Лорен Уиллиг - The Orchid Affair

“If we took some of the blankets—,” she said.

Laura dropped the blanket she had been holding and pressed both her hands to her face. “This is ridiculous,” she said indistinctly. “Ridiculous.”

“But necessary,” he reminded her. “It was your scheme to travel as husband and wife.” He made sure to keep his voice pitched low. The walls might provide the illusion of privacy, but they weren’t thick.

She took a step back from the bed—and from him—practically tripping her over her hem in her haste. “I didn’t know we would be forced to interpret that quite so literally!”

Was the idea really that distasteful to her? André found himself mildly irked. “I wasn’t planning to ravish you,” he said irritably.

Laura bristled. “I didn’t expect you were.”

Perhaps that hadn’t been the most politic thing to have said. André rubbed a hand over his eyes, doing his best to make amends. “I’m too tired to ravish anyone.”

Laura plunked her hands on her hips. “Oh, is that supposed to make me feel better? I’m glad to know that it’s only fatigue that preserves my slender hold on virtue.”

André blinked. “Do you want me to ravish you?”

She sucked in air through her nose. “I want to go to sleep. Alone.”

“I’m sorry not to be able to oblige.”

She turned in a flurry of wool. “I don’t see why not. There are certainly enough extra blankets. If I made them into a pallet . . .”

André held out a hand to stop her. She froze as his fingers touched her shoulder.

He said, more gently than he had originally intended, “Those are to use on top of us, not under us. It’s going to get very cold overnight.”

He could see Laura’s throat work as she swallowed. She pressed her eyes briefly together, as though searching for composure. “I’m sorry,” she said in a low voice. “This is just a very odd situation.”

That was one way of putting it.

“I’m used to . . .” She struggled for words. “I’m used to my privacy.” She tried, belatedly, to make a joke of it. “I don’t share well.”

“Think of it as being comrades in arms,” André suggested. “Soldiers put their pallets together in the field for warmth. It’s only sensible that we should do the same. That’s all it is. Nothing more.”

Nothing to be afraid of, he added silently. It wasn’t, he sensed, so much the threat of ravishment that she feared, but the rest of it. The intimacy of it. As she had said, they were both used to their privacy.

Laura’s shoulders were very stiff beneath the red wool shawl. She nodded without looking at him, her head slightly bent. “It makes sense. In this camp, one never knows who’ll come barging in. It’s better to keep up the pretense, I suppose.”

André tried for levity. “Unless we have a fight and you boot me out of the wagon.”

He was rewarded with a slight quirk of her lips, the distant cousin of a smile. “It might be a bit soon for that. But I’ll bear it mind for later.”

“Do you need help?” he asked. “With your laces or buttons or . . .” He gestured helplessly with his hands. It had been a long time since he’d had intimate acquaintance with the intricacies of feminine garments.

Aside, of course, from buttoning his governess back into her gray dress in the dark dining room of Daubier’s studio. But that hardly counted.

“No, thank you.” She backed away, clutching a rolled-up blanket to her chest like armor. “I thought I’d sleep in my clothes. For the warmth.”

It wasn’t an absurd notion. Most people did. There were whole parts of the French countryside where André suspected people hadn’t changed their garments in years.

“That makes sense,” he said mildly. He loosened the knot of his cravat, easing it out from around his neck, moving slowly and deliberately, like a gamekeeper trying not to startle the deer.

Laura began spreading extra blankets along the bed, arranging the edges with finicky care. “Do you think the children will be warm enough?”

There was something artificial about the very mundanity of the comment. André was reminded of children playing house, playing at being mother and father, with acorn caps for teacups and pinecones for children.

“Jeannette wouldn’t have it otherwise. She’s a tough old bird.”

André began unbuttoning his coat. He’d sleep in his shirt and breeches, but the buttons on the coat itself would be uncomfortable. His hand bumped against something hard and heavy, shoved into an inner pocket. He fished it out, the edge catching on the lining.

He looked at it bemusedly. It looked very different, somehow, in the shadowy light of the small wagon than it had in his bedroom that morning. “Oh. I almost forgot.”

“Forgot?” Laura glanced at him quickly, pausing in the act of plumping pillows that were already as plump as they could get.

André held out the book he had brought. He had taken it up on a whim that morning, before he left for the Temple. It had been by his bedside, along with the Ronsard, and he had stuffed it in his coat pocket, for reasons not entirely clear even to himself. “I brought this for you. I didn’t know if you had your own copy.”

Laura stood there, staring at the book in his hand. “I don’t.” She started to reach out for it, then abruptly dropped her hand. “But I can’t take yours. Doesn’t this . . . Isn’t it? . . . Sorry. I don’t know where my wits are.”

“Back in Paris with mine?” he suggested. “Take it. I brought it for you.”

“But it has your wife’s drawings. I would have thought that”—she paused, as though looking for the right words—“that you would have wanted something of her.”

“I have Gabrielle and Pierre-André.” He winced at the sickly sweetness of the sentiment. It might be true, but it still sounded mawkish.

Laura didn’t seem to notice. She was absorbed in reflections of her own, her attention focused on the book.

“I’ll keep this in trust, then, for Gabrielle.” She ran a finger over the faded gold lettering, lingering over it. “Thank you.”

“You’re welcome.”

Silence fell between them as each looked at the other, waiting for a cue, the book still clutched in Laura’s hand.

Well, there was no time like the present.

André gestured to the bed. “Would you prefer the right side or the left?”

Laura couldn’t figure out what to do with herself.

It was dark in the wagon—true dark, a world away from the diffused light of the city, with the embers of a fire still an orange-red in the hearth. Laura knew that André Jaouen was next to her, knew it from the regular rasp of his breath and the way the pallet dipped off to the side where his body pressed it down, but she couldn’t see him.

Would it have made it better if she could?

It was a very strange thing, this having another person in bed beside her. Maids might have to share quarters, but a governess never did. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she had shared a bedroom with someone, much less a bed, and a bed of proportions that would insult the average pygmy.

André Jaouen didn’t seem to be bothered by it. It was safer to think of him by his full name, using the extra syllables as a wall to ward off the fact that there was no wall between them at all.

Her putative husband, on the other hand, had said his good-night, rolled himself in one of the blankets—they had separate blankets, at least; there was that much between them—snuffed the lantern, and gone to sleep. As simple as that. While she suddenly seemed to have too many limbs, all of which took up far too much space on the narrow pallet. Her elbows extruded, her knees stuck out, her forearms seemed to have expanded until they required an entire mattress unto themselves.

Laura tucked her knees into her chest, lying on her side with her back to the blanket-covered bundle that was André. Her left arm, scrunched up beneath her, was beginning to go numb. She cautiously wiggled her fingers, hoping her bedmate wouldn’t feel the pull on the blankets. In and out, in and out went his breath, peaceful and even.

Laura scowled. How did he manage to sleep so easily? And why couldn’t she?

It had been an exhausting few days. She should be exhausted. She was exhausted. So why wasn’t she asleep? In peasant households, people piled six in a bed for warmth. In this very camp, Cécile was curled up beside Rose, de Berry stacked in with Leandro and Harlequin. She would be willing to wager they were all snoring peacefully away, dreaming their respective dreams, not a one of them lying awake monitoring the movements of the person on the pallet beside him.

Laura eased onto her back, wincing at the crinkle of straw. As pallets went, this one wasn’t too terribly uncomfortable. The straw tick had been bolstered with enough blankets to keep scratchy bits of hay at bay. She had slept on worse over the course of her various employments. But alone. She had always slept alone.

One would think, in the dark, André Jaouen would be easy enough to ignore. It wasn’t as though she could see him, other than as a shadowy blob of blanket. But she was ridiculously aware of his presence, of his breath, his smell, the warmth of his body through the blankets. He made the small space seem even smaller, the walls narrower, the roof lower—as though there weren’t enough air for both of them to breathe.

Laura clamped her elbows against her ribs, making herself as narrow as her limbs would allow, neck stiff, legs straight down, arms at her sides. Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . breathe in.... If they made decent time on the road, they were to have their first rehearsal the next evening. Cécile had filled her in on the scenario, which was simple enough: Leandro was in love with the fair Inamorata, who was, in her turn, being courted by Il Capitano, whose suit was favored by her father, Pantaloon. In . . . Out....