The Orchid Affair (3 page)

“Monsieur.” Laura forced herself not to flinch away.

Beneath the twin circles of glass, Jaouen’s eyes were a bright, unexpected aquamarine. In contrast to his drab brown cloak and weather-browned skin, there was something almost frivolous about the color, as if it had been an oversight on the part of nature.

There was nothing frivolous about the way the Assistant Prefect of Police was looking her up and down.

There was nothing about her appearance to give her away, Laura reassured herself, fighting to keep the prickles of fear at bay. They had been very careful of that. Her attire was all French-made, from the scuffed half-boots on her feet to the hairpins driving into her scalp. Her real wardrobe, the wardrobe she had worn in her past life as Laura Grey, governess, as well as her small cache of books and personal keepsakes, had been left in Sussex, in a trunk in a box room in a house called Selwick Hall—sixteen years of her life boxed away and reduced to three square feet of storage space. There was no more Laura Grey, governess. Only Laure Griscogne.

Governess.

Ah, well.

Whatever André Jaouen saw passed muster. Well, it should, shouldn’t it? French or English, she looked like the governess she was. “Apologies for keeping you waiting,” he said. “I can only spare you a few moments.”

As apologies went, it wasn’t much of one. Still, the fact that he had offered one at all was something. Laura inclined her head in acknowledgment. Servility had come hard to her, but she’d had many years in which to learn it. “I am at your convenience, Monsieur Jaouen.”

“Not mine,” he said, with a sudden, unexpected glint of humor. Or perhaps it was only a trick of the watery light, reflected through rain-streaked windows. “My children’s. The agency told me that you have been a governess for … how many years was it?”

She would have wagered her French-made hairpins that he knew exactly how many, but she supplied the number all the same. “Sixteen.”

That much was true. Sixteen excruciating years. She had been sixteen herself when she began, stranded and friendless in a foreign country. She had lied with all the efficiency of desperation, convincing the woman at the agency that she was twenty. She had scraped back her hair to make herself look older and ruthlessly scowled down anyone who dared to question it. Mostly, they hadn’t. Hunger and worry did their work quickly. By the end of that first, desperate month, she could easily have passed for older than she claimed. Her upbringing might have been unconventional, but it had left her unprepared for the shock of true poverty.

“Sixteen years,” her prospective employer repeated. Through the spectacles, he submitted her to the sort of scrutiny he must have given dodgy witnesses in the courtroom, as though he could fright out lies by the force of his look alone. “Think again, Mademoiselle Griscogne.”

Laura pinched her lips together. Sixteen years ago, she had learned that the expression made her look older, more reliable. People expected their governess to look like a prune who had just been sucking on a lemon.

By now it came naturally.

She had to succeed in this mission. Had to, had to. Anything rather than face being a governess forever, feeling her face freeze a little more every year into a caricature of herself until there was no Laura left beneath it.

For the next few months, she would be the very best governess she could be, if only it meant—please God—that she never had to be a governess again.

Laura squared her shoulders beneath her sodden pelisse, steeling herself against the urge to shiver. “I assure you, Monsieur Jaouen,” she said frostily, “my experience as a governess is quite as extensive as the agency has claimed. I provide elementary instruction in composition, literature, Scripture, history, geography, botany, and arithmetic. I am proficient in Italian, German, English, and the classical languages. I teach music, drawing, and needlework.”

André Jaouen’s eyebrows lifted. “All that in the same day?”

Laura’s brows drew together. Was he joking? It was hard to tell. Either way, it was always better to ignore such lapses in one’s employers. If they weren’t joking, they tended to take offense at the assumption of levity. If they were, it was dangerous to encourage them.

The reflection helped settle her nervous stomach. She felt on firmer ground here, putting a prospective employer in his place. She had played this game before.

“I tailor the curriculum to fit the specific needs and interests of the children in my care,” she said loftily. “Not all subjects are appropriate in every situation.”

André Jaouen made an impatient gesture. “No, of course not. I doubt my son would appreciate your tutelage on needlework. You are free to start immediately?” At her look of surprise, he said briskly, “I wish to have this business dealt with as quickly as possible. Your references were excellent.”

Of course they had been. The Pink Carnation employed only the best forgers.

Was it just her nerves acting up again, or had that been too easy? Shouldn’t he question her about her references? Ask her more about her teaching methods? Tell her about the children?

“Mademoiselle Griscogne?”

“Yes,” she said hastily. “I can begin whenever you like.”

André Jaouen motioned her forward, already in motion himself, making short work of the distance to the double doors through which Laura had entered. “I have two children, Gabrielle and Pierre-André. Gabrielle is nine. Pierre-André is almost five. Until now, they have been with their grandparents in Nantes. This is their first time in Paris.” He spoke as he walked: direct, economical, no effort wasted.

“And their prior education?” Laura lengthened her stride to keep up, her wet skirts tangling in her legs as she followed him past a wide staircase, the marble balustrade gone a dull gray with grime. An empty pedestal stood on the landing, marking the place where a statue must once have stood. Tapestries still lined the walls, but they hung crookedly, and several bore poorly mended gashes.

“Their grandfather taught them at home.”

Laura did her best to suppress a grimace. Fairy stories. Basic reading. Arithmetic. If she were lucky. She would have to start from the very beginning with them. The boy, Pierre-André, was nearly of an age to be sent off to school. She would have to bring him up to the level of other boys his age.

No, she wouldn’t. The thought brought Laura up short. If she did her job well, she wouldn’t be around long enough for it to matter. She had been thinking like a governess again, falling back into the old patterns.

Jaouen was still talking, words marshalling themselves into neat, economical sentences. Behind the measured cadences, Laura could detect just a hint of a Breton burr. There was no faux-aristocratic ostentation there, no pretense. “Your wages will be paid quarterly. Room and board will be provided to you. Ah, Jean.” That last had been directed to the gatekeeper. “Tell Jeannette to find Mademoiselle Griscogne a room. Something near the children.”

Jean and Jeannette? His servants couldn’t be named Jean and Jeannette. It was too much like something out of the Commedia dell’Arte. Did the still-unseen Jeannette run around in a parti-colored costume smacking Jean over the head with a big stick, like Pierrot and Pierrette? Perhaps they were spies too. If so, one would have thought they could have come up with better aliases.

“Jeannette is the nursery maid,” Jaouen said as an aside to her. Without waiting for them to be handed to him, he scooped up his own hat and cane off a marble-topped table by the door. “Jeannette will see you settled and make you known to Gabrielle and Pierre-André. If you need anything, either Jean or Jeannette will see to it.”

With a nonchalant push, Jean the gatekeeper shoved open the door, letting in a blast of damp air. The rain looked as though it were contemplating turning to snow. The icy pellets stung Laura’s cheeks as she followed Jaouen to the door. She was still wearing her pelisse, and her pelisse was still just as wet as it had been when she had entered; the entire interview, such as it was, had taken all of ten minutes. Ten minutes to embark on the most dangerous gamble of her life.

A carriage was waiting in the courtyard, plain and black like the cloak draped over Jaouen’s shoulders, the horses pawing impatiently at the cobbles.

She had clearly been dismissed. And hired. She had been hired, hadn’t she?

Jean the gatekeeper gave her a disapproving look as she followed her new employer out under the porte cochere. Or perhaps that was just his normal expression. “I will need to fetch my things,” Laura said desperately. “And settle my account at my current lodgings.”

Reaching into his waistcoat pocket, André Jaouen took out a purse and shook several coins out into his palm. He thrust what looked to her untutored eyes like a substantial sum in her direction.

“An advance,” he said impatiently, when Laura looked at him uncomprehending. “On your wages.”

Laura’s back stiffened. “My own funds are more than adequate to settle my current obligations.”

He looked at her curiously, then shrugged, returning the coins to his pocket. “Will you bite my head off if I offer you the use of the carriage?”

He cocked an eyebrow, waiting for her reply. There it was again, that glimmer of what might be humor.

“There is no need, sir,” Laura said coolly. “My lodgings are not far and I am more than accustomed to managing for myself.”

Jaouen eyed her speculatively, his glasses glinting in the light of the carriage lamps. “I can see that.” And then he ruined it by adding, “I wouldn’t hire you if I thought it were otherwise. My occupation is a demanding one. I have no time for domestic squabbles.”

That had put her in her place. Between fear and relief, she felt almost giddy. “Squelching squabbles is one of my particular specialties.”

Jaouen forbore to comment. With the air of someone getting done with a bad job, he continued, “You may be troubled from time to time by my wife’s cousin, who persists under the unfortunate delusion that my home is his own. Ignore him.”

Ah, one of those, was he? Once, she might have claimed that she wasn’t the sort of governess to inflame a young man’s lusts. But she had learned the hard way that, after a certain degree of inebriation, all it took was being female, and sometimes not even that. She had also learned that employers seldom took kindly to their elder sons, nephews, or houseguests being hit over the head with a warming pan, candlestick, or chamber pot. Laura appreciated both the warning and the implicit authorization to do whatever she needed to do.

It was comforting to know that the intimidating M. Jaouen had an Achilles’ heel, even if that Achilles’ heel was only a cousin by marriage. It made him more human, somehow. And human meant fallible. Fallible was good, especially for her purposes.

“I will. Sir.”

Jaouen nodded brusquely, her message received and accepted. Hat in one hand, cane in the other, he started for the carriage. At the last moment, just beyond the protective cover of the awning, Jaouen jerked his head back over his shoulder. Laura shot to attention.

“Why did you leave your last position?” he asked abruptly.

“My pupil married.” If he had hoped to shock her into an admission, he would be disappointed. Her pupil had married in June, leaving her once more without a situation. The family had been kind; they had kept her on through the wedding, but there was a limit to the charity she was willing to accept. “She had no need for a governess anymore.”

But the Pink Carnation had had need of an agent.

Rain pocked Jaouen’s glasses as he treated her to another long, thoughtful look. He held his hat in one hand but didn’t bother to put it on, despite the rivulets of rain that silvered his hair and dampened his coat. “An occupational hazard?”

Laura permitted herself a grim smile. “One of the most hazardous.”

She had never thought much of matrimony herself—her parents had set no favorable example—but it had been distinctly unsettling to make a place for oneself only to be flung out into the world again. And again and again. Some of them, the sentimental ones, sent letters for a time, but those generally tailed off within the first year, as the daily demands of the domestic state outweighed sentimental recollections of the schoolroom.

“You shan’t have to worry about that with Gabrielle. Yet.”

She wouldn’t be around long enough to worry about that.

“Indeed,” she agreed. Noncommittal replies were always best in dealing with employers. Yes, sir; no, sir; indeed, sir. It came out by rote.

Jaouen clapped his hat onto his head. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “The children will be expecting you.”

Jean the gatekeeper slammed the door shut behind Jaouen as he swung up into the carriage. The horses’ nostrils flared, their breath steaming in the cold air as the coachman clucked to them, setting them into motion. Through the rapidly misting glass of the window, Jaouen was nothing more than a silhouette, a blurred image in tans and browns.

That was it. She had done it. She had really done it. Blood surged to Laura’s cheeks and fingertips, sending a rush of warmth tingling through her despite the freezing wind gluing her soaking skirts to her legs. Whatever else came of it, the first step was accomplished; she was a member of Jaouen’s household. She was in.

Between the rain and the sound of hooves against the cobbles, Laura could just barely hear her new employer call out his instructions to the coachman.

“To the Abbaye Prison. As fast as you can.”

Laura swallowed hard, turning her face away from a sudden gust of wind that tore at her bonnet strings and snatched away the very breath from her throat.

Oh, she was in all right. Way over her head.

Chapter 2

T
he carriage rocked abruptly forward and then back as it came to a stop in front of the Prison de l’Abbaye. The stone bulk of the Abbaye squatted sullenly in front of the carriage, the towers set in each side jutting out like a pair of angry elbows. Torches illuminated the entrance, burning greasily against the early dark of a wet winter night.

“So kind of you to finally join us.” A small man in unrelieved black stepped out from under the lee of the portal at the entrance of the Abbaye Prison.

“Us?” André said mildly, taking his time climbing down from the carriage. He’d be damned if he’d hurry for the likes of Gaston Delaroche. “I had no idea this was to be an ensemble event.”

Delaroche positioned himself so that the guttering torches on either side of the entrance cast an eerie glow over the polished silver of his coat buttons, bathing him in an unnatural and unholy light.

Bloody stagy, if you asked André’s opinion, which no one had.

Delaroche liked to claim he had once been the second most feared man in France. André would have put his position at fourth or fifth at best. Voicing that opinion had not endeared André to Delaroche.

“How very … unlike you to be tardy, Jaouen.” Delaroche bared a set of unnaturally yellowed teeth. André suspected him of buffing them with tobacco and a side of tea leaves. “It is, I suppose, no surprise that you would be distracted—now that your children are come from Nantes.”

There was no point in asking him how he knew. They were all in the business of knowledge. Any self-respecting senior official in the Ministry of Police employed his own private system of informers, above and apart from those sanctioned by the state. They spent as much time monitoring one another as they did the enemy.

André forced himself to shrug. “A nursery is a nursery, whether in Paris or Nantes. They provide no impediment to my duties.”

Delaroche’s eyes glinted red in the torchlight. “Paris is a far cry from Nantes, my friend. So much more … dangerous.”

Rain ran beneath André’s collar from the back of his hat, sending an icy sluice down his spine. André favored Delaroche with a hard stare. “Can any relation of Fouché, however young, be deemed to be in danger? They are not unprotected,” he added pointedly.

Delaroche shrugged, a shrug that made André want to take him by the shoulders and shake him like the little rat that he was. “Even so,” he said.

Even so? Even
so
? What in all the blazes was that supposed to mean?

André pictured his children, Gabrielle, with her snub nose, her plump child’s cheeks, her hair that was beginning to lose its baby curl and the eyes that looked so uncannily like his own; Pierre-André with Julie’s open, smiling countenance and hair like the gilded angels’ wings in a church fresco, trusting, open, laughing. He pictured them as he had seen them the night before, asleep in bed, their limbs so small beneath the blankets Jeannette had drawn up over them, their faces smooth and vulnerable in sleep. They were so small, his children, so vulnerable, such tempting hostages to fortune.

Why did Père Beniet have to die? And why did he have to die
now
?

André seethed with the same mingled grief and anger that had wrung through him since the news had arrived from Nantes. Grief at the loss of a man who had been more of a father than his own father had ever been: old M. Beniet, first his tutor, later his father-in-law. Anger at Père Beniet’s leaving them, and leaving them at so inopportune a moment. Not that mortality left any man much room for choice. André knew his anger was illogical, but that didn’t stop him from feeling it. How could his old tutor, who had always been so sage, have misjudged so radically at the last?

A chicken bone. Père Beniet had choked on a chicken bone. A great soul brought low by a fragment of fowl. There were times when the divinity had a positively mordant sense of humor. All his knowledge, all his experience, brought to nothing against a splinter of bone lurking between a dumpling and a cabbage leaf in an innocent-seeming bowl of stew.

If that chicken hadn’t been dead already, André could have cheerfully wrung its neck. Gabrielle and Pierre-André had been safe in Nantes, safe and well cared for, well away from the tangled intrigues of Paris. Well away from men like Gaston Delaroche.

André glanced at Delaroche, at Delaroche who resented his ascent, who wanted Fouché’s confidence for his own. There was no point in saying that Delaroche wouldn’t. Delaroche would. When it came to his position, there was nothing Gaston Delaroche wouldn’t do. Especially now.

“What are you doing here, Delaroche?” André asked flatly.

Delaroche smirked, displaying his yellowed teeth. “Fouché asked me to assist you in this interrogation.”

Had Fouché set Delaroche to spy on him?

No. André dismissed the idea as rapidly as he had considered it. Fouché knew that André was his man, not only by marriage but by the bonds of necessity. Any position or power that André possessed came solely through Fouché. Position and power were terms that Fouché understood, tools he employed to grapple men to him. Loyalty, love, ideals—all those were as grass compared to the powerful motivator of man’s self-interest.

It was far more likely that Delaroche had invited himself along and Fouché had conceded, deeming it an easy way to keep Delaroche out of his own hair.

“Excellent,” André said briskly, clamping his hat under his arm and striding forward ahead of Delaroche into the foyer. The guards stood aside at his approach, recognizing him by sight. “How very considerate of my cousin to provide me with an assistant.”

“With assistance,” Delaroche corrected, trotting along behind him. “Not an assistant.”

“Forgive me,” said André insincerely. “My mistake.”

He deliberately picked up the pace. He could hear the clip-clop of Delaroche’s boot heels as the other man hurried to catch up. He lengthened his stride, nodding to the guards on either side as he hastened up the worn stone stairs to the second floor.

“Interrogation,” Delaroche oozed—or wheezed, although he made a valiant effort to turn the sound sinister, even while scurrying to keep up. “Interrogation is an art. One that takes years of study and dedication to perfect.”

“Or just a small room and a prisoner,” said André heartlessly. “I hope you left your thumbscrews at home.”

Delaroche regarded André with disfavor.

The two men came to a halt before a thick wooden door, the panels relieved only by a small, metal grille. In the cell, a man sat slumped on a cot, his bare head bowed. His hair had been carelessly clubbed back with a ribbon, but chunks stuck out at odd angles, as though it had been accomplished without the aid of a brush.

As the guard unlocked the door, the prisoner sprang up. Hope and fear chased across his haggard face, as though he didn’t know whether to fear to hope or hope to fear. Execution or pardon? The lady or the tiger?

A deputy sidled through in front of them to take his place at a square, sturdy-legged table on which paper, ink, and pens—several of them—had already been arranged. Nothing had been left to chance. Fouché was determined that Querelle would talk and talk now. He had gone to great lengths to ensure that it would be so.

“Good evening, Monsieur Querelle.” André positioned himself in front of Delaroche, effectively blocking the smaller man. He needed no assistance from Delaroche for this; he had played through this script before. He wanted nothing more than to get through it as quickly as possible. “I hear that it is the will of the people that you will not be with us much longer.”

The night before, the prisoner had been hauled out of bed and dragged before a military court specifically convened for that purpose. Still fuddled with sleep, Querelle had been tried and condemned to execution, then shoved back into his cell to contemplate his own imminent demise.

“The will of the people?” Querelle made the mistake of allowing his scorn to show. “What people? That was no real court.”

André couldn’t help but agree. Any court convened at three in the morning and presided over by the First Consul’s brother-in-law, a man more famed for his hair than his wit, could hardly be accounted much of an ornament to the French justice system. However, he didn’t think his employers would thank him for sharing that opinion. The law as he had learned it had no place in the new regime.

“No?” André said quietly. “The consequences, I assure you, are very, very real.”

Delaroche trod on André’s foot in his eagerness to get to the prisoner. “Have you looked out the window? You will find something there that might interest you.”

The window was little more than a rough square hewn in the wall, lined with closely set bars that did little to keep out the elements. Frigid night air whistled between the bars, and with it the sound of activity in the courtyard below.

There was a scaffold already built in the courtyard. A man in a ragged wool vest was spreading fresh sawdust across the boards.

André saw the muscles in Querelle’s throat work as he swallowed. To hear that one was condemned to death and to see the instrument of it, oiled and ready for use, were two very different things.

The Ministry of Police was nothing if not efficient in its work.

“That is for me?” Querelle asked hoarsely. He had to clear his throat before the last word.

“Not just for you.” Delaroche folded his arms across his chest, giving the prisoner a superior look. Not hard to look superior, thought André critically, when your opponent was in chains and hadn’t been allowed fresh linen in nearly a month. “Did you think you were the only soul in Paris with more pride than sense? Some of your comrades made the same mistake … and will pay the same price.”

The prisoner looked at Delaroche uncomprehendingly. A sort of dull trepidation could be seen in his expression, as though he had some inkling of what was to come but knew himself to be powerless to ward against it.

“‘Price,’” Querelle repeated. “Price?”

“Picot and Le Bourgeois have also been condemned to death,” said André, ending with brutal simplicity what otherwise would have been at least ten minutes of ominous innuendo.

The two men had been part of the same Royalist network as Querelle, but they had been less fortunate in their captors. Kept in close confinement in the Temple Prison, they had been put to the question in fine medieval fashion. They had begged for death and in the end been granted it, not out of any impulse of mercy, but because Fouché had found what he hoped would be a weaker link: Querelle.

“Condemned,” confirmed Delaroche, rolling the word lovingly on his tongue. “Condemned to an end on the guillotine. They, too, refused to cooperate with the officers of the Republic. Last night, they were taken before a military commission, tried, and”—Delaroche allowed a brief pause, during which time his gaze went meaningfully to the window—“sentenced. To death.”

Querelle licked his lips, as though they had gone dry. “So fast?”

“Justice is swift, Monsieur Querelle. Ah, and there we see it in action. Shall we?”

It was a command rather than an invitation. In the courtyard, the torches burned sullenly in their brackets against the wall. The rain and wind made the flames sizzle and crackle. The flames cast an eerie red glow over the proceedings, like a medieval painter’s rendition of hell, the red light lapping at the raw wood of the scaffold and glinting off the blade that hung so ominously suspended above.

From the lee of the building, a man stumbled forward, his hands bound behind him just as Querelle’s had been. His head, too, was bare to the elements. The rain slicked his shirt to his skin. From the second-story window, they could hear him shudder, although whether with cold or with fear was unclear. He swayed as the wind buffeted him, his head and shoulders hunched against the stinging rain.

There was to be no grand state execution, no glorious death for his cause. Any speech made at the scaffold would be lost in the howling rain, blunted against the bored indifference of the detail of soldiers who were his only audience. They were prepared to dispatch the man as any farmer might dispatch vermin caught poaching on his crops, without mercy or regret.

It wasn’t Picot. Both Picot and Le Bourgeois had been killed the night before. Tried, sentenced, executed, all within the space of an hour. This man was someone else entirely. A thief, a murderer, a rapist. Expendable fodder from Paris’s overflowing prisons.

Querelle, of course, was not to know that.

In the rain, in the dark, one bound and hunched man looked much like another. It was necessary, for the sake of the charade, that Querelle think it was one of his comrades, that he see in the arc of the ax the intimation of his own mortality. To be told, at a remove, in simple, whitewashed words that his comrades were dead would not have at all the same effect.

It all made André sick.

“Such brave defiance,” purred Delaroche, his chin practically resting on the prisoner’s shoulder. “Such unwavering insolence. But, as you shall see, Monsieur, Madame la Guillotine will not be defied, not for all the bravery in the world.”

Despite the freezing air gusting through the window, sweat beaded Querelle’s forehead.

André spoke, his calm voice unnaturally loud in the waiting hush. “There is, of course, still a chance for a pardon.”

Outside, two soldiers helped the bound man to kneel. With rough efficiency, they settled his head in the hollowed trough designed for just that purpose.

“A pardon?” croaked Querelle, never taking his eyes from the figure of the man on the block.

“A pardon,” repeated André quickly, as Delaroche opened his mouth to say something, undoubtedly taunting, pointless, and time-wasting. “I have a pardon with your name on it. All it lacks is the First Consul’s signature.”

Querelle’s nails scraped against the stone of the sill as his hands opened and closed, seeking some sort of purchase. He cast an agonized glance out the window, at the man kneeling on the scaffold. He looked back, uncertainly, at André.

“Should you choose to change your mind, Monsieur Fouché himself would personally obtain the First Consul’s signature on your behalf.”