The Orchid Affair (29 page)

“Ruffiana? If you could, a little to the right?” called Pantaloon, for at least the third time in ten minutes. “You’re blocking Harlequin.”

Laura moved obediently to the right, knowing that it would be the left next time, or the middle the time after that. No matter where she was, it wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Apparently, dissembling and performing weren’t quite the same skills after all. Leading a double life didn’t seem to have prepared her for the exigencies of the stage. Lying one’s way into someone’s household didn’t necessitate such skills as projecting one’s lines or remembering to cheat out towards the audience. Upstage, downstage … Laura’s head swam with it.

None of the others seemed to be having the same problem. André, it seemed, was a natural on the stage. She would have accused him of practicing on the sly but for the fact that he hadn’t known about the acting troupe until after she had. It must be his background in debate, Laura decided. Like Commedia dell’Arte, being a public representative was an art form that demanded thinking on one’s feet and speaking very, very loudly.

Being a governess didn’t provide quite the same training.

Excuses, excuses. No matter how she attempted to parse it, the result was the same: She was an unmitigated disaster on the stage. Even de Berry had done better than she. He, at least, remembered to address his lines downstage.

“Shall we begin the scene again?” suggested Pantaloon wearily.

“What makes him think the tenth time will make any difference?” murmured Rose to Leandro.

Leandro blushed and scuffed his feet, torn between his innate good nature and the attentions of his goddess.

“Is it time for supper yet?” Laura asked hopefully.

Harlequin checked his watch. “It’s four o’clock.”

Blast.

Pantaloon sighed and rose from his perch on an overturned log. “Again, I think. We must have something to perform when we reach Beauvais.”

Beauvais was to be their first stop, roughly a week hence. They were rehearsing in the open, in a clearing in a wooded copse. It had been deemed a good place to camp, largely due to the small pond nearby.

From Leandro, who did manage to string together complete sentences as long as Rose was out of eyeshot, Laura learned that they were taking something of a detour. Under normal circumstances, the troupe would have traveled by the major roads, stopping to give performances along the way, staying as many as three nights if the town were large enough and the take good. With so many new troupe members, Pantaloon had decreed it more prudent to take to the back roads, using the opportunity to put the new cast members through their paces. By avoiding the inns, they broke even. There was no revenue, but little in the way of cost.

It also meant they had no witnesses. There was no one to comment on the man with the strangely broken hand, the actor with the oddly aristocratic accent, or the two small children who just happened to have the same names as the small children of a wanted man.

According to Leandro, the decision had been Pantaloon’s. Pantaloon was, after all, the nominal head of the troupe. Laura had a fairly good idea who had first broached the plan.

Laura wondered how much the Pink Carnation was paying Cécile. Whatever it was, she deserved double.

Laura thought back over the rehearsal. Make that triple.

“From the beginning, then,” said Pantaloon. “Ruffiana, you have intercepted Harlequin, who is returning from a rendezvous with Columbine, who has given him a note from Inamorata to be delivered to Leandro. You want him to play go-between on your behalf with Il Capitano, but first you must feel him out to make sure he won’t betray you to your husband. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” said Laura. It wasn’t the scenario she had trouble with. She could summarize it perfectly well. It was acting it that was the problem.

Apparently, one couldn’t just walk up to Harlequin and say, “Hello, young messenger. Would you carry this letter for me?” No. One had to work around to it and make it sound natural. Preferably with sufficient double entendre to keep the audience amused, interspersed with a well-worn repertoire of physical gags.

André had been brilliantly comedic as Il Capitano, the blustering Spanish officer simultaneously attempting to seduce young Inamorata and repel the advances of her mother, Ruffiana. Even de Berry had been adequate as Leandro’s two-faced best friend, who pretends to aid in the courtship of Inamorata while secretly wooing her for himself, although Laura did wonder how much of that was acting and how much the prelude to an actual seduction.

They began the scene again. Harlequin strolled “onstage,” hands in his pockets, whistling a merry Mozart tune, only to be intercepted by Laura. She gave an exaggerated start of surprise. “You! You there!”

“I, Madame?” Harlequin waggled his eyebrows in a way that managed to be effortlessly comedic.

“Yes, you.” Blast. What next? Molière this was not. Next time she escaped from Paris, it was going to be with a classical theatre troupe, where one could simply memorize one’s lines. Memorization, she could do. “You have the look of a lackey. Can you carry a letter for me?”

“For a beautiful woman”—Harlequin made the word “beautiful” a joke in itself, in complicity with the imaginary audience—“there’s very little I can’t carry.”

“Er, good. Um. I have need of your skills. Your letter-carrying skills.”

Pantaloon dropped his head into his hands.

“Where did you say you performed again?” said Harlequin jokingly, dropping out of character.

“I’m sorry,” said Laura wretchedly. “I don’t know where my mind is today. I must have offended one of the muses.”

She meant to make a joke out of it, but it fell flat. The others exchanged significant looks.

“We’re all tired,” said André quickly. “After being based in Paris for so many months, none of us are used to this much travel anymore. It saps the creative energy.”

It hadn’t seemed to hurt his creative energy.

Laura mustered an unconvincing yawn. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Didn’t you?” murmured Harlequin. He winked at André. “You’re a lucky man, Capitano.”

She hadn’t … Oops. Laura bit down on a quick negation. In any event, at least this furthered the pretense that they were married. She could cling to that small reassurance, at least.

It was a new and unsettling sentiment, feeling this incompetent. She didn’t like it, not at all. She might not be particularly talented or inspired, but she had always at least risen to the level of competence.

“We’ll have an early night tonight and resume again tomorrow,” said Cécile briskly. “Everyone has a bad day now and again.”

Laura trailed after her out of the clearing. One bad day, yes. But what happened when she failed again tomorrow?

How long before the other actors smelled a rat?

Chapter 27

“
I
t shouldn’t be this hard,” Laura muttered. “It’s simply a matter of knowing what to say and where to stand. How hard can that be?”

“Very,” André said, propping himself up on one elbow.

He was sprawled comfortably across the pallet, waiting as his temporary wife prepared for bed. Since she didn’t appear willing to remove much in the way of clothing, this consisted solely of yanking her hair back into a braid that looked as though it were intended as much for punishment as convenience. André winced in sympathy for her scalp as she crossed one section with another.

A brief squall of rain had driven the troupe from their campfire early tonight. As Pantaloon had commented, not unkindly, it was perhaps for the best. If they were to perform in Beauvais on Saturday, they would have a great many miles to travel the next day and an even greater deal of work to accomplish.

Seated next to Laura, André had felt her flinch at the words. She knew they were intended for her.

Laura gave the knot at the bottom of her braid a final, vicious yank. “But you manage well enough. Better than well enough. You were quite good.”

André leaned back against the bunched-up pillows. “I’ve had more practice than you have. I participated in the odd amateur theatrical in my youth.”

More than a few, in fact. There had been a large garden behind Père Beniet’s house, with a terrace perfectly suited for balcony scenes.

They had been such innocent revels, those summer theatricals. They had all laughed a great deal—sometimes at Julie, who could never remember her lines; sometimes at Renaud, comrade in legal studies, who thought no play was complete without a duel and insisted on inserting them in the most unlikely places in the narrative.

Renaud had died long since, killed in the fighting in the Vendée during the war. He had never been meant to wield any weapon heavier than a law book.

The others, too, were gone, each in their own way. Julie, dead. Marie-Agnès, Julie’s cousin, married with three children in Brest. Their entire enchanted summer circle, scattered and gone.

“Don’t forget,” he added wryly, “I’ve spent the past few years playing at a pretense. There’s nothing like the threat of execution to improve one’s acting skills. You wouldn’t know that.”

Something passed across her face, like a ripple beneath still waters.

Laura set her brush down very carefully on the table. “I had wondered,” she said slowly. “You made such a convincing show.”

“I had to,” André pointed out. “I wouldn’t be here otherwise.”

“When did it start?” she asked. “And why?”

“Is it important?” He looked at her, perched on the three-legged stool, and thought how odd it was how unremarkable it felt to be here like this, sharing a room and a bed. She wore a loose blouse tucked into a high-waisted skirt—peasant clothing, convenient for travel. Her hair hung in a long braid over one shoulder. With her honey-colored skin and her dark hair, she might have been an Umbrian peasant in an old mural.

Abandoning the stool, she perched on the edge of the pallet, tucking her legs up beneath the wide folds of her skirt. “You don’t have to tell me if you don’t want to. It’s your prerogative.”

André remembered another conversation, another night. “I’ve always had mixed feelings about prerogatives.”

“So you’ve told me.”

It was folly, he knew, to confide in her. What did he know of her, after all, other than this? That she had been his governess; that she could teach Latin, literature, and the rudiments of nearly everything else; that her resourcefulness deserted her when it came to the stage; and that she curled an arm beneath one cheek as she slept. All of these things, he knew, but they told him nothing at all.

They did claim that sharing a bed brought out confidences, even though he suspected that this wasn’t quite what they meant.

The urge to confide, after five years of silence, was surprisingly tempting, like water after thirst. He had kept his own counsel for so long. Père Beniet had known part of it, but not all. Jean had been Cadoudal’s creature, just as the coachman had been Fouché’s, both there to keep him in line. As for Daubier, he wasn’t the sort of friend in whom one confided. Even if the stakes hadn’t been what they were, Daubier was more interested in appearances than emotions; his attention tended to wander.

And then there had been Julie. He had tried to tell her, but she hadn’t wanted to hear. She preferred the world as she transmuted it, translated into certitude by paint and canvas, no doubts or gray areas.

André looked at Laura, her dark eyes steady on his, waiting him out without saying a word. He thought of her as he had first seen her—a shadowy figure in gray, waiting, watching, listening. Whatever else she was, she knew how to keep her counsel. And she understood the shades of gray.

André peeled off his glasses, rubbing his eyes with one hand.

“It began four years ago. No,” André corrected himself, frowning at the brown wool of the blanket. “If I’m being honest, it started before that. We were in Paris during the Terror, Julie and I.” He looked up at the woman sitting on the bed next to him. “Were you there too?”

She shook her head wordlessly.

André rolled a bit of lint between his fingers. “Then I can’t tell you what it was. It’s the sort of thing that has to be experienced to be believed. I wish I hadn’t experienced it. It all started off so well. We had a constitution, an assembly, all the things we had been demanding. Feudal privileges abolished, the common humanity of man exalted …” He broke off. “You have the idea.”

It was hard, even now, to reassemble the rest. As a student of history, he could follow action A to consequence B, but at the time, event had followed event with incomprehensible rapidity.

“Julie wanted to stay in Paris, to paint. The Revolution opened opportunities for her, opportunities greater than any she had had before.” Her friends had been more radical than his own. Through Jacques-Louis David, she had become close to both Marat and Robespierre. In the meantime, André’s own party, the Girondins, were coming increasingly under attack.

Robespierre had commissioned her to craft a series of murals on the theme of Reason Exalted. Exalted? André had demanded. With their friends being arrested, carted off to one didn’t want to imagine what? Julie had taken umbrage at that. For her, the ideals of the Revolution were still pure and whole. She didn’t see the blood pouring down the Place de Grève or notice the gaps in their dinner parties. She had always had that facility, the facility of ignoring those things that didn’t fit in her compositions. It was part of her charm. At least, it had been.

But there was one thing she hadn’t been able to ignore, although she would have liked to have done. It was at the height of the Terror that she had become pregnant with Gabrielle.

“We moved back to Nantes when Julie was expecting Gabrielle. It seemed safer.”

Laura’s dark eyes followed him. “But it wasn’t,” she guessed.

“No,” he said shortly. Even now, it was hard to bring himself to talk about it. “Have you heard of republican marriage?”

“Vows before a registry office?”

He gave a short, harsh laugh. “If only. The Republican Committee in Nantes came up with a new way of dispatching dissidents they oh-so-euphemistically termed a republican marriage.”

“Yes?” Laura prompted.

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.