The Garden Intrigue by Lauren Willig Read Free Book Online

third. There were no unnecessary heroics, no reckless bits of daring. The French press had taken note, and so had Augustus. It had been in June that his superiors in London had ordered him to liaise with the Carnation. Augustus had gone to the rendezvous expecting a man: middle-aged, gnarled, nondescript.
    Instead, he had found Jane.
    In profile, her face was shadowed, the lanterns strung along the edges of the garden casting strange patterns of light and shade. There was something to be written there, something about dark and bright, her aspect, her eyes, but the words eluded him.
    Augustus spared a glance at the scroll in his hands. All he had to offer was reams of endless drivel and the odd nugget of military intelligence. Quite a wooing, that. Cyrano would weep.
    “But how?” she asked, tilting her head in a practiced pose of feigned interest, her face a mask of polite boredom. Her shoulders were relaxed, her hands loosely folded, her body language at complete odds with her tone, low and urgent. “A month ago, Decres said it couldn’t be done.”
    Augustus took refuge behind his scroll. “A month ago, they didn’t have the device.”
    “The device? What sort of device?”
    “That’s the rub,” said Augustus. “My source doesn’t know what it is. The device, Decres called it, and that was all. Whatever it is, though, they seem to set a great deal of store in it.”
    “Why are you telling me this?” she asked. “Aside from professional courtesy.”
    “You know I don’t like to ask for favors—”
    “But I owe you one,” Jane said. “For the Silver Orchid.”
    He had played liaison for Jane with one of her agents, helping to spirit the woman and the duc de Berri out of Paris. Augustus had played no part in the actual escape; he had merely relayed a message when it had proved impolitic for Jane to do so herself. It had been a small enough favor, and Augustus said as much.
    “Even so,” said Jane. “Don’t think I’m not sensible of my debt to you.”
    “There can be no debt between friends,” Augustus said.
    Didn’t she know he would have done more for her if she had asked? A phoenix feather from the far ends of the earth, a dragon’s horde from the depths of a flame-scorched cave, the head of a prophet on a platter.
    At least, so the poet liked to think. The agent was well aware that he had compromised the terms of his own mission by doing even such a little thing for her. His mandate was to observe, not to act. Any action he took made detection more likely. Wickham had other men planted in Paris, but no one of his standing, no one who had been there as long or seen asmuch. He might not be indispensible, but he would be bloody hard to replace.
    “What do you need of me?” she asked.
    “Entrée into Malmaison,” he said promptly. “Whatever this device is, they plan a final test a month from now, somewhere on the grounds of Malmaison. The trial is planned for the weekend of June ninth.”
    Jane looked thoughtfully over his shoulder. “They have a party planned that weekend, in honor of the American envoy.”
    Augustus leaned back on one elbow, lolling artistically on the flagstones. “Distraction,” he said. “It provides Bonaparte with an excuse.”
    At Saint-Cloud, the consular court lived in state, surrounded by a growing entourage of servants and hangers-on. At Malmaison, on the other hand, the Bonapartes maintained the pretense of simplicity. Even with the addition of tents to house the servants and the consular staff, the house was nothing more than a modest gentleman’s residence, its small size necessarily limiting the number of people invited. The grounds, constantly in the process of improvement, stretched out for hectares in either direction, the private preserve of Mme. Bonaparte.
    It was, in other words, the perfect place to conduct a trial of Decres’ mysterious device, far away from Paris and prying eyes.
    “I had wondered,” admitted Jane, “why he was having Mr.