The Orchid Affair Page 33

  André closed his eyes. Even now, he could see it—the winter-blasted bank of the Loire, the bare tree branches, the shivering bodies of the condemned. “They would take a man and a woman,” he said in a monotone, “strip them, bind them together, and fling them into the river. It was January. Cold. They didn’t stand a chance.” His tongue felt dry at the memory. “Sometimes, they would run them through with a sword, from one straight through the other, one blade for both.”

  He might not have been on the Committee, but all those unwilling initiates into the “republican marriage” had been, in some part, his doing. All those heads lost on the guillotine. He had fought for the Revolution, lent his voice and his will to bring it about, and in the end, it had brought only death. He had helped unleash forces he had been powerless to control.

  André felt Laura’s hand on his arm—just a fleeting touch, a wordless gesture of sympathy. It was enough to bolster him to go on.

  He drew a shuddering breath. “I spoke to Jean-Baptiste Carrier, the head of the Tribunal. He said it wasn’t any of my concern. My day was over. What we had done in the Assembly was all well and good, but it wasn’t enough. It was their turn now. And if I questioned too much, well, they might just start to doubt my loyalty as well. My loyalty and my family’s.” He looked at Laura, silent, attentive, her face still in the light of the single lamp. “They were burning books, Laura. Killing men for making the wrong friends. It was madness. He threatened Père Beniet—my father-in-law.”

  Laura nodded. “I know.”

  “I had intended to try to take up my legal practice and put together a normal life again. But there wasn’t any such thing as normal. It seemed safer to try to work from within. At least, it made me and my family harder to denounce.”

  “I still don’t understand how you came to be working for Artois,” said Laura. “I wouldn’t have pegged you as a monarchist.”

  André shook himself out of the past. “What was the alternative? None of the reforms we had dreamed of could exist in a world where coup followed coup and the army had the power to unseat the people’s chosen representatives. Monarchy might not be the best of all possible systems, but at least it promised stability and, if done right, the rule of law.”

  “But what laws?” Laura asked sensibly. “I should think the value of the system would depend on the laws underlying it.”

  “To a point. There’s something to be said for predictability. Even in a flawed system, at least one knows where one stands. Predictability is all.”

  “Not all. What if the laws decreed that ten people, chosen in a preordained way, were to be guillotined at ten in the morning every Sunday? It might be predictable, but it wouldn’t be pleasant. Or just,” Laura added, as an afterthought.

  André propped himself up on one elbow. “That’s to take the argument to absurdity. It’s as if to argue that because one cat scratched you, all cats should be declawed.”

  “No,” said Laura, a glint in her black eyes. “That’s your argument, not mine. You argue that all law is functionally the same. I argue for distinctions among them, between good law and bad law.”

  “What if it’s neither good nor bad, but merely normative?” André argued back.

  “What if I fling words about for the sake of saying them?”

  “Isn’t that what rhetoric is?”

  “But is rhetoric conducive to law? Or to reason?”

  André grinned up at her, feeling lighter-hearted than he had for some time. “You’re too quick for me.”

  Laura’s expression turned wry. “Only off the stage. On it, I can’t seem to tell my right from my left.”

  On an impulse, André took her hand. He half-expected her to object, but she didn’t.

  He rubbed his thumb along the side of it. “It will get easier, you’ll see. You’ll pick it up.”

  For a moment, her hand tightened on his. Then she pulled away, scooting off the edge of the pallet and yanking at the blanket.

  “I hope so, or we’re all in trouble,” she said, the flippant tone of her voice at odds with the lines between her brows.

  There was nothing he could say, so André did the only thing he could do. He stretched out an arm, making room for her in the bed.

  Laura hesitated for a moment and then eased herself down next to him, resting her head in the crook of his arm.

  André felt, absurdly, as though he had just won a difficult case in court.

  “For warmth,” he said, into her hair.

  “For warmth,” she agreed, and closed her eyes.

  Despite André’s confident words, the next rehearsal wasn’t any better, nor the one after that. By the time they arrived in Beauvais, Laura’s nerves were as frazzled as her hair.

  Despite everyone’s efforts to coach her, she only seemed to get worse rather than better—more clumsy, more tongue-tied, more prone to tripping over props. Here they were in Beauvais, with only one night left before they performed for an actual audience. They were renting the town hall, three nights of use in exchange for ten percent of their take, whatever that take might be. If they had a take.

  Laura just hoped the audience didn’t ask for their money back.

  Gabrielle was to be ticket collector; Pierre-André had been given the role of assistant prop-master (which, when translated, meant that he played backstage with the paper daggers until someone actually needed them). Jeannette had turned a pile of secondhand clothes into the last word in gaudy finery, embellished with enough frills, furbelows, and gold trim to keep even Rose happy. Everyone served a useful role.

  Except Laura.

  With one day to go until the performance, the troupe had dispersed to paper the town with playbills. At least, that was what they claimed to be doing. Based on the glint in de Berry’s eye as he set off with Rose, Laura had her doubts.

  “I had acting lessons when I was young,” she fumed to André, slapping some paste on the back of a poster and slamming it with unnecessary force against the wall. “I was tutored by some of the best actresses at the Comédie-Française.”

  “What sort of lessons?” André asked practically, reaching over her to tug down a crooked corner. “Memorizing speeches from Corneille and Racine?”

  “Yes.” She had been rather good at those, actually. It had been easy enough to mimic the inflection of her teachers.

  But that had been all it was, mimicry. She couldn’t create Medea’s madness on her own or Antigone’s pain. Left to herself, she had all the creativity that God gave a duck.

  “Well, that explains it,” said André, in the sort of sensible tone designed to make someone want to claw his eyes out. And by someone, Laura meant her. “Those were set pieces. Memorization. It’s an entirely different art form.”

  “Thank you so very much,” said Laura acidly. “I would never have realized that.”

  For a man who had been married before, André was slow to pick up on the danger signs. “Classical theatre is a highly ritualized form, while the Commedia dell’Arte is all about spontaneity and improvisation.”

  “You make me sound like an automaton.” Laura knew there was no reason to take it so to heart, but she was tired and frazzled and her emotions felt dangerously raw. The self-control she had so assiduously cultivated over the past sixteen years was cracking around the edges, like a piece of pottery left too long in the kiln. “Wind her up and watch her go! But don’t expect any original thought or any human feelings. She’s not capable of those.”

  André looked at her in surprise. “I never said that.”

  “No, but it’s true, isn’t it?” Laura suddenly felt dangerously close to tears. She pressed down hard on a wrinkle in the poster. “Never mind. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

  André’s hands settled on her shoulders. “You’ve been pushing yourself too hard.”

  “It doesn’t matter how I push myself. I’m not getting anywhere,” she said bitterly.

  André’s hands slid down her shoulders, rubbing up and down over her arms
.

  Something about the gesture made the tears prickle at the back of her eyes again. Laura’s legs were wobbly with the urge to sag back against André’s chest and let him hold her up, his arms around her, his warmth comforting her. He was so familiar by now, the feel of his arms, the smell of his skin, the very contours of his body. It would be so easy.

  If she were an entirely different woman.

  “You’re better than you were,” he said reassuringly. “People train all their lives for this. You can’t expect to pick it up in four days.”

  “Five,” said Laura, to the playbill.

  “Five, then.” She could hear the smile in his voice, as he gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Because that extra day makes all the difference.”

  Shaking his hands off, Laura turned. Wedged between the wall and his body, she tilted her head up at him. “What if I ruin it for us all?” She couldn’t keep the despair from her voice. “The others must suspect already. What if one of them guesses the whole?”

  “They won’t,” said André confidently, his hands resting on her shoulders. She could hear the crackle of the poster behind her back. Behind his spectacles, his eyes searched her face. One of the earpieces was crooked. “I told Harlequin—in confidence, of course—that you had been wardrobe mistress in our last troupe, but that I had promised you a chance onstage. That’s how we met, you know. You were measuring my tights.”

  “You bribed me into your bed with the promise of a glorious career?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I’m flattered that you went to so much trouble to seduce me.”

  “Don’t you think you’re worth it?”

  Laura turned her head away. “Right now, I feel like the scrapings off the bottom of a carriage wheel.”

  “That good?” André teased.

  “The scrapings off the scrapings off the bottom of a carriage wheel.” She ducked under his arm, taking her paste pot and heading for the next stretch of wall.

  This was clearly a popular stretch of wall for notices. New ones had been pinned over the decaying remains of the old. Laura brushed aside the tattered fringes of an advertisement for Berowne and his amazing dancing bears. She was glad they wouldn’t have to compete with that. Judging from the condition of the poster, the bears were probably hibernating by now. The placard next to it was of far more recent origin, the ink still bold and black, advising the good citizens of Beauvais that—

  Laura groped for André, her fingers closing around his arm. “Look,” she croaked, dragging him over. “Look at this.”

  “‘Wanted,’” he read. “‘André Jaouen, former assistant to the Prefect of Paris, for crimes against the state. Medium height, brown hair, spectacles. Likely traveling in the company of two children, a girl aged nine and a boy aged five.’ They gave Pierre-André an extra year.”

  “That will make all the difference, I’m sure.” Fear brought out Laura’s sarcastic side.

  André was studying the poster with more interest than alarm. “They don’t mention Jeannette or Daubier. Or you.”

  “They didn’t need to mention Daubier. Look.” Pasted next to it was another poster. The Ministry of Police was also interested in any information as to the whereabouts of Antoine Daubier, painter. Elderly, obese, prone to brightly colored clothing, favoring his left hand.

  That was one way to create an identifying characteristic: cripple a man before allowing him to escape.

  Laura could feel sweat clammy under her arms.

  “Well,” said André calmly. “It’s a good thing our posters are larger than theirs.”

  Appropriating the paste pot from Laura, he slathered a generous portion of paste onto the back of a playbill and slapped it right over the two government notices. Laura was fairly sure that to do so was illegal. On the other hand, they were already illegal, so what was a little more illegality?

  An outlaw. They were all outlaws.

  The Commedia dell’Aruzzio’s advertisement completely covered the government notices, but Laura could still see the faint outline of print showing beneath the flimsy paper. One could attempt to paper over the past, but one could never eradicate it entirely.

  “Those can’t be the only ones.” Laura’s fingers tightened on André’s sleeve. “You and the children. Someone might see these posters and recognize you.”

  “I’m not the only man of middle height with brown hair in France,” said André sensibly. His eyes settled on her. “And the notice makes no mention of a wife.”

  “But we’ve already determined that I’m no actress. What if I ruin it for us all? What if my incompetence means we’re caught?”

  “Whether you like it or not,” said André lightly, “you’re part of the family now. We’d no more toss you out than we would Jeannette.”

  “You don’t like Jeannette,” she said accusingly.

  “But I’m very accustomed to her.”

  “Don’t protect me simply because I’ve become a bad habit. I’m used to fending for myself. If it becomes necessary for the general good, I’ll go.”

  “Where?”

  “Into the sunset and far away.” There was no reason for the thought to be quite so depressing. They would have had to part ways once they got to England anyway. This fiction of being man and wife was just that, a fiction. She would do well to remember that. She was only here because the Pink Carnation had instructed her to see the Duc de Berry safely to England.

  The recollection caught Laura up short. How long had it been since she had thought of the Pink Carnation? Or her obligation to the Duc de Berry? She had let herself get caught up in a fantasy, and this was the result of it.

  “You’re willing to give up this quickly?”

  “I’m not giving up. I’m reassessing based on the situation. You might do better without me.”

  “Don’t fool yourself. You’re not the liability. I am. I’m the one Delaroche wants. None of us would be here if it weren’t for my missteps. And then there’s Daubier. But for me . . .”

  The bitterness in André’s voice made Laura blink. She had seen him, over the past few days, frowning in Daubier’s direction, but she’d had no idea it had been weighing on him so.

  She frowned up at him. “You’re not responsible for his hand.”

  André’s features looked as though they had been etched in acid. “If not I, who else? I promised to get him out. I failed.”

  “You did get him out,” Laura pointed out. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

  André didn’t smile at the reference to Candide. “I may have removed him from the Temple, but not until he was rendered incapable of performing the one function that makes his life worth living. Trust me, he was very blunt about that.” André’s expression was bleak. “He told me to leave him.”

  “He didn’t mean it.”

  “You didn’t hear him.”

  Laura remembered that last night at the Hôtel de Bac, the anxious consultations, the preparations for the children, André’s face gray with fatigue. “Did he realize what you were risking in going back for him? But for him, you might have stayed as you were. No one would have been any the wiser. I certainly wasn’t.”

  Although she should have been. The clues had been there, if she had cared to piece them together.

  André looked ruefully down at her. “Did you ever think of taking up work as an advocate? You would have been quite good at it.”

  Laura accepted the tacit change of topic. “Far better than I am as an actress.”

  André braced a hand on the wall behind her. “You had me quite convinced with your performance as Suzette. For a moment, I wondered if—”

  “If?” There was no reason for Laura’s blouse to feel so tight.

  André shook his head, looking bemused. “If you were what you said you were. You play the seductress extremely well.”

  His eyes were the color of the remembered waters of her childhood, the shores of Italy on a sunny day. Laura couldn�
��t seem to look away.

  “It was all an act,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Just an act.”

  André’s hand was still braced on the wall above her head, but the space between them seemed to have contracted. “I thought you said you couldn’t act.”

  Laura tilted her head up at him. An unnecessary gesture. They were nearly of a height to begin with. “I’m better offstage than on.”

  “Are you?” he said huskily, his lips so close that she felt the words as much as heard them, in the brush of his breath and the rise and fall of his chest.

  If she closed her eyes, she didn’t have to think about what she was doing or not doing. If she closed her eyes, she didn’t have to see his hand rise to smooth the hair away from the side of her face, or his head tilt to match his lips to hers. If she closed her eyes, it was none of it real, the movement of his lips against hers, his hand cupping her cheek, his tongue tracing the contours of her mouth. If it wasn’t real, she didn’t have to make him stop.

  Heaven only knew, she didn’t want it to stop. The paste pot clattered to the ground. As of their own volition, her arms twisted around his neck, drawing him closer, and the kiss changed. She could feel his response in the way his arms tightened around her—not the comfort of a comrade but the passion of a lover, pulling her closer, matching her body to his, his tongue slipping between her lips, kissing openmouthed, exchanging breath for breath, both clinging, fevered, wanting.

  It was as it had been at the inn, but better. At the inn, they had been performing to an audience, but now . . .

  Now.

  Reality slammed in on Laura and she yanked back, her back hitting the wall, hard enough to make her see stars.

  “What—,” she said hoarsely. What were they doing?

  André Jaouen seemed as kerflummoxed as she was. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling erratically beneath his coat.

  “Laura, I—”

  Laura sidled sideways, away from André. Her ears were ringing as if someone had been singing a very high note very loudly just next to her.

  She groped after logic. “We have to get back to the inn. We’ll be missed.”