The Garden Intrigue by Lauren Willig Page A

Engineering hadn’t come easily to her. She had always been more a creature of words than of charts and figures. But hydraulics had been Paul’s passion. Don Quixote had his windmills; Paul had an expanse of marshland he was determined to transform into habitable and arable land, freeing his tenants of the crippling diseases bredby the swamps. It had been a noble project, but one that had absorbed so much of his time and attention that there had been little left over for the cosseting of a child bride, and a spoiled child bride, at that.
    She had accused him of caring only for her dowry, of wooing her with lies, before storming off to Paris to slake her hurt feelings in a round of amusements.
    Poor Paul. Poor both of them. It hadn’t been all a lie, although it had taken her years to see that. In is own way, Paul had loved her. Those long afternoons in the garden outside Mme. Campan’s, the poetry, the clandestine letters, he had meant them all. He had reveled as much as she in the high drama of romance. She could see that now.
    Once the courtship was over, though, he had settled again into his normal life, into his estate at Carmagnac and drainage and the million and one responsibilities of land ownership, while Emma waited fruitlessly for the poetry that had gone silent. It had been easy enough to assume the worst, that he had, as everyone claimed, married her for her purse, especially as their evenings devolved from caresses into recriminations and from recriminations into full-blown fights. Later, bit by bit, she had pored over his notes and charts, puzzling over the mysterious mechanics of it all, making painstaking sense of the rough sketches of pumps and pulleys and the mathematics that went with them. Once she convinced him she was in earnest this time, that she meant to stay, he had explained it to her, Paul slowly and patiently remedying the defects of a ramshackle education, sitting hour after hour with her in his study, going over facts that must have seemed as elementary to him as the difference between Mozart and Beaumarchais was to her.
    It had been a renaissance for their marriage, as well as for Paul’s beloved Carmagnac. A second chance, after so much hurt and confusion and misunderstanding.
    Paul’s picture gazed blindly above her head from its position over the mantel, frozen forever at thirty-seven. He had been painted in his study at Carmagnac, surrounded by the implements of his vocation. Behind him,the treatises he had so painstakingly collected and shipped out across the marsh stood in neat rows in the bookcases behind him. The painter had caught Paul’s surroundings, but not his expression. The black eyes that had been so bright and lively in life were flat and dull on canvas, staring blankly out at the viewer. Like a death mask.
    A premonition? She had commissioned the portrait as an anniversary present, shortly before he took ill, the first present she had ever bought him—and the last.
    Why did he have to go and die just as they were beginning to understand each other? He had died, leaving her with Carmagnac, a great deal of abstruse knowledge about hydraulics, and a wealth of hurt and confusion.
    Fulton bowed gallantly in Emma’s direction. “If I were wise, I would make it a practice to consult Madame Delagardie on all my inventions. Her observations are always invaluable.”
    With an effort, Emma yanked herself back to the present. “Pooh. It takes little understanding to be shown a drawing and nod one’s head in all the appropriate places. I bow entirely to your expertise, Mr. Fulton, and can only extend my thanks. The new pump is a vast improvement.”
    Cousin Robert dealt her an avuncular pat on the shoulder. “I imagine it must be hard for you to leave Carmagnac,” he said kindly. “Having put so much work into it.”
    “Not really,” said Emma. “I never did spend terribly much time there, except when Paul—well. I’ll go down to visit again at harvest. Otherwise, if