Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

“Look at me! Look at me!” Pierre-André tried to twirl and got tangled up in his own dangling sleeves. The long tails of the coat trailed behind him, picking up a decorative trim of dust as they swished across the floor.

Laura lunged to catch him before he could go over.

“There are more!” he exclaimed in glee. “We can play soldiers!”

“Not in here, you don’t.”

Laura looked up to see Jean standing in the doorway, looking like a hobgoblin in a fairy tale.

“The children aren’t supposed to be in here.” It was the longest sentence Laura had ever heard Jean say. “No one is supposed to be in here.”

Two sentences! They were truly honored.

“Then someone should lock the door, shouldn’t they?” said Laura tartly.

“An excellent suggestion, Mademoiselle Griscogne,” said someone from behind Jean, and another shadow fell across the crowded floor.

“Papa!” exclaimed Pierre-André, tripping over his tails in his excitement. “Look! I’m a soldier!”

“That will teach Cousin Philippe to leave his spare uniform here,” murmured Jaouen. For Pierre-André’s benefit, he said, “Very dashing, but why don’t you take it off now. We’ll have to find one for you closer to your size.”

“Really?” Pierre-André began to shrug out of the jacket, getting hopelessly tangled in the too-long sleeves. “Can I have one? Can I? Can I?”

Laura would have gone to help him, but Jaouen beckoned to her. “If you will, Mademoiselle Griscogne.”

She wondered what he would do if she said she wouldn’t. Why ask if one would, when there was no won’t? She would have preferred an outright command, such as, “Come here. Now.” Sit. Roll over. Play dead.

Laura followed Jaouen to the window embrasure. So much for their rapport of the previous night. She wondered if he would like to reconsider his policy on curtsying.

When he spoke, though, his voice was mild enough. “Why aren’t the children in the nursery?”

The most dangerous animals weren’t the ones who barked and bayed. They were the ones who took their time to bite and sank their teeth the most deeply. The cunning ones. The quiet ones.

The sun slanted through the window with all the desperate brightness of a winter sunset. Laura put up a hand to shield her eyes from the orange glare. “They finished their lessons for the day, so I took them exploring as a treat.”

“I’d rather you hadn’t.”

Laura looked around, trying to figure out what was so objectionable. It was amazing how much havoc two children could wreak on a pile of boxes in a scant few minutes. Books littered the floor; a pile of canvases that had rested against the wall had toppled over; and the globe, detached from its stand, had rolled into a corner of the room. “If it’s the mess . . .”

“It isn’t the mess that concerns me.” Jaouen’s eyes were on Pierre-André, still figuring out how to get his arms out of the too-large jacket. He looked back at Laura. “It is unsettling for the children to be around their mother’s things.”

Pierre-André didn’t look particularly unsettled to her. In fact, he seemed to be enjoying himself immensely. Gabrielle, on the other hand, still maintained her death grip on her mother’s volume of poetry as she watched her father and the governess with a decidedly inimical expression.

Jaouen might have a point there, but Laura wasn’t willing to acknowledge it. She went on the attack instead. “More unsettling for them to have that death’s head following them around.” She jerked her head in the direction of Jean. “He frightens them.”

“He wouldn’t, if they stayed in the nursery,” said Jaouen pointedly.

What was the point of Laura having gained access to the household if she was confined to the schoolroom? At the end of the week, she would be able to provide the Pink Carnation with a stirring account of Gabrielle’s Latin translations and Pierre-André’s progress in sums. If she was ever allowed out of the house to deliver it.

“Forgive me, sir,” Laura said with heavy sarcasm. “When you instructed me to keep the children indoors, I mistakenly believed that your directive referred to all the walls of the building, not merely those that confined the nursery. Shall I keep them in the schoolroom alone, or might their parole extend to the night nursery as well?”

Jaouen braced a hand against the windowsill, fixing her with that disconcertingly blue stare. Sunlight winked off the lenses of his glasses, dazzling Laura with sparks of silver and gold. “Have your other employers allowed you to speak to them like this?”

Laura took a gamble. “No,” she said bluntly.

For an endless moment, Jaouen was silent. Resting his head against the window embrasure, he said, with amused resignation, “I suppose I am meant to be flattered that you reserve your special treatment for me?”

Laura seized her advantage. “You cannot expect me to confine the children to two rooms, Monsieur. There are animals who have wider cages.”

Jaouen brightened with the zeal of the born debater. “We are each of us in a cage, Mademoiselle. Some more tangible than others.”

“Man is born free, but everywhere is in chains,” quoted Laura.

A spark of recognition lit in Jaouen’s eyes at the familiar quotation from Rousseau. He raised a brow. “I wasn’t suggesting you manacle them to the nursery rafters.”

“How could I? The nursery doesn’t have rafters.”

“Surely someone so ingenious as you can find a way around such a minor obstacle.”

“Not,” said Laura demurely, “without securing prior permission from my employer. One would never want to overstep one’s bounds.”

She surprised him into laughter. He looked younger when he laughed. It filled out his cheeks and hid the dark circles beneath his eyes. For a moment, she could see him sprawled on the grass, a poetry book in hand.

“A point to you,” he said. “Well played.”

“What do I get if I win the match?”

“To keep your position.”

Ouch. Laura felt as though she had been dealt a summary slap across the face. Foul, she wanted to cry. But she couldn’t. He was, as he had just reminded her, her employer. Quite different from any employer she had ever had before, but still her employer.

Before she could muster her scattered wits to make an appropriate—and tactful—response, Jaouen made a noise of irritation and reached into his jacket. “I nearly forgot. This came for you.”

As Laura looked at him in confusion, he held out a folded note, with her name written on the back of it. There was no wax on it; it must have been delivered unsealed.

Taking it from him, Laura began unfolding it, saying, “I can’t imagine who would—oh.”

“Oh?” said Jaouen.

Laura displayed the letter to him. “I sent a query to a bookseller about a text I wanted for Gabrielle and Pierre-André. He doesn’t have it, but he knows someone else who might.”

She had no doubt Jaouen had already read the note. It was dated a good two days before. She sent a sideways glance at Jean, who was looking about as smug as a hobgoblin could look, which, considering that hobgoblins were seldom known for their modest and retiring natures, was very smug indeed. Jean must have received the note on her behalf and held on to it until he had the opportunity to show it to his employer.

No matter. There was nothing in it that even the most suspicious Ministry of Police official couldn’t be allowed to see. The bookseller was desolated to inform her that he was unable to provide her the Latin fables she had requested, but he believed that a fellow bookseller on the Rue Saint-Honoré might have the item she desired. There had been two copies the last time he had inquired. He suggested she inquire after them at her earliest convenience.

Her earliest convenience was her half day, Sunday. As for the rest . . . Two copies. Two o’clock? That seemed the likeliest explanation. She had a rendezvous with an agent of the Pink Carnation next Sunday at two o’clock in the bookshop on the Rue Saint-Honoré.

Jaouen looked thoughtfully out over the piles of boxes in the center of the room. “You might find what you need among Père Beniet’s books.”

“Père Beniet?”

“The children’s grandfather. My wife’s father.”

It was a strange way of phrasing it, but that wasn’t what caught Laura’s attention. Beniet. The name nagged at her memory. It might have been from the Pink Carnation’s files on Jaouen. His wife’s family’s name would have been in there somewhere, along with all of the other pertinent details, especially since it was through his wife’s family that he was connected to Fouché. But that wasn’t it at all. Beniet. Julie Beniet. She could hear someone saying it, with the English inflection, not the French. Candlelight glinting off claret, crystal glasses above a polished table. She had been brought in as an extra to round off a table, seated all the way at the end by the vicar’s brother-in-law. But at the top of the table, the talk was all of Julie Beniet.

Laura looked wide-eyed at Jaouen. “Your wife was Julie Beniet?”

The drawings in the poetry book, the canvases piled by the wall, that charcoal drawing of Pierre-André and Gabrielle in Jaouen’s study . . . She knew it was rude to stare, but she couldn’t help it. André Jaouen and Julie Beniet! It was like finding that Fouché had been married to Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, or Leonardo da Vinci to Lucrezia Borgia.

“The very one.” There was a tightness to his voice that ought to have signaled a warning, if Laura had been listening for it.

“I saw an exhibition of her paintings.” Laura almost added “in London,” but caught herself in time. “They were . . .”

“Awe-inspiring? Groundbreaking? Life-changing?”

“All of that.”

She might not have any artistic gifts herself, but she could appreciate them when she saw them. No wonder the sketches in the margins of her mother’s poetry had seemed to leap and dance. Julie Beniet. She had been invited to paint the Royal Family and refused. Her work had caused a brief sensation in London, both for her painting and her politics.

It was said that Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun had gone into a sulk that lasted for months.

“What—,” Laura began, and then snapped her mouth closed. There were some questions one didn’t ask, and especially not of one’s employer.

“What happened to her? Not that.” Jaouen obviously hadn’t missed her brief, betraying glance at Pierre-André. In a clipped voice, he said, “It was a fever.”

Laura had thought she was immune to embarrassment, but it had her in its grips now.

“I am sorry,” she said. It sounded painfully inadequate.

Jaouen apparently felt the same way. He pushed away from the window. “So am I. Do you have any more personal questions you wish to ask?”

Laura’s spine stiffened. “No.”

“Good. The children have my permission to explore the house. But take care where you go.”

Without another word, he turned and walked away, his boots clicking against the dusty floor.

“Papa!” Pierre-André scrambled after him, tripping over the long coat-tails of the uniform jacket.

Gabrielle, her arms wrapped around the book of poetry, gave Laura a dirty look.

So much for winning the love and trust of her charges and building a rapport with her employer.

Blast.

Proper governesses didn’t curse, but Laura had been raised in a different school.

Blast, blast, blast.

Blast. In multiples.

So much for a romantic weekend in Paris with my boyfriend.

At least the rain had let up. It hadn’t stopped entirely, but it was more of a mist than a drizzle. I furled my umbrella and dashed across the crosswalk, which seemed to operate less on lights and more on an honor system—i.e., if you moved fast enough, they wouldn’t actively try to mow you down. Slow-moving pedestrians were fair game. I made it safely to the other side and paused, panting, considering my options.

Across the street, I could still see Colin through the window of the Minerve, sweet-talking the woman at the desk.

I knew that this weekend was more stressful for Colin than for me, that I should be kind and patient and all that politician’s-wife jazz, but I still wanted to shake him. Wasn’t this weekend stressful enough without sharing space with his sister? I set off grimly down the Rue des Écoles, in what I hoped was the direction of the Musée de la Préfecture de Police. I had a miniature Lonely Planet guide with an equally miniature map buried somewhere in the bowels of my bag, but it was very hard to stalk effectively while consulting a map. Right then, stalking took precedence.