The Orchid Affair Page 37

  Il Capitano’s eyebrows engaged in gymnastics that challenged the strength of their glue. “Delaroche? Here?”

  “He was—” Laura started to point and stopped. Where the Delaroche doppelganger had been a moment before she could see only a group of rowdy apprentices, tossing roasted nuts at one another. “I really am losing my mind.”

  André took her face between his hands and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her lips. “You just need to hold on to it for a few hours more and then we’ll be safely on that boat to England.”

  “England,” echoed Laura. “We should be there by tomorrow, weather willing.”

  Off the boat tomorrow and then what? Back to Selwick Hall for her, she supposed, to see if the Pink Carnation had any further assignments for her now that she was effectively banned from Paris.

  She did speak fluent Italian. Perhaps, Laura thought, with an effort at enthusiasm, the Carnation might send her to Italy next time. She hadn’t been to Italy since that last trip to Como.

  Or she could tell André the truth.

  And then what? she asked herself. She couldn’t make him love her just by wishing it so.

  André touched his fingers to her wrist. “About England . . . ,” he began.

  Laura felt a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the lacing of her stomacher. “A small island off the coast of France?”

  “Yes, that one.” André’s fingers absently traced the pattern of her laces.

  She would miss this, Laura thought with sudden clarity. She would miss this ease of touch, this lease they had on each other’s bodies. It was like a gleaner’s easement, free rein to roam within the prescribed areas during the course of the arrangement.

  André plucked at a string. “We haven’t really discussed . . .”

  “Beginners, on!” shouted Cécile from somewhere in the wings.

  André grimaced. “That would be me.” He looked at her, hesitated, then shook his head. “We’ll talk after.”

  After? After they would be managing de Berry, shepherding the children, running for the boat. Their chances of privacy were nil.

  “What is it? Just spit it out. Quickly,” Laura added. “Before Cécile gets agitated.”

  Cécile never got agitated, but the words seemed to have the correct effect.

  André scratched his head, making his wig list to one side. “Once we get to England . . . I’ll be starting over. I won’t have much to offer. There’ll be no Hôtel de Bac. It will likely be hired lodgings at first, while I try to find work of some sort.”

  Laura’s fingers itched to re-center his wig, but at the moment that was rather beside the point. Those little domestic gestures would soon be a thing of the past. If he was trying to say what she thought he was trying to say.

  He was giving her the sack, wasn’t he? Both as governess and as lover.

  “What are you trying to tell me?” she asked flatly. “If this is your way of telling me that we’ll be going our separate ways . . .”

  Then what? She found she couldn’t herself finish the sentence. The flippant words jammed together at the back of her throat.

  “No!” André said hastily. The wig wobbled. André made a wry face. “Forgive me. I’m out of practice at this whole wooing thing.”

  Wooing. Wooing?

  “I feel like a besotted fool,” he muttered. “Hell, I am a besotted fool.”

  André grasped her hands in his. “I’d get down on one knee, but it seems redundant at this point—and this blasted belly would get in the way.”

  “Beginners!” called Cécile.

  André didn’t turn around. Holding fast to Laura’s hands, he said urgently, “We’ve done everything all upside down. All I’m trying to say is . . . I don’t want to lose you when we get to England.”

  In his brightly colored doublet, the extravagant black wig perched askew on his head, and his mustache wiggling with every word, he had never looked more ridiculous. There were bright spots of rouge on his cheeks and fake hair on his eyebrows and his boots had bells on them.

  “What we have,” he said. “It means too much. I never thought—but now that we are—oh, hell. I’m making a mess of it.”

  “Emotions are messy, she agreed. Her hands tightened convulsively on his. From a long way away, she heard her own voice saying, in a tone like gravel, “You won’t lose me unless you want to.”

  Heedless of the rouge on his cheeks, she reached up both hands to cup his cheeks and pulled his mouth down to hers. André didn’t need to be asked twice. His arms clasped around her with a force that knocked the breath right out of her—although that was partly the doing of Il Capitano’s fake stomach, which whacked into her stomacher with enough force to leave a permanent dent.

  Laura didn’t care. Breathing was highly overrated. Her ruff was squished, her greasepaint was smeared, her cap was askew, and she couldn’t have cared less.

  All her carefully constructed armor seemed to have deserted her. Laura knew it was folly—not the grand, magnificent folly of her parents’ affairs, but folly all the same—but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

  As André had said, why shouldn’t Ruffiana have a bit of a happy ending too?

  If Cécile was still calling for beginners, Laura didn’t hear her. But she did notice when André abruptly let go.

  “Wha—,” Laura started to say, but broke off when she saw what had arrested André’s attention.

  “Gabrielle . . . ,” he began.

  Gabrielle’s eyes were round as saucers. Very, very unhappy saucers. She was staring at her father and her former governess with the sort of expression usually reserved for mass executions and invading Viking hordes.

  “Cécile sent me to fetch you,” she said in a very small voice. There was a distinctly accusing tone to the words.

  Laura took a hasty step back, straightening her stomacher. “Gabrielle,” she said. “It’s not what you—”

  She broke off. If there was one thing she demanded of her charges, it was honesty. And what could she say? It was exactly what Gabrielle thought. And probably worse.

  Gabrielle backed away, as one might from a house marked with the plague. She cast Laura an accusing look. “Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to talk to you again. Ever.”

  André recovered his voice first. “Sweetheart—”

  Gabrielle didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Turning on her heel, she blundered away, knocking into a bit of scaffolding before recovering herself and disappearing in the direction of the front of the house, moving awkwardly, as though she were still reeling from a blow.

  “Gabrielle!” Laura started after her.

  André caught at her arm. “Gabrielle was going to have to know sooner or later,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll talk to her after the performance. I’ll explain . . . something.”

  “Beginners! Capitano, that means you! Not next week. Now.” Cécile might not be agitated, but she certainly sounded miffed.

  “She’ll come to terms with it,” André said. He pressed a quick kiss to her head. “We’ll all make it work. You’ll see.”

  Laura watched as André hurried off onto the stage, the feather on his hat wagging.

  The audience greeted Il Capitano’s appearance with an anticipatory roar of laughter and a smattering of rude comments, which Il Capitano, in character, returned with interest, in the heavy, pseudo-Spanish accent required by the role.

  Gabrielle had run off towards the front of the house, where the holders of the lower-priced tickets milled together in the pit. Laura positioned herself on the side of the stage, looking for the little girl in her plain brown dress. There were no women allowed in the parterre—at least, not officially—so that meant that if Gabrielle were there, she would stand out.

  There was no sign of her in the pit. Blast.

  Laura devoutly hoped that Gabrielle had chosen to nurse her wounded feelings somewhere within the theater. Dieppe was a port town, with all the dangers that implied. A young girl alone on th
e streets might encounter any number of perils, the likes of which Gabrielle had no inkling. God willing, she never would.

  Thank goodness. There she was, taking her appointed place at the ticket table at the front of the theatre.

  That’s my girl, thought Laura with a surge of approval and relief.

  They might not adore each other, but Laura felt an odd sense of kinship. She understood what it was to be prickly and stubborn. Good girl, not running off and hiding. There was nothing like going on just as usual to kick your adversaries in the teeth. It might be Laura’s teeth being kicked, but she was proud of Gabrielle just the same.

  The play was well under way now, Il Capitano making his play for the fair Inamorata while Leandro conspired with the maid, Columbine, to press his own suit for the young lady’s hand. The audience seemed to be enjoying it well enough, laughing in all the right places. They were laughing and shouting, calling back quips to the actors on the stage, tossing the odd apple. One man wasn’t doing anything of the kind. He was staring at the stage, his gaze fixed on one actor alone: André.

  There was no mistaking him this time. That was Gaston Delaroche. In their audience. In Dieppe.

  It was too much to hope that he was there on holiday.

  “Ruffiana!” Cécile was calling her.

  Laura hurried onstage, trusting to the familiarity of thirty-odd days’ worth of performance to see her through.

  “What ho, lackey!” she called out. The Commedia dell’Aruzzio didn’t demand veracity of dialogue from its practitioners. They spoke a sort of theatrical pidgin, designed to sound vaguely archaic, with modern colloquialisms for humor. “You, over there!”

  Harlequin struck an exaggerated pose of surprise. “Me, mistress?”

  He sidled sideways, mugging for the audience, sending them into anticipatory waves of laughter.

  “Yes, you,” said Laura. She could see Delaroche’s tall-crowned hat making its way through the crowd, heading towards the exit. Where was he going? For the gendarmes? If they all fled now . . . “I have a commission for you, saucy youth.”

  “A commission? For me?” Harlequin’s flexible face betrayed suitable shades of anticipatory horror. “What sort of commission?”

  He made a bawdy joke out of it. The audience loved it. Laura felt her skin go clammy beneath the heavy fabric of her costume. Delaroche wasn’t heading for the exit.

  He was heading for Gabrielle.

  Chapter 31

  “I have a message for you.” Laura’s lips were moving and sound was coming out, but she hardly registered her own voice. All her attention was fixed on the scene playing itself out by the ticket table. “A message for you to deliver.”

  Delaroche had stopped beside Gabrielle and was saying something to her. His head was tilted down, the angle and the hat brim making it impossible for Laura to see his face. Not that she would be able to read his lips at this distance anyway, but it would have been nice to have some inkling of what he was saying.

  Damn. Laura looked frantically at the wings. She didn’t see André. Where was he?

  “Indeed, mistress?” Harlequin all but snapped his fingers in front of her face. He spoke very, very loudly. “What sort of message?”

  “An extremely important one.”

  Whatever it was that Delaroche had said to Gabrielle, he had said his piece. He wasn’t there anymore.

  Neither was Gabrielle.

  This was not happening. This was not allowed to happen. They had made it all the way to Dieppe. The boat was here, for goodness’ sake.

  “They all claim it’s important,” riposted Harlequin, winking at the audience.

  Laura rounded on him, her skirts swishing in a broad arc. They were very broad skirts, bolstered with a number of extremely stiff petticoats. Harlequin jumped out of the way, making a joke out of it, but he cast her a look that said quite clearly, What in the blazes do you think you’re doing?

  “Hold a moment, trusty lackey,” Laura improvised hastily. “I have a message for you, but I seem to have left it in my boudoir, which is not but a moment’s walk away.”

  This was not in the scenario.

  “There’s many a fine thing lost in a lady’s boudoir,” quipped Harlequin gamely. “If my lady will deliver the letter with her lips, that too would serve?”

  The audience loved it.

  “Kiss her!” someone shouted.

  “That old sow?” protested another.

  Fruit flew, mercifully not at the stage.

  “Entertain yourself awhile, resourceful Harlequin, with a song,” shouted Laura, “while I fetch the letter from the casket in my boudoir and send my maid, Columbine, to deliver it to you.”

  “Columbine? I believe I know the wench—,” began Harlequin, but Laura was already gone.

  On the stage, she could hear him gamely going into a popular song, something about the fickle nature of women.

  “What’s going on?” Cécile caught her by the arm.

  “An agent of the Ministry of Police is here,” said Laura, in a low voice. “Gaston Delaroche. He has Gabrielle.”

  “What did you just say?”

  It was André, standing just behind Cécile. Despite his costume, there was nothing comical about him now.

  “I saw Monsieur Delaroche in the audience,” Laura said rapidly. “I’m quite sure it was he. He spoke to Gabrielle. Now I can’t find either of them.”

  André stared past her, like someone trying to scry the future in a murky pool. “He would have had to buy a ticket from Gabrielle to get in.”

  “He knows who she is,” Laura said reluctantly. “He’s tried to use her to get to you before.”

  André looked past her, his eyes focusing with sudden, terrifying intensity. “That bastard has my daughter.”

  Something about the very flatness of his voice made Laura shiver.

  “We’ll find her,” said Laura. “We’ll get her back.”

  “We’ll hear from him,” said André, with terrible certainty. There was something about the cool logic of his voice that was more dreadful than any amount of raving. “He won’t have taken her for her own sake. She has nothing to tell him. There’ll be a ransom demand; you’ll see.”

  “You for her?” asked Laura, watching him closely.

  “Me, de Berry, something,” André said, shrugging the question aside as immaterial. “He’ll want revenge. For extracting Daubier. That would have embarrassed him.”

  Laura’s eyes flew to his. “You don’t think—”

  An exchange was one thing. Revenge another. Surely, even Gaston Delaroche . . . But there was no “surely” when it came to Delaroche. She could read the certainty of it in André’s eyes.

  “He reduces her value as a bargaining chip if he hurts her,” Laura argued, as much for herself as André. “He won’t endanger his main objective for a little . . . immediate gratification.”

  “I wouldn’t bank on that.” André’s voice grated like sandpaper. “He can’t have gone far. I—”

  He stopped as Laura’s fingers closed convulsively around his arm, her fingers digging into his sleeve. Her lips moved, but no sound came out.

  “Thank God,” she breathed. “Thank God.”

  Dropping his arm, she darted past him, straight at a small figure in a brown dress who was hovering at the end of the corridor, scuffing her boots and looking sullen.

  Laura had never seen anything so sulky look so good. She didn’t care if Gabrielle glowered at her for the rest of her natural life, just as long as she was there to glower, all in one piece, with all of her fingers and other appendages intact.

  “Gabrielle!” Laura swooped down and hugged the little girl so tightly that she nearly knocked the air out of her. “Thank goodness.”

  Gabrielle wiggled her way free, looking distinctly uncomfortable.

  André was making choking noises. He couldn’t seem to breathe properly. “Thank God,” he finally managed—he, who hadn’t worshipped the deity since the churches were closed back
in 1792.

  He held out his arms to his daughter. With a last glare at Laura, she went into them.

  “We thought Monsieur Delaroche had gotten you,” he said into his daughter’s hair.

  “Monsieur who?”

  “The slightly crazy-looking one in a black hat.” Laura hunkered down next to her. “What did he say to you?”

  Gabrielle ignored Laura and addressed herself to André. “He gave me a note for you.”

  “He knew who you were,” André said grimly.

  He and Laura exchanged a look over Gabrielle’s head.

  “What do you think he wanted?” Laura asked quietly. “We know he must have wanted something.”

  Even in his panic, André felt gratitude for her presence. He had been alone so long that he had nearly forgotten the luxury of having another adult with whom to share his burdens, someone whose judgment he trusted. Someone he could count on to be on his side, with no ambiguities, no crosses or double crosses. Her presence in his life, at this juncture, was nothing short of a sort of miracle. Heaven only knew, they needed all the miracles they could get.

  “I have a feeling we’re going to find out,” he said just as quietly.

  Gabrielle tugged at André’s sleeve in a bid to retrieve his attention. “Monsieur Delaroche called me by name. I told him he was mistaken, that my name was Arielle Malcontre. He didn’t say anything. He just smiled and left. It was,” she added reflectively, “a very nasty smile.”

  “He is a very nasty man,” said André. He gave his daughter an extra squeeze, just because. Just because she was alive and whole and not at Delaroche’s dubious mercy. He looked over Gabrielle’s head to Laura. “We’re going to need to move quickly. We need to get out of here before he comes back.”

  Laura didn’t miss a beat. She yanked off her cap and pulled loose the tie on her ruff, moving as she spoke. “I’ll collect Daubier and de Berry if you fetch Jeannette and Pierre-André. The baggage is already in a hired hack waiting for us outside the theatre.”

  Gabrielle squirmed against her father’s arm. “You haven’t read the note,” she reminded him, giving Laura a hard look.

  “Right. Thank you.” André took the folded piece of paper from her, breaking the seal. It was black, of course. Delaroche didn’t go in for anything so mundane as red sealing wax.