Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

“I say, you’re the governess, aren’t you! I remember now.” Philippe bounded down the two steps from the platform. “Did André send you? Do you have a message for me?”

“He knows you’re here?” said Laura sharply.

Philippe blinked. “Here? Me? Oh, of course. Of course he knows. I was, er, just waiting for a sitting. Old Daubier’s painting my portrait, don’t you know. A surprise present for my mother.”

“I see,” said Laura. “A sitting.”

“Well, you might call it a standing,” said Philippe, with an over-energetic cheer that reminded Laura forcibly of Jaouen and Daubier earlier that evening. “He doesn’t let me do much sitting. It’s deuced tiring. I don’t know how artists’ models manage it.”

Laura took a slow turn around the room, looking for anything out of the ordinary among the general debris. “An unusual time for a sitting.”

“Yes, well, I’m an unusual person.” Philippe grinned at her, piling on the charm like coals on a fire. “Why don’t you come sit here near me and I’ll tell you all about it?”

She had seen him before, and not just at Jaouen’s. Laura stared at him, fighting to place the elusive memory.

Philippe patted the chaise next to him. “Mademoiselle?”

Apparently, he was used to being stared at by women; he seemed to be more amused than alarmed by her attention. Or simply used to being stared at.

With a final, fatal click, Laura remembered.

That was why he didn’t look at all like Jaouen, or like his supposed cousins. There was no relation there, not unless one counted Adam and Eve. She had seen him once before, in England, riding by in an open carriage, surrounded by an admiring entourage.

The lost prince they were all searching for wasn’t the Dauphin. It was the third man in line for the throne, the Duc de Berry.

And he was here, in front of her, in Antoine Daubier’s studio.

“Won’t you sit down, Mademoiselle, er . . .”

The heir to the French throne patted the velvet seat of the chaise longue.

“Griscogne,” Laura said numbly. “Mademoiselle Griscogne.”

In this world turned upside down, even her name sounded curiously unreal, the syllables unfamiliar on her tongue. Here, in the disordered artist’s studio of her youth, so remarkably unchanged over the years, one of the heirs to the French throne was urging her to a seat.

A mere fifteen years before, sitting in the presence of a prince of the blood would have been accounted a little sort of treason.

It was mad. Laura stared at the man on the pedestal, fighting to reconcile the evidence of her eyes with the outraged voice of practicality. Unutterably, irredeemably mad. But no matter how mad it was, her memory didn’t lie. She knew him for who he was.

The Duc de Berry. Here. In Daubier’s studio.

“Ah, yes,” said the Duc de Berry, nodding. “Mademoiselle Griscogne. Of course.”

But if he was the Duc de Berry, then Jaouen . . . Laura’s mind fumbled after conclusions and fell short. Jaouen was the cousin of the Minister of Police, his most trusted confederate.

And he was harboring one of the heirs to the French throne.

Laura forced her dry throat to move. “But what am I to call you?”

“Well, you can’t very well call me cousin as André does,” said the Duc de Berry winningly. “Since we aren’t. So I imagine it will have to be Monsieur Philippe.”

Laura recklessly tossed the dice. “Or should I just say ‘Your Highness’ ?”

His reaction was all the confirmation she needed. The Duc de Berry jumped as though she had just pinched him. “I say, I—what?”

“You know exactly what,” said Laura, hearing her own voice as from a distance. Against it, she could hear the echoes of other conversations, Jaouen and Daubier in the antechamber that evening; de Berry’s earlier visits to the Hôtel de Bac. “He’s been hiding you, hasn’t he? Daubier.”

The Duc de Berry looked about as though looking for a place to bolt. “Don’t know why you would think such a thing. Hiding! Ha. I’m simply on leave from my regiment. As my cousin André might have told you.”

“He’s no more your cousin than you are mine,” said Laura brusquely. “Why did he agree to it? Jaouen? Is he helping you?”

De Berry backed away from the intensity in her voice. “I haven’t the slightest idea what you’re on about,” he said, looking slightly hunted. “Are you sure you’re feeling quite all right, Mademoiselle?”

No, she wasn’t sure. But that wasn’t the point.

Jaouen—a Royalist agent?

Laura felt as though she were clinging with one hand to the side of a cliff, watching the landscape sway beneath her, everything turned topsy-turvy.

She knew Jaouen’s past as well as she knew her own. She had read every word of his dossier, committing it all to memory in the pleasant gardens of a manor house in Sussex. Avocat of Nantes, delegate to the Estates-General, committed republican, cousin by marriage to the all-powerful Fouché, Minister of Police. There was nothing in there to indicate any form of Royalist leanings, nothing. There was no time unaccounted for, no period when he hadn’t been in the service of the Revolutionary regime for which he had so passionately advocated in the dying days of the old order.

And Daubier! Where was Daubier in all this? He was no more a Royalist than Jaouen, albeit for different reasons. He had never been political, not even when politics were all the fashion. King and country concerned Daubier only in so far as they provided him a place to hang his canvases. For those purposes, a Consul served him as well as a king.

Why?

And who was deceiving whom?

“Mademoiselle?” The Duc de Berry bent over her, too much a gentleman to toss her out the window. His mistake. If she were an agent of the government, such solicitude would sign his death warrant.

“I’m quite all right,” said Laura sharply, brushing off de Berry’s solicitous arm. “But you may not be. We have no time for these charades. Monsieur Daubier was arrested tonight.”

De Berry looked at her in confusion. “Then are you—? Do you—? Jaouen didn’t tell me that you were—”

“You don’t imagine that he tells you everything, do you?” That might be more true than either of them knew. Laura wondered what Jaouen was telling. And to whom. “The agents of the Ministry might be here at any moment. Does Monsieur Daubier keep anything here that might condemn him? Other than you.”

De Berry reacted without question to the note of authority in her voice. “His ledger. He has the code in his ledger.”

“Where is it?” Laura asked. “Quickly!”

“He keeps it here, close by him,” said de Berry, looking around helplessly. “As to where exactly . . .”

“It’s a book?” said Laura. “A leather-bound one?”

De Berry nodded. “About yea high.” He sketched it out with his hands. “Should be around—”

The door to the foyer burst open, spitting out Jaouen like a cork from a bottle. He was speaking as he moved, in a rapid-fire staccato that matched the brisk pace of his legs.

“Bad news. Dau—” Jaouen broke off, breathing hard. He came to an abrupt halt. His eyes locked with Laura’s. “You. What are you doing here?”

Laura took a step towards him. “What are you doing here?”

“Shouldn’t you be with the children?”

“Shouldn’t you be at the Prefecture?”

They stared at each other, mirror images of mistrust, neither caring to let the other out of sight. Jaouen’s breath was ragged from his hasty ascent of the stairs. Laura had no such excuse, but her breath came fast just the same, rasping against her throat.

“She’s not with us?” said de Berry unnecessarily. “But I thought . . .” He blanched, as though realizing what he had so nearly given away.

“I know who he is,” Laura said, addressing herself only to Jaouen. “There’s no use pretending.”

Jaouen didn’t betray himself by so much as a flicker of the eye. “He?”

“Your supposed cousin. His royal highness, the Duc de Berry.”

“I didn’t tell her,” de Berry said hastily, looking from one to the other. “She guessed. I thought she was one of us. She seemed to know. . . .”

Jaouen pressed his eyes together in a brief, telling moment of irritation. Laura couldn’t blame him. The Duc de Berry must be a very trying coconspirator. He was rumored to be a man of courage on the battlefield and charm in the ballroom, but the world of subterfuge was not for one such as he.

Unlike Jaouen.

When Jaouen spoke, his voice was hard and flat. “Who are you working for?”

Laura spoke with a bravado she didn’t feel. “The last time I looked, I was working for you. The question is, who are you working for?”

“We’ll have to do something with her,” said the Duc de Berry anxiously from somewhere behind her. “Tie her up or . . .”

“One word to the wrong person,” said Jaouen, his eyes on Laura, “and you sign Daubier’s death warrant.”

“Are you here to save Daubier?” Laura demanded. “Or to hang him?”

“What is it to you?”

Laura met his gaze steadily. “More than you imagine.”

There were noises from the stairs; Laura could hear the heavy tread of boots through the open door to the foyer.

“Too many damn flights of stairs,” someone was saying. He didn’t bother to keep his voice down.

The bubble encasing them shattered. Jaouen swung abruptly away, his head jerking towards the door.

Jaouen cursed, briefly and violently. “Delaroche’s men. He wasted no time. Merde. Both of you, in the back room. Now.”

De Berry danced from one foot to the other, spoiling for a fight. “How many of them are there? We could take them, you and I. There’s a sword on the wall—”