The Orchid Affair

Chapter 24

The last time Laura had kissed someone had been the summer of 1794.

She had been twenty-two; he had been the cousin of the family for whom she was working at the time, visiting for a house party. Generally, she knew better than to permit liberties. But it had been June and the garden had been in bloom. There had been a mist rising off the river and Chinese lanterns hanging from the trees. She had let him lead her by the hand, down the boxwood paths, to the place where the garden met the river, in the no-man’s-land between dusk and dawn, knowing that it meant nothing more than what it was—a stolen bit of fleeting pleasure. He had departed the next morning and she had returned to her schoolroom. She couldn’t remember his name, much less his face. There was only the shadowy recollection of a hand on her cheek, the brush of breath against her lips.

She had nearly forgotten what it was like, this pressure of lip to lip.

She would have said she was beyond such things, long since rendered immune to human desires. She intended the kiss entirely as an act of expedience. It was nothing more than a tableau, a set piece, two lovers frozen in embrace, their faces conveniently blotted from view.

That was the idea, at any rate.

André’s hand slid up beneath the hair at the nape of her neck. She hadn’t remembered this, the caress of bare fingers in her hair, disarranging her hair ribbon, making her skin tingle. His other hand slid around her waist, beneath the woolly mass of her shawl, holding her firm at the small of her back.

“Relax,” he murmured against her lips. “You’re as stiff as a board.”

“Am n—,” she began, but the word was lost as he bent her backwards and kissed her.

It was quite a thorough performance.

Laura clung to that thought, or tried to. Performance. Acting. Her arms went around his neck, holding tight. Holding to keep from falling, if she were being honest. She’d meant to monitor Murat’s movements, but she found herself closing her eyes, clinging to André’s neck, and, heaven help her, kissing him back. For the performance. All for the performance.

There were hoots and cheers from the company. Laura blinked, forcing her eyes to focus.

Murat was gone.

There were grins on the faces of many of their new colleagues. Jeannette was scowling at her knitting. Gabrielle was scowling at Laura.

Oh, dear. Perhaps they should tell the troupe that Pierre-André and Gabrielle were her stepchildren. That would explain the look of death on her so-called daughter’s face.

“Well,” Laura said. Her brain didn’t seem to want to work properly. “That served its purpose.”

“Purpose. Yes.” André cleared his throat. “Good thinking, there. That was a, er, clever ploy.”

Laura managed a crooked smile. “No one will doubt our relationship now.” The words stuck in her throat, but she forced them out. “You’re a very good actor.”

“I had an excellent leading lady.” He slid an arm around her shoulders and squeezed, in a counterfeit of affection. He was a very good actor, indeed. She needed to remember that. “Shall we meet the troupe?”

Laura nodded. “The sooner we’re away from here, the better.”

Jaouen’s arm tightened around her shoulder. “I’ll be a happier man once we’re past the gates.”

“Mmph,” she agreed, clumsily matching her steps to his.

It felt odd, and more than odd, to be so intimately pressed against someone, with all the assumptions that went with it. When was the last time someone had held her so? Years.

A sham, she reminded herself. As flimsy as a scroll of scenery, rolled down for an audience one moment and the next rolled up again, reduced to nothing more than cloth and paint.

She would have to watch herself, to be wary of such intimacies. It wouldn’t do to fall prey to her own deception. She knew what she was to him—a means of escape, nothing more.

“Well, well!” Harlequin was the first to rise to greet them, pounding André companionably on the shoulder. “I see you’ll be usurping Leandro’s roles next.”

André dropped his arm from Laura’s back, extending a hand to Harlequin. “André Malcontre. Your Inamorato is safe from me. I’m too old to play the lover.”

Harlequin cast Laura a significant look. “You could have fooled me. Madame Malcontre, I take it?”

Laura made her curtsy. “The very one. But I hope we shan’t be so formal. You can call me . . . Ruffiana.”

Harlequin pursed his lips appreciatively. “Getting into role already! You’ll put us all to shame. Except, of course, our Rose, who plays her love scenes both onstage and off.”

Rose stuck her pretty nose in the air. “Simply because I won’t play one with you . . .”

“Have you seen me serenading in the mud outside your wagon?” demanded Harlequin derisively.

The actress reddened. “I should have thought a wallow would have been just to your taste.”

“Better my sty than yours.”

“Just because some of us like elevated company . . .”

“Don’t look too high, Rose,” drawled Harlequin. “You just might fly too close to the sun.”

“Too close to the sun?” The Duc de Berry stepped forward. “I should think the sun would hide its rays in shame. You eclipse it, lady, as the sun does the moon.”

“That doesn’t quite scan,” murmured André to Laura.

Rose looked de Berry up and down, torn between a smirk and a snub. “And you are?”

“Philippe Malcontre,” Laura put in hastily, before de Berry could speak. “My husband’s younger brother. He is to understudy Leandro. He’s also very good at carrying things. Sets, props.”

“Oh. An actor.”

“Like you,” needled Harlequin.

Rose cast him a freezing glance. “Are we to stand here all day?” she demanded loftily.

Harlequin clapped his hands. “Hey, you!” he called. “Milady grows impatient. We can’t have that, now, can we?”

De Berry stepped quickly forward. “You must allow me to help you to your chariot.”

“You mean her wagon?” interjected Cécile.

“With you in it,” de Berry said, never removing his eyes from Rose, “a farm cart would look like a phaeton.”

“Poor, overused Icarus,” muttered Harlequin, as they followed Rose and de Berry out. “That’s twice in one conversation.”

“You’ve studied the classics?” Laura asked politely. She wouldn’t have thought it. He had the wiry build and chipped teeth of the former guttersnipe.

Harlequin made a rueful face. “Used to be a schoolteacher. Then I got myself clapped up for debt. And now you find me here.”

Laura nodded her understanding. “I was a governess once.”

“Pounding Latin into the heads of the ungrateful young? Then you understand how it can drive one to drink. You have your own now, though.” Harlequin nodded at Pierre-André and Gabrielle, being hustled along by Jeannette.

Laura leaned forward confidingly. “My stepchildren. André and I have only been married a year now.”

“Ah,” said Harlequin knowingly. He nodded at André as André fell into pace beside them. “Practically newlyweds.”

Laura tilted her head up at André. “It feels like it. Doesn’t it, darling?”

André threaded his arm through hers. From the outside, it looked like an affectionate gesture. Only Laura felt the warning pinch of his fingers. “As if every day were the first. May I borrow you for a moment, dear heart?”

“Why borrow what is yours to take?” said Laura extravagantly, but ruined it by skidding in the mud.

André hauled her upright again. “Why borrow what is yours to take?”

Laura snuggled against his side. “We’ve only been married a year. Look besotted.”

André lowered his lips to her ear. “Was that wise? Telling him you were a governess? Rose may not be the only one with government connections.”

“I hardly think it will damn us. I’m not the only former governess in Paris. The closer we stay to the truth, the less likely we are to make mistakes.”

“Newlyweds?” said André.

“Aren’t we?” countered Laura. “I certainly never contemplated marriage to you before yesterday.”

“Fair point.” André’s tired face quirked into a smile. “You can’t get much more newlywed than that.”

His chin was stubbled with a day’s growth of beard and there were dark circles beneath his eyes. But there was something about that smile that made it impossible not to respond. Laura felt her chest clench with something she couldn’t quite identify.

“We’ll make this work,” she said softly. She hadn’t intended to. It just came out. “You’ll see.”

He looked down at her, comrade to comrade, equal to equal. His lips softened. “I rather think you’re right.”

Little bits of icy rain pecked at Laura’s cheeks. Why did she suddenly feel awkward? He was agreeing with her. Agreement was good.

Putting her nose in the air, Laura adopted her bossiest governess voice. “You ought to have realized by now, I’m always right.”

“Always?” He sounded not just amused, but . . . fond.

He was, Laura reminded herself, an excellent actor.

“Well . . . frequently,” she said hastily. “Oh, look, there’s Cécile.”

André gave her a funny look. “Yes, I could see that.” He inclined his head to their de facto troupe leader, who had been bustling about, arbitrating disputes and supervising disposition of baggage. “Madame Cécile?”

“No need to stand on formality, Cécile will do well enough,” said Cécile absently. “You have your baggage?”

“Yes,” Laura said calmly.

Laura had braved Jaouen’s lair, from which Jean had unceremoniously ceased guard, and bundled up linen, breeches, a brush, a shaving kit, a spare pair of spectacles. There had been precious little to choose between. His wardrobe was scanty and fairly repetitive. His room had revealed little in the way of secrets, other than a secret penchant for poetry. There had been a volume of Ronsard’s poems by his bed. She had been surprised to find that he read poetry still.

“We’ll have to find a wagon for you and the others,” Cécile was saying. “We’ve lost two, and there are eight of you. This may take some arranging.”

“Philippe had best come in with us,” said Harlequin, amiably enough, but there was a slightly malicious edge to his smile as he turned towards Leandro. “Leandro and I bunk together. We have grand times, don’t we, Leandro?”

“It’s well enough,” Leandro mumbled. He was too busy watching de Berry flirting with Rose, who might not want to waste herself on an actor but certainly wasn’t above accepting his skills as porter.

“Good,” said Cécile definitively. “That solves that. Monsieur Désormais, you can share with Pantaloon. Il Capitano and Ruffiana had their own wagon; that will go to Monsieur and Madame Malcontre.”

“And the children,” put in Laura.

The idea of sharing a wagon with André didn’t seem nearly as alarming with a wriggly Pierre-André in the middle, popping up and down half the night.

“Nonsense.” Jeannette elbowed her way in. “The children will stay with me. Just as they always have. The precious lambs will have nightmares without me.”

“The five of us, then!” said Laura. “One big, happy family.”

Cécile made a face. “There’s not really room, is there? Rose? Rose!” She snapped her fingers until Rose languidly turned her head, ribbons fluttering prettily. “If you give up your wagon to Jeannette and the children . . .”

“Me? Give up my wagon?” The threat to her privacy was enough to make Rose forget to put her best profile forward. “What about yours?”

“Either way,” said Cécile firmly, “we’ll have to share. Unless, of course, you’d rather take the children.”

Rose wrinkled her nose. “Why can’t they all go in with you?”

“Because,” said Cécile, in the tones of one dealing with a substandard child, “two and three makes far more sense than four and one.”

“That,” said de Berry gallantly, casting Rose a smoldering glance, “depends on the one.”

Leandro glowered.

Harlequin sighed.

Cécile rolled her eyes. “We’re settled, then. Rose will share with me; Jeannette and the children will have Rose’s wagon.”

“I really don’t mind having the children . . . ,” Laura began, but Cécile cut her off with a shake of the head.

It was a fleeting gesture, intended for Laura’s benefit only. Laura took the hint. Whatever her personal feelings about the woman, Cécile had her own reasons for wanting to keep Rose close. Given that Cécile was an associate of the Pink Carnation’s and Rose an associate (of an entirely different kind) of the Governor of Paris, it wasn’t, when she thought about it, altogether surprising.

Even if it did mean she had to share a wagon with André Jaouen.

Their wagon looked much the same as all the others—a rectangular structure hitched to two tired mules. There was a pallet on one side of the floor, a trunk that doubled as a makeshift table, and a haphazard miscellany of props and cookware jumbled into sacks. Whatever possessions the former Capitano and Ruffiana had owned had already been removed.

“Thank you for packing for me,” murmured André as he hauled her carpetbag and his bundles into a spare bit of corner between a pile of spare blankets and three Roman breastplates.

“I couldn’t let you traipse the countryside without a change of linen,” said Laura tartly.

That was an exceedingly small pallet.

Admittedly, it was also a fairly small wagon, but surely one could eke out a little more bed room than that.

“And Ronsard?” André held up a small volume bound in paisley paper covers and waggled it in her general direction.

Laura shrugged. Throwing the book into the bundle had been a whim. They were taking so little, after all. And there had been something about that marked page . . . Gather, gather, the rosebuds of today.

“More verisimilitude,” she lied. “I’d imagine that actors like poetry. It makes you seem more artistic.”

“If a little behind the times,” he agreed. He joined her in contemplating the pallet. “It is rather . . . small, isn’t it?”

Laura shook her hair back behind her shoulders. It felt very odd to have it so, practically unbound. “Don’t worry,” she said flippantly. “We can always put a naked sword down the middle.”

“That’s not what I—”

“Laura? André?” Cécile’s head appeared between the curtains at the back of the wagon. “We’re ready to go. I assume you can drive a wagon.”

André shook himself like a duck shaking off water and turned towards Cécile. “It’s been a few years, but I think I can manage.”

“Wait.” Laura grabbed at his arm, her nails scraping against his sleeve. It was a terrible sound. Wincing, she drew her hand away. “Hadn’t you better, um, take a nap? After your very late night of saying farewell to all your friends in Paris?”

“My very—ah.” He drew back, comprehension settling over his face.

André looked, for a moment, as though he might have liked to demur. It couldn’t, Laura imagined, be very pleasant to be smuggled out of Paris like a vat of wine, passively hiding inside a wagon while someone else did the driving. But there was no denying the validity of her concern. He had spent many years at the Prefecture. It wasn’t beyond the realm of reason that he might be known to the guards at the gates.

“Yes,” he said at last, although there was no mistaking the reluctance of it. “You might be right. I could use the rest.”

“You know how to drive?” Cécile asked Laura.

“I can manage,” she said, echoing André’s own words.

She had driven a dog cart during her governess days, and the odd trap. The mules attached to their wagon didn’t seem like terribly spirited beasts. It couldn’t be that hard to point them down the center of the road and make them go. She had no aspirations of driving to an inch.

She looked from André to Cécile. “If Jeannette can spare them, it might be nice to have the children sit on the box with me. Just until we’re outside of the city.”

She didn’t have to explain what she meant. There was nothing like children to lend an air of innocence to a scene.

“Naturally,” said Cécile blandly. “You wouldn’t want to be separated from your children.” Her head disappeared again between the curtains.

“So that’s what I’ve been reduced to,” André said grimly. “Using my children as shields.”

Laura paused in the act of following Cécile out of the wagon. “Don’t you know they’re glad to?” she said. “They love you, you fool.”

Before he could answer, she bunched up her skirts and followed Cécile out through the curtains.

They might no longer be employer and employee, but it still felt like lèse-majesté, calling him a fool. Even when he was being one.

If she had a family . . . Well, she hadn’t. Just a pretend one. She shouldn’t let herself forget that.

Outside, the other wagons had been loaded, the mules hitched up. It wasn’t an entirely inspiring sight. En masse, the general shabbiness was even more pronounced than it had been when the vehicles were scattered around the inn yard. Pantaloon sat on the box of one wagon, Harlequin another. Cécile climbed onto the box of the wagon she was to share with Rose, ably claiming the ribbons.

Pierre-André was snuggled next to Jeannette on the bench of the fourth, Gabrielle hunched beside them, cradling a book as another girl might have cuddled a doll.

Laura clapped her hands. “Gabrielle! Pierre-André! Won’t you come up with me?”

Jeannette bristled.

Laura gave her what she hoped was a meaningful look, but probably succeeded only in making herself vaguely cross-eyed.

“Your father is sleeping,” she called, “and I could use the company. If you like,” she added cunningly, “I’ll let you hold the reins.”

Pierre-André wiggled in Jeannette’s hold. With a look at Laura, Jeannette boosted him down off the wagon into Laura’s arms.

“How long?” he demanded.

“That depends on how good a driver you are.” Laura set him down on the ground, taking his hand in hers. The rain had lightened into mist, but his mittens were still damp.

Hot tea, Laura thought. Hot liquid of some kind. Once they were past the gates, she would send him into the wagon, where he would at least be dry, if not warm. The last thing they needed was the children getting an influenza.

Gabrielle wasn’t as easily won as her brother. It took a whispered instruction from Jeannette to make her move, and even then only with the greatest of reluctance. She stalked past Laura, book under her arm, nose in the air, refusing Laura’s offer of a hand to help her up onto the box of the wagon. So much for the hard-won entente of the past few weeks. That faux kiss in the coffee room seemed to have set them back to where they had been in the first week of January.

“This is for your father’s sake,” Laura murmured to Gabrielle as she settled herself down between the two children. “Just until we get him out of the city.”

Gabrielle gave her a withering look. “How would you know what’s good for my father?”

“Because I’m older than you,” Laura replied, slapping the reins. “And because I said so.”

Logic. It worked every time.

The wagons set off in painfully slow procession, mud churning beneath the wheels. It was a dreary sight, the bright paint dulled with wet, the sides of the wagons splattered with dirt. The drivers hunched down over the reins, intent on keeping the rain off their heads as much as possible. There was a reason most troupes traveled only in summer.

Laura checked beneath her shawl, making sure she still had the papers the Pink Carnation had forged for them. They crackled reassuringly in their greased paper wrappings, the seals thick and official-looking. Whatever forgers the Pink Carnation used, they were the very best of their kind. To Laura’s eye, their papers, hastily made though they were, had seemed quite convincingly official.

Hopefully, the guards at the gates would feel the same way.

The cavalcade slowed to a halt as the first wagon paused at the gates. A guard, his cloak pulled up high around his neck, his hat pulled down low, came out to inspect Pantaloon’s papers. Daubier sat beside him on the box, huddled into his coat, his mangled hand hidden within his sleeve.

For this, at least, Laura blessed the rain, which did more than any disguise to render men anonymous. There was nothing the least bit curious about a man pulling his hat down over his head or wrapping himself up in a cloak, not when the rain was dripping down and all honest men yearned for nothing more than to be inside and out of the wet.

The guard gave a perfunctory look at the papers and handed them back to Pantaloon. Thank God. She hadn’t prayed in years, but Laura found herself breathing out thanks as the first wagon passed beyond the gates, the first step to safety. There was still a long way to go, but to be out of Paris meant that they had the whole of the countryside in which to hide, a million anonymous fields and unknown back roads.

Harlequin’s wagon approached next, pausing for a moment as the actor exchanged quips with the guard. To Laura’s eyes, de Berry’s ruddy countenance was unmistakably Bourbon—but it had been more than eleven years since a Bourbon had been last seen in Paris. Likenesses on medals seldom approximated the reality.

De Berry was through, then Cécile, then Jeannette.

“Wardrobe mistress,” Laura heard Jeannette say as she waved her knitting at the guard. Only Jeannette could contrive to knit and handle two mules at the same time. The guard eyed the yarn askance but let her through.

Laura edged her mules gently up to the gate. She was holding Pierre-André too tightly. He wiggled impatiently, making her fuddle one of the reins.

“Papers?” the guard said in a bored way.

Laura fished them out from beneath her shawl, fumbling with the wax-paper wrappings. “Here,” she said, sounding more breathless than she would have liked. “For me and my family.”

The guard shuffled through, looking once at Gabrielle, once at Pierre-André, matching names with faces.

“The children are yours?”

Laura put an arm around Pierre-André on one side and Gabrielle on the other. The little girl’s shoulders were stiff beneath her arm. She prayed Gabrielle wouldn’t choose this moment to act up. “Yes. My stepchildren.”

Come on, come on, come on, thought Laura. The other wagons were well ahead, pulling away down the road. They had gone through one after the other, with scarcely a pause.

She held out her hand for the papers, but the guard didn’t seem in any hurry to hand them back over. He was frowning at the paper on the bottom.

“There are four passports here,” he said abruptly. “But only three of you. Where is the fourth?”