The Orchid Affair (12 page)

Chapter 11

L
aura looked at Delaroche in confusion. “You have the advantage of me, Monsieur.”

This man, whom she had met only once, was smiling at her as though they were somehow complicit. She didn’t recall telling him her name, although she imagined he could have found it easily enough. Although why bother? She was just a governess. Insignificant.

At least, she was supposed to be.

“A fine day, Mademoiselle Griscogne.” There he went, lingering on her name again, pressing down on the syllables as though staking a claim to her person. “Is it not?”

“Out enjoying the weather, Gaston?” Jaouen stepped between her and Delaroche, although whether to shield her or block her, she wasn’t sure. The briskness of his tone belied the seeming casualness of his words. “Or have you come to flirt with my governess?”

Delaroche continued to smile at Laura, although his words were directed to Jaouen. “I was told I would find you here. Playing … chess.” He made the game sound like an aberration.

“As you see, you find me here, although the game has yet to begin.” Laura got the feeling that chess wasn’t the game Jaouen was speaking of. “What news?”

Delaroche took his time about answering. There was no mistaking the ring of triumph in his voice. “Cadoudal has been found.”

Laura held herself very still, clamping carefully down on any reaction. Cadoudal. That was the man Whittlesby claimed was the sole link to their missing prince. If Cadoudal had been found …

“Found?” Jaouen stepped up to the window of the coach, all business. “Is he in custody?”

Was it too much to hope that Whittlesby was still at the print shop?

Delaroche’s lips thinned. “The vole escaped the snare.”

“In other words, no,” said Jaouen dryly.

Laura resumed breathing. It was rather a relief to know that there was no immediate need to find Whittlesby, alert the Pink Carnation, free Cadoudal from police custody, and spirit an as-yet-unidentified prince of the blood out of Paris. The Pink Carnation would still have to be informed of this turn of events, but it wasn’t as dire as it might have been.

“Cadoudal’s manservant has been taken to the Prefecture. Fouché wants you”—Delaroche’s lip curled—“to go through his lodgings.”

“And you offered to play messenger? Terribly kind of you.”

“Are you coming?” Delaroche demanded.

Instead of answering, Jaouen turned to Daubier. “Daubier, my friend, we shall have to postpone our match for another day. Will you see Mademoiselle Griscogne back to the Hôtel de Bac on my behalf?”

Escort? Or custody? Jaouen’s face betrayed nothing more than polite regret.

“I should be honored.” Daubier essayed a bow, but was thwarted by his own girth.

“Don’t be honored, be swift. As I must be, it seems. Mademoiselle.” Touching a hand to the brim of his hat, Jaouen put his hand to the latch of the carriage door.

Instead of shifting to make room for him on the bench, Delaroche remained precisely where he was, in the seat nearest the door, leaving Jaouen the choice of climbing over him or closing the door and circling behind the carriage to the other side.

Holding the door open, Jaouen looked patiently at Delaroche. “I can sit on you, or next to you,” he said. “It is entirely your choice.”

He would do it too, Laura had no doubt. Neither did the man in the carriage. Slowly, grudgingly, Delaroche shifted across the seat.

“Thank you,” said Jaouen blandly, and swung into his vacated seat.

Delaroche gave Jaouen a look that could have dissolved rock. Even a yard away, Laura could feel the pure vitriol of it.

Colleagues they might be, but Laura felt very safe in guessing that they weren’t friends.

“Shall we?” said Monsieur Daubier, startling her.

Laura pulled her attention away from the retreating carriage and squinted at her parents’ old friend.

He had the sun behind him, turning his shock of white hair to silver so that he glowed like an unlikely angel—one of the larger, less kempt ones, too fond of his cloud and his comfort to have followed Lucifer on his expedition down to Hell.

“Come, my dear. The streets of Paris await us!” Daubier gestured expansively, opening his arms as though to embrace the entire street and everyone on it.

A matron in a flowery hat gave him an alarmed look and scurried over the planks to the other side of the street.

Laura shook her head at him. Her bonnet brim still skewed at an odd angle. Really, one would think the blasted thing could survive one collision. She gave it an irritated tug. “I am no fine lady to need escorting, Monsieur Daubier. Just a governess.”

“Nonsense, my dear. As you can see, I need the exercise.” Daubier dealt a resounding smack to his middle. He hadn’t had quite that paunch when she was little, although the first signs of it had already begun to appear. He’d had only one chin then, rather than five, but otherwise it was the same Daubier, an expansive manner hiding a too-shrewd eye. “You would be doing me a service by taking me for a stroll on this fine day.”

“It is fine, isn’t it?”

“Not quite so fine as finding you after all these years. My little Laure, all grown up.” Daubier beamed down at her, but there was something hollow about it. The sentiments were correct, but his mind was elsewhere. “How did you come to be working for my old friend Jaouen?”

Daubier’s cane tap-tap-tapped on the cobbles as they made their way towards the Hôtel de Bac.

Good heavens, did he really want the whole story? It was a very long story, starting with a storm off the coast of Cornwall and two people without the sense to stay indoors on dry land.

How could she even begin to explain to M. Daubier, whose world, from what she had seen, began and ended with the walls of his studio? What could she tell him of those sixteen years of scrabbling for positions, of the chance opportunity that had led her back to Paris?

Laura settled for the simple version. “Monsieur Jaouen needed a governess. I am one. It is simple enough.”

Simple enough on the face of it, but Daubier didn’t look reassured. “Was there no one who would take you in, when it happened?”

“When they died, you mean?”

Daubier looked a bit nonplussed by her frankness, but he soldiered boldly on. “Yes. There must have been someone, even abroad. Where were you when it happened?”

“Italy,” Laura lied calmly. “They died in a sailing accident.”

It had been England, but who was there to contradict her now? What did it matter whether it had been Cornwall or Lake Como?

“But surely,” persisted Daubier, “one of their friends … Your parents had so many friends.”

Laura couldn’t argue with that. All across Europe, there was hardly a town where there hadn’t been an open door, a spare room, an extra place laid at the table. Her parents had possessed the gift of making themselves loved, not deeply, but broadly. When they had died, they had left behind them a million acquaintances, but no family, no close friends, no one to whom she could reasonably turn for shelter.

To be fair, she hadn’t tried. She hadn’t wanted to be a charity case, Chiaretta and Michel’s useless daughter, without the talent to be trained as an artist, too plain to be anyone’s muse.

Over the years before their death, she had become something of a running project among her parents’ friends. Her parents had sent her for drawing lessons to Daubier, for voice to Aurelia Fiorila, for drama, for dance, for anything at which she might conceivably be found to excel. Laura had become proficient at everything, but excelled at nothing. She had known, as children do without being told, that her parents would have preferred a few spectacular failures to her own particular brand of passionless mastery.

“You might,” said Daubier tentatively, “have come to me.”

He looked so uneasy at making the offer, as though still fearing that she might, after all these years, actually take him up on it, that Laura couldn’t help but laugh.

“Nonsense, Monsieur Daubier,” Laura said fondly. “You would have used me as a perch for your birds and I would have resented you horribly for it.”

“Your parents—,” he began again.

“Loved you dearly,” said Laura firmly. “But you are too old to find yourself with child, and I am far too old to find myself with parent. Consider yourself absolved of all responsibility.”

Daubier let out a little huff of breath. “I always told Chiaretta she ought to have named you Minerva rather than Laura.”

“For my wisdom?”

“No,” said Daubier, “for your domineering disposition.”

Laura wasn’t sure whether to be amused or offended. She had lived so long among strangers that she had forgotten what it was to be among old acquaintances, particularly old acquaintances who had known one since a little beyond birth and claimed all the outspokenness that was the privilege of age.

Perhaps it was true; she might have been accounted a bit assertive as an adolescent.

All right. She had been called domineering more than once. And officious. And occasionally headstrong. But someone had to make sure the bills were paid and the sculptures delivered on time and that her mother’s many admirers didn’t run into one another and cause scenes in the public rooms of inns. Her mother thrived on those scenes, but Laura didn’t. High drama they might provide, but they invariably occasioned a search for new lodging. Hostelries with clean sheets and good soap were hard to find, especially when one had been banned from the bulk of them.

She had raged all these years about being abandoned, but the abandonment had suited her better than an adoption, especially an unwilling one.

Daubier broke into her recollections. “Let me find you another situation,” he said abruptly.

Laura looked at him in confusion. “Another situation?”

“I can find you a post in another household. There are still plenty of affluent families in Paris. Many of them come to me for portraits. If you must earn your living, I can find you a nice family, a pleasant family.”

Laura squinted against the sunshine, wishing she could see more clearly. “Are you saying that Monsieur Jaouen is not?” she asked, half joking.

Daubier’s rumpled face was entirely serious. “I love André as a brother. Well, as a sort of nephew. Or maybe a first cousin once removed. But I should not want to see a daughter of mine in that house.”

Daubier had never had daughters, partly because he had never been able to pull himself away from his canvases long enough to sire any.

“Why ever not?” demanded Laura. “Does Monsieur Jaouen turn into an ogre at the full moon? Hold wild orgies in the basement? Ought I to be on the lookout for headless wives bundled into a trunk?”

Daubier was not amused. “It isn’t that,” he said reluctantly. “André is a man of perfectly sound moral character and respectable habits. But …”

Laura’s levity faded away as she watched the old artist poke at the cobbles with the tip of his cane. “You are serious, aren’t you? Why?”

Daubier’s eyes shifted from one side to the other. Lowering his voice, he said tersely, “It isn’t safe to be so closely associated with Fouché’s chosen successor. These are unsettled times.”

“Are you referring to Monsieur Delaroche?”

Daubier glanced anxiously over his shoulder, as though expecting Delaroche to pop up behind them like a genie from a bottle. “Among others. You don’t want to draw their attention to yourself, and you will if you remain with Jaouen.”

“But you are associated with him yourself,” Laura pointed out. “You play chess with him, you call him friend. Why should I be any more in danger than you?”

“I don’t live under his roof.”

“You are very kind, Monsieur Daubier, and I appreciate your concern, but—”

“I’m a meddling old man and you don’t believe a word I say.”

“I would never put it like that.”

“Even if it is true,” he finished for her.

They paused at the gate of the Hôtel de Bac. As always, Jean was nowhere to be seen.

“Tell me about Monsieur Jaouen,” Laura demanded.

“What about him?” Daubier’s eyebrows rose like caterpillars on a string.

Laura couldn’t find a way to put it into words, so she settled for, “Anything you think I ought to know.”

Daubier cleared his throat with a series of harrumphing noises. When the aural symphony died down, he said, “I was better acquainted with his wife. Julie.”

Not surprising. Monsieur Daubier had always made it a practice to be better acquainted with the wives. Even as a ten-year-old, Laura had been aware of that. But then, growing up as she had, she had been an unusually precocious ten-year-old.

“Julie was a pupil of mine, you see,” said Daubier, as if guessing what Laura was thinking.

Of course, she was. Why hadn’t Laura put two and two together? Naturally the most talented young lady of her generation would go to the most acclaimed artist of his.

“You remained friends with Monsieur Jaouen after Madame Jaouen’s death?” Laura prompted.

Daubier assumed his most cherubic expression. “Jaouen plays a good game of chess. A competent chess partner is hard to find, even in Paris.”

For all his practiced bonhomie, Daubier could be infuriatingly close-lipped when he wanted to be. Laura supposed he had to be, with all the secrets that came out over long portrait sittings, but she could hardly count it a virtue when she was the one questioning rather than concealing.

Daubier forestalled further questions by taking her hands into his, as he had long ago with the small child she had been when he had helped her up onto the plinth for her portrait. Even though she was a great deal older now, the gesture made Laura feel small again—small and cherished.

“If you change your mind, you know where to find me.”

Laura smiled up at Daubier, feeling the sun glint against the tips of her eyelashes. Looking into his lined old face, as wrinkled and red as an apple, she felt a surge of affection for him, for all the memories she had all but forgotten and for his clumsy attempt at reparations now.

It was nice to have someone who might be just a little bit on one’s side.

“You’re not still in the old studio, are you?” There it was again, memory, coming back after all this time: sunlight slanting across a honey-colored floor, a green velvet drape cloth nubby to the touch, the prickle of tiny claws against her fingers.