The Orchid Affair Read online

  Colin pointed at the painting on the ceiling. “Nice touch. Ouch.” He’d banged his head on the slope.

  Wincing in sympathy, I put a hand to his temple, sliding my fingers through his hair. It was beginning to get long on top, like the floppy-haired teen idols of my 1980s youth. “There?”

  Colin angled his head for better access. “You can keep rubbing,” he said hopefully. “A little to the left. . . .”

  “I think you’ll live.” I patted him briskly on the shoulder and stepped back. “All right, BooBoo, let’s go.”

  “BooBoo?” Colin looked at me quizzically as I jettisoned my in-flight reading from my bag. Because everyone needs three heavy research tomes and two novels for a forty-minute flight.

  “You know. As in ‘Sit, BooBoo, sit.’” Every now and then I forget that we’re divided by a common language. I’d never felt quite so glaringly American until I started dating an Englishman. I decided to leave off the “good dog” bit. Even the most laid-back of boyfriends might take that the wrong way. “It was a commercial.”

  Colin decided to let it go. He twisted the door handle, conducting an elaborate shuffle in order to open the door without trapping himself behind it or impaling himself on the side of the desk. He managed it, but only just. “Shall we get a coffee before I lose you to the archives?”

  “I’d love a coffee.” I scooped up the key and gestured to him to move along so I could lock up. There wasn’t room for both of us. “And maybe one of those marzipan pigs.”

  “Marzipan what?”

  “Pigs.” I hoisted my bag up on my shoulder and followed him back along the hall to the elevator, walking a little bit behind, since there wasn’t room for us to go two abreast. “They were sort of a thing for me and—well, they were sort of a thing last time I was here.”

  I squeezed myself into the elevator next to him. No need to explain that the last time I had been in Paris had been with my ex, Grant. He’d been speaking at an academic conference and I had tagged along. A lot of Grant’s time had been devoted to departmental schmoozing, which was only fair, considering that his department had been paying his tab, but I had managed to kidnap him for coffee and cake in between panels.

  I had been delighted by the marzipan-coated pigs, Grant rather less so. He had been even less delighted when the pig attempted to carry on a conversation with him. Not that it was anything particularly deep. It had been more of the “Hello, Mr. Piven. Are you planning to eat me?” variety. Grant had been terrified that one of his colleagues would see him in flagrante pigilicto . Not very good for one’s image as a mature and responsible member of the faculty of the Harvard gov department.

  That was what he got, I’d teased him, for dating a grad student.

  Not one of his grad students, he’d hastily specified. Dating one’s own grad students was a no-no, punishable by expulsion. I was in another department; I was fair game.

  So, apparently, were underage art historians.

  But that had all been a long time ago. Two years ago, to be precise. It had been more than a year now since the breakup, two years since we had been in Paris together. This Paris would be a different city; my city with Colin, not with Grant.

  The elevator decanted us into the lobby and we wiggled our way out, the strap of my bag snagging on Colin’s coat.

  “Marzipan pigs, eh?” said Colin, skeptical, but game, and I liked him even more for it, liked him so much that it made my chest hurt.

  “You’ll see.” I threaded my arm through his. “The big question is, tail first or head first?”

  “What do you usually do?” he asked.

  “I generally start with the tail and work my way up.”

  “Prolonging the agony? Bloodthirsty woman.” Colin sounded like he rather approved. He nodded towards the desk. “Shall we see if Serena’s in yet?”

  “We can get her a pig too,” I said cheerfully. Serena needed fattening up. They say a camel can’t fit through the eye of a needle, but Serena probably could. She was at the point of thin that crosses over from elegant to gaunt. And, no, that wasn’t just sour grapes speaking.

  I smiled ingratiatingly at the receptionist, who couldn’t have cared less.

  “Est-ce que une Serena Selwick est ici?” I asked in my very ungrammatical sixth-grade French. I can read the stuff; just don’t ask me to speak it.

  The receptionist was not impressed. She checked the book. “Selwick . . . 403?”

  “Um, no,” I said. “I mean, non. Nous sommes dans 403. Me and him. Nous cherchons l’autre Selwick. Serena?”

  “Oui.” The woman seemed unfazed. She poked a manicured nail at the book. “Selwick. 403.”

  This was getting a little frustrating. “Mais où est l’autre Selwick? Une autre Selwick? There should be another reservation.”

  Now it was her turn to look confused. From the look on her face, she was thinking, Americans. Why do I always get the Americans?

  Colin stepped in. “My sister is also staying here,” he said in accented but perfectly grammatical French. “Which room is she in?”

  “Room 403,” repeated the woman in the same language, frowning at him, although not as she had frowned at me. This was confusion, not annoyance. “The entire party is in 403. It is a room for three.”

  “What?” I yelped. Like I said, I can’t speak it, but I can understand it. Room for three came across loud and clear.

  Turning to me, she switched to English. “How you say? A . . . three-person,” she said helpfully.

  Not if I had anything to do with it, it wasn’t. “There’s been a mistake,” I said.

  “No mistake,” she said peacefully. “Selwick, 403.” She tapped the ledger for emphasis.

  I was getting pretty damn sick of that ledger.

  “That may be so,” I said, “but we reserved two rooms, one for two people, one for one.” I looked to Colin for support. “Didn’t we?”

  “Um . . .” Colin didn’t quite meet my eyes. Never a good sign.

  I shifted so that we were facing away from the reception desk, our bodies angled away from the receptionist, who was watching us with a certain amount of I-told-you-so, or whatever that might be translated into French. “What did you do?” I whispered.

  “I didn’t do anything,” said Colin with patent untruth.

  “All right,” I said, with the same tone of exaggerated patience he had used on me. I wasn’t going to quibble over syntax. There were more important things to quibble over. Like who was going to be sleeping on the couch. “What did you not do?”

  “I rang and asked them to add an extra.”

  “An extra room or an extra person?”

  Colin jammed his fists in the pockets of his Barbour jacket, pulling it down taut around his shoulders. “I don’t remember.”

  There went my moral high ground with the desk woman.

  I bared my teeth in a fake smile, just for her benefit. “Try.”

  “Does it matter?” Colin raked a hand through his already disordered hair. “Look, we’ll get it sorted, all right? It’s not that big a deal.”

  Not that big a deal? If he wanted to share a bed with Serena, that was just fine with me. My lingerie and I would be elsewhere. Like back in London.

  If I stayed any longer I was going to say something I would regret later, and that wouldn’t be good. For either of us. Discretion might not be the better part of valor, but it saves you a lot of apologizing later on.

  “Here,” I said, thrusting the key into his hand. “You got us into this; you get it sorted. I have research to do.”

  And with that, I fled out into the rain.

  Chapter 1

  Paris, 1804

  “Around the back,” said the gatekeeper.

  Laura scrambled backwards as a moving wall of iron careened towards her face. From the distance, the gate was a grand thing, a towering edifice of black metal with heraldic symbols outlined in flaking gilt. From up close, it was decidedly less attractive. Especially when it was on a collisi
on course with one’s nose. Her nose might not be a thing of beauty, but she liked it where it was.

  “But—” Laura grabbed at the bars with her gloved hands. The leather skidded against the bars, leaving long, rusty streaks across her palms. So much for her last pair of gloves.

  Laura bit down on a sharp exclamation of frustration. She reminded herself of Rule #10 of the Guide to Better Governessing: Never Let Them See You Suffer. Weakness bred contempt. If there was one thing she had learned, it was that the meek never inherited anything—except maybe a gate to the nose.

  “I am expected,” Laura announced with all the dignity she could muster.

  It was hard to be dignified with raindrops dripping off one’s nose. She could feel wet strands of hair scraggling down her neck, under the back of her collar. Errant strands tickled her back, making her want to squirm. Oh, heavens, that itched.

  She looked down her nose through the grille of ironwork. “Kindly let me in.”

  Ahead of her, just a stretch of courtyard away, across gardens grown unkempt with neglect, lay warmth and shelter. Or at least shelter. From the look of the unlit windows, there was precious little warmth. But even a roof looked good to her right now. Roofs served an important purpose. They kept off rain. Blasted rain. This was France, not England. What was it doing mizzling like this?

  The gatekeeper shrugged, and started to turn away.

  Laura resisted the urge to reach through the bars, grab him by the collar, and shake.

  “The governess,” she called after him, trying to keep any touch of desperation from her voice. She refused to believe her mission could end like this, this ignominiously, this early. This moistly. “I am the governess.”

  “Around the back,” the gatekeeper repeated and spat for good measure.

  Around the back? The house was a good mile around. Would it really have been so much bother to have let her in through the front? What had happened to liberté, égalité and fraternité? Apparently, those sentiments didn’t extend to governesses.

  Laura took a step back, landing in a puddle that went clear up to her ankle. She could feel the icy water soaking through the worn kid leather of her sensible boot. At least, it would have been sensible, if it hadn’t had a hole the size of Notre-Dame in the sole. Laura took a deep breath in and out through her nose. Right. If he wanted her around the back, around the back it was. There was no point in starting off on the wrong foot by fighting with the gatekeeper. Even if the man was a petty cretin who shouldn’t be trusted with a latchkey.

  Temper, she reminded herself. Temper. She had been a semi-servant for years enough now that one would think she was immune to such slights.

  Gathering up the sodden folds of her pelisse (dark brown wool, sensible, warm, didn’t show the dirt, largely because it had already been designed to look like dirt), Laura trudged the length of the street, skidding a bit as her sodden shoes slipped and slid on the rounded cobbles. The Hôtel de Bac was in the heart of the Marais, among a twisted welter of ancient streets, most without sidewalks. During her long years in England, Laura had never thought she would miss London, but she did miss the sidewalks. And the tea.

  Mmm, tea. Hot, amber liquid with curls of steam rising from the top, the curved sides of the cup warm against one’s palms on a cold day....

  This had been her choice, she reminded herself. No one had placed a knife to her neck and demanded she go. She could very well have stayed in England and done exactly as she had done for the past sixteen years. She could have walked primly down the sidewalked streets, herding her charges in front of her, yanking them back from horses’ hooves and mud puddles and bits of interesting masonry; she could have poured her tea from the nursery teapot, watching the steam curl from the cup and knowing that she was seeing in those endless curls a lifetime of the same streets, the same tea, the same high-pitched voices whining, “Miss Grey! Miss Grey!”

  She didn’t want to be Miss Grey anymore. Miss Grey might have warm hands and dry feet, but she wanted to be Laura again, before it was too late and the stony edifice that was Miss Grey closed entirely around her. It was time to get her feet wet.

  Laura looked down at the soaking mess of her shoes. It was a pity Fate had to take her quite so literally.

  The gatekeeper was waiting for her by the side entrance. He had an umbrella—which he held over his own head. Unlike the main gate, this one was designed for use rather than show, two thick slabs of dark wood leading onto a square stone courtyard. He opened the gate just wide enough for her to wiggle through, in an undignified sideways shuffle. That was, she was sure, quite intentional.

  Rain oozed down the gray stone of the building, seeping through the cracks in the masonry, puddling in the crevices in the paving. Tucked away in a corner, a stone angel wept over the round mouth of a well, raindrops dripping down her face like tears. The long windows were the same unforgiving gray as the stone.

  After the bright, modern town houses of Mayfair, the great bulk of the seventeenth-century mansion looked archaic and more than a little threatening.

  From very long ago, a whisper of memory presented itself, of the fairy stories so in vogue in the fashionable salons of her youth, of castles under curses, their ruined halls echoing to the fearsome tread of the ogre as a captive princess shivered in her tower.

  Laura didn’t believe in fairy stories. Any ogres here would be of the human variety.

  One ogre, to be precise. André Jaouen. Thirty-six years old. Formerly an avocat of Nantes. Now employed at the Préfecture de Paris under the ostensible supervision of Louis-Nicolas Dubois. Commonly known to be a protégé of Bonaparte’s Chief of Police, Joseph Fouché, to whom he bore a distant relation. It was his department through which any word of suspicious personages in Paris would come. It was his job to hunt down and secure these threats to the Republic.

  Which meant that it was Laura’s job to get the information to the Pink Carnation before he could get to them.

  They had dubbed her the Orchid—the Silver Orchid. The Carnation had chosen the name, with her usual perspicacity. It seemed appropriate, thought Laura, for the Carnation to have named her after a flower that drew its sustenance from others, dependent on more firmly rooted flora for its very existence.

  Her mission was simple enough. She was to embed herself into the household of the assistant to the Prefect of Police. There, she was to keep an eye out for suspicious behavior and useful information, taking specific instructions from the Pink Carnation as directed.

  Just a simple little task. Nothing to write home about. She had nothing to do but outwit a man whose very business was the outwitting of others, with no training but sixteen years of governessing and a six-month course at a spy school in Sussex executed in a way that could only be called cheerfully haphazard. The Selwicks had taught her to blacken her teeth with soot and gum (just in case she wanted to play a demented old hag); to ask the way to Rouen in a thick Norman accent; and to swing on a rope through a window without breaking the glass or herself. None of these skills seemed entirely applicable to her current situation.

  Laura wasn’t under any illusions as to her qualifications. The Pink Carnation would have been happier inserting a maid into Jaouen’s household, or a groom—someone with more experience in the field, someone less conspicuous, someone with a proven record—but Jaouen hadn’t needed a maid or a groom. He had needed a governess, and governess she was.

  If there was one role she could play convincingly, it was the one she had lived for the past sixteen years. She just had to remember that.

  Laura looked levelly at the gatekeeper, trying not to wince at the rain that blew below her bonnet rim, plastering wet strands of hair against her face.

  “Hello,” she said, as if she hadn’t been forced to walk half a mile in the rain when there had been a perfectly good gate right there. “I am the governess. Your master is expecting me.”

  The gatekeeper jerked his head brusquely to the side. “This way.”

  There had been
a formal entrance on the other side, equipped with a grand porte cochere designed to keep the rain off more privileged heads than hers. No such luxuries for a potential governess. Shivering, Laura picked her way along behind the gatekeeper across the uncovered courtyard, trying to avoid the slicks of mud where the stone had cracked and crumbled, ruinous with neglect. Whatever equality the Revolution had preached, it didn’t extend to domestic staff.

  Laura squelched her way down an uncarpeted corridor after the gatekeeper, her sodden shoes leaving damp prints on the floor. If possible, it felt even colder inside than out. Despite the frost on the windows, there were no fires in any of the grates. The Hôtel de Bac was as cold as the grave.

  Pushing open a door, the gatekeeper managed to force two full syllables through his lips. “Wait here.”

  With that edifying communication, he stalked off the way he had come.

  Shaking out her damp skirts, Laura turned in a slow circle. Here was a once grand salon, entirely bare of furniture. Smoke had dulled the once-elegant silk hangings on the walls and filmed the ornate plasterwork of the ceiling. Darker patches on the wall revealed places where paintings had once hung, but did no longer. The gold leaf that had once picked out the frame of a painting set into the ceiling had flaked off in large chips, giving the whole a derelict air. The painting was still in its rightful place, but dirt and wear had given the king of the gods a decidedly down-at-the-mouth look.

  Most of the decay was due to neglect, but not all. The coat of arms above the fireplace had been hacked into oblivion. Deep gashes scored the shield, obliterating both the symbols of rank and the ceremonial border around them. Beneath a now lopsided border of plumes, the gashes gaped like open wounds, oozing pure malice and mindless hate.

  Laura felt a chill run down her spine that had nothing to do with the January cold. So much for the old family de Bac. She wondered what this new regime did to spies. That particular information had not been part of her training course, and probably for good reason.