Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

“Was there no one who would take you in?”

Mlle. Griscogne’s lips lifted slightly at the corners. For a moment, he could see her as she had been in Daubier’s painting all those years ago, the girl with the finch, wide-eyed and alive with possibility. “Monsieur Daubier just offered,” she said.

“Now?”

She nodded.

“A bit late, isn’t he?” said André, trying not to be annoyed.

Mlle. Griscogne scanned the rug for stray soldiers. “It was a kind impulse.”

“Depriving me of my governess?”

His children’s governess, technically. Despite the fact that she had lived under his roof for more than a month now, that was all he had known of her, that she was a governess, that she wore gray, that she came well recommended. He had never imagined that she might be the daughter of a poetess, or the girl with the finch—because he had never bothered to ask. But for that chance encounter with Daubier, he would never have known.

It was, as she had pointed out, not exactly relevant to her employment, but André couldn’t help but feel that it was relevant all the same.

She seemed less formidable, somehow, and not just because their earlier encounter had knocked her hair loose. He remembered the feeling of warm flesh beneath his fingers, the curve of her back beneath his hand, not made of steel but of skin and bone.

On impulse, André asked, “Did you have a Christian name, in this past life of yours?”

Mlle. Griscogne bent down to pick up a cavalry horse, the mane missing. “A name, but not a very Christian one. They called me Laura.”

“After Petrarch’s muse?” It made sense for one poet to nod to another.

Mlle. Griscogne bedded the horse down among its fellows. “They were thinking more of the laurel crown,” she said wryly. “The coronet of victors and the artist’s reward. I think they hoped it would encourage me to garner laurels.” She busied herself sorting soldiers. “They were disappointed.”

“Julie gave Gabrielle a paintbrush before she could talk.” André wasn’t sure where the words had come from, they just came out.

“What happened?”

“She chewed it,” said André dryly.

He surprised a laugh out of her, a proper laugh. André found himself laughing with her, although at the time it had been anything but comical. He wasn’t quite sure what Julie had expected from a teething child, but she had taken it as a personal affront.

“Monsieur Daubier was always terribly kind about my daubs,” Mlle. Griscogne said reminiscently. “But I could tell he was thinking, Poor girl, her paintings will never hang in the Royal Academy.”

André chuckled, as he was meant to, but he wondered about the little girl she had been. “Did you want them to?”

The question seemed to catch her off guard. “No,” she said, after a moment. “Having grown up with two artists, I’m not sure I would want to be one. It isn’t a very orderly life.”

That was one way of putting it.

He looked around the schoolroom, all the books in their places, all the toys in order. The only thing out of place was the scarlet volume of poetry, a relic from another time and place: her childhood, his youth.

“Once a month, I hold a salon of sorts,” André said abruptly. “It’s nothing terribly formal, mostly artists of various sorts. Painters and poets and writers.”

“How nice,” she said politely.

André clasped his hands behind his back. “It all started when Ju—when my wife was alive. I’ve kept it up since, more out of habit than anything else.”

Mlle. Griscogne was all that was professional. “Would you like the children to come down and recite? I’ve been teaching them excerpts from Racine and Corneille. Gabrielle does a lovely job with the Count’s speech from Le Cid.”

“No!” André said quickly. That was all he needed, to draw more attention to the presence of his children. “No. It wouldn’t be appropriate. My guests are not always the most . . . circumspect of people.”

“You mean they drink and curse,” said Mlle. Griscogne calmly. Her matter-of-fact manner made an odd contrast with her demure façade. But then, she had grown up with Chiara di Veneti.

“They also recite love poetry.” André nodded towards the red book on the table. “Instructive for the children, but not for a few more years, I think.”

“If you want me to make sure they stay out of the way, that can be easily arranged,” she said. “The house is certainly large enough to keep them well out of your way.”

He was making a muddle of this. “No, no,” he said abstractedly. “Jeannette can manage that.”

Mlle. Griscogne looked at him quizzically. “Then . . . do you need assistance with the refreshments?”

André took a deep breath, feeling like a green boy asking a girl into a garden. Absurd, since there was no garden. And Mlle. Griscogne was certainly no girl. There was no need to make a to-do about a simple invitation.

“What I meant to ask was whether you would like to come. To attend. As a guest.”

She looked genuinely confused. “You’re inviting me? To attend?”

“That generally is what ‘guest’ means.” André retreated towards the nursery, speaking rapidly. “The invitation is there, should you choose to accept it. It certainly isn’t a requirement of your job. I thought Daubier might be glad of a chance to see you, that’s all. And you might find other acquaintances of your parents there.”

Stopping abruptly at the door of the nursery, André shrugged. “I leave it to you. It’s your decision whether you want to attend or not.”

He reached for the handle of the door. From the sputtering noises inside, Jeannette was rubbing down Pierre-André’s face, cleaning off the day’s accumulation of dust, jam, and anything else that might reasonably or unreasonably adhere to the face of an active five-year-old boy.

Mlle. Griscogne’s voice arrested him just as he put his hand to the handle.

“It’s very kind of you,” she said. “But you needn’t do this just because my father was the foremost sculptor of his generation.”

André looked at her for a long moment, at the woman who used to be the girl with the finch.

“I’m not doing it for him,” he said, and went to join his children.

Before joining Serena for drinks, Colin and I went for a stroll along the Seine.

At some point over the course of the afternoon, the sky had cleared. As if repenting of its earlier behavior, it was treating us to a truly spectacular sunset. The spires of Notre-Dame floated in the water of the Seine against a backdrop of red and purple as fantastical as anything from an artist’s absinthe-flavored imagination.

Strolling beside Colin, handsome in his dark blue sport coat and flannels, I felt like something out of an old Audrey Hepburn movie.

I winced as my inadequately shod foot landed in a puddle. All right, scrap the Hepburn bit. One could put on the black cocktail dress, but the whole grace and charm thing was harder. And a puddle was still a puddle. The rain might have cleared, but the ground hadn’t. My open-toed heels kept slipping and sliding on the cracked and damp stone of the street.

We were meeting Serena at a café in the Place des Vosges, only a few yards from the gallery where Colin’s mother’s party was being held, but in the meantime we were both content just to walk, breathing in the cool, fresh air of a March evening after rain. Across the way, the long façade of the Louvre glowed golden in the setting sun, and next to it, the empty space where the Tuileries Palace had once been. Somewhere on the far bank, to the right of the palaces, set farther back from the river, was the house that had once been the Hôtel de Bac, where Laura Griscogne had played her dangerous game of infiltration. I wondered whether it was still there now, turned into a museum like the Cognacq-Jay or broken into flats and offices. Or, perhaps, like the Tuileries or the Abbey Prison, gone altogether now, leaving not even a blue plaque behind to mark its passing. Look on, ye mighty, and despair?

“Crap!” I’d lost the end of my pashmina again. So much for deep thoughts. I lurched for it, hoping to catch it before it trailed its way into a puddle.

Colin, more efficient than I, scooped up the errant end and tucked it up for me, anchoring it under his arm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“All part of the service.”

I looked over at my boyfriend, who was watching the boats go by on the water, and felt a deep surge of gratitude that we were where we were, with all the afternoon’s accidents and alarums behind us. “I’m sorry to have been such a brat earlier.”

“I wouldn’t have said you were a brat.”

Nice save, there. Brat was an Americanism. “Shrew, virago, harpy . . .”

“I should have checked the reservation.” We were still in the warm and gooey make-up stage, where everyone is guiltier-than-thou and a bit of self-flagellation is par for the course. “It never occurred to me that they would put Serena in with us.”

“And especially in that room!” I chimed in.

“I’ve grown rather fond of it,” said Colin blandly, and my cheeks went pink. We’d had a very nice little make-up session there before changing for the party. Not to mention while changing for the party.

Not appropriate thoughts with just an hour to go before meeting his family.

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry for being cranky at you. I’m just a little”—I sketched a gesture in the air—“I don’t know.”

Colin’s lips twisted in a wry expression. “So am I,” he agreed. “Just a little.”

“Are you . . .” I had no idea what I was trying to ask. “Nervous?”