The Orchid Affair (8 page)

“Not my stars.” Seizing Jaouen’s coffee cup, he hoisted it in an exuberant toast. “How go the plans for the fête?” Dark drops of drugged coffee sloshed over the sides and onto Jaouen’s papers. Any moment now, and the desk would be snoring.

No, Laura thought. No, no, no.

Reaching up, Jaouen snagged the cup, placing it firmly back on its saucer. “The fête may need to be postponed.”

“Postponed!” Philippe shot up with all the indignation of a young child denied a treat.

Jaouen pressed his eyes tightly closed for a moment before turning to Laura. “You may go, Mademoiselle Griscogne. I wouldn’t want to keep you from the children.”

“Oh, I say!” intervened the young man, flapping a hand. With a nod at the coffeepot, he said winningly, “Do you think we might …”

“No,” said Jaouen.

“Shall I bring another cup?” asked Laura, beyond hope of salvaging the situation. When the stars chose to frown, they frowned indeed. Who knew that putting one tired man to sleep would be so much bother? Now she had two of them in the study, drugged coffee all over the desk, and none of it in Jaouen.

“Yes,” said the young man, just as Jaouen said “No.”

“Then I shall return to the children.” Laura started to curtsy, remembered herself, and nodded instead. “Good night, sir.”

“How about a brandy, then?” Laura heard Jaouen’s cousin say behind her.

“Later,” said Jaouen. “You’d best come with me. I have something to show you.”

A door closed, and over the tread of male feet, Laura heard Jaouen saying quietly, “Didn’t you get the news? Both Tante Hélène and Cousin Héloïse are indisposed.”

“Merde!”
Philippe’s voice carried, echoing along the marble. “The same complaint?”

“I don’t think they will be receiving again for a very long time.”

“Well, that won’t do—,” she could hear Philippe saying, and then another door closed and the sound was blotted out.

Laura paused, tucking herself into the corner between the door and the wall in one of the endless strings of reception rooms that marched along the ground floor. She listened, but she couldn’t hear them anymore. They must have moved sufficiently far away towards the other side of the house.

Leaving Jaouen’s study, with all his papers in it, untenanted.

Perhaps the stars weren’t so very unfavorable after all. Laura cautiously made her way back along the way she had come, taking care not to creep. Only suspect persons crept; persons with nothing on their consciences walked normally. She had lost a handkerchief, or a button. She had forgot to ask whether the children liked warm milk. She had come to collect the coffee tray, to make him a fresh pot, since this one would have gone cold.

Oh yes, she liked that one. Very good, very eager, very plausible. That was she, a regular Good Samaritan. Back in her prior situations, she would never have stooped to so menial a chore. She had jealously guarded her prerogatives in the cutthroat world of the household hierarchy.

Like an echo, she could hear Jaouen’s words of half an hour before.
Just because one has a prerogative doesn’t mean one should abuse it
. A curious sentiment from an employer to an employee. It certainly wasn’t one to which any of her previous employers had subscribed.

The study door had been closed, but not latched. At times like this, the understaffing of the Hôtel de Bac was a decided advantage. Jeannette was with the children, Jean in his cubbyhole by the gate. There was no one to see her as she turned the latch on the study door. The door squeaked as she pressed it forward, but there was no one to hear it.

Laura hoped that whatever it was that Jaouen had to show his cousin took a very long time indeed.

The study was just as it had been before, the crowded bookshelves, the almost empty walls, the papers scattered along the desk. Without Jaouen in it, it felt, perversely, smaller, as though his presence had lent the little room depth and dimension. Strange what force some personalities had, to shape the world around them. Her own was as a nullity, scarcely creating an eddy in the landscapes through which she passed.

That was, she reminded herself, a good thing, especially in situations such as these.

Tucking her skirts close to her legs to keep them from rustling, she slipped around to the far side of the desk, to the document Jaouen had been writing when she interrupted him. It appeared to be a bulletin of some sort, a report of the latest interrogation.

Laura quickly scanned Jaouen’s summary. His writing was neat, precise, just what she would have expected from him, with no wasted flourishes or curlicues: At the Abbaye the night before, he had interrogated a Royalist agent named Querelle. Querelle confessed to a plot to kidnap the First Consul, replacing him with a member of the royal family who would claim the throne in the name of Louis XVIII. All fairly standard stuff, so far. This was to be accomplished by the work of five generals, four of whom he had named under interrogation. Arch-agitator Georges Cadoudal was known even now to be in Paris. Jaouen recommended an immediate watch be set for him. He would be known by his extreme girth and Royalist sentiments.

How did one identify Royalist sentiments? Were they emblazoned on one’s hat like a Revolutionary cockade?

The plot struck Laura as distinctly far-fetched. Kidnapping the First Consul? Expecting five generals to all work together instead of jockeying for power and selling one another out? It was a plot so naïve only a man could have come up with it.

There was no mention of lost princes.

What had the Pink Carnation been talking about in the bookshop? Laura spared a thought for the lost Dauphin. If (and it was a very large if) this Cadoudal’s cell had somehow found and secured the lost Dauphin, if the member of the royal family they intended to produce was indeed the lost Louis XVII—if, if, if—this far-fetched plot might not be so very far-fetched after all. The people of Paris wouldn’t rally for five bickering generals, but they just might for the son of Louis XVI. There was a romance already to the legend of the lost Dauphin, and hardheaded though they otherwise might be, the people of Paris loved a good romance.

But there was no reference to the Dauphin—or, for that matter, any prince at all—in Jaouen’s report.

With a feeling of deep resignation, Laura turned to the larger sheaf of papers. It was written in a different hand, not Jaouen’s, clumsy and sprawling, marred with blots and cross-outs and bits of dripped wax. It had to be at least fifty pages long, in a sort of hectic shorthand, where essential verbs appeared to be left out in the interest of speed.

Laura skimmed as quickly as she could over the first section, sweat prickling under her arms as she read, one ear trained on the door, alert for any sign of movement. The ink was cheap, the paper bad, and the coffee drops didn’t help. It was the same as what she had seen already in Jaouen’s report, except more disjointed and at greater length. Only the answers had been set down, not the questions—nor the means used to acquire them.

This Querelle insisted that the plan was merely to kidnap the First Consul until he agreed to abdicate voluntarily. Laura snorted. If he believed that, he was more naïve than she. If the First Consul didn’t agree to abdicate voluntarily—

Laura turned the page and came up short. A good five pages of the report had been ruined, soaked through with ink, as though someone’s elbow had jarred against an ink pot. It must have been a full ink pot; the paper had been utterly saturated, washing out most of the writing beneath, except for some fragments around the edges and bottom that had missed the deluge. It looked, curiously, as though the spilled ink were darker in color than the ink in which it had been written, although that might have had more to do with quantity. It had all long since dried.

Hmph. Jaouen was going to have to write up this part of the report from memory. Laura frowned, wondering how she was going to access it. She held the top sheet to the light, squinting at it, but it was no use; the spilled ink had obliterated everything in its path. All that was left were disjointed fragments—not even full words most of the time.

Laura turned the page. The stain was lighter further on. The bottom page wasn’t legible, but one could at least make out the vague shapes of what must have been words—an “and” here, or a “Consul” there, and sometimes what looked like part of “general” or “troops” (unless, of course, the prisoner had simply said “oops,” but Laura rather doubted they would bother to take that down).

She was amusing herself with that concept when something caught her attention that wasn’t amusing at all. It was the remains of a word, only four letters of it clear, the rest covered under the pervasive ink stain. “—ince.”

The blotted word was “prince.”

Chapter 7

L
aura dreamed of lost princes and woke up with a headache.

Fortunately, she still had the headache powder Jeanette had given her for Jaouen the night before. Laura stirred it into her tea and set about teaching. If she was to make so elementary a mistake as bungling a simple administration of sleeping powder, she might at least make sure her teaching was satisfactory.

It was going to be an interesting challenge, communicating with the Pink Carnation when she wasn’t allowed to leave the house.

That afternoon, as Jeannette reclaimed the children for feeding, bathing, and general clucking, Laura drafted a brief note to the bookseller. On reflection, she wrote, she had decided to delay the children’s introduction to botany until they were further along in their general studies. She would be along on her half day the following Sunday to collect the Latin texts she had requested. His with the greatest expressions of respect and esteem, et cetera, Laure Griscogne.

She stuck the note just within the front cover and entrusted the whole to Jean to deliver. Monsieur Jaouen had said she could, after all. And if he were to open the note, there would be nothing at all he could find there to excite his suspicion. She only hoped the bookseller caught her double meaning. Or that the note didn’t fall out along the way. Or that Jean didn’t just drop the book on the floor of his gatehouse lair, put his feet up, and spit in her general direction.

There was no reply that night. Laura sat by the fire and read aloud to the children from Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont’s fairy tales. Jeannette rocked back and forth and pretended not to listen while Laura read and brooded, the old, familiar phrases rolling off her tongue with very little relation to her brain. As Beauty wandered into the Beast’s castle, Laura wondered whether the bookseller had missed her meaning. By the time the Beast’s favorite flower was dying, Laura was quite sure that Jean had resorted to a drop and a spit. Jean, she had learned, used spitting the way other, more evolved, creatures used speech: to convey a whole range of emotion. And wouldn’t it be just like him to hold on to the book just to thwart her?

Of course, he couldn’t realize just how much it would thwart her. If he did, she would really be in trouble.

“Read us another!” exclaimed Pierre-André.

“Tomorrow,” said Laura, and closed the book.

That might be it! She could send to the shop for more fairy tales. Or … she could wait and see what happened. Prudence over impatience, she counseled herself. Even a governess could only patronize a bookshop so much before people started getting suspicious. And by people, she meant the Ministry of Police. All she needed was to draw their attention to the bookshop on the Rue Serpente and bring the whole edifice crashing down upon all their heads.

On the second day, she taught lessons in the morning and set the children passages from Racine to memorize in the evening, Pierre-André’s significantly shorter than Gabrielle’s. Pierre-André lost his place and giggled. Gabrielle slunk off with her
Romance of the Forest.
Jeannette knit. When Jean appeared to deliver the evening’s load of coal, it was all Laura could do not to jump up and shake him.

But she didn’t.

By the third day, Laura was feeling distinctly twitchy. She had never imagined that it would be possible to feel marooned in the midst of one of the major cities of Europe—utterly cut off from everyone and everything but the play of light in the nursery grate, Pierre-André’s giggles, Gabrielle’s sulks, and the
click, click, click
of Jeannette’s needles as she carried on with her everlasting knitting. One more click, and Laura wasn’t going to be accountable for the consequences.

“Who wants to go exploring?” Laura asked impulsively, flinging down the slate she had been using to demonstrate the principles of long division.

“Papa said we weren’t to leave the house,” said Gabrielle primly.

Laura eyed Gabrielle appraisingly. They had come to what Laura could only consider an armed truce; Gabrielle was tolerating her until such time as someone had the sense to throw her out. There were no frogs in the bed (the youngest Marchmont child), no ink down her back while she marked up compositions (Harry Littleton), and no midnight apparitions by ghosts in bedsheets (Laura had particularly enjoyed that one, especially when the littlest ghost had taken a header into the fender). Gabrielle wielded good behavior like a weapon, performing her lessons punctiliously and with a minimum of personal communication. Infinitely preferable to the frogs.

“But have you been exploring within the house?” Laura demanded.

“A house is a house is a house,” contributed Jeannette, spinning her woolly web like a spider who had hijacked a sheep.

“Not this sort of house.” Laura lowered her voice thrillingly. “Who knows what might be in the other wings.”

“Toys?” asked Pierre-André brightly.

“Perhaps,” said Laura noncommittally, but she was watching Gabrielle. No reader of Mrs. Radcliffe’s could resist that sort of possibility. Skeletons in closets, secret passageways, moldering manuscripts … “The house is very large and very old. There’s no telling what we might find.”

Gabrielle grudgingly dragged herself out of her chair. “If we have to …”

Ha! Laura had her. She didn’t know if they would find secret passageways, or a large manuscript entitled
How to Thwart Royalist Plots
by André Jaouen, but goodness knew what else might be there. At least she would be doing something instead of waiting, waiting, waiting. If she was to be marooned on an island, at least she might make full use of all the resources it offered.

They passed through room after empty room until Laura was dizzy with it, although it was easy enough to navigate by keeping one eye on the courtyard through the window. There were three of them—the larger garden court in front, two smaller courtyards in back—all perfectly symmetrical. Any internal symmetry, though, had been marred by the improvements of successive generations. There were strange crannies where the shapes of rooms had been altered to create fashionable ovals or octagons, leaving odd, triangular spaces behind; there were doors into narrow, windowless hallways running along behind the formal rooms, the openings cunningly disguised within the paneling.

Pierre-André made tracks in the dust, shuffling to watch his footsteps blur. The children hunted for lost jewels in the depths of old armoires, and danced to watch their own reflections twirl in the tarnished mirrors of the ballroom.

When the Parisians looted, they looted well. The only furniture remaining were those pieces too large to be easily tossed out a window or chopped up into firewood. Even bits of the wood paneling had suffered the latter fate, leaving gashes in the walls and empty hinges where doors must once have hung. After corridor after corridor, room after room of dusty emptiness, they all came to an abrupt stop at finding a third-floor room crammed full with bundles and boxes. They had climbed and wandered so much that Laura wasn’t quite sure where they were, other than that it was somewhere towards the back of the house, overlooking the service courtyard.

The boxes were wooden crates, the lids sitting askew where the nails had been prised out. There were canvases and framed pictures propped facedown against the wall, rolled rugs piled in corners, even a large, padded chair sitting in state all by itself among the boxes, as though waiting for someone to sit in it.

“But these are ours,” said Gabrielle, hanging over the side of a box. “These are our things from home.”

“Grandfather’s globe!” exclaimed Pierre-André, spotting something sticking out of one of the other boxes, and went to go pull at it.

“Don’t!” said Gabrielle fiercely. “You’ll break it.”

There was a brief scuffling match, resolved only by Laura lifting the globe out of the box for them and setting it on its stand. It wasn’t a particularly grand specimen. The paint had begun to crack in places and some of the boundaries were out of date, but it was obviously well used and much loved. Pierre-André gave it a well-practiced spin, turning the hard-won products of war and dynastic alliance into little more than a multicolored blur.

The box next to Laura was filled with books—books of all shapes and sizes, with dog-eared pages and broken spines. She leaned over the box, turning them over in her hands, one after the other. Plato rubbed shoulders with Rousseau, Aristophanes with Molière, and Seneca with the
The Sorrows of Young Werther
. Weighty treatises on law lounged cover by cover with thin volumes of poetry: Petrarch, Scève, Ronsard, du Bellay. There was Greek and Latin, German and Italian, and even a very small smattering of English titles, although those seemed the least thumbed of the lot. Ah, well, who really wanted to read Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England?

Laura sorted busily through the box, setting aside those that might be useful in the schoolroom—yes to Racine, no to Blackstone, yes to Plato, no to Ronsard—when something made her pause. She stood with her hands clamped on either side of the box, staring down into it, at a small red book with faded gilt lettering on the cover. The sound of the children’s voices receded into the background, replaced by other, louder voices, dead now for so many years.

Reaching into the box, Laura let her fingers close around the book, lifting it with care. The red morocco cover was worn now, eaten away at the edges by time and use, the pages spotted with brown.

Venus’ Feast
by Chiara di Veneti.

Then, under it, in smaller lettering,
Chansons d’Amor
.

Her mother had never believed in the subtle approach.

Laura could remember it fresh and new, just this same edition. She could picture the book in her mother’s hands, her fingers unnaturally white against the red cover, rings glittering in the candlelight, bracelets jangling on her wrists. Above it all shone the great mass of her golden hair, never powdered, always with long curls tumbling around her shoulders as though the bands of any headdress ever made could never hope to contain the vibrancy of it.

She would stand there, Laura’s mother, in all her shining wonder, the little volume of poetry small and insignificant. Then, just as the laughing, chattering crowd had begun to grow restless, to shift and whisper in their seats, she would let the covers fall open and begin to read.

Everything else would be forgotten—the jewels, the hair, the artful dishabille of her dress. Friends, lovers, former lovers, the lovers of former lovers, no matter how petty or vicious, how inebriated or exhausted, would all fall silent, enchanted into immobility by those words, those wonderful, rolling, searing words. It was better than music, better than dance, thought and form in perfect harmony, painting images in words, addressing all the old, visceral emotions in a powerful combination of lyric and rhyme.

There wasn’t a person who could resist Laura’s mother when she read. She was a force of nature, pure, elemental.

To see those poems confined to printed words on a page was to leach them of half their power. Laura remembered her surprise, at first learning how to read, to find how small the print looked, how meek and faded in comparison to the ringing, rolling tones of her mother’s voice. How could something so large possibly be contained within something so small?

Laura slid a finger between the pages, letting the book fall open at random. But it was all wrong. Instead of black print on paper, bordered in the majesty of broad white margins, the pages were covered with doodles.

Someone had scribbled all over her mother’s book.

It wasn’t her book, Laura reminded herself. It was one of thousands, thousands and thousands. Her mother had scattered volumes across Europe like handkerchiefs, and one wouldn’t feel all sentimental about a used handkerchief, would one? She had no business feeling sentimental at all. It was all a very long time ago and nothing to do with who and where she was now. Laura swallowed hard, pushing back against the childish sense of betrayal. It was just a book, just paper and ink and leather and someone’s silly sketches along the margins.

Only, they weren’t silly.

Laura flipped slowly through, her attention caught despite herself. They were little more than pencil sketches, most of them, but they contained such a sense of energy and movement that they seemed much more. There were children dancing, acrobats balancing on a wire, fantastical bouquets of flowers, old wives hanging out the wash, and one particularly detailed rendition of lovers trysting within a glade—although the lady wore a rather wry expression as she glanced away, a whole world of expression in one twist of the pencil. Each poem had been dramatized in some way, Laura’s mother’s words turned flesh in a miracle of ink and suggestion, doing with line what Laura’s mother had done with language.

Curious, Laura flipped backwards, to the title page.

To Julie
, it read, in bold black letters, just below Laura’s mother’s name.
Who sees no use in poetry. Shall I make you change your mind? André.

There was a sketch beneath, a pretty girl perched on a low wall, laughing down at the man seated at her feet, who read aloud to her from a book that was subtly but unmistakably the one in Laura’s hands. His face was tilted up, hers down, in a way that left the viewer in no doubt as to her answer to his question.

Laura slammed down the cover, feeling as though she had been caught spying. She could feel the ghosts all around her: Julie in her light summer muslin; her mother, all paste jewelry and riotous curls, declaiming to a rapt audience in that throaty voice to which just a hint of an Italian accent still clung; this younger M. Jaouen, this André, with hair that curled down around his neck, sprawled on the ground reading from a book held aloft in one hand.

Something brushed past her and Laura jumped, her heart in her throat.

It wasn’t a ghost but Gabrielle, her face like a thundercloud. She snatched at the volume, tugging it out of Laura’s hands. “What are you doing? That was my mother’s.”