The Garden Intrigue Read Free Page B

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
    F or, 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