The Garden Intrigue Read Online Free PDF

begging for life to praying for death. The prisons of Paris were just names to him, names and blank facades; he had no real understanding of the true nature of the terrors within.
    This was what happened of hiring boys who were still wet behind the ears and sending them out into the field with nothing more than a few vague instructions and a slightly outdated map of central Paris.
    Augustus preferred not to address the fact that he had been equally amateur when William Wickham had first recruited him for covert operations, fresh out of Cambridge. At the time, he had been an aspiring poet by vocation, a fledgling clergyman by necessity, resigned to the prospect of taking a parish and sandwiching verse between his sermons. His encounter with Wickham had changed all that.
    Twelve years later, Augustus could hardly imagine having been that young or that naïve. That young, that naïve, and that eager.
    Augustus cocked his head, listening. After this many years in the field, he could discern the subtleties of a silence, the way a painter could distinguish between the various forms of black. There was no listeningpresence from behind the door; he would have known her from the breathing.
    Augustus turned back to Horace. “She’s gone,” he said. “What do you know?”
    Leaning forward, Horace braced his palms on the knees of his breeches. His hands were too large for his frame, as if he hadn’t quite yet grown into his height. “The First Consul summoned Admiral Decres to Saint-Cloud. It was a warm day, so he left the window ajar. I,” he added modestly, “was beneath it.”
    “What did you hear?”
    “The fleet. They’re readying it.”
    “Which fleet?” There was more than one.
    “All of them!” Horace said excitedly. “The plan, it has been approved at last. I heard it direct from the First Consul’s lips. Save just one thing, all is readiness.”
    Augustus didn’t need to ask, but he did. “For?”
    “The First Consul, he is giving the orders for the invasion of England!”

Chapter 2
    “Whither wend ye, sir?” Cytherea cried,
    “And why hast thou come for me?
    To drag me, O, so far from home!
    Along the wine dark sea!”
    —Augustus Whittlesby,
The Perils of the
    Pulchritudinous Princess of the Azure Toes,
    Canto XII, 28–31
    Y ou really must stop poking at him like that,” said Jane, as the poet made his offended way out of the room.
    “I wasn’t poking,” said Emma.
    Her friend gave her a look. Jane had a way with looks.
    “Well, maybe just a little,” Emma admitted. “But when he perpetrates poems like that, it’s just too tempting not to poke.”
    Jane continued to look, her gray eyes amused.
    “What?” said Emma defensively.
    “There are better ways to get someone’s attention.”
    Emma chose to ignore that. “All I did was offer a little helpful criticism.”
    “In the middle of his reading,” pointed out Jane.
    “Was it the middle? It’s so hard to tell when it goes on for forty-five cantos.”
    “Twenty-two,” corrected Jane. She would know. Whittlesby had dedicated all of them to her, his Princess of the Pulchritudinous Toes. “Haven’t you ever thought of just conducting a conversation with him rather than embarrassing him in public? It might better serve your cause.”
    Emma wrinkled her nose at her friend. “I don’t have a cause.”
    Jane adjusted an already perfectly aligned flounce. “You go to every single one of his readings. Poetic devotion?”
    “Consider it a well-developed sense of the absurd?” Emma suggested. “For farce, he’s better than the commedia dell’arte.”
    “Almost anything is better than the commedia dell’arte,” said Jane. As Emma had learned, her friend was something of a snob when it came to theatre. It was one of the few flaws in an otherwise perfect personality. Fortunately, Emma had caught Jane reading gothic novels, or else they might never have become friends. “Care to try again?”
    “It’s not like that,” said Emma.