Jaouen diverted the conversation into less dangerous waters. “Was Daubier’s studio as much a mess then as it is now?”

Laura accepted the diversion gratefully. “I hadn’t really thought of it for years. Not so much a mess . . . I thought of it as an Aladdin’s cave. You never knew what you might stumble over. He kept all sorts of props scattered about—swords and shields and bits of pillars.”

“And finches,” said Jaouen. His eyes met hers in private communication, cutting out the world around them.

“Did he ever make you sit for him?” Laura asked quickly. “Daubier?”

“Me?” Jaouen’s eyebrows rose over the rims of his glasses. “Never. Not all of us are innately paintable.”

“You mean you didn’t want to sit still.” It was hard to imagine him as anything but in motion.

Jaouen’s lips lifted at the corners. “That, too.”

“Did your wife never paint you?” As soon as Laura asked, she wished she hadn’t. Jaouen had made it clear that his wife was a closed topic. “Never mind. I shouldn’t have—”

“She did. The critics consider it one of her less successful works.”

“Mmm,” said Laura, for lack of anything better to say. “Well, she wasn’t really known for realism, was she?”

“What makes you think I wasn’t an allegory?”

Laura considered. “I can’t really see you decked out in a bedsheet, playing Peace and Plenty.”

“Is it the concept you object to, or the bedsheet?” he inquired.

“Both,” she said boldly.

“So did I.” There was a pause, and then he smiled. “Especially to the bedsheet.”

Somehow, the image was more unsettling without the sheet than with it.

“They are useful things in their way, bedsheets,” said Laura at random. “But they leave something to be desired as an article of costume.”

“Hmm,” said Jaouen. His eyes narrowed on something over her shoulder, his attention directed elsewhere. “Will you excuse me, Mademoiselle Griscogne?”

Without waiting for her permission, Jaouen dropped her arm. Laura felt curiously marooned, like a promontory suddenly chopped into an island. “There is a matter that demands my immediate attention.”

“Of course. Thank you. I shouldn’t have kept you so long.” Laura tucked her misplaced hand at her side, feeling for a pocket that wasn’t there.

Jaouen nodded, but absently. He might have been gone already. “Mademoiselle.”

And he was away, leaving Laura standing by herself in the center of the room.

Chapter 16

Had she offended him with her comments about his wife? And bedsheets?

The elegantly gowned throng closed about Jaouen, half a dozen people clamoring for his attention.

Laura looked down at her own soot-colored skirts. Or was it simply that he had used up the time allotted for being kind to the governess? It had been too easy, for those few moments, to forget the nature of her position in his household.

Both her positions in his household.

She had overheard something in that green marble anteroom, something she hadn’t been meant to hear, something that had made both Daubier and Jaouen visibly uncomfortable, each in his own way. She hadn’t heard enough to decipher it, only the merest fragment of a phrase. She had been left only with an impression of something left undone.

If Jaouen’s intention had been to distract her, he had succeeded admirably.

They had ended their tour of the rooms in a room lined with easels, depicting various new works by emerging artists. Laura moved at random to the first easel, feigning interest.

Someone moved to stand beside her. Laura instinctively moved aside, making room.

There was a whisper of muslin as the lady followed, sidestepping as Laura sidestepped.

Laura moved again.

The lady moved with her.

Frowning, Laura glanced sideways, prepared to glare down the person intruding upon her space. She might be plainly garbed, but art was for everyone, and she didn’t mean to be rushed.

She encountered an elegant, classical profile and one dangling blue enamel and seed pearl earring. The lady continued to gaze straight ahead, ostensibly examining the painting on the easel in front of them.

“An intriguing composition, is it not?” said the Pink Carnation.


Who in the blazes had invited Gaston Delaroche?

André twisted his way through the throng in the music room, hoping he was mistaken, but knowing he was not. Among the ladies’ pale muslins and the flamboyant garb of the gentlemen, that rusty black coat was unmistakable. Delaroche stood out like a raven in a dovecote.

Delaroche was already setting the pigeons’ feathers fluttering; André could hear the rustle of fabric and snapping of fans as people hastened to get out of his way. Everyone knew about Gaston Delaroche. He was as well known as the Black Death and just about as popular.

“Gaston!” André hailed him from across the room. The former fourth-most-feared man in France hadn’t bothered to remove his hat or cloak. Because they gave him extra height and bulk? Or for other reasons? André felt his blood quicken with apprehension, but he took pains not to show it. “How kind of you to patronize my humble gathering! I don’t recall inviting you.”

“The Ministry of Police needs no invitation.” Delaroche’s voice was pitched to carry.

A crash punctuated the statement. A lady had dropped her champagne glass.

André nodded to a waiter to clear it up. “I hadn’t thought you cared for art, Gaston. Broadening your horizons?”

Delaroche frowned. “I have no time for fripperies. I am here on official business.”

André couldn’t quite bring himself to take the other man’s arm, so he dealt him a comradely smack on the back instead. “Well, now that you’re here, you might as well take advantage of the opportunity. I believe you know the First Consul’s daughter, Madame Bonaparte?”

Hortense Bonaparte was nowhere to be seen, but André was counting on Delaroche’s snobbery to override whatever mischief he had planned. For all his supposed egalitarian principles, the man was determined to regain his standing with the First Consul. André was gambling that he wouldn’t make a scene in front of the First Consul’s beloved stepdaughter.

The dice wobbled and fell off the table. Delaroche’s thin lips twisted into a smile. “This concerns Madame Bonaparte, as it must all good citizens who have the welfare of the First Consul at heart.”

Trepidation settled like a block of ice in André’s chest. “As does everyone here,” he said with forced bonhomie.

Delaroche’s smile never wavered. A bad sign. A very bad sign. “Not quite everyone.”

Right. Enough of the indirect approach. Taking the other man by the arm, André turned him to the side. “This is a private party, Delaroche. Whatever it is can wait until tomorrow.”

Delaroche’s expression was dangerously smug.

“No, Jaouen. I don’t believe that it can.”


Laura concentrated on the painting in front of her, keeping her eyes squarely on the canvas.

Next to her, the Pink Carnation tilted her head, scrutinizing the painting on the easel. “A very bold use of color,” she commented, as if to herself.

It was a historical allegory, commemorating some significant Roman moment or other. It was the sort of painting Julie Beniet had become famous for, but it had been executed without her skill. The painted figures’ limbs looked stiff and unnatural, their togas like—well, like bedsheets.

“I find it overdone,” said Laura stiffly. “There’s no life to it.”

Were they speaking in code? If so, Laura wasn’t sure what the code was meant to be. She didn’t know what to make of the fact that they were speaking at all.

The Pink Carnation nodded thoughtfully, setting her earrings swaying.

It would be very easy to hate her, thought Laura. Miss Jane Wooliston was the very image of the style currently in vogue—tall and slender, with a face that might have been modeled off an antique cameo. Her jewelry was muted, only a small gold locket on a blue silk ribbon and a pair of blue enamel earrings decorated with seed pearls, but it made the toilettes of the other women look overdone and gaudy. No wonder she was an ornament of Bonaparte’s court. Nature had given her so much. Not only beauty, but the wit to employ it to good purpose.

It would have been easier to tolerate her if she had been beautiful but dim; or clever and plain. One could respect clever and plain. But to be beautiful and clever seemed like an oversight on the part of the gods.

She was young, too, this Pink Carnation. So close, Laura could see the smoothness of her skin, none of the creases in her forehead or lines down the side of her mouth that Laura saw every time she looked in her own mirror.

How old was the Pink Carnation? Twenty-two? Twenty-three? A good decade younger than Laura in any event. It made Laura feel tired and more than a little depressed that this debutante, this marble creature in white muslin, should have achieved so much with so seeming little effort, while Laura, with all her struggle and strife, had managed so little.

The Pink Carnation tilted her head, examining the painting as if weighing Laura’s opinion. “I agree,” she said at last. “This one may be more in the current style, but I prefer that one.”

She gestured to the next easel over, which held a much smaller painting in tones of green and brown, depicting a stretch of woods on a cloudy day.

Laura obediently moved to stand in front of it. “It’s very . . . pastoral.”

What in heaven’s name was she trying to tell her?