Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

The paper of the wall was cool against Laura’s temple. They were eye to eye, only inches apart. Without his glasses, his eyes were brilliantly blue. “I don’t know what to take you for. Not anymore.”

“Trust me,” said Jaouen, “the feeling is mutual, Suzette.”

Laura felt a sudden, absurd urge to tug up her bodice, even though she knew it to be quite firmly in place. “You’re fortunate that Suzette appeared when she did. If those men had gone blundering off through Daubier’s studio, we would be in worse case than we are.”

“We?”

“Whose motives are the more in question?” she asked. “Mine? Or your own?”

“You don’t flinch, do you?” he said admiringly.

“Not from what needs to be done.”

Jaouen propped himself up on one elbow. His shadow fell across the wall behind her, blocking her in. “What needs to be done for whom? Delaroche? Or someone else?”

“I told you already. My interest is in saving Daubier. I will also,” she said, in her driest, most governess-like tones, “admit to a certain interest in the future of your offspring. I have invested considerable effort in them. I would prefer not to see them fatherless.”

It was as close as she could come to saying that she cared. On the children’s behalf, of course. And Daubier’s.

She shrugged. “You can believe me or not as you choose.”

“You needn’t worry that I’m planning to hand myself over to the Ministry of Police on a platter. I’m going to do my damnedest to get out. I have no interest in martyrdom. Not in this cause or any other.”

“Then why embroil yourself in it?”

Jaouen’s face was as closed as the city gates. “Because it seemed like a good idea at the time.”

All right, then. If he didn’t want to talk about it, they didn’t have to talk about it. “Didn’t you have an escape plan?”

“We did.” The use of the past tense was unmistakable. Whatever the escape plan had been, it was no longer viable. “I owe an obligation to Daubier,” Jaouen said woodenly, with the dogged single-mindedness of exhaustion. “I intend to see it through.”

Laura wiggled upright in her chair, girding for battle. “And what of your other obligations? Are you just going to abandon your children, abandon your cause, and let the Ministry do with you what they will? I call that poor spirited.”

She had hit a nerve. Jaouen’s lips curled back over his teeth. “I am not abandoning my children.”

“Sending yourself off to be killed? And what will become of them? A return to Nantes with Jeannette? What would you call it?”

“Protecting them. Saving them from the consequences of my actions. They shouldn’t be damned for my carelessness.”

Carelessness. Like taking a boat out on the coast of Cornwall—the rocky coast of Cornwall—in the middle of a squall.

“Isn’t it a bit late for that?” she said nastily.

Jaouen whitened as though she had slapped him.

“I—,” he began, and stopped. She could see the words whirring through his brain—defense, denial, attempts at exoneration—all considered and discarded. He came out fighting. “Do you think you could do better?”

Well, since he asked. “Yes,” said Laura.

Behind them, de Berry snored on.

“How?” Jaouen had his voice back under control, but there was a rough edge to it, half anger, half hope. She could see his knuckles white against the seat of the chair. “Pray, do enlighten me.”

If he were what he claimed . . . She couldn’t tell him about the Pink Carnation; it wasn’t her secret to share. But if he were what he claimed, if he were the Duc de Berry’s protector rather than his executioner, the Pink Carnation would want to know.

And, quite possibly, help.

The agents of the English government and those of the French royal family did not always work in accord. To smuggle the Duc de Berry out of Paris—when Artois’s own organization had failed—would be an immense feather in the Pink Carnation’s cap.

“I know someone—someone who might be able to help you. You could leave Paris with your children. With the duke. And Daubier.”

“Grand promises, Mademoiselle Griscogne.”

“I don’t make any promises. But it is a chance.”

“A chance.” There was a bitter tinge to the word. Propping an elbow against the back of the chair, he asked, “Who is this someone?”

Laura shook her head. “I can’t tell you that.”

“And yet you expect me to trust you, not only with my own life, but those of my children?”

“Do you have any other choice?”

Jaouen pressed his bloodshot eyes shut. “There might,” he said raggedly, “have been more politic ways of phrasing that.”

“There might,” she agreed. “But we are plainspoken people, you and I. Aren’t we?”

Jaouen’s elbow rested on the back of her chair. “Are you telling me you’ve never lied to me?”

Only about everything.

Nearly everything. What a cosmic joke it was that her deception had taken her from her assumed identity and put her back to what she was, Michel and Chiaretta de Griscogne’s daughter. She had lied her way back to the truth.

“I don’t make claims I can’t keep,” she countered. “Have I led you false yet?”

“Where do you find this friend of yours?”

“Alone,” she said, and saw him wince. “You can’t have expected I would have allowed you to come.”

She saw his eyebrows lift on the word “allowed,” but he forbore comment. The balance of power had shifted, and they both knew it.

“You do realize,” he said slowly, “what a risk I take in allowing you to go alone. You might go straight to Delaroche.”

“I might,” she agreed levelly. “You might take de Berry and run as soon as I leave the house. We both act on faith.”

“Faith,” Jaouen murmured. “The last refuge of those with nothing else.”

“You said it, Monsieur, not I.”

“If you are to be our salvation, you might as well call me André.” His lips creased in a weary smile. “You were never terribly convincing about the honorific.”

“André,” she said, testing the name. Perhaps there was a little bit of Suzette in her after all. She rolled the “r” on her tongue and watched his eyes follow her lips. “Are you sure you wish to allow me such liberties?”

“I think we are well past liberties, you and I.”

There was a muffled crash behind them. Laura twisted, hastily, just in time to see the Duc de Berry hauling himself back up onto the settee, off of which he had fallen. “Not made for normal-size people,” he muttered sleepily, before his bleary eyes focused on André. “I say! You’re back. Is the painter—”

“Still in prison,” said André bluntly. He turned back to Laura. “When can you see your . . . friend?”

“This morning. Wait for me before you do anything else. It would probably be best,” she added, “if you go to the Prefecture as usual.”

“Thank you,” said Jaouen dryly, “for the advice. I would never have thought of that.”

The Duc de Berry looked from one to the other. “Is . . . What?”

“Mademoiselle Griscogne,” said Jaouen levelly, “has undertaken to help us remove from Paris.”

“Remove?” The Duc de Berry woke up in a hurry. “But our plans—the plan—”

“Is over,” said Jaouen brutally. “Without Daubier, we can’t get into the palace. And there’s more. All gates have been ordered closed and all carriages searched. We’ll be lucky if we leave Paris with our lives.”

Laura watched as the duke processed the information, all his grand ambitions scattering into dust around him. To his credit, he took it on the chin. He didn’t protest or argue.

Instead, like the soldier he had been, he went straight to action. “How do we get out? If all the gates are being closed . . .”

“For that,” said Jaouen, “we are forced to rely upon Mademoiselle Griscogne. And her friend.”

The Duc de Berry’s brow furrowed. He looked Laura up and down, from her trampled hem to her wildly tousled hair. “Then . . . she is one of ours?”

“That,” said André Jaouen, his eyes on Laura, “is entirely up to her.”

Mist lay heavy over the graveled paths of the Jardins du Luxembourg. It wasn’t so much raining as it was oozing; Laura’s pelisse was already damp through, simply from walking in the moisture-rich air. Beads of liquid pearled the statues on their stone plinths. Inadequately garbed for the climate, Venus shivered on her pedestal, casting recriminatory glances at Mars in his boots and breastplate.

Would the Pink Carnation keep her appointment? The desolation of the gardens increased the risk of the meeting. If the gardens were bustling with activity, with nannies and their charges, young ladies sketching, clerks snatching a moment in the sunshine, it would be easy enough to contrive a chance meeting. Two women alone in the rain made a stranger spectacle.

Not, of course, as strange a spectacle as Suzette, the girl men couldn’t forget.

Laura grimaced at the memory. To be honest, she had rather enjoyed herself. It had been nice, for a change, to shuck off restraint along with her dress and to play the sort of character she seemed destined never to be. For about ten minutes, she had felt beautiful. Desirable. She remembered the expression on Jaouen’s face as she had made her grand entrance from the dining room, more courtesan than governess.

We are well past liberties, you and I.

If her mission succeeded, Jaouen would be gone within a matter of hours. Gone from Paris, gone from her life.

Onward and upward, she told herself bracingly. She wasn’t meant to get attached, either as a governess or as an agent. In fact, one of her primary attractions for the Pink Carnation had been her detachment. She belonged to nothing and to no one.