The Orchid Affair Read online

  “Thank you.” Mlle. Griscogne snatched the garment out of his hand, hastily shaking it out. Dropping the red velvet wrap, she shrugged her dress over her head, thrusting her arms into the sleeves. She twisted her arms behind her back, feverishly fumbling after her buttons. “Why are we going back to the Hôtel de Bac? What about Monsieur Daubier?”

  She was struggling to reach the buttons, her hair getting in the way of her fingers. Without a word, André took her by the shoulders, turned her around, brushed her hair out of the way, and began doing up her buttons. She started at the brush of his fingers against her back, giving him a quick, wide-eyed look over her shoulder.

  “Hold still, Suzette,” he said dryly.

  She frowned at him but complied, lowering her head so he could reach the buttons by her neck. André brushed the hair away from her nape, surprised to find his hand unsteady. It was the aftermath of a long evening, he told himself, the nervous tension of the confrontation with Delaroche, nothing to do with the long line of her neck, the curve of her spine, the intimate act of doing up a lady’s buttons. The last time he had served this office had been for Julie.

  André shoved the last button into its hole. “There,” he said brusquely. “Let’s go.”

  “Wait!” She yanked on his arm. “The ledger!”

  André looked at the fingers on his arm and then at her face. “What do you know about the ledger?”

  De Berry shrugged. “Sorry. I thought . . .”

  “She was one of us,” André finished flatly. “Right.” The ledger was already burned, destroyed immediately following Picot’s arrest, as soon as the net began to close. She might want it for one of two reasons, to save Daubier or to condemn him. “The ledger isn’t here. You needn’t worry about that.”

  “Good,” she said, giving her tangled hair a quick twist. It promptly fell right back down. “I assume it’s somewhere safe.”

  André raised his brows, but forbore to comment. “Come on,” he said instead. “Time is wasting. They’ll be back when they can’t find that warehouse.”

  “Or they’ll search the wrong one,” she countered. She navigated the narrow hallway with the ease of familiarity. “A dispute with the owner will occupy them for a spell.”

  “You gave them a real address?” André almost ran into an ornamental urn.

  Mlle. Griscogne’s eyes met his. “It seemed the expedient thing to do.”

  Expedient? It was bloody brilliant. If there was a warehouse at the Rue des Puces, Laclos and Maugret could expect to be embroiled for some time with an indignant owner.

  André yanked open the front door. “Who are you?”

  Mlle. Griscogne slipped past him, through the open door, Jeanette’s old cloak pulled tight around her shoulders. “Laure Griscogne. A governess.” Two stairs down, she glanced back at him over her shoulder. “A friend to Monsieur Daubier.”

  André shoved the door at de Berry, catching up with her halfway down the flight. “You expect me to believe you would involve yourself in treason for him?”

  “Is that what this is? Treason?”

  She automatically started towards the square as they reached the base of the stairs. André grabbed her arm, yanking her into safety in the shadows, de Berry following behind. “Don’t play games, Mademoiselle Griscogne,” he said in an undertone, careful not to wake the sleeping concierge. “They don’t suit you.”

  Mlle. Griscogne’s voice was breathless from keeping pace with him. “Then deal with me honestly. Speak to me plainly.”

  André kept a tight hold on her arm. “You want plain speaking? Your old friend Daubier is bound for the guillotine unless we can get him out.”

  “There is no hope they will release him?”

  “Intact? No.”

  “Can you get him out?” she asked urgently.

  “I can try.”

  He could try, but he wasn’t sure he could succeed. Years of building up his position, and yet his influence only went so far. One false move, and he condemned not only Daubier but himself.

  Jean wasn’t at the gate. André shoved it open himself, taking some solace in physical exertion, the simple act of pitting muscle against iron. If only it would be so easy to move the guards around Delaroche.

  “In,” he said brusquely. “You’ll both stay here tonight. Cousin Philippe, make sure Mademoiselle Griscogne is well settled for the night.”

  He could hear the gravel crackle beneath Mlle. Griscogne’s boots. “You mean you want him to guard me.”

  “In plain language, yes. Would you do otherwise in my position?” He pulled open the front door, holding it open for her with exaggerated gallantry. The guests had long since gone home, the remnants of the feast been cleared away, the gauze torn down from the walls. The Hôtel de Bac was as it had been before—an empty, ruined shell of a place. “We have a great deal of talking to do, you and I.”

  Mlle. Griscogne gave him a long look as she took up the candle that Jean had left on the front hall table. “I couldn’t agree more.”

  A small voice piped up out of the shadows. “Mademoiselle?”

  André saw a small figure huddled on the stairs.

  “Pierre-André?” Pushing back her hood with her free hand, she moved quickly towards him. “What are you doing out of bed?”

  Pierre-André stood on the first stair and wrapped his arms around her waist, burying his small head in her torso. “Nightmare,” he mumbled.

  André took a step forward into the hall, feeling strangely out of place with his own son, in his own family. Pierre-André hadn’t seen him, he tried to reassure himself. Pierre-André would have come to him otherwise. Or would he? He had been little more than a stranger to his own children for the past four years.

  And all for what? A plot that was fast unraveling, a cause to which his commitment was at best equivocal.

  Mlle. Griscogne cupped Pierre-André’s head with a practiced hand. “What kind of nightmare?”

  Pierre-André burrowed against her stomach. “We were on the bridge and that man—the man in the carriage—”

  Mlle. Griscogne’s eyes met André’s over his son’s head. “Monsieur Delaroche.”

  “He pushed me into the water. Hard,” Pierre-André added in injured tones. “I was drownding and drownding,” he said dramatically.

  “But you’re not now,” said Mlle. Griscogne, in matter-of-fact tones. “You’re not in the Seine and you’re not on the bridge. You’re in your own house, all dry and safe.”

  “Mmmph,” said Pierre-André.

  She continued her rhythmic stroking of his hair. “It was only a dream, nothing more. It can’t hurt you.”

  But Delaroche could. She knew it. André knew it. The worst nightmares were those that took place when one was awake.

  Prising Pierre-André’s arms from around her waist, she leaned back just far enough to look André’s little boy in the eye. “I’ll put you back to bed, shall I?”

  Pierre-André put up his arms and she hefted him up with surprising ease. André stood in the shadows, frozen, the full weight of what he might have done dragging at him like the waters of the Seine.

  Pierre-André buried his downy head in the governess’s shoulder. She looked back to André. “I’ll be down directly.”

  “I’m off to the Prefecture. I may be some time.” He added, with a flash of dry humor, “You needn’t wait up.”

  Mlle. Griscogne’s eyes met his over his son’s tousled head. “But I will.”

  Chapter 20

  Laura started awake as boots sounded against the wood of the floor.

  She hadn’t realized she’d fallen asleep. De Berry still snored peacefully away on his settee, one arm flung up along the back, but the candle had guttered into a puddle of wax and the pale light of dawn filtered through the windows. It was a particularly dispirited sort of dawn, as strained and gray as Jaouen’s face as he strode into the room.

  Laura rose clumsily from her chair, aware that the fire had burned down long since, th
at her fingers were stiff with cold and her toes numb in her boots.

  “Well?” she croaked. Her voice was dry with disuse. Laura cleared her throat and tried again. “What news?”

  “It was no use.” Jaouen’s customary vitality appeared to have deserted him. He peeled off his glasses to rub his eyes, that gesture so familiar, and yet, like everything else, so suspect. “Fouché’s men have him under close watch.”

  Laura wiped her palms against the rumpled material of her skirt. “I thought you were one of them,” she said tiredly. “Fouché’s men.”

  She still hadn’t made sense of the fact that he wasn’t. The entire world had turned upside down and spun on its head in the space of the evening.

  “I was.” Jaouen caught himself. “I am. For the moment.”

  Until Fouché found out the truth.

  What was the truth? Laura was too tired to sort out plots and counterplots. To her tired eyes, Jaouen seemed sincere. But then, she had believed him before, too, believed him to be whatever it was that he had claimed to be.

  Laura sat back down, taking her time, using the motion as an excuse to study her so-called employer as she arranged her rumpled skirts with as much care as if they had been a princess’s best ball gown, her brain swimming with crosses and double crosses, deceptions and counterdeceptions.

  In the mist-laden silence, de Berry made a snuffling noise and rolled over.

  What did royal dukes dream of? Laura wondered irrelevantly. Castles and coronets? Swift horses and beautiful women?

  Jaouen spoke, so abruptly that it made her jump. “I can get Daubier out. But if I do so, the game is up, for all of us.” Pressing his bloodshot eyes together, he breathed in deeply, shaking his head. “No. That’s a lie. It’s over already. It has been from the moment they arrested Picot. It’s only a matter of time now until it all unravels. And not much time.”

  How did one tell the lies from the truths? She couldn’t be sure whether he was lying to himself or to her. Or both. His words had the ring of sincerity, but she no longer trusted her own ability to discern fact from fiction. At least, not where Jaouen was concerned.

  “What are you going to do?” Laura asked quietly.

  Jaouen dropped heavily into the chair next to hers. She could hear the scrape of the legs against the uncarpeted floor. He let his head fall back against the wall, as though it had grown too heavy to carry. “I can get him out,” he repeated. “I can go and present my cousin’s seal and claim that I’m moving Daubier on Fouché’s request. They’ll believe me. It’s been true often enough in the past. Once they discover the deception . . .” He let out his breath in a long, tired exhalation. “I’ll have to arrange for the children first. There’ll be preparations to be made.”

  He spoke as though he didn’t expect to return. Laura twisted in her chair to face him. Her gray skirt brushed his leg. He was still wearing formal stockings and breeches, his garb from the party, but the white stockings were stained with mud, the shiny black shoes scuffed.

  “And what about you?”

  Jaouen rolled his head against the wall so he was facing her. His eyes were bloodshot and there was a night’s growth of beard on his chin. He said nothing.

  He didn’t need to.

  “You’re not just going to give yourself up,” Laura said disbelievingly. “Oh, for heaven’s sake! You are, aren’t you? Trading yourself in for Daubier? That’s something straight out of—out of a bad chivalric romance!”

  Unless, of course, he knew himself to be in no danger, the more cynical part of her mind whispered. That would be clever, to free the old artist—at seeming risk of his own life—only to follow Daubier to his confederates.

  “Of course, I’m not,” said Jaouen irritably. “What do you take me for, Robin Hood?”

  The paper of the wall was cool against Laura’s temple. They were eye to eye, only inches apart. Without his glasses, his eyes were brilliantly blue. “I don’t know what to take you for. Not anymore.”

  “Trust me,” said Jaouen, “the feeling is mutual, Suzette.”

  Laura felt a sudden, absurd urge to tug up her bodice, even though she knew it to be quite firmly in place. “You’re fortunate that Suzette appeared when she did. If those men had gone blundering off through Daubier’s studio, we would be in worse case than we are.”

  “We?”

  “Whose motives are the more in question?” she asked. “Mine? Or your own?”

  “You don’t flinch, do you?” he said admiringly.

  “Not from what needs to be done.”

  Jaouen propped himself up on one elbow. His shadow fell across the wall behind her, blocking her in. “What needs to be done for whom? Delaroche? Or someone else?”

  “I told you already. My interest is in saving Daubier. I will also,” she said, in her driest, most governess-like tones, “admit to a certain interest in the future of your offspring. I have invested considerable effort in them. I would prefer not to see them fatherless.”

  It was as close as she could come to saying that she cared. On the children’s behalf, of course. And Daubier’s.

  She shrugged. “You can believe me or not as you choose.”

  “You needn’t worry that I’m planning to hand myself over to the Ministry of Police on a platter. I’m going to do my damnedest to get out. I have no interest in martyrdom. Not in this cause or any other.”

  “Then why embroil yourself in it?”

  Jaouen’s face was as closed as the city gates. “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

  All right, then. If he didn’t want to talk about it, they didn’t have to talk about it. “Didn’t you have an escape plan?”

  “We did.” The use of the past tense was unmistakable. Whatever the escape plan had been, it was no longer viable. “I owe an obligation to Daubier,” Jaouen said woodenly, with the dogged single-mindedness of exhaustion. “I intend to see it through.”

  Laura wiggled upright in her chair, girding for battle. “And what of your other obligations? Are you just going to abandon your children, abandon your cause, and let the Ministry do with you what they will? I call that poor spirited.”

  She had hit a nerve. Jaouen’s lips curled back over his teeth. “I am not abandoning my children.”

  “Sending yourself off to be killed? And what will become of them? A return to Nantes with Jeannette? What would you call it?”

  “Protecting them. Saving them from the consequences of my actions. They shouldn’t be damned for my carelessness.”

  Carelessness. Like taking a boat out on the coast of Cornwall—the rocky coast of Cornwall—in the middle of a squall.

  “Isn’t it a bit late for that?” she said nastily.

  Jaouen whitened as though she had slapped him.

  “I—,” he began, and stopped. She could see the words whirring through his brain—defense, denial, attempts at exoneration—all considered and discarded. He came out fighting. “Do you think you could do better?”

  Well, since he asked. “Yes,” said Laura.

  Behind them, de Berry snored on.

  “How?” Jaouen had his voice back under control, but there was a rough edge to it, half anger, half hope. She could see his knuckles white against the seat of the chair. “Pray, do enlighten me.”

  If he were what he claimed . . . She couldn’t tell him about the Pink Carnation; it wasn’t her secret to share. But if he were what he claimed, if he were the Duc de Berry’s protector rather than his executioner, the Pink Carnation would want to know.

  And, quite possibly, help.

  The agents of the English government and those of the French royal family did not always work in accord. To smuggle the Duc de Berry out of Paris—when Artois’s own organization had failed—would be an immense feather in the Pink Carnation’s cap.

  “I know someone—someone who might be able to help you. You could leave Paris with your children. With the duke. And Daubier.”

  “Grand promises, Mademoiselle Griscogne.�
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  “I don’t make any promises. But it is a chance.”

  “A chance.” There was a bitter tinge to the word. Propping an elbow against the back of the chair, he asked, “Who is this someone?”

  Laura shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

  “And yet you expect me to trust you, not only with my own life, but those of my children?”

  “Do you have any other choice?”

  Jaouen pressed his bloodshot eyes shut. “There might,” he said raggedly, “have been more politic ways of phrasing that.”

  “There might,” she agreed. “But we are plainspoken people, you and I. Aren’t we?”

  Jaouen’s elbow rested on the back of her chair. “Are you telling me you’ve never lied to me?”

  Only about everything.

  Nearly everything. What a cosmic joke it was that her deception had taken her from her assumed identity and put her back to what she was, Michel and Chiaretta de Griscogne’s daughter. She had lied her way back to the truth.

  “I don’t make claims I can’t keep,” she countered. “Have I led you false yet?”

  “Where do you find this friend of yours?”

  “Alone,” she said, and saw him wince. “You can’t have expected I would have allowed you to come.”

  She saw his eyebrows lift on the word “allowed,” but he forbore comment. The balance of power had shifted, and they both knew it.

  “You do realize,” he said slowly, “what a risk I take in allowing you to go alone. You might go straight to Delaroche.”

  “I might,” she agreed levelly. “You might take de Berry and run as soon as I leave the house. We both act on faith.”

  “Faith,” Jaouen murmured. “The last refuge of those with nothing else.”

  “You said it, Monsieur, not I.”

  “If you are to be our salvation, you might as well call me André.” His lips creased in a weary smile. “You were never terribly convincing about the honorific.”

  “André,” she said, testing the name. Perhaps there was a little bit of Suzette in her after all. She rolled the “r” on her tongue and watched his eyes follow her lips. “Are you sure you wish to allow me such liberties?”