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

the urge to tug at her décolletage. Her dress might be low by New York standards, but it was positively modest by Parisian ones, largely because she didn’t have terribly much to display. “It’s been over ten years since you last saw me. It would be more surprising if I hadn’t changed.”
    “You’ve become so…French.”
    The comment surprised her into a laugh. “The French find me very American. Or so I’ve been told.”
    Refreshing, they had called her. Natural. Fruitlessly, Emma had tried to explain that her parents’ home in New York was as sophisticated as anythingto be found in the Faubourg Saint-Germain and the only savages on their property were her brothers, but such protestations had been unpopular with her audience. They preferred to cherish Rousseauian notions of noble savages clad in loincloths and adorned with feathers.
    “When did you arrive?” she asked. “Have you been in Paris long?”
    “Tuesday,” he said. “Whenever I mention your name, I hear only effusions. Everyone adores Madame Delagardie.”
    Mme. Delagardie had made a great effort to be adored. As for Emma…well, it was what it was and that was all. She was Mme. Delagardie now and had been for some time.
    “Almost everyone. Not everyone has come to a full and proper appreciation of my inestimable worth, but they will in time. What brings you to Paris after all these years? Surely, you could have spared a visit to your favorite cousin before this. It’s just a little sea voyage. It’s only a few months at sea, and I have it on the very best authorities that sea monsters have gone out of fashion.”
    He didn’t respond to her raillery in kind. A shadow passed across his face. He paused for a moment before saying, “You will have heard about Sarah, I expect.”
    Oh, Lord. Emma felt like the scrapings off his boots, if he had been wearing boots. She was the lowest level of Paris gutter slime, heartless and unfeeling. She had heard. But it had been how long ago now? A year? Two? Time moved strangely in Paris, and the Atlantic divide meant that news was no longer news by the time of arrival.
    “I had heard.” She touched a gloved hand fleetingly to his arm. “I’m sorry, Kort.”
    His lips twisted with dark humor. Bitterness sat strangely on his clean-cut face. “So am I.”
    She had hated Sarah once. She had hated her for being older, for being taller, for catching Kort’s eye. Emma had wished warts on her, or hives, with all the petty desperation of her wounded adolescent soul. She had fantasized about Sarah, always so competent and complacent, tripping on theway to the altar or ripping her wedding dress or spilling punch down her front in some humiliating and public occasion.
    But not this. Never this. Emma’s heart winced away from the image of Sarah and her babies, still and cold.
    Sarah was the sort of woman her mother was, the sort of woman her mother had wanted to be. She ought to be running a bustling household with a brood of children around her, all good housewifery and Dutch thrift. They had had three children, Emma had been told. She had learned of them one by one, when her mother and brothers had gradually begun writing to her again, slowly resuming the flow of family news and gossip. Two girls and a boy, all dead of the influenza, and Sarah with them, a whole family gone in one cruel blow.
    “If you need distraction,” said Emma, “Paris is the place to be. It’s very good at helping one to forget.”
    Or, at least, at keeping one so busy one failed to remember. Either way, the result was the same, except in those wee, dark hours of the morning, the ones not filled with balls and the chatter of sophisticated people, when memories, regrets, and doubts came crowding in, one on top of the other, murdering sleep and shattering repose.
    She had tried laudanum once, but hated the grogginess that came after. It made her feel less herself, less energetic, less alive. She was left with no recourse but to keep as