by Лорен Уиллиг
Emma didn’t doubt it. “How specific?”
Kort suddenly discovered an interest in the flattened grass on the verge of the river. A little farther along, Mr. Fulton was bending over his model, feeding small pieces of coal into a miniature furnace. “Pretty much what you would expect.”
“Which might be?” Emma prompted.
Mr. Fulton’s steamship let out a long, stammering, huffing noise. A few yards away, a duck turned up its tail feathers in indignation.
Kort’s eyes followed the duck as it flounced up the bank. One of the children was throwing cake crumbs at it. “She urged me to do whatever it would take to convince you to come back with me.”
“Up to and including proposals of marriage?”
She knew she had hit home when she saw her cousin wince. “Proposal. One proposal.”
She gave him credit for not pretending he didn’t know what she meant. He had never been able to tell a lie, not even when it would have saved them all from being sent to their rooms without supper.
“Quite a sacrifice to make for the family,” she said neutrally. “I hope you told my mother that familial devotion goes only so far.”
“Familial devotion, yes.” Kort didn’t meet her eye. Something in his voice made Emma look up. He was staring at the river still, his face in profile, his expression abstracted. His hands flexed at his sides. Clearing his throat, his eyes fixed on the river, he said awkwardly, “Have you ever thought that it might not be such a bad idea?”
Had she? At twelve, she had thought it was an excellent idea. But that was over half a lifetime ago and half a world away.
“You don’t really mean that,” she said. She poked him in the arm. “Kort? Hello?”
He focused on her with difficulty, blinking as though coming back from somewhere very far away. His Adam’s apple moved up and down in his throat. “I do, actually.” He looked down at her, his face serious. “There have been worse matches.”
“Yes, the Prince of Wales and Caroline of Brunswick, or Henry VIII and just about anyone,” said Emma spiritedly. “I’m flattered, Kort, really I am.”
Kort pressed his eyes closed. “I deserved that, didn’t I? I didn’t mean it the way it sounded.”
Emma looked at her cousin’s troubled face. It was not that of a man about to propose to the woman he loved. It was that of a man set to do his duty, no matter how unpleasant that duty might be.
He had said exactly what he meant. It was expedient and it could be worse. That was Kort for you, always honest to a fault, even with himself. It was a rare but not necessarily comfortable commodity.
“Do you know,” said Emma thoughtfully, “I rather think you did.”
Kort ignored her. “It would be a sensible match,” he said, almost as much for himself as for her. “We’ve both had losses. We would be kind to each other.”
It was a very odd way of framing the sentiment. In fact, it was a very odd proposal. Not that Emma had received that many, but she couldn’t imagine that any of her favorite plays or novels would ever have included such an avowal as this one.
Emma voiced the truth her twelve-year-old self had had such trouble stomaching. “You really loved Sarah, didn’t you?”
Kort’s face was bleak. “More than I ever want to love anyone again.”
“And I’m safe.” She didn’t need the sudden tightening of his lips to know she had hit it, the real reason for Kort’s proposal. “You know exactly what you’re getting with me. You won’t ever have to feel about me the way you did about her. I’m the perfect compromise option.”
Kort’s shoulders sagged. “It’s not as cold as you make it sound. We understand each other. We’re comfortable with each other.”
No, he was comfortable with the memory of her. It was a very different thing. And even if it weren’t, there was one major flaw to the plan.
“I think,” Emma said slowly, “that I want something more than comfort. We both should.”
Kort did his best to rise to the occasion. “I do love you, you know.” He sounded like a man offering bonbons when he knew he ought to have brought rubies.
Once, that might have been enough for her. Not anymore.
“And I love you. But not in the right way.” Emma released her pent-up breath in a long, gusty sigh that ruffled the folds of her cousin’s cravat. “No, Kort. It wouldn’t work, for either of us. Trust me.”
For a moment, she thought he was going to argue. But whatever it was he saw in her face, it made her argument for her better than any number of words could.
Kort let out his own breath. “All right,” he said, sounding easier and more natural than he had since the conversation began. Reaching out a hand, he ruffled her hair as he used to long, long ago. “Come back anyway. I promise not to importune you with proposals.”
Emma hastily readjusted her hair ornaments. “Why are you so keen to get me out of Paris?”
“Not just Paris,” Kort said. “France.”
Emma narrowed her eyes at him.
Kort locked his hands behind his back. “Uncle Robert thinks that once Bonaparte gets the crown on his head, he’s going to put aside his old wife and take a more nubile one. I know you’re friends with the old one. If your safety here rests on that friendship…”
He didn’t need to fill in the rest. With cousin Robert gone back to America, what official clout she had had as the cousin of the American envoy would be gone. If she lost her voice at court or, even worse, was actively associated with a discarded and disgraced faction, her place in Paris could become very precarious.
Precarious and possibly even dangerous.
Emma glanced back at the canopy. Bonaparte sprawled in his chair, clearly bored. His wife leaned towards him, her hand on his arm, her body fluid and pliant, her smile designed to charm. In her white dress and gilt diadem, she made a charming picture still, the shadow of the canopy protecting her from the too-honest light of the sun.
Bonaparte might have his mistresses, but it was always his wife he came back to. She knew how to coax him out of his sulks, how to soften the rough edges of his life. The idea of his being married to someone else was unthinkable.
“No,” said Emma decisively. “He wouldn’t. Whatever his other shortcomings, he adores her. He does.”
She sounded like a child and she knew it.
Kort looked at her with infuriating patience. “That has nothing to do with it. If it’s politically expedient…”
“Like your proposal to me?”
All right, that hadn’t been fair. But if he was going to go all know-it-all at her…What did he know, in Paris for all of two months? She had been here far longer than he. He knew nothing about the French court and the political games they played.
Even if he might be right.
The thought sent a chill down Emma’s spine. No, it couldn’t be. “Excuse me,” she said abruptly. “I shouldn’t be monopolizing you.”
“Don’t storm off.”
“I’m not storming.” If she were storming, he would know it. She did a good line in flounce and stomp when the occasion called for it. Emma mustered a strained smile. “I’m not doing my duty as guest. We’re meant to mingle and be charming.”
Looking down at her, Kort’s expression softened. “You don’t have to be charming with me. You only have to be yourself.”
Emma recognized it for the olive branch it was. She touched her fingers lightly to Kort’s arm. “I’ll take that as it was intended,” she said, and slipped away before he could respond.
It was always best to have the last word, especially when there were discussions one wanted to avoid.
It was absurd, of course. The Emperor would never put Mme. Bonaparte aside. If he were, why would she be collecting ladies-in-waiting? Unless, of course, she, too, was avoiding unpleasant truths.
Emma thought of the open disdain with which Caroline had greeted Mme. Bonaparte last night. It didn’t mean anything. Caroline had always treated Mme. Bonaparte like that. But it d
id mean that she felt safe in doing so.
Caroline and all the rest of the Bonapartes would be lobbying for Mme. Bonaparte’s replacement.
Emma smiled and nodded as she went. She hadn’t thought she was going anywhere in particular, but she found her steps slowing as she approached a familiar bend in the river, where a young woman sat with a child in her lap, watching the steamship begin its progress down the river.
Hortense raised a hand in warning, jerking her head towards the sleeping child in her lap.
Emma nodded to show that she understood, and lowered herself awkwardly onto the blanket, taking care not to bump Louis-Charles. Hortense’s husband was on the other side of the clearing, pointedly ignoring his wife and child.
Emma folded her legs beneath her, wondering how to ask what she needed to ask.
Before she could, Hortense said quietly, “Remember our old games of prisoner’s base?”
She was looking out across the river at the undulating vista of green grass and artfully artless trees, the scene of their old revels and games. “Yes. You always won.”
“My legs are longer than yours.” Hortense had always been generous in victory.
Emma couldn’t take it anymore. “Is it true?” she blurted out. “Is the Emperor planning to divorce your mother?”
Emma expected shock, outrage, denial. There wasn’t any. Hortense didn’t seem the least bit surprised. Bending her head over her sleeping child, she said carefully, “It is possible.”
Emma felt as though she had had the wind knocked out of her. “But—why?”
Hortense glanced over her shoulder to the canopy where the Emperor sat. Caroline stood by his side. He was dandling Caroline’s son, Achille, on his knee. The three-year-old squirmed, wriggling to be let down. Mme. Bonaparte looked on, a strained, fixed smile on her face.
Behind them, among the rest of the hangers-on, she could see Augustus in conversation with Horace de Lilly. He didn’t seem happy about whatever it was. In fact, he didn’t seem happy. Emma wondered, unhappily, if he were still brooding over Jane.
They hadn’t spoken since last night, not since the incident with Marston.
“They want him to put Maman aside,” Hortense said quietly.
“What?” Emma guiltily turned her attention back to her friend. Now wasn’t the time to dither over Augustus, not when the whole world was falling to pieces around her.
“They want him to divorce her,” said Hortense. “Before the coronation. Theirs was only a civil marriage, you know.”
“Who wants it? The Bonapartes?” The Bonapartes had hated Hortense’s mother from the very beginning, holding against her her age, her past, her effortless elegance.
Hortense shook her head. “Not just the Bonapartes. His advisors, too. They say the succession is unsure. They want him to make a dynastic marriage.”
“A dynastic marriage?” Dynastic marriages were for kings and dukes and the scion of ancient houses, not jumped-up generals turned rulers. Hadn’t they fought a revolution to be done with dynasties? The very idea was ludicrous. “He’s not exactly King George.”
“No,” said Hortense quietly. “He rules far more territory than King George, and will rule still more if his plans go as he intends them. They usually do,” she added.
It wasn’t an indictment, just a statement of fact.
“What plans?” asked Emma suspiciously.
“There are always plans,” said Hortense wearily. “This time it’s the invasion of England. He’s always wanted to conquer England. If he manages that…” She shrugged. “He’ll have achieved what none of his predecessors could. France will rule England. For that, he’ll need an heir.”
Emma couldn’t care less about England, but she did care about Hortense. “But he has an heir,” Emma said stubbornly. “What about you? What about Louis-Charles?”
The very purpose behind Hortense’s disaster of a marriage to Bonaparte’s younger brother had been to provide Bonaparte with that heir, an heir of both his blood and Josephine’s. Louis-Charles had been intended for that position from birth. If the Emperor had changed his mind now, it meant that Hortense’s sacrifice and all the pain she had endured since had been for naught.
It was, thought Emma passionately, unthinkable.
“He won’t go back on his word now,” she said, wishing she could believe her own words.
Hortense smiled without humor. “It’s not the same. If he is to be an emperor, he must have heirs of the blood. Or so they say.”
Emma bit down on her lower lip. “What about your mother?”
Hortense didn’t even need to think about it. “It will devastate her,” she said simply.
Emma could remember when Bonaparte had been the one clamoring for Mme. Bonaparte’s attention, suing for such crumbs of affection as she might choose to toss him. She had treated him, then, with a sort of abstracted fondness, and chosen her lovers elsewhere.
Emma wasn’t sure when the balance had shifted; she had been preoccupied with her own affairs, with Carmagnac and Paul and her own wounded feelings. It had been a blurry and confused time, and, at the end of it, she had come to Malmaison to find that the world had shifted, that it was Mme. Bonaparte begging her husband’s affection, biting her lip and looking the other way as he chose his mistresses from among the actresses at the Comédie-Française, and sometimes even from among his stepdaughter’s friends.
Once, Mme. Bonaparte might have had her own way with a single, softly spoken word. Not anymore.
Emma had a very bad feeling about this.
“What can you do?” Emma asked her friend.
Hortense looked down at her son’s head. “I’ve done everything I can do,” she said, and there was a touch of bitterness in her voice. “What else, I don’t know.”
They sat together in silence, each caught in her own thoughts. The sun shone brightly on the river, but it seemed dim to Emma’s eyes, too much light turned dark, like a black spot on one’s eye from staring directly at the sun.
Emma looked at Hortense’s familiar face, at the new hollows between her cheekbones and the shadows below her eyes, prettier, in some ways, than she had been as a girl, but so much sadder. They had sat so often like this, she and Hortense, in this same spot, watching the play of light on the water, tossing crumbs to the ducks, and talking of books and dresses and life and love. Here Emma had told Hortense of her disillusionment with Paul, twisting her hands in her lap, hour slipping into hour as the sun set over the water, and here Hortense had confessed her love for a young general, Duroc, one of the set that had flocked to Malmaison in those long-ago halcyon days.
Hortense had been so certain her stepfather would give his consent.
Emma jerked around as a sudden clatter erupted from the river. Bored with the adults, Caroline’s child had wiggled free and was pelting Mr. Fulton’s steamship with pebbles. The noise battered against Emma’s skull, shattering the illusion of peace. The ducks squawked in protest, their feathers ruffled.
Plink, plink, plink went Achille’s pebbles against the side of Mr. Fulton’s ship. Crowing to himself, he scrambled along the bank, looking for more powerful ammunition. Something, Emma thought bitterly, of which Achille’s uncle Napoleon would approve.
Emma’s hands balled into fists in her lap. “It didn’t need to come to this,” she said.
She didn’t need to explain what she meant; Hortense always knew.
The Emperor’s daughter smiled wryly. “Didn’t it? My stepfather is the comet and we are the tail. We must follow where he leads for better or ill.” Her smile twisted, like a theatrical mask, half comedy, half tragedy. “I imagine the comet’s tail doesn’t much enjoy it either.”
Emma’s heart ached for her friend. She held out a hand. “Hortense—”
Hortense waved her away. “Forgive me. I can’t think why I’m being so melodramatic! It must be the child. It wreaks havoc with one’s emotions. You’ll see.”
“But you’re not being melodramatic. Not at all! N
ot if you really believe—” Emma would have pressed the topic, but her words were drowned out by a resounding crash.
In the shocked silence that followed, she could hear an ominous cracking noise.
As the crowd stared in mingled horror and delight, the chimney of Mr. Fulton’s steamship cracked, sliding slowly sideways. The ship skewed sideways, a sad, ruined thing.
“I sank it! I sank it!” crowed Achille.
Mr. Fulton looked ill. Kort gaped, as though he couldn’t quite believe what had just happened. Hortense sighed, and shifted her own sleeping son on her lap.
“Yes, you did,” said the Emperor genially. He pushed out of his chair, gesturing brusquely to his staff. “Enough entertainment. To work!” He jerked his head in the direction of Mr. Fulton. “You, too.”
With one last, wordless look of dislike at Achille, Fulton joined the stream of naval commanders following the Emperor to the summerhouse he employed as an office in good weather.
The party was over, at least for some. Emma could see Mme. Bonaparte moving graciously through the crowd, smoothing over her husband’s gaffe, urging everyone to stay where they were and enjoy the refreshments and the fine weather. Most people didn’t need to be asked twice. Someone began plucking at a guitar, singing in a pleasant tenor voice about flowers blooming, bloomed too soon, ducking and striking a false chord as a candied chestnut sailed past one ear. In Hortense’s lap, Louis-Charles stirred fitfully.
“I should take him in,” Hortense said, just as a shadow fell over their sunny spot.
Emma didn’t need to look up. She could see the silhouette stretched across the blanket, the full sleeves, the curling hair, the long legs, distorted and caricatured by the angle of the sun, and, yet, still recognizable. Or maybe it was the other things that she recognized: the smell of fresh-washed linen and ink, the elaborate clearing of the throat that preceded a grand oration.