The Orchid Affair Read online

  “No argument there.” André yanked his old shirt up over his head, revealing an expanse of chest lightly fuzzed with dark hair.

  Laura swiveled around on the stool, reaching for her hairbrush. What with one thing and another, she had forgotten to braid her hair before going to bed, and it was a snarled mess. She attacked a chunk at random, wincing as the bristles hit knots. “Do you think Monsieur Delaroche is after us yet?”

  André’s head emerged through the top of the fresh shirt. He pulled the ties together. “I would be very surprised if he weren’t. He’ll be itching to get his hands on Daubier.”

  “And you,” Laura pointed out.

  “And me,” André agreed.

  “You seem surprisingly unconcerned.”

  “I slept well.”

  Laura made a face at him.

  “I’m not unconcerned. Believe me,” André said with feeling, “I couldn’t be farther from unconcerned. But I did take some precautions before we left.”

  Despite herself, Laura was intrigued. She lowered the hairbrush. “What sort of precautions?”

  “I planted a few false trails. Delaroche should be getting reports of a man answering my description heading with two small children in the direction of Austria.”

  “Austria?”

  “In the fireplace of my study in the Hôtel de Bac are the charred remains of a series of letters with the Austrian foreign minister, bargaining for safe conduct. Such a pity the fire went out before it could burn down completely.”

  “Isn’t that too obvious? Won’t he suspect?”

  “Trust me, it’s very artful charring. He’ll also receive conflicting reports about a fishing boat.”

  “Meaning,” said Laura, “that he’ll assume that the Austrian documents are a façade, but the fishing boat is worth following.”

  André looked smug. “Or the other way around. Delaroche’s mind is just twisted enough to assume that the obvious falsehood must be real and the real-seeming option false. There should be enough there to keep him busy for some time. You, by the way, have accepted new employment in Provence and are on your way there even as we speak. It’s a very old family. And very hard to find, given that they died out two generations ago.”

  “And Daubier?”

  “Went to ground, presumably with Cadoudal. Someone is going to go to his studio to make it look as though he snuck back to get necessaries for himself.”

  “Someone?”

  “I do still have some friends in Paris. The point is that it ought to look as though we’re all in separate groups, with Daubier still somewhere in Paris. They won’t be looking for us all together, and certainly not here.”

  “Unless Governor Murat saw,” Laura countered.

  “After your extraordinary efforts to prevent him doing so?”

  André’s voice was mild enough, but Laura felt a rush of warmth at the memory. After a night spent pressed together, body to body, it was absurd that the recollection of a bit of playacting could make her blush. That was all it had been, playacting.

  Now, if only her body would remember that.

  “There was nothing so extraordinary about it,” Laura muttered. “Anyone would have done the same.”

  “Somehow,” said André dryly, “I doubt Jeannette could have pulled that off in quite the same way.”

  “Well,” said Laura. She tossed her brush aside and rose from the stool. “Let’s hope my acting skills prove equally good on the stage.”

  “Nervous?” asked André.

  “Nonsense,” said Laura. “All one has to do is act out a scenario. What can possibly be so hard about that?”

  “Ruffiana? If you could, a little to the right?” called Pantaloon, for at least the third time in ten minutes. “You’re blocking Harlequin.”

  Laura moved obediently to the right, knowing that it would be the left next time, or the middle the time after that. No matter where she was, it wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

  Apparently, dissembling and performing weren’t quite the same skills after all. Leading a double life didn’t seem to have prepared her for the exigencies of the stage. Lying one’s way into someone’s household didn’t necessitate such skills as projecting one’s lines or remembering to cheat out towards the audience. Upstage, downstage . . . Laura’s head swam with it.

  None of the others seemed to be having the same problem. André, it seemed, was a natural on the stage. She would have accused him of practicing on the sly but for the fact that he hadn’t known about the acting troupe until after she had. It must be his background in debate, Laura decided. Like Commedia dell’Arte, being a public representative was an art form that demanded thinking on one’s feet and speaking very, very loudly.

  Being a governess didn’t provide quite the same training.

  Excuses, excuses. No matter how she attempted to parse it, the result was the same: She was an unmitigated disaster on the stage. Even de Berry had done better than she. He, at least, remembered to address his lines downstage.

  “Shall we begin the scene again?” suggested Pantaloon wearily.

  “What makes him think the tenth time will make any difference?” murmured Rose to Leandro.

  Leandro blushed and scuffed his feet, torn between his innate good nature and the attentions of his goddess.

  “Is it time for supper yet?” Laura asked hopefully.

  Harlequin checked his watch. “It’s four o’clock.”

  Blast.

  Pantaloon sighed and rose from his perch on an overturned log. “Again, I think. We must have something to perform when we reach Beauvais.”

  Beauvais was to be their first stop, roughly a week hence. They were rehearsing in the open, in a clearing in a wooded copse. It had been deemed a good place to camp, largely due to the small pond nearby.

  From Leandro, who did manage to string together complete sentences as long as Rose was out of eyeshot, Laura learned that they were taking something of a detour. Under normal circumstances, the troupe would have traveled by the major roads, stopping to give performances along the way, staying as many as three nights if the town were large enough and the take good. With so many new troupe members, Pantaloon had decreed it more prudent to take to the back roads, using the opportunity to put the new cast members through their paces. By avoiding the inns, they broke even. There was no revenue, but little in the way of cost.

  It also meant they had no witnesses. There was no one to comment on the man with the strangely broken hand, the actor with the oddly aristocratic accent, or the two small children who just happened to have the same names as the small children of a wanted man.

  According to Leandro, the decision had been Pantaloon’s. Pantaloon was, after all, the nominal head of the troupe. Laura had a fairly good idea who had first broached the plan.

  Laura wondered how much the Pink Carnation was paying Cécile. Whatever it was, she deserved double.

  Laura thought back over the rehearsal. Make that triple.

  “From the beginning, then,” said Pantaloon. “Ruffiana, you have intercepted Harlequin, who is returning from a rendezvous with Columbine, who has given him a note from Inamorata to be delivered to Leandro. You want him to play go-between on your behalf with Il Capitano, but first you must feel him out to make sure he won’t betray you to your husband. Understood?”

  “Perfectly,” said Laura. It wasn’t the scenario she had trouble with. She could summarize it perfectly well. It was acting it that was the problem.

  Apparently, one couldn’t just walk up to Harlequin and say, “Hello, young messenger. Would you carry this letter for me?” No. One had to work around to it and make it sound natural. Preferably with sufficient double entendre to keep the audience amused, interspersed with a well-worn repertoire of physical gags.

  André had been brilliantly comedic as Il Capitano, the blustering Spanish officer simultaneously attempting to seduce young Inamorata and repel the advances of her mother, Ruffiana. Even de Berry had been adequate as Leand
ro’s two-faced best friend, who pretends to aid in the courtship of Inamorata while secretly wooing her for himself, although Laura did wonder how much of that was acting and how much the prelude to an actual seduction.

  They began the scene again. Harlequin strolled “onstage,” hands in his pockets, whistling a merry Mozart tune, only to be intercepted by Laura. She gave an exaggerated start of surprise. “You! You there!”

  “I, Madame?” Harlequin waggled his eyebrows in a way that managed to be effortlessly comedic.

  “Yes, you.” Blast. What next? Molière this was not. Next time she escaped from Paris, it was going to be with a classical theatre troupe, where one could simply memorize one’s lines. Memorization, she could do. “You have the look of a lackey. Can you carry a letter for me?”

  “For a beautiful woman”—Harlequin made the word “beautiful” a joke in itself, in complicity with the imaginary audience—“there’s very little I can’t carry.”

  “Er, good. Um. I have need of your skills. Your letter-carrying skills.”

  Pantaloon dropped his head into his hands.

  “Where did you say you performed again?” said Harlequin jokingly, dropping out of character.

  “I’m sorry,” said Laura wretchedly. “I don’t know where my mind is today. I must have offended one of the muses.”

  She meant to make a joke out of it, but it fell flat. The others exchanged significant looks.

  “We’re all tired,” said André quickly. “After being based in Paris for so many months, none of us are used to this much travel anymore. It saps the creative energy.”

  It hadn’t seemed to hurt his creative energy.

  Laura mustered an unconvincing yawn. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

  “Didn’t you?” murmured Harlequin. He winked at André. “You’re a lucky man, Capitano.”

  She hadn’t . . . Oops. Laura bit down on a quick negation. In any event, at least this furthered the pretense that they were married. She could cling to that small reassurance, at least.

  It was a new and unsettling sentiment, feeling this incompetent. She didn’t like it, not at all. She might not be particularly talented or inspired, but she had always at least risen to the level of competence.

  “We’ll have an early night tonight and resume again tomorrow,” said Cécile briskly. “Everyone has a bad day now and again.”

  Laura trailed after her out of the clearing. One bad day, yes. But what happened when she failed again tomorrow?

  How long before the other actors smelled a rat?

  Chapter 27

  “It shouldn’t be this hard,” Laura muttered. “It’s simply a matter of knowing what to say and where to stand. How hard can that be?”

  “Very,” André said, propping himself up on one elbow.

  He was sprawled comfortably across the pallet, waiting as his temporary wife prepared for bed. Since she didn’t appear willing to remove much in the way of clothing, this consisted solely of yanking her hair back into a braid that looked as though it were intended as much for punishment as convenience. André winced in sympathy for her scalp as she crossed one section with another.

  A brief squall of rain had driven the troupe from their campfire early tonight. As Pantaloon had commented, not unkindly, it was perhaps for the best. If they were to perform in Beauvais on Saturday, they would have a great many miles to travel the next day and an even greater deal of work to accomplish.

  Seated next to Laura, André had felt her flinch at the words. She knew they were intended for her.

  Laura gave the knot at the bottom of her braid a final, vicious yank. “But you manage well enough. Better than well enough. You were quite good.”

  André leaned back against the bunched-up pillows. “I’ve had more practice than you have. I participated in the odd amateur theatrical in my youth.”

  More than a few, in fact. There had been a large garden behind Père Beniet’s house, with a terrace perfectly suited for balcony scenes.

  They had been such innocent revels, those summer theatricals. They had all laughed a great deal—sometimes at Julie, who could never remember her lines; sometimes at Renaud, comrade in legal studies, who thought no play was complete without a duel and insisted on inserting them in the most unlikely places in the narrative.

  Renaud had died long since, killed in the fighting in the Vendée during the war. He had never been meant to wield any weapon heavier than a law book.

  The others, too, were gone, each in their own way. Julie, dead. Marie-Agnès, Julie’s cousin, married with three children in Brest. Their entire enchanted summer circle, scattered and gone.

  “Don’t forget,” he added wryly, “I’ve spent the past few years playing at a pretense. There’s nothing like the threat of execution to improve one’s acting skills. You wouldn’t know that.”

  Something passed across her face, like a ripple beneath still waters.

  Laura set her brush down very carefully on the table. “I had wondered,” she said slowly. “You made such a convincing show.”

  “I had to,” André pointed out. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

  “When did it start?” she asked. “And why?”

  “Is it important?” He looked at her, perched on the three-legged stool, and thought how odd it was how unremarkable it felt to be here like this, sharing a room and a bed. She wore a loose blouse tucked into a high-waisted skirt—peasant clothing, convenient for travel. Her hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder. With her honey-colored skin and her dark hair, she might have been an Umbrian peasant in an old mural.

  Abandoning the stool, she perched on the edge of the pallet, tucking her legs up beneath the wide folds of her skirt. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s your prerogative.”

  André remembered another conversation, another night. “I’ve always had mixed feelings about prerogatives.”

  “So you’ve told me.”

  It was folly, he knew, to confide in her. What did he know of her, after all, other than this? That she had been his governess; that she could teach Latin, literature, and the rudiments of nearly everything else; that her resourcefulness deserted her when it came to the stage; and that she curled an arm beneath one cheek as she slept. All of these things, he knew, but they told him nothing at all.

  They did claim that sharing a bed brought out confidences, even though he suspected that this wasn’t quite what they meant.

  The urge to confide, after five years of silence, was surprisingly tempting, like water after thirst. He had kept his own counsel for so long. Père Beniet had known part of it, but not all. Jean had been Cadoudal’s creature, just as the coachman had been Fouché’s, both there to keep him in line. As for Daubier, he wasn’t the sort of friend in whom one confided. Even if the stakes hadn’t been what they were, Daubier was more interested in appearances than emotions; his attention tended to wander.

  And then there had been Julie. He had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to hear. She preferred the world as she transmuted it, translated into certitude by paint and canvas, no doubts or gray areas.

  André looked at Laura, her dark eyes steady on his, waiting him out without saying a word. He thought of her as he had first seen her—a shadowy figure in gray, waiting, watching, listening. Whatever else she was, she knew how to keep her counsel. And she understood the shades of gray.

  André peeled off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

  “It began four years ago. No,” André corrected himself, frowning at the brown wool of the blanket. “If I’m being honest, it started before that. We were in Paris during the Terror, Julie and I.” He looked up at the woman sitting on the bed next to him. “Were you there too?”

  She shook her head wordlessly.

  André rolled a bit of lint between his fingers. “Then I can’t tell you what it was. It’s the sort of thing that has to be experienced to be believed. I wish I hadn’t exp
erienced it. It all started off so well. We had a constitution, an assembly, all the things we had been demanding. Feudal privileges abolished, the common humanity of man exalted . . .” He broke off. “You have the idea.”

  It was hard, even now, to reassemble the rest. As a student of history, he could follow action A to consequence B, but at the time, event had followed event with incomprehensible rapidity.

  “Julie wanted to stay in Paris, to paint. The Revolution opened opportunities for her, opportunities greater than any she had had before.” Her friends had been more radical than his own. Through Jacques-Louis David, she had become close to both Marat and Robespierre. In the meantime, André’s own party, the Girondins, were coming increasingly under attack.

  Robespierre had commissioned her to craft a series of murals on the theme of Reason Exalted. Exalted? André had demanded. With their friends being arrested, carted off to one didn’t want to imagine what? Julie had taken umbrage at that. For her, the ideals of the Revolution were still pure and whole. She didn’t see the blood pouring down the Place de Grève or notice the gaps in their dinner parties. She had always had that facility, the facility of ignoring those things that didn’t fit in her compositions. It was part of her charm. At least, it had been.

  But there was one thing she hadn’t been able to ignore, although she would have liked to have done. It was at the height of the Terror that she had become pregnant with Gabrielle.

  “We moved back to Nantes when Julie was expecting Gabrielle. It seemed safer.”

  Laura’s dark eyes followed him. “But it wasn’t,” she guessed.

  “No,” he said shortly. Even now, it was hard to bring himself to talk about it. “Have you heard of republican marriage?”

  “Vows before a registry office?”

  He gave a short, harsh laugh. “If only. The Republican Committee in Nantes came up with a new way of dispatching dissidents they oh-so-euphemistically termed a republican marriage.”

  “Yes?” Laura prompted.