The Orchid Affair
Authors: Lauren Willig
Tags: #General, #Romance, #Historical, #Fiction, #Romantic suspense fiction, #Regency Fiction, #Historical Fiction, #Regency, #Spy stories, #Governesses, #Espionage, #Women spies
Table of Contents
ALSO BY LAUREN WILLIG
The Secret History of the Pink Carnation
The Masque of the Black Tulip
The Deception of the Emerald Ring
The Seduction of the Crimson Rose
The Temptation of the Night Jasmine
The Betrayal of the Blood Lily
The Mischief of the Mistletoe
DUTTON
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Published by Dutton, a member of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
First printing, January 2011
Copyright © 2011 by Lauren Willig All rights reserved
REGISTERED TRADEMARK—MARCA REGISTRADA
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Willig, Lauren.
The orchid affair / Lauren Willig.
p. cm.—(Pink carnation series 8)
eISBN : 978-1-101-49545-2
1. Women spies—Fiction. 2. Governesses—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3623.I575O73 2011
813’.6—dc22 2010040588
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To my brother,
Spencer,
who wanted to be a privateer
but instead became a lawyer
Prologue
Paris, 2004
“
T
hat was a short flight,” I said, peering out the window as the wheels of our plane touched tarmac at Charles de Gaulle. It was amazing how short a flight could be when one was in no particular hurry to arrive at one’s destination.
“We can go back and do it again,” Colin suggested. “Just to drag it out a bit.”
I tilted my head so that my cheek briefly touched his shoulder. At least, that’s what I’d intended to do. Instead I head-butted the side of his seat.
It’s the thought that counts. “I knew we should have taken the Chunnel.”
“Next time,” he said, although both of us knew that there wasn’t going to be a next time. At least, not for this particular trip. It was purely a one-off, and one on which neither of us had particularly wanted to go.
It sounds insane, doesn’t it? Anyone would think I should have been delighted at the prospect of a long weekend in Paris with my still new-enough-to-be-exciting boyfriend. We could stroll the Champs-Élysées, drink coffee in little cafés, smooch on the platform of the Eiffel Tower. Paris is for lovers. Everyone knows that.
Everyone had clearly never been summoned to Paris for a boyfriend’s mother’s birthday.
Some people had birthday parties. Colin’s mother was having a birthday weekend. We’re not talking your short, arrive-on-Saturday-morning, home-by-Sunday-evening type weekend either. The festivities kicked off Friday evening and carried on straight through Sunday night. Three whole days with Colin’s charmingly dysfunctional family was not my idea of a romantic weekend. It was, however, my idea of an Agatha Christie novel. I kept checking over my shoulder for Hercule Poirot. I could just see him twirling his mustache, saying, “Ah, ’Astings, such a tragedy about zee leetle American girl. A pity she ’ad to be the first to die.”
Meeting the parents is nerve-wracking even under normal circumstances. Colin’s family could not, by any stretch of the imagination, be called normal.
I couldn’t really complain, given that I would never have met Colin if his ancestors had been, well, sane. As a fifth-year graduate student in pursuit of footnotes to eke out my dissertation, my reasons for being in London had been academic rather than amorous. Well, that isn’t entirely true. When I came to London, I was in the throes of a doomed love affair with my dissertation topic. Some people are handed their dissertation topics by their advisors; others choose theirs for practical reasons, such as current trends on the academic job market or easy availability of sources. Not me. I had fallen madly in love with my topic: “Aristocratic Espionage during the Wars with France, 1792-1815.” The Scarlet Pimpernel, the Purple Gentian, the Pink Carnation—what wasn’t to love about dashing rogues in knee breeches racing back and forth across the Channel, outwitting the dastardly schemes of the French?
Ha. If my relationship with my dissertation was a love affair, we’re talking one of those gloomy, nineteenth-century ones where everyone dies of consumption at the end and there’s supposed to be a moral, but you can’t quite figure out what it is, other than to make sure to insulate your garret and stay away from large bottles of laudanum. In short, it didn’t love me back. The topic was dashing, it was glamorous, it was [insert your own adjective here], but like so many objects of affection, it had proved elusive.
Until Colin.
Colin’s great-great et cetera grandfather had been one of those masked men. Under his chosen
fleur de guerre,
the Purple Gentian, Lord Richard Selwick had dashed around Europe in tights, rescuing aristocrats from the clutches of the guillotine. Colin liked to point out that at the time they had been called pantaloons, not tights, but a man in tights is a man in tights, call it what you will. Nothing says buckle and swash like a pair of skintight leg coverings.
Besides, a man who chooses to name himself after a flower can’t be too picky about his pantaloons.
Whatever their choice in legwear, I was very extremely grateful to Colin’s flowery ancestors. If they hadn’t kept copious journals and letters, I wouldn’t be where I was now: with Colin and the rudiments of a dissertation. I certainly wouldn’t be in Paris.
“Where are we meant to find the shuttle?” asked Colin.
I consulted the instructions the woman from the hotel had given me. “She said it would be outside baggage claim.”
“That must be it.” Colin nudged me towards a van-like conveyance.
The driver pitched his cigarette out the window, wearily extracted himself from the front seat, and trudged around to open the back of the van so Colin could pitch our bags in, a quilted overnight bag for me, a big, complicated leather folding thing for him.
“Hôtel Minerve?” I said hopefully.
The driver grunted and set the car into gear. Okay. I’d take that as a yes. If he wanted to take us somewhere else, that was fine with me.
Just as long as it wasn’t the Georges V.
Jeremy, Colin’s stepfather, who liked to do people favors they didn’t want, had booked us into the famous—and ridiculously expensive—hotel. We had canceled the reservation and booked ourselves into the much cheaper Hôtel Minerve, over on the West Bank. Neither of us was exactly flush with funds, me because I was living on a graduate student stipend, Colin because he was supporting a money-sucking estate. A grad student at the Georges V? So not happening.
Colin’s stepfather hadn’t been pleased by this decision.
Jeremy had an agenda for the weekend, and we were getting in the way of it. I wasn’t entirely sure what that agenda was, although I suspected it was only partly about Colin’s mother. Legitimation? Proving his place as head of the family? The latter was pretty ridiculous, given that Jeremy was only eight years older than Colin. Yes, Colin’s stepfather was a fair chunk younger than Colin’s mother.
I suppose this might be a good time to add that Colin’s stepfather also happened to be his second cousin.
Jeremy was Colin’s great-aunt’s grandson, and he had run off with Colin’s mother pretty much on Colin’s father’s deathbed. If you’re having trouble following that, don’t worry. It’s not just you. As Colin had pointed out to me on a prior occasion, it was all very economical. By combining cousin and stepfather in one, he saved on the Christmas gifts. Kind of like two-in-one shampoo and conditioner, only with more years of therapy involved.
It was all more than a little reminiscent of the more improbable sort of soap-opera plot. I could only hope that I wasn’t heading for kidnapping by the mafia or a three-episode-long bout of amnesia in which I would find myself embroiled with Colin’s evil twin.
For the record, Colin has no evil twin. At least, none that I know of. Yet.
His sole sibling—the only one to whom he had confessed—is a sister named Serena. Serena had taken the whole cousin/stepfather thing a lot harder than Colin had. I had my own suspicions about Serena’s relationship with Jeremy, but since that was going a little too soap-opera, even for Colin’s family, I’d kept them to myself. I could be wrong. I hoped I was wrong. And if I wasn’t wrong, I didn’t want to know.
We’d booked Serena into the Minerve with us. Not in the same room, of course. I’d been tempted to ask if they could put her on a different floor, not because I don’t like Serena, but because there’s something distinctly off-putting about knowing your boyfriend’s sister is just one thin layer of plaster away. This might not exactly be a romantic dream weekend, but I still hoped to salvage some of it. It was Paris, after all.
I looked out the window at the stone houses with their iron balconies, at the striped awnings, brightly colored even in the gloom, at the narrow streets with their ineffectual metal posts, at the garbage truck backing up in front of us, blocking off traffic for a good three blocks down.
Yes, definitely Paris.
I leaned back into the crook of Colin’s arm, resting my head against his shoulder. “Can you believe it?” I murmured. “We’re in Paris.”
“It would be strange if we were elsewhere,” Colin pointed out. “Given the direction of our flight.”
I dealt him a halfhearted swat. “You know what I mean.”
For a moment, I felt his arm tighten around me. “Yes.” Colin’s lips fleetingly brushed my hair. Then he relaxed his grip, leaning back against the seat. “My mother doesn’t want us until nine. What do you want to do before then?”
“I should get some research done.” I wiggled my way upright, resting an elbow against the faux-leather backing. “I have a whole list of documents I want to look at in the archive of the Musée de la Préfecture de Police.”
“So you really are planning to work?” It was part of the excuse we’d given Jeremy for changing hotels; the Prefecture and its archives were on the Left Bank, much closer to the Minerve.
“Yep. I want to look at the French operations of the League of the Pink Carnation. According to reports, the Pink Carnation was in operation in Paris from May of 1803 through the summer of 1804. What was she doing there?”
“Spying?” Colin suggested.
“Yes, but why, how, and on whom?”
“I suppose you have an idea?”
“Okay,” I said, wiggling around on the seat to face Colin. “You know the Selwick spy school?”
“I am familiar with the concept,” said Colin, straight-faced.
Of course, he was. It was his family. And the spy school had been run out of his home, albeit two hundred years before he got there. Colin’s ancestor, the Purple Gentian, had founded the spy school when his marriage put him out of active service in early 1803.
“Well, anyway,” I said, brushing that aside, “the Pink Carnation came back home for Christmas in 1803. Thanks to your archives, I have full documentation on that. While she was there, she solicited the services of a graduate of the Selwick spy school, a Miss Grey.”
“A good name for an agent,” commented Colin. He should know; not only was he descended from spies, he was writing a novel about them—although his novel, or so he claimed, was more of the James Bond variety, complete with extraneous gadgetry and hot and cold running women.
“They dubbed her the Silver Orchid. I suppose they couldn’t very well go around referring to her as Miss Grey in correspondence.”
“Why not just 24601?”
“You don’t think Victor Hugo would have objected?”
“He wasn’t born yet,” Colin pointed out.
“Details, details.”
Colin raised a brow. “And you, a historian.”
“Even historians go on”—the shuttle came to an abrupt halt, sending me lurching forward—“holiday,” I finished breathlessly.
Okay, I got it; the shuttle driver wasn’t a fan of academic history. Or of Hugo.
“Minerve!” he called back. With a long drag on his cigarette, he settled comfortably back into his seat, pausing only to exchange obscenities with a passing driver who had taken umbrage with his stopping in the middle of the street.
Colin went to check us in while I loafed around the inevitable leaflet rack. There were advertisements for various museums and attractions, some of which I had heard, others more obscure.
My attention was caught by one for a special exhibition at a museum I had never heard of. It was a single sheet, on glossy paper, with a diagonal band across the middle that read, in bold letters,
Artistes en 1789: Marguerite Gérard et Julie Beniet
. It was a little early for my time period, but close enough to pique my interest.
A large key dangled in front of my nose. “All set,” said Colin. “Ready?”
“Ready.” I shoved the leaflet into my pocket and took the key from him. As the one with a large shoulder bag, I automatically assumed the role of Keeper of Movable Objects, including, but not limited to, keys, tissues, cough drops, and airline tickets.
The elevator was a tiny thing, barely large enough for the two of us to squeeze in together, our luggage jammed in at our feet and my shoulder bag wedged between us like a modern chastity belt. The wooden tag attached to the key, worn smooth with time and use, read 403. Room 403 turned out to be all the way in the corner. After two tries, during which I accidentally relocked the door while Colin tried to reach around me to help and managed to bang an elbow on the door frame, the lock finally gave and we both all but fell into the room.
It was certainly cute. There was pink-striped paper on the walls, pink fleurs-de-lis ringing the green carpet, and a mural on the ceiling, featuring an idyllic image of fluffy white clouds, blue sky, and green foliage, with a few birds winging their way peacefully along. It was also about three feet square, the entire center of the room taken up by a double bed sporting a pink quilt and four suspiciously flat pillows. The ceiling sloped down at an acute angle behind the bed. On one wall, long windows opened out onto a view of an air shaft. On the other side, a narrow sofa covered in a pink and green print stretched across one wall. A desk had been jammed in the corner across from the door, with just enough space for the door to clear.
The room looked absurdly small—and absurdly pink—with Colin standing in the middle of it. His big leather folding bag took up the better part of the bed.
“It’s cozy,” I said, dumping my own overnight bag on the sofa. “Cute.”
My bag was about an eighth the size of Colin’s. Fortunately, cocktail dresses pack small. So does the aspirational lingerie that one buys in the hopes of things like romantic weekends in Paris, that then generally sits in the back of the drawer, gently yellowing.
That, I had to admit, had been a big part of the draw of this weekend’s Paris jaunt, the chance to finally take out the That Weekend lingerie. I might not have the guts to wear it, but at least it was getting an outing.
Colin pointed at the painting on the ceiling. “Nice touch. Ouch.” He’d banged his head on the slope.
Wincing in sympathy, I put a hand to his temple, sliding my fingers through his hair. It was beginning to get long on top, like the floppy-haired teen idols of my 1980s youth. “There?”
Colin angled his head for better access. “You can keep rubbing,” he said hopefully. “A little to the left… .”
“I think you’ll live.” I patted him briskly on the shoulder and stepped back. “All right, BooBoo, let’s go.”