting up from the garden, as much of a cliché as the stereotypical violins.
“Oh, sorry,” someone said, and I realized that I did smell rosebuds, preserved in alcohol and condensed into perfume. One of the film crew was standing in the doorway, younger than me at a guess and inappropriately attired for an English spring, in tight jeans and tighter shirt. “I was just looking for the computer. It’s in here, right?”
I came down to earth with a crash. Literally. Colin is a fair bit taller than I am. My heels hit carpet with a jarring thump.
“This computer is off-limits,” I said, since Colin seemed incapable of saying anything at all. “This whole wing is off-limits.”
“But the computer…”
Why does whining sound worse in an American accent?
“Is not available,” I said. “Please close the door on your way out.”
I’ll say this for her, she did take direction. She pulled the door smartly shut behind her.