by Лорен Уиллиг
I leaned back against Colin. “We’re going to hear about this from Jeremy, aren’t we?”
“Bugger that,” said Colin elegantly. “They’re supposed to have their own Internet connection set up. Since when does Private mean ‘Hey! Come on in!’?” Colin’s voice shifted on the last words into a parody of the film people.
His fake American accent was truly atrocious. I wondered if my fake English accent sounded as awful to him. Probably. Huh.
Colin glowered at the door, as if it had personally offended him by allowing itself to be opened. “What do we have to do, put up an electric fence?”
I decided that this was not a good time to tell Colin that amusing story about the guy who had blundered into our bathroom while I was showering. Picture Psycho, only without the axe and with more Herbal Essences.
“I was thinking buckets of water on the doorjamb,” I said. “If I could figure out how to rig it without getting soaked.”
“Pots and pans,” contributed Colin. “For them to trip over.”
We exchanged rueful smiles.
I stood on my tiptoes to press a quick kiss to his cheek. “Are you going to be okay in here?”
Colin’s eyes drifted to the window. “I’ll put my headphones on,” he promised. “If I can’t hear it, it’s not happening.”
“That’s the spirit!” I cheered. I paused with one hand on the doorknob. “If you get to the point where you can’t take it anymore, you know where to find me. We can drop water balloons on the film crew from the library windows. Or not.”
“Hmph,” said Colin, and pulled his headphones firmly down over his ears. They made him look a bit like Princess Leia.
I decided not to share that observation.
I grinned and waved and drew the door shut behind me, making my way back down the corridor, past the door to the master bedroom, over to the center of the house and the wing that housed the library. We’d taped signs that said “Private” on the door of the master bedroom, the bathroom, Colin’s study, and the library, but, so far, those signs had been just about as effective as the paper they were printed on, when it came to keeping people out.
It was going to be even worse starting this evening.
The high mucky-mucks were first showing up tonight and we were all going to have a great big get-to-know-one-another shindig in the dining room, catered courtesy of DreamStone. With big names to be found, Jeremy had condescended to come out to the wilds of Sussex for it.
Lucky us.
I only hoped that whoever did the seating chart had the sense to place Jeremy and Colin at opposite ends of the table. Not that I really thought Colin was going to go after Jeremy with his fish knife…but, hey, why take unnecessary risks? I’d been tempted to go after Jeremy with something sharp a time or two myself.
In the meantime, we were both trying to go on pretty much as usual, Colin working on the spy novel he claimed he was writing, me making my way through his collection of family papers, taking notes for a dissertation that was turning out to be much more detailed than I could ever have dreamed.
With the threat of imminent return to America hanging over me, though, I had to force myself to focus. With all the rich resources available via Colin, I had let myself meander down some pretty random byways, researching rogue French spies, plots and schemes in India, and even an attempt to kidnap George III. It was time to get back to basics, i.e., the Pink Carnation. I knew she had been in operation in Paris in 1804. There was evidence that she had been involved—albeit peripherally—in the famous plot to assassinate Napoleon that had resulted in the execution of the duc d’Enghien in the spring of 1804.
But what had happened after?
The hallway was mercifully empty, all the crew members outside, making mincemeat of Colin’s ancestral shrubbery. Someone, however, had been inside. The door to the library, with its hand-lettered sign reading “No Admittance,” was ajar.
I had closed it when I left. I knew I had.
My notebook wasn’t on my favorite desk anymore. Instead, it was on the chair, and the folio I had taken out to look at before taking my e-mail break was open, when I was pretty sure I had left it closed.
Weird.
One of the film guys must have been looking for a spare sheet of paper, I decided, rearranging my materials the way I liked them. If any of them had torn out one of the precious documents in the folio and used it for scrap, I would personally tear out his masculine bits and feed them to the dogs.
Colin didn’t have any dogs, but I was sure we could find some in the neighborhood.
Nope. I flipped quickly through. No sign of tearing. The neighborhood dogs were safe. And so, thank goodness, was the correspondence of Lady Henrietta Dorrington with her cousin by marriage, Miss Jane Wooliston, aka the Pink Carnation. The two ladies had constructed an ingenious code, devised around just the sort of frivolous goings-on designed to make the eyes of your average Ministry of Police employee—aka your average male—glaze over, ranging from the new cut of bonnets to the refreshments at the Venetian breakfast. Each of these terms was carefully calibrated to a double meaning designed to convey information back to the authorities in England.
Jane, the mastermind of the piece, collected her information in Paris and sent it back to Henrietta under the guise of frivolity. Henrietta passed it on to her husband, Miles, who in turn saw that it made it to the authorities at the War Office.
I had an advantage the French Ministry of Police lacked. No, not just a reliable coffeemaker. I had Henrietta’s code book. I had been steadily working my way through Jane’s reports through the spring of 1804, the spring of the duc d’Enghien’s execution, the spring Napoleon declared himself Emperor, and the spring when invasion of England seemed imminent.
Stuck among the papers was a fragment of poetry in a surprisingly tidy hand, addressed to Jane but forwarded to Henrietta. I shook out the page and read.
For, lo, in Cytherea’s perfumed sleep
Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…
Chapter 1
“Alas!” she cried, “I spy a sail
Hard-by on the wine dark sea.
I know not what it is or bides,
But I fear it comes for me!”
—Augustus Whittlesby, The Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes, Canto XII, 14–17
“For, lo!” proclaimed Augustus Whittlesby from his perch on top of a bench supported by two scowling sphinxes. “In Cytherea’s perfumed sleep / Did she dream of the denizens of the dithery deep.…”
“Dithery? How can the deep be dithery?” A female voice, lightly accented, cut into Augustus’s stirring rendition of Canto XII of The Perils of the Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes.
Among the smattering of people who had left the dancing in the ballroom to admire, mock, gossip, or, in the case of an elderly dowager snoring in a chair by the far wall, nap, stood two young women.
One was tall and graceful, garbed simply but elegantly in a white dress that fell in the required classical lines from a pair of admirably shaped shoulders. Her pale brown hair was gathered in a simple twist, her only jewelry a golden locket strung on a ribbon of sky blue silk.
Jane Wooliston was, thought Augustus, all that was finest in womanly charm. He had said so quite frequently in verse, but it held true in prose as well. Not even his execrable effusions could mask her inestimable worth.
She wasn’t the one who had spoken.
It had been the other one. Next to her. Half a head down.
What Emma Delagardie lacked in height, she made up for in the exuberantly curled plumes that rose from her silver spangled headdress. The tall plumes jutted a good foot into the air, bouncing up and down—like great, annoying bouncing things. In Augustus’s annoyance, metaphor failed him. Her dress was white, but it wasn’t the white of innocent maidens and virtuous dreams. It was of silk, sinuous and shiny, overlain with some sort of shimmery stuff that sparkled when she moved, creating the sensation of a
constant disturbance in the air around her.
Emma Delagardie was slight, fine-boned, and small-featured, the top of her head barely level with Miss Wooliston’s elegantly curved shoulder, but she took up far more room than her small stature would warrant.
“You might have the dire deep,” Mme. Delagardie suggested, her American accent very much in evidence, “or the dreadful deep, but not dithery. It’s not even a proper word.”
“Your deep may be dire, but my deep is dithery. There is such a thing as poetic license, Madame Delagardie,” said Augustus grandly.
“License or laziness? Surely, another word might serve your purpose better. The deep is a rather stationary thing.”
Who had appointed Emma Delagardie the Grand Inquisitor for Poetical Excellence, Greater Paris Branch? It had been a sad, sad day for France when her uncle had been appointed American envoy to Paris and an even sadder one when she had decided to outlast his tenure and stay.
Perhaps America would like to take her back?
“The waves, Madame Delagardie, maintain a constant flow, back and forth, just so.” Augustus used the flowy fabric of his sleeves to illustrate, rocked back and forth on the bench. “And on and on they go.”
With a hey nonny nonny and a ho ho ho.
Christ, he made himself sick sometimes. You’re doing it for England, old chap, he used to tell himself, but the for-England bit had been rubbed bare over time, torn to shreds on the detritus of rhyme.
Oh, bugger. He was thinking in rhyme again. Was there no way to turn it off? To end the adjectives that infected his consciousness? That bedeviled his brain? That assaulted his…
Next time, Augustus promised himself. The next time he was recruited for a life of espionage, he was posing as a philosopher or a student of ancient languages, as someone staid and sober, someone who expressed himself in prose rather than verse, and fourth-rate verse at that.
They had warned him of this, his mentors at the War Office. Choose your persona wisely, they had said. Over time, you might just become what you pretend to be. Augustus had scoffed at it at the time. Nineteen and fearless he had been then, confident of the power of both his sword and his pen. It had seemed like such a lark, a decade ago, to couch his reports to the War Office in poetry so bad that even the Ministry of Police wouldn’t want to read it. Even fanatical devotion only went so far. For the French surveillance officers, “so far” generally ended somewhere around the thirty-ninth canto.
What a stroke of brilliance, a code no one could break—because there was no code. No count-ten-letters-and-subtract-one, no book of code words and phrases, no messy paper trails to trip one up, just the information itself couched in terms of purest absurdity, truth drowned in a sea of verbiage.
Sometimes, it felt like truth wasn’t the only one drowning. He had been doing this for too long; he felt the weariness of it to his very bones.
Augustus looked at Jane Wooliston, his buoy, his anchor, his island in a turbulent sea. Until she had arrived in Paris, he had been giving serious thought to throwing it all in.
Clasping his hands to his breast, Augustus looked meaningfully at Miss Wooliston. “What can one say about the sea? Oh, the sea! The inconstant sea! As indeterminate as a lady’s affections and as unfathomable as the female heart.”
Miss Wooliston hid her smile behind her fan. “Beautifully said, Monsieur Whittlesby, but I would urge you to credit our sex with somewhat more resoluteness of character than that.”
She managed to make her voice carry without seeming to try. What a lovely voice it was, too, a fine, clear contralto, neither too high nor too low.
Augustus clapped the back of his hand to his forehead, just managing not to gag on his own sleeve. They had played this game before, he and Miss Wooliston. “Resolute in cruelty! Obdurate in obfuscation!”
“Ornate in ormolu?” It was the American again. Of course.
“Ormolu,” Augustus repeated. “Ormolu?”
Emma Delagardie gave a little bounce that made her silver spangles scintillate. “Just helping out. You are doing Os, aren’t you? “
Augustus would have loved to tell her exactly what she could do with her As, Es and Us—in prose—but he had spent years perfecting his pose of poetic otherworldliness. He wasn’t about to ruin it for one noisy chit from the colonies. The former colonies, that was. If Emma Delagardie was a representative example, good riddance to them.
“If I may continue?” he said.
Emma Delagardie fluttered her fan. Augustus sneezed. The fan was made of feathers. Feathers with silver spangles. They had a long reach.
“Oh, do. Please do,” she said, far too enthusiastically for Augustus’s peace of mind. No one wanted to hear his poetry that badly. In fact, no one wanted to hear his poetry at all. This boded ill.
Augustus brooded. He did it quite well. He bloody well ought to. He had spent hours practicing. “My soul shies back! To flourish, the delicate blooms of poetry must be gently nurtured and watered from the well of an understanding spirit, not withered in the harsh glare of unfeeling criticism.”
“Do go on, Mr. Whittlesby,” said Miss Wooliston soothingly. “I assure you, we are all attention to hear how Cytherea comes about.”
“All thirty dithery cantos,” added her friend cheerfully.
Did she think it was easy to consistently perpetrate works of such poetic awfulness?
He could have told Emma Delagardie a thing or two about that. Years, it had taken, years of grueling practice and downright hard work. It was a hard balance to maintain, writing poetry dreadful enough to be laughable but just credible enough to be believable.
Augustus rustled his roll of papers. “Shall I go on? Or need I fear the slings and arrows of outrageous interruptions?”
“We’ll be good,” promised Emma Delagardie, in a way that signaled anything but. “Mum as church mice.”
The church mice he had known had been rather noisy, actually, in the walls of the vicarage of his youth, but that was beside the point. He wasn’t going to let himself be drawn into yet another pointless argument.
“In that case…” Augustus made a show of scrolling down his page, searching his place. The gilded doors to the music room racketed open and someone skidded into the room, dressed inappropriately for an evening of entertainment, in boots with the mud of travel still on them. He was a young man, cheeks flushed, hair mussed, cravat askew. He was dressed in the glorified riding dress that the upper classes had made their common clothing, a tightly fitted coat over a bright waistcoat, tight pantaloons tucked into Hessian boots. The difference was, these clothes had obviously been used for riding, and recently.
A few of the ladies whispered and giggled behind their fans. The dowager made a snorting noise in her sleep and burrowed deeper into her chair.
What in the hell was Horace de Lilly doing here? As a very junior sort of agent, employed for the sole purpose of his aristocratic connections, de Lilly was meant to be at Saint-Cloud, hanging about the fringes of Bonaparte’s semi-regal court, not in Paris, attending a ball at the Hotel de Balcourt.
This did not bode well.
With a wary eye on his young associate, Augustus returned to his poetry. “For in the lady’s youth was told / A tale of prophecies ancient and old—”
Horace began to bounce on the balls of his feet, striving to be seen over Mme. Delagardie’s plumes. He mouthed something.
Augustus frowned in his general direction. Raising his voice, he proclaimed, “That once in Triton’s court did dwell / And ring a nasty watery knell, / With a clangety clang and an awesome—”
“Yell?” suggested Emma Delagardie, in something that strove to be, but was not quite, sotto voce. “Knell? Mell?”
If Augustus had been holding a book, he would have slammed it. Instead, he jammed the roll of poetry under his arm. “No more! My sensitive soul can endure no further interruptions! The muse has fled. The Graces have left the building.”
He jumped down off the settee, landing with a t
hump on the parquet floor, and had the satisfaction of seeing Mme. Delagardie take a step back. He had landed rather close to her feet, inadequately shod in Grecian sandals that showed off the diamond rings on her toes.
Augustus wafted a trembling hand in the air. “I beg you, good people! Do not attempt to follow! I must soothe myself and my muse in the only way available to one of my delicate temperament, with a spell of solitude and solitary reflection, making humble homage to the muses in the hopes that they will once again heed my call after so brutal and rude a series of interruptions of their delicate endeavors.”
The excess fabric in his sleeves made a highly gratifying swishing noise as he swept towards the door.
As he passed de Lilly, he murmured, “In the study. Five minutes.”
He didn’t wait to see if de Lilly would answer. Casting a lingering backwards glance at Miss Wooliston—exaggerated yearning with just a hint of lustful smolder—he paused only long enough to give the footmen time to open the doors before swanning out into the throng in the next room, where refreshments had been set out among Balcourt’s collection of faux Egyptological artifacts. At least, Augustus hoped they were faux. A selection of pastries had been set out on a sarcophagus that served as sideboard, while uniformed footmen scooped champagne punch from bowls constructed of Canopic jars.
Augustus was no antiquarian, but he did recall hearing somewhere that those jars had been used to contain the internal organs of the deceased. He made a mental note to stay away from the punch.
The same couldn’t be said for the rest of the company. The punch was flowing freely, the party the sort that would be termed in England “a sad crush,” fashionable people jostling one against the other, doing their best to see and be seen. Balcourt might not be admired, but he was known to set a lavish table and he was not without his contacts at court.
It was easy enough to waft his way through the crowd, the eccentric poet in his own private fog, with the occasional murmur of “The muse! I must set it down!”