Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

“Maybe she was hoping it would all just go away?” I’d tried that technique a time or two myself. It never works, but that doesn’t stop me from trying.

Colin was still fuming. “That bastard. That bloody bastard.”

I didn’t say anything. What could I say, other than to agree? Jeremy was a bloody bastard.

We were back on the Seine, back on the bridge that had been so charming hours before, in the rose-and-purple glow of sunset. Now it was a dark place, and the damp of the night air enhanced the slight smell of old urine.

Colin kicked a cobble. “My mother hates Selwick Hall. She’s always hated it. She wouldn’t care less if it burned into the ground. He didn’t do it for her; he did it for him. He’s been trying to get his hands on the Hall for years, and if he can’t, then he’ll do his best to ruin it for me.”

“It’s only a month,” I pointed out.

“Only a month,” Colin echoed bitterly. “Ha. If he can do this once, why not again?”

I thought of Serena’s stricken face, the expression on it as she had watched her brother walk away.

“I don’t think he’ll find Serena’s agreement so easy to secure next time,” I said thoughtfully. “I’m pretty sure this was it.”

“Oh? What happens when Paul changes his mind about the partnership? What happens when he ups the price? What happens when someone wants to make a fucking music video?”

“She loves you,” I said. “She wouldn’t deliberately hurt you.”

“What was this, then?”

“Business?” I ventured.

Colin slammed the flat of his hand against the stone parapet. It must have hurt him far more than it did the bridge. “Brilliant,” he said bitterly. “Sold for thirty pieces of silver.”

Okay. I understood he was hurting, but this wasn’t precisely the fall of man, here. It seemed like a good idea to shift the blame back onto the real culprit. “Why does Jeremy want Selwick Hall so badly?”

“Because he couldn’t have it. Why does anyone want anything?” There was so much acid in Colin’s voice I was surprised it didn’t corrode the stone. “It came as a shock to him when he discovered my mother didn’t inherit it outright.”

“You don’t think . . .”

“That he married her for Selwick Hall?” Colin’s hands tightened on the edge of the parapet. The light of the iron lamp picked out the smattering of gold hairs on the back of his hand, the white of his knuckles. “Jeremy wanted whatever my father had. Selwick Hall. My mother. He got one of the two.”

“Ouch,” I said, for lack of anything better.

My lips tingled with questions I knew I couldn’t ask. Why did Jeremy hate your father so much? Do you think he loves your mother? Does your mother know? Does she care?

And the biggie: How in the hell have you managed to stay on good terms with them for so long? Why didn’t you say anything sooner?

Somehow, I didn’t think Colin would appreciate the inquisition.

There were also more pressing issues at the moment. No matter how Colin felt now, he only had one sibling.

“About Serena . . . ,” I began.

“Not now.” Colin turned to me, his face bleached pale by the streetlamp. I could feel the clutch of his fingers through the wool of my pashmina, pressing into my upper arms. “I don’t want to talk about this now. Please.”

I nodded, swallowing half a dozen potential comments before saying simply, “Okay. Whatever you want.”

He didn’t answer in words. Instead, he hugged me tightly—a prolonged squeeze that forced the breath out of my lungs and made me fear for the fate of those gougeres I’d eaten over drinks.

I lifted my head to say something, but he kissed me before I could muster the words.

Normally I would have minded that we were in public and this was behavior better reserved for drawn shades and closed doors. But not now.

I could feel the urgency in his kiss, the desperate push to use the body to forget the things the mind would rather not remember. Not exactly the most reliable method of therapy, but it does sometimes work in the short term. I kissed him back, using the press of my body and my lips to blot out the past hour, Jeremy, Serena, Melinda, Colin’s mother.

Colin released me, leaving me wobbly against the parapet. I vaguely registered that I was still holding my purse. I was amazed it hadn’t gone over into the Seine.

“Whatever, you said?” Colin’s eyes glittered in the lamplight. I was pleased to hear that he sounded as breathless as I felt.

“Well . . .” I’m not a lawyer’s daughter for nothing. “Within reason.”

“Reason is overrated,” said Colin, and pulled me to him again.

Laura was already in bed by the time André ventured into their room.

Aside from their difficulties onstage, this past week had been surprisingly peaceful. They had fallen into a pattern as if they were the married couple they had claimed to be, and if he had woken up a morning or two—all right, every morning—feeling uncomfortably, er, wooden, that was something he had been prepared to ignore. Or douse with cold water.

But then, today . . .

André felt strangely off balance, as confused and callow as an adolescent confronted with the first stirrings of desire. All of a sudden he didn’t know what to say to her, or how to behave. He had almost elected to stay downstairs in the coffee room with Pantaloon and Leandro, drinking cheap house wine and bemoaning the high cost of lodgings (Pantaloon) and the vagaries of women (Leandro).

Just the fact of their being in a proper room made it strange. In the makeshift confines of the wagon, with theatrical props stacked all around them, it was easier to play make-believe. The pallet on the ground did feel a bit like a soldier’s billet, rendering the whole comrade-in-arms argument somewhat more plausible.

Laura had changed out of the clothes she had been wearing for the past few days, exchanging the voluminous blouse and skirt for a white nightdress.

The nightdress wasn’t the least bit revealing, but just its being one was enough to make André sweat.

He seized on the book Laura was holding as a suitably neutral topic. “What are you reading?”

She looked down at her hand as though surprised to find a book attached to it. “Oh. This? Just some poetry. Ronsard.”

André cleared his throat. “He’s a good poet. Ronsard.” Ronsard might be old-fashioned, but he never went out of vogue. He had captured certain universal truths about life, love, and the fleeting nature of time.

Laura’s head bobbed up and down. “Yes. Quite good.”

That exhausted the extent of their literary analysis. André leaned with his back against the door and wondered whether he ought to have stayed downstairs after all. Laura stared down at the book in her hands as though waiting for the paisley pattern on the cover to rearrange itself to her satisfaction.

Hitching herself higher against the pillows, she twisted her braid over one shoulder. “It’s quite warm in here, isn’t it? I’d almost forgotten what it’s like to have a proper fire.”

“Not to mention walls,” André agreed.

Laura folded her hands primly on top of the coverlet. “It does have a salutary effect on the temperature.”

“I guess that means you don’t need me tonight,” André said, only half jokingly.

Laura thought about that comment for an alarmingly long period of time. “I don’t need you,” she said at last.

André felt the words like the first stages of a wound—not quite fully comprehended yet, but with the awareness that it was going to hurt like hell in a few minutes when the reality of it registered. What sort of idiot was he? He had handed that one to her. He should have just behaved as though nothing had changed, splashed his face in the water from the basin, pulled back the covers, and climbed into bed next to her as he had these past five nights in their pallet in the wagon. The pallet was considerably smaller than the bed.

But something had changed that afternoon. It wasn’t just that this was a proper bed in a proper room with a proper fire. After that kiss, there was no way of pretending they were just colleagues of sorts, maintaining a deception for safety’s sake. He wasn’t that good a dissembler.

Laura ran her thumb abstractedly along the leaves of the book, making the pages rustle. “I don’t need you. But that doesn’t mean I don’t want you here.”

Her face was turned away from him, leaving him only with her profile, the strong angles of cheek and chin, the slender line of her neck, the dark hair curling against the nape of her neck where it had escaped from her braid. She looked like the lady on an antique cameo, and just as unreadable.

André heard the words as though from very far away, through the roaring in his blood.

“What are you saying?” André asked hoarsely.

Laura’s eyes shifted warily away. “What do you think I’m saying?” she hedged.

André knew what he’d like her to be saying. On the other hand, they had shared a bed for the better part of a week now. She could be offering him nothing more than a pillow for the night.

He tried to find a euphemistic way to signal what he meant. “Don’t ask me to stay unless you mean it.”

Laura hoisted herself up against the pillows. “Do you not want to stay? I should have thought a bed would have been preferable to a bench.”

An act of mercy, then, designed to keep him off the common-room floor? He didn’t want her charity. He didn’t think he could survive her charity.

“There’s one thing we should clear up first,” he said harshly. “About this afternoon—”

“The part of the day that comes after noon but before evening?”

“Yes, that one.” How to say this? For once in his life, André was entirely at a loss. All his skill at rhetoric had deserted him.

He took a deep breath. “If I were a gentleman,” he said, “I would say I was sorry for what happened today. But I’m not.”

“A gentleman?”

“Sorry.”

“Oh.”

André spoke in a rush, knowing that if he didn’t speak now, he would never have the nerve to do it. That bench in the coffee room was looking damned attractive just then. “I know our marriage isn’t a real marriage. I know I have no claim on you. And I know I have no right to say what I’m saying.”

“And that might be? . . .” Her eyes were as hard and bright as stars. Not the pretty sort that poets mooned about, but the kind that made men’s destinies.

“If all you’re offering me is a bed,” he said bluntly, “I’ll take the bench.”

On the plus side, she didn’t run screaming from the bed. On the other hand, she didn’t jump up and down and fling her arms around his neck, either.

Instead, she took up the book of poetry and looked at it thoughtfully, saying, in a conversational voice, as if they were discussing the likelihood of rain and whether the wagon might need an extra coat of paint, “Ronsard has several useful things to say on this issue.”

When had they gone back to Ronsard? André felt that he had missed something somewhere along the line. Probably his wits. He had left them back there in that alleyway, along with one large playbill and the remains of his dignity.

“Ronsard?” he ventured. One thing was for sure, Ronsard would have managed this far better, at least if his poetry was any indication. Ronsard wouldn’t be sleeping on the bench in the coffee room.

André was beginning to feel pretty bloody unkindly towards Ronsard.

“Ronsard had a great many interesting reflections on the topic. This, for example.” Opening the book of poetry, Laura thumbed through until she found what she had been looking for. “ ‘What comes to-morrow who can say? Live, pluck the roses of the world to-day.’ ”

“Very... poetic,” André agreed.

“And then there’s this.” She checked to make sure he was listening, and declaimed, “ ‘Gather, gather the flower of your youth, / Take your pleasure at the best; / Be merry ere your beauty flies, / For length of days will blight it / Like roses that were loveliest.’ ”

She looked up at him from under her lashes. He had never noticed before just how long those lashes were. “I don’t want to wither on the vine,” she said quietly. “Even if I have little beauty to blight. Ronsard had a point, don’t you think?” She took a deep breath. “Shall we take our pleasure at the best?”

André made a concerted effort to control his breathing. “Are you sure?”

“Do you really want to sleep on the bench?”