The Orchid Affair Page 36

  She laughed, but shakily, since by that point he had moved from the lobe to exploring the inside of her ear with his tongue.

  “And then there’s your hair,” he said. He didn’t bother with anything so complex as untying; he simply eased the tie off the bottom of her braid, his fingers moving to separate the interwoven strands, fanning it out around her. “You have beautiful hair.” He ran his fingers through it, tracing the wild curls and waves. “Like Eve’s wild, wanton locks.”

  “I thought Eve was blond,” said Laura breathlessly.

  “Not in this version,” said André firmly, following the contours of a curl down to her breast. He brushed the nipple with her hair, watching it pucker in response. “In this version, the temptress was quite definitely brunette.”

  “Are you mocking me?” There was something uncertain in her voice, uncertain and heart-wrenchingly vulnerable.

  “Do you really think I’m mocking you?” He’d never been less inclined to mock anything in his life. “Here.” He grabbed her hand and lowered it to the placket of his breeches. “Feel. This is how much I’m mocking you.”

  They stared at each other, frozen, each sizing up the other. Her lips were already red and swollen with kisses, her cheeks flushed. The feel of her hand against him was a Mephistophelean sort of torment.

  “Do you think I’m a cad?” André asked.

  “No.” Her hand tightened. André couldn’t tell if it was meant consciously or not. He gritted his teeth against a groan. “Just that you’re honest.”

  “André gave a rough laugh. “That’s a strange word to apply, given what you know of me.”

  She rose on one elbow, he hair falling about his face. “There’s honesty and there’s honesty,” she said. “If nothing else, this is honest, what we have together right now. Just us. No dissembling. No pretense.”

  “Just us,” he agreed. “Right now.”

  Sometime later, they lay together in the sweaty sheets by the dying light of the fire, André playing idly with Laura’s hair while she curled up against his chest. They had lain this way a dozen times over the past week, but never like this. Being naked did make rather a difference.

  André yawned and pillowed his cheek against Laura’s hair. At this moment, he was a very happy man.

  “I don’t think we should tell anyone,” Laura said abruptly.

  “Hmm?” Sated and sleepy, André was only half paying attention.

  “That we’re—well . . .”

  “Lovers?” he contributed. “That would be rather odd if we weren’t, considering that we’re supposed to be married.”

  Laura propped herself up, her hair falling across his chest. André reached out to toy with the ends of it. “That’s not who I meant. I meant our lot.”

  “Daubier?” André curled a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “I doubt he’ll act the outraged father about this.”

  “It’s not Daubier I’m worried about.” Laura absently untucked the hair he had just tucked. “It’s Jeannette and your children.”

  “Pierre-André is a little young yet for the birds and the bees,” said André mildly. “As for Gabrielle—” That didn’t even bear thinking about.

  Laura went doggedly back to her theme. “Children pick up on things, even if they don’t entirely understand them. Gabrielle and I have only just made our peace. I don’t need her coming after me with a dagger.”

  “The daggers are pasteboard.”

  “Paper cuts hurt.”

  There was honesty and there was honesty, she had said. Odd that after playing a part for so long, this subterfuge should seem more repugnant to him than others.

  “All right.” André smoothed back her hair. “If that’s what you want.”

  With a contented sigh, Laura eased down against him. “Mmm-hmm,” she said, rubbing her cheek against his chest. “It shouldn’t be too hard. We’re already sharing a room and have been from the beginning. As long as we’re discreet outside of bed, no one need be any the wiser.”

  “Let me get this straight,” said André. “We’re pretending to be lovers pretending not to be lovers.”

  “Is that right? Or have you got it upside down?” Laura frowned into his chest. “I’m too tired to work it out.”

  “Do you think we’ll be able to keep it under wraps?” he said meditatively.

  “I don’t see why not.” Laura pressed the back of her hand against her mouth to suppress a yawn. “You’ve led a double life before. How hard can it be?”

  “I wasn’t sleeping with Fouché.”

  “I should hope not. His wife wouldn’t have been amused.”

  André tilted his chin down to look at her. All he could see was the tangled mass of her hair. “You have a surprisingly bawdy sense of humor.”

  Laura snuggled more firmly into his chest. “I had a surprisingly unconventional upbringing.”

  “I did rather get that.” He thought of her as he had first seen her, the very definition of the word spinster. The image was unreconcilable with the woman in his arms, all lush curves and surprising talents. “How did you manage all these years?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Being prim.” He tightened his arms around her, enjoying the squish of her breasts against his chest. “You do a very good job of acting prim, you know.”

  “Years and years of practice.” Her hair tickled his chest as she turned her head, searching for a more comfortable spot. “It was sheer self-defense at first. After a time it became habit.”

  “Hmm,” said André, dropping a kiss on the top of her head. “I like your new habits better.”

  Laura’s blurred voice emerged from the vicinity of his chest. “What makes you think you’re going to become a habit?”

  “I’ll just have to make sure of it, won’t I? But not right now,” he added with a yawn. “I’m not as young as I used to be. Remind me in the morning.”

  “Maybe,” she murmured. “If you’re very, very lucky.”

  André rested his cheek against her head. He couldn’t remember the last time he had felt so peaceful or so comfortable. “I’m already very, very lucky.”

  He was three-quarters asleep when Laura’s voice, so low as to be almost inaudible, drifted up to him.

  “It’s nice not to have to,” she said, almost as if to herself.

  “What?” André asked sleepily.

  “Pretend,” she said.

  André hugged her tighter, putting into touch what he couldn’t into words.

  “Mmm-hmm,” he agreed, and together, they drifted into sleep.

  Chapter 30

  “Only a few hours left to go,” said Laura, fastening the tie of her ruff behind her neck. Her fingers fumbled on the familiar strings.

  Turning her around, André took over the task for her. “Nervous?” he asked.

  Laura tried to shoot him a sarcastic look but was stymied by several layers of starched fabric. “I can’t imagine why I would be,” she said acerbically.

  After a month and half on the road, they were backstage in the theatre at Dieppe, preparing to go on for what would be, with any luck, their final performance with the Commedia dell’Aruzzio.

  Laura would never be an inspired actress, but she had, over the past month, become a reasonably competent one. The stage no longer held the same terror for her. Their flight from France, however, was a different matter entirely. True, they had made it this far, but there was still the boat to England to be dealt with.

  Of what would happen when they arrived in England, Laura tried not to think.

  So far, their haphazard escape had gone almost unnervingly well. After Beauvais, they had taken again to the back roads for a week (Laura could only assume Cécile had seen the same notices she and André had seen) before venturing again into towns large and small for a performance here and a performance there, seldom staying in any place longer than two nights at a time. They had fallen into a pattern of sorts. In the mornings, she gave lessons to Gabrielle and Pierre-André.
In the evenings, they rehearsed or performed, depending on their situation. And at night, she and André retired to the privacy of their wagon.

  March dripped away into April. The grass began to look more green than gray, and the first of the wildflowers took advantage of the thaw to stake their claims on the fields and roadsides. There were no more notices on the town hall wall, no signs of pursuit. Laura wasn’t naïve enough to hope that the First Consul’s agents had given up the chase, but if they were chasing, they were being remarkably laggardly about it.

  Apparently, they had bigger fish to fry. In April, word reached them from Paris that Cadoudal had been caught in the second week of March. He had fought to the last, battling his way through the streets until he was overcome and taken into custody. Rivaling the news of Cadoudal’s arrest was that of the arrest and trial of General Moreau, accused of conspiring with Artois to turn coat and place a Bourbon on the throne. André had gone grim when he heard the news about Cadoudal and Moreau, but Laura had been quietly thankful. Compared to Artois’s chief lieutenant and a general turned traitor, the escaped former assistant to the Prefect of Police and a maimed painter were distinctly unexciting.

  André squeezed her shoulders. “All set?”

  He was already in his Il Capitano costume, sporting a doublet padded out in front and at the shoulders to provide a comical aspect, with a half-cape slung from one shoulder in the style of a century before. On his head he wore an extravagantly curled black wig, crowned by a broad-brimmed feathered hat of the style commonly associated with Louis XIII’s musketeers.

  A bushy black mustache adorned his upper lip. It wiggled as he spoke. Laura hoped they had remembered to put on enough glue.

  Laura squinted at André’s upper lip. “Does your mustache feel loose to you? It looks loose.”

  She touched two fingers to it, pressing it into place.

  André caught her hand by the wrist, pressing a kiss against the palm before letting go. He had removed his spectacles for the performance—the blustering braggart of a Captain would never allow himself to be seen in spectacles—but even without them, he saw far too much.

  “It will all be all right,” he said, knowing, without having to be told, that it wasn’t really his mustache that was worrying her. “Don’t fret. We’re too close to fail now.”

  Laura cast a glance over her shoulder. She didn’t hold with superstition, but if there were such things as premonitions, she was having one. She could feel it trickling like cold water down her spine.

  “Don’t tempt Fate,” she warned. “It wouldn’t do to get cocky.”

  André grinned, making the mustache slant dangerously to one side. “That’s not what you said last night.”

  “See! I told you it was loose.” Laura pushed down hard on his mustache.

  André seized the opportunity to slide an arm around her waist and press a kiss against her neck—or what he could reach of it, since the high ruff of her costume made most of her unreachable. The padded belly of his doublet bumped against her stomacher.

  Laura squirmed. The mustache tickled.

  “Not exactly conducive to romance, is it?” André said ruefully.

  Laura quickly scanned the wings. For now, they were alone in the hallway. Rose would be finishing her makeup (or de Berry), Harlequin would be joking with Leandro, Pantaloon would be nervously counting the number of people in the audience, Daubier would be supervising the scenery, Gabrielle would be taking tickets, Jeannette and Pierre-André would be sorting props, and Cécile would be wherever the troupe most needed her to be.

  They had kept to their resolution to keep their liaison quiet, to pretend to be lovers pretending not to be lovers, which meant that they had plenty of opportunity for consummation—pretending to be married did have its benefits—but a constant struggle to remember to refrain from being too affectionate in front of the three people who might find it suspect: Jeannette, Daubier, and Gabrielle.

  It was the little, everyday moments that nearly gave them away. It was next to impossible to remember not to touch each other. There would be times when André would be looking down at her, his lips going on about something perfectly mundane, his eyes saying something else entirely, and she would almost lean up and kiss him, without thinking, just because. Or, at the fireside, when he would forget himself and kiss the top of her head or play with her hands or any of a number of touches that would be too innocuous to notice if only they were what they claimed to be.

  Laura had seen Jeannette looking at them suspiciously a time or two and hoped the old nursemaid would ascribe their intimacy to dedicated acting.

  Laura patted André’s padded stomach. “No wonder Il Capitano has had so little luck with Inamorata.”

  André’s fingers found the gap beneath her bodice and her stomacher. “It’s not Inamorata the Captain is interested in.”

  “Don’t say that too loudly. It would ruin the plot if Il Capitano ran off with Ruffiana.”

  “I don’t see why.” The ends of his mustache tickled her ear. “It might do them good to get a bit of a happy ending for a change.”

  Laura turned to press a kiss to the corner of André’s mouth, navigating around the mustache. “They’re not the sort of characters who get happy endings.”

  André raised the Captain’s bushy brows. Under the stage paint, he looked surprisingly young and boyish. “That doesn’t seem quite fair.”

  Laura felt something squeeze in her chest, something that wasn’t supposed to be there. This wasn’t part of their arrangement, this fondness.

  Why not call a spade a spade? Not fondness, love. That ridiculous, inconvenient emotion her father had immortalized in marble and her mother in print. She had told herself she was proof against it, bolstered by example. But she wasn’t.

  She looked at André’s face, so familiar under even the horsehair and greasepaint, and felt a surge of tenderness for this clever, naïve man, who still, for all his reversals, thought in terms of fairness and the basic equality of man. Didn’t he know that life wasn’t fair? There was something incredibly endearing about it and, at the same time, terrifying. She wanted to lock him in a box and protect him from the world.

  Protect him from the world? Laura shook herself back to reality. This was the former assistant to the Prefect of Police she was talking about. He was perfectly capable of taking care of himself.

  After tonight, he would have to. There had been no discussion of what would happen when they arrived in England. She could only assume that they would go, as originally planned, their separate ways.

  There were times when she had teased herself with the possibility that it might be otherwise. But it had been easier to push thoughts of the future aside and enjoy the moment, pretending they were the married couple they claimed. It had been all too easy to forget that it was a pretense, and that it must, like all pretenses, come to an end.

  Now with the moment upon them, Laura found it impossible to make herself broach any of this. It went against the unspoken code of their arrangement.

  Instead, she said mildly, “Pantaloon would have heart failure if you changed the script on him.”

  “Pantaloon has heart failure every time we go on the stage.” Releasing her, André stepped back and pressed a quick kiss to her brow. “All right, I’ll behave. When are we to be at the ship?”

  “Ten o’clock,” said Laura.

  André grinned at her, in high spirits. He seemed, perversely, younger the longer they were on the road, more relaxed than he had been in Paris. Laura thought, from time to time, she caught glimpses of the young man who had sat beneath the tree in Julie Beniet’s garden.

  Julie Beniet’s garden, not hers.

  “Not midnight?” André said. “I thought it was always midnight.”

  “Not when the performance begins at six.”

  They would be done with the play by nine or a little bit after. The sooner they left the theatre for the boat, the better. Laura had given instructions to Jeannette to pack
the children’s things and Daubier’s. By mutual consent, neither of them had alerted Daubier or de Berry. Daubier was learning to use his left hand where he had once relied on his right, but his temper was still uncertain. It wasn’t that he would betray them, but Laura worried that he might, if given notice, absent himself from the group, choosing to stay in France and court discovery rather than seek a new life in England. He would, she knew, be lionized by those who cared for the arts if only she could get him to England.

  As for de Berry, despite his protests that his sense of self-preservation outweighed his libido, they didn’t trust him not to let the plan slip to his current inamorata. Whatever else Rose might be, she was still the sometime mistress of Joachim Murat, brother-in-law to the First Consul.

  Besides, Laura thought callously, de Berry didn’t need to pack. He would have clothing enough waiting for him in England. His costumes would have been discarded anyway, unless he meant to keep them as souvenirs of a coup that had failed.

  Everything was in readiness. The Bien-Aimée would be waiting for them at ten. Jeannette might be grumpy, but she was efficient and unquestionably loyal. So why did she feel so twitchy?

  Laura surveyed the audience, thinner now than it had been on the first three nights, but still reasonably full. In a month, the Commedia dell’Aruzzio would have competition from other traveling troupes, but for now, they were the only new game in town.

  There was a man moving down the aisle, clad entirely in rusty black. There was something about him that looked very familiar, and not in a good way.

  Laura squinted, leaning perilously close to the edge of the curtain. “Isn’t that—”

  “What?” André asked, hauling her back by the stiffened peplum of her dress.

  Laura shook her head. “Nothing. I’m seeing shadows, that’s all.” Settling her very unattractive cap more firmly on her head, she made a face. “For a moment, I thought I saw Monsieur Delaroche.”