The Orchid Affair

Chapter 27

“It 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.

“I had acting lessons when I was young,” she fumed to André, slapping some paste on the back of a poster and slamming it with unnecessary force against the wall. “I was tutored by some of the best actresses at the Comédie-Française.”

“What sort of lessons?” André asked practically, reaching over her to tug down a crooked corner. “Memorizing speeches from Corneille and Racine?”

“Yes.” She had been rather good at those, actually. It had been easy enough to mimic the inflection of her teachers.

But that had been all it was, mimicry. She couldn’t create Medea’s madness on her own or Antigone’s pain. Left to herself, she had all the creativity that God gave a duck.

“Well, that explains it,” said André, in the sort of sensible tone designed to make someone want to claw his eyes out. And by someone, Laura meant her. “Those were set pieces. Memorization. It’s an entirely different art form.”

“Thank you so very much,” said Laura acidly. “I would never have realized that.”

For a man who had been married before, André was slow to pick up on the danger signs. “Classical theatre is a highly ritualized form, while the Commedia dell’Arte is all about spontaneity and improvisation.”

“You make me sound like an automaton.” Laura knew there was no reason to take it so to heart, but she was tired and frazzled and her emotions felt dangerously raw. The self-control she had so assiduously cultivated over the past sixteen years was cracking around the edges, like a piece of pottery left too long in the kiln. “Wind her up and watch her go! But don’t expect any original thought or any human feelings. She’s not capable of those.”

André looked at her in surprise. “I never said that.”

“No, but it’s true, isn’t it?” Laura suddenly felt dangerously close to tears. She pressed down hard on a wrinkle in the poster. “Never mind. I’m just tired, that’s all.”

André’s hands settled on her shoulders. “You’ve been pushing yourself too hard.”

“It doesn’t matter how I push myself. I’m not getting anywhere,” she said bitterly.

André’s hands slid down her shoulders, rubbing up and down over her arms.

Something about the gesture made the tears prickle at the back of her eyes again. Laura’s legs were wobbly with the urge to sag back against André’s chest and let him hold her up, his arms around her, his warmth comforting her. He was so familiar by now, the feel of his arms, the smell of his skin, the very contours of his body. It would be so easy.

If she were an entirely different woman.

“You’re better than you were,” he said reassuringly. “People train all their lives for this. You can’t expect to pick it up in four days.”

“Five,” said Laura, to the playbill.

“Five, then.” She could hear the smile in his voice, as he gave her shoulders a squeeze. “Because that extra day makes all the difference.”

Shaking his hands off, Laura turned. Wedged between the wall and his body, she tilted her head up at him. “What if I ruin it for us all?” She couldn’t keep the despair from her voice. “The others must suspect already. What if one of them guesses the whole?”

“They won’t,” said André confidently, his hands resting on her shoulders. She could hear the crackle of the poster behind her back. Behind his spectacles, his eyes searched her face. One of the earpieces was crooked. “I told Harlequin—in confidence, of course—that you had been wardrobe mistress in our last troupe, but that I had promised you a chance onstage. That’s how we met, you know. You were measuring my tights.”

“You bribed me into your bed with the promise of a glorious career?”

“Something like that.”

“I’m flattered that you went to so much trouble to seduce me.”

“Don’t you think you’re worth it?”

Laura turned her head away. “Right now, I feel like the scrapings off the bottom of a carriage wheel.”

“That good?” André teased.

“The scrapings off the scrapings off the bottom of a carriage wheel.” She ducked under his arm, taking her paste pot and heading for the next stretch of wall.

This was clearly a popular stretch of wall for notices. New ones had been pinned over the decaying remains of the old. Laura brushed aside the tattered fringes of an advertisement for Berowne and his amazing dancing bears. She was glad they wouldn’t have to compete with that. Judging from the condition of the poster, the bears were probably hibernating by now. The placard next to it was of far more recent origin, the ink still bold and black, advising the good citizens of Beauvais that—

Laura groped for André, her fingers closing around his arm. “Look,” she croaked, dragging him over. “Look at this.”

“‘Wanted,’” he read. “‘André Jaouen, former assistant to the Prefect of Paris, for crimes against the state. Medium height, brown hair, spectacles. Likely traveling in the company of two children, a girl aged nine and a boy aged five.’ They gave Pierre-André an extra year.”

“That will make all the difference, I’m sure.” Fear brought out Laura’s sarcastic side.

André was studying the poster with more interest than alarm. “They don’t mention Jeannette or Daubier. Or you.”

“They didn’t need to mention Daubier. Look.” Pasted next to it was another poster. The Ministry of Police was also interested in any information as to the whereabouts of Antoine Daubier, painter. Elderly, obese, prone to brightly colored clothing, favoring his left hand.

That was one way to create an identifying characteristic: cripple a man before allowing him to escape.

Laura could feel sweat clammy under her arms.

“Well,” said André calmly. “It’s a good thing our posters are larger than theirs.”

Appropriating the paste pot from Laura, he slathered a generous portion of paste onto the back of a playbill and slapped it right over the two government notices. Laura was fairly sure that to do so was illegal. On the other hand, they were already illegal, so what was a little more illegality?

An outlaw. They were all outlaws.

The Commedia dell’Aruzzio’s advertisement completely covered the government notices, but Laura could still see the faint outline of print showing beneath the flimsy paper. One could attempt to paper over the past, but one could never eradicate it entirely.

“Those can’t be the only ones.” Laura’s fingers tightened on André’s sleeve. “You and the children. Someone might see these posters and recognize you.”

“I’m not the only man of middle height with brown hair in France,” said André sensibly. His eyes settled on her. “And the notice makes no mention of a wife.”

“But we’ve already determined that I’m no actress. What if I ruin it for us all? What if my incompetence means we’re caught?”

“Whether you like it or not,” said André lightly, “you’re part of the family now. We’d no more toss you out than we would Jeannette.”

“You don’t like Jeannette,” she said accusingly.

“But I’m very accustomed to her.”

“Don’t protect me simply because I’ve become a bad habit. I’m used to fending for myself. If it becomes necessary for the general good, I’ll go.”

“Where?”

“Into the sunset and far away.” There was no reason for the thought to be quite so depressing. They would have had to part ways once they got to England anyway. This fiction of being man and wife was just that, a fiction. She would do well to remember that. She was only here because the Pink Carnation had instructed her to see the Duc de Berry safely to England.

The recollection caught Laura up short. How long had it been since she had thought of the Pink Carnation? Or her obligation to the Duc de Berry? She had let herself get caught up in a fantasy, and this was the result of it.

“You’re willing to give up this quickly?”

“I’m not giving up. I’m reassessing based on the situation. You might do better without me.”

“Don’t fool yourself. You’re not the liability. I am. I’m the one Delaroche wants. None of us would be here if it weren’t for my missteps. And then there’s Daubier. But for me . . .”

The bitterness in André’s voice made Laura blink. She had seen him, over the past few days, frowning in Daubier’s direction, but she’d had no idea it had been weighing on him so.

She frowned up at him. “You’re not responsible for his hand.”

André’s features looked as though they had been etched in acid. “If not I, who else? I promised to get him out. I failed.”

“You did get him out,” Laura pointed out. “Otherwise, he wouldn’t be here. Quod erat demonstrandum.”

André didn’t smile at the reference to Candide. “I may have removed him from the Temple, but not until he was rendered incapable of performing the one function that makes his life worth living. Trust me, he was very blunt about that.” André’s expression was bleak. “He told me to leave him.”

“He didn’t mean it.”

“You didn’t hear him.”

Laura remembered that last night at the Hôtel de Bac, the anxious consultations, the preparations for the children, André’s face gray with fatigue. “Did he realize what you were risking in going back for him? But for him, you might have stayed as you were. No one would have been any the wiser. I certainly wasn’t.”

Although she should have been. The clues had been there, if she had cared to piece them together.

André looked ruefully down at her. “Did you ever think of taking up work as an advocate? You would have been quite good at it.”

Laura accepted the tacit change of topic. “Far better than I am as an actress.”

André braced a hand on the wall behind her. “You had me quite convinced with your performance as Suzette. For a moment, I wondered if—”

“If?” There was no reason for Laura’s blouse to feel so tight.

André shook his head, looking bemused. “If you were what you said you were. You play the seductress extremely well.”

His eyes were the color of the remembered waters of her childhood, the shores of Italy on a sunny day. Laura couldn’t seem to look away.

“It was all an act,” she said, her voice unsteady. “Just an act.”

André’s hand was still braced on the wall above her head, but the space between them seemed to have contracted. “I thought you said you couldn’t act.”

Laura tilted her head up at him. An unnecessary gesture. They were nearly of a height to begin with. “I’m better offstage than on.”

“Are you?” he said huskily, his lips so close that she felt the words as much as heard them, in the brush of his breath and the rise and fall of his chest.

If she closed her eyes, she didn’t have to think about what she was doing or not doing. If she closed her eyes, she didn’t have to see his hand rise to smooth the hair away from the side of her face, or his head tilt to match his lips to hers. If she closed her eyes, it was none of it real, the movement of his lips against hers, his hand cupping her cheek, his tongue tracing the contours of her mouth. If it wasn’t real, she didn’t have to make him stop.

Heaven only knew, she didn’t want it to stop. The paste pot clattered to the ground. As of their own volition, her arms twisted around his neck, drawing him closer, and the kiss changed. She could feel his response in the way his arms tightened around her—not the comfort of a comrade but the passion of a lover, pulling her closer, matching her body to his, his tongue slipping between her lips, kissing openmouthed, exchanging breath for breath, both clinging, fevered, wanting.

It was as it had been at the inn, but better. At the inn, they had been performing to an audience, but now . . .

Now.

Reality slammed in on Laura and she yanked back, her back hitting the wall, hard enough to make her see stars.

“What—,” she said hoarsely. What were they doing?

André Jaouen seemed as kerflummoxed as she was. He was breathing hard, his chest rising and falling erratically beneath his coat.

“Laura, I—”

Laura sidled sideways, away from André. Her ears were ringing as if someone had been singing a very high note very loudly just next to her.

She groped after logic. “We have to get back to the inn. We’ll be missed.”

André followed after her. “None of them are there. They’re all putting up playbills. Laura—”

She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. “What if they’ve returned already?” She was already backing out of the alleyway. “I wouldn’t want to add tardiness to my other shortcomings.”

André stopped short in the middle of the alley. He looked at her quizzically. “Are you running away?”

Who was he to talk about running away? And what was he thinking, going about kissing her like that? Did he think she wouldn’t care?

“I’m not your wife,” Laura announced. Her voice was pitched too high. It made her wince to hear it. That wasn’t her talking. It was someone else, someone briefly inhabiting her body, someone who had been kissing André Jaouen as though she meant it.

Her breasts still ached with it. What was her body thinking? That was the bother. It didn’t think, it felt. It was her job to do the thinking, no matter what her body wanted or thought she wanted.

“What are you saying?”

Laura held up the paste pot to ward André off. “No matter what we’ve been pretending”—her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the small alleyway—“I am not really your wife.”

“I was aware of that,” he said.

He seemed to be missing the point. “This past week—sharing as we have—” Laura’s voice had gone raspy. She coughed to clear her throat. The paste pot hung heavy from her hand. “Perhaps this wasn’t the best idea after all. I hadn’t thought . . .”

“Hadn’t thought what?” he pressed.

There was still a lump at the back of her throat, as though a whole pool of toads had bred and spawned in there. Her lips felt sore and swollen from his kiss, both her brain and lips slower and clumsier than usual.

“I hadn’t thought that I would grow so accustomed to you. That’s all. Here. You can put up the rest of the playbills.”

Pushing the paste pot at him, she set off at a pace that was practically a jog. He didn’t try to follow. Or, if he did, she didn’t see it.

Only Pantaloon and Leandro were in the common room of the inn, sharing a carafe of the house wine, when Laura came in.

“The children are already in bed,” Pantaloon informed her kindly. “Jeannette put them up an hour ago. You might want to do the same. A good night’s sleep, always a good thing before a performance. That’s what I told the others as well.”

“Mmmph,” said Leandro, into his wine.

“Well, good night, then,” said Laura vaguely as she took up a candle from the table and scurried up the stairs.

It was a good-size inn for a good-size town, although all but empty in the off-season. The troupe had almost entirely taken it over. There were eight doors on the hall, three opening off on either side. The inhabitants of the first room on the left had made the mistake of leaving the door slightly ajar.

Through it, Laura could hear the crinkle of a straw mattress and a voice whispering breathily. “I shouldn’t . . .”

“But you want to,” said de Berry confidently.

There was the rustle of clothing being either removed or displaced.

Rose let out a squeal. “Throw myself away on a penniless actor?” she demanded coquettishly.

More rustling. “You’d be surprised at what I have to offer.”

“But I imagine”—rustle, rustle—“you’re going to offer to show me.”

Oh, for heaven’s sake. Laura knew it was nearly spring, but did that mean everyone had to mate?

She made to hurry past, but was slowed as she spotted Harlequin, standing in the open door of the opposite room.

Catching her eye, Harlequin made a wry face. “Leandro will be sobbing over his wine again tonight.”

That was a safe enough prediction. “He already is. I don’t see what he sees in her,” Laura added waspishly.

“Don’t you?” Something in the way Harlequin said it made Laura wonder if it was entirely on Leandro’s account that Harlequin was concerned.

“I don’t,” said Laura firmly. “He’s worth ten of her, and you can tell him I said so. Besides, Gabrielle will be devastated if he doesn’t wait for her.”

Gabrielle would be nothing of the kind. For all that Leandro was a decade her senior, she treated him with the sort of patient condescension usually reserved by empresses for their underlings. But it seemed the right sort of thing to say.

Harlequin smiled faintly. “I’ll let him know.”

Laura continued on down the hall, to the room she was to share with André. Would he come to bed at all? Or would he emulate Leandro and spend his night on a settle by the hearth, regretting the impulse that had led him to offer consolation in the form of a kiss? Laura tried to imagine the paths of thought that might have led to it. The governess is whining, must shut her up. Oh, well, best stop her mouth. Or perhaps it had been some lingering memory of Suzette, the girl men couldn’t forget, before he remembered that in real life the beguiling Suzette was nothing more than plain Laura Griscogne, who balked desire simply by being herself.

That hadn’t been the case once upon a time.

She might not have been the prettiest girl in the group—and even then she had shown a dampening inclination to actually think things through, an attribute not considered an asset among her parents’ set—but she had been young and nubile and curious. Antonio had been a sculptor, come to study with her father. They had conducted several intriguing anatomy lessons down by the pier, with the stars glittering on the water. Laura had never been quite sure whether her parents knew or not.

There had never been any talk of love, although, like any fifteen-year-old, she had imagined herself in love, just a little bit.

But then the commission had come from England, and they had left Lake Como for Cornwall, where the stars were dimmer and the waters colder and the sea leapt up and swallowed up all there was of youth and joy and desire.

She had been a very different girl, that Laura, the one who had dallied with Antonio in Como.

She had thought she was done with that, that she had frozen it out of her blood. That was what was so terrifying—not the memory of desire, but the reawakening of it, like fire in the blood.

When André had kissed her, up against the wall, she had wanted to take him by the ears and yank his head back down to hers.

Laura let herself into her room. It was a simple enough accommodation, but it had amenities she had all but forgotten, like a proper bed with proper sheets and a fireplace with real logs in it. There was even a mirror on one wall, dirty and tarnished, but still a mirror. Laura grimaced at the sight of herself. There were sweat stains under the arms of her blouse and mud on her skirt. Her hair had been washed—water was one thing they hadn’t lacked along the way—but the damp air had turned it into a frizzy tangle. She looked like a gypsy. Not just a gypsy, but a gypsy who had fallen on hard times.

Someone had brought up her meager bag and placed it on a chair. After six days of wearing the same clothes, Laura ferreted through, marveling over the items she had so naively packed before leaving the Hôtel de Bac. There were three dresses—gray—and chemises and stockings. There were two nightgowns and, beneath those, a slim, paper-bound volume of poetry.

Ronsard. He who believed in gathering one’s flowers while one may.

Well, one could seize the day in multiple ways. Laura untied the strings at the neck of her blouse. It felt like heaven, peeling off the stiff, dirty fabric. There was a basin on the nightstand, with a cloth beside it, and Laura gratefully sponged off some of the dirt of travel. The tapes on her skirt followed. Should she be worried that the skirt could practically stand by itself by now?

It felt almost decadent to let the nightdress slide down over naked flesh, even though, like all her clothes, the nightdress was heavy and serviceable, made of thick, opaque cloth. There wasn’t anything the least bit suggestive about it.

It was ridiculous that she wished there was.

It might be rather nice to be Suzette for a bit, rather than Laura, to seize her pleasure where she could find it and think nothing of the morning. What did she have to lose, after all? She had no family, no obligations. There were no chaperones to wag their fingers or employers to threaten her with dismissal. She was utterly afloat in the world, and that circumstance might be as freeing as it had formerly seemed constraining.

Laura made a face at herself in the mirror. Yes, that was all very well, but with whom? She doubted André would be coming to bed. Not tonight.

And even if he did . . . well, he was coming to bed, not coming to bed.

This was what came of associating with actors.

On an impulse, Laura took up the book of poetry as she clambered into the high, tester bed. She could always read about it if she couldn’t live it.

Ah, time is flying, lady, time is flying / Nay, tis not the time that flies but we . . . Be therefore kind, my love, whilst thou art fair.

So much time already gone. So many dull and dry and barren years. Ronsard, dust now these two-hundred-odd years, had known that.

Shall I not see myself clasped in her arms / Breathless and exhausted by love’s charms....

Laura plumped up the pillows behind her, finding them less comfortable than she had before. The fire was burning down again. It seemed symbolic. That was the problem with poetry. It made everything seem symbolic.

Why hadn’t she just grabbed him and kept kissing him while she had the chance?

Laura grimly turned her eyes again to her book. Sermons, that was what she should have brought with her. Or political economy. Not this, not flowers and kisses and breathless embrace.

She skimmed the next few lines. Kissed by desire . . . breast to breast . . . quenching fire . . . Goodness, it was warm, wasn’t it?

A squeaking noise sent her bolting upright against the pillows, the book clamped shut over one finger.

The door eased open.