The Garden Intrigue by Lauren Willig Read Free Book Online Page A

Livingston to Malmaison, rather than to Saint-Cloud. The excuse given was that the choice was for sentimental reasons. Mr. Livingston is Emma’s cousin, and Emma is so very fond of Malmaison.”
    Augustus snorted. “Bonaparte is about as sentimental as a barracuda. Can you get me in?”
    Jane paused a moment, then shook her head. “Not this time. I haven’t been invited myself.”
    Augustus reacted to the tone rather than the words. “Do you think Fouché suspects you?” His mind was already racing ahead, formulating plans, ways to dodge the all-seeing eye of Bonaparte’s sinister Minister of Police. He could get Jane out of Paris if he had to. The old network, stretchingfrom Paris to Boulogne, had been eviscerated in Fouché’s latest raids, but he still had connections, personal ones. “Don’t be heroic.”
    “No, no, it’s nothing like that. Nefarious behavior from the lady of the cameos? They would sooner suspect the statuary. But the group is small and Mr. Livingston is known to have little sympathy for the English. My invitation might be considered an insult.” She paused, her head cocked to one side. “But there is a way.”
    “La belle Hortense?” Jane had become fast friends with Mme. Bonaparte’s daughter from her first marriage. The two were of an age. Hortense was universally acknowledged as the best of the Bonapartes, probably because she was one only by marriage: her mother’s marriage to Bonaparte, and her own marriage to Bonaparte’s younger brother, Louis. “Hortense finds me amusing. Perhaps you can convince her that the weekend demands immortalizing in verse.”
    “Hortense has her own worries. You may have noticed she isn’t here tonight.” Jane spread her fan, revealing a painting of swans floating languidly on a lake. “No. I have a better idea.”
    “Tunneling beneath the grounds?” Augustus teased. “Fighting my way through the gates with Miss Gwen’s parasol?”
    “You miss the obvious,” said Jane calmly. “The simplest proposition is always the best.”
    “I don’t follow.”
    Jane smiled at him over the edge of her fan. “The answer was right in front of you all along. Emma Delagardie.”
    “A poet?” echoed Kort.
    “Miss Wooliston tends to inspire that sort of thing.” Emma wafted a dismissive hand, turning her attention back to her cousin. “Goodness, Kort. I can’t believe you’re really here. After all this time.”
    She had forgotten how big he was, or perhaps it was that he had filled out since she had seen him last. He had been only eighteen then, after all,eighteen to her thirteen. At the time, she had thought him the last word in manliness and sophistication. She had been as infatuated as only a thirteen-year-old could be, saving his dropped handkerchiefs and scribbling maudlin verse in the solitude of her favorite branch of an apple tree.
    Goodness, she’d forgotten that apple tree. She had created quite the fuss by tumbling out of it and breaking her arm. She could still feel the twinge in it when the wind blew in the wrong direction.
    “Cousin Robert told me I would most likely find you here. I just hadn’t expected—” Kort’s eyes dipped from the plumes on her headdress to the diamonds glittering at her ears, her arms, her breast.
    “To see quite so much of me?” Emma quipped, and her cousin’s gaze hastily snapped upwards again.
    Oops. She hadn’t meant to make him squirm. She had forgotten. They were less frank at home, at least about certain things. It felt odd to be speaking English again; the once familiar syllables came uncomfortably to her tongue, although not as uncomfortably as Kort’s labored French.
    “Something like that,” Kort admitted, carefully avoiding the general direction of her bodice. He shook his head again. “I would never have known you.”
    It would have been nice if the statement had sounded a little bit more like a compliment.
    “That’s not surprising,” she said, striving for sangfroid. She resisted