“He was—” Laura started to point and stopped. Where the Delaroche doppelganger had been a moment before she could see only a group of rowdy apprentices, tossing roasted nuts at one another. “I really am losing my mind.”

André took her face between his hands and pressed a quick, hard kiss to her lips. “You just need to hold on to it for a few hours more and then we’ll be safely on that boat to England.”

“England,” echoed Laura. “We should be there by tomorrow, weather willing.”

Off the boat tomorrow and then what? Back to Selwick Hall for her, she supposed, to see if the Pink Carnation had any further assignments for her now that she was effectively banned from Paris.

She did speak fluent Italian. Perhaps, Laura thought, with an effort at enthusiasm, the Carnation might send her to Italy next time. She hadn’t been to Italy since that last trip to Como.

Or she could tell André the truth.

And then what? she asked herself. She couldn’t make him love her just by wishing it so.

André touched his fingers to her wrist. “About England . . . ,” he began.

Laura felt a tightness in her chest that had nothing to do with the lacing of her stomacher. “A small island off the coast of France?”

“Yes, that one.” André’s fingers absently traced the pattern of her laces.

She would miss this, Laura thought with sudden clarity. She would miss this ease of touch, this lease they had on each other’s bodies. It was like a gleaner’s easement, free rein to roam within the prescribed areas during the course of the arrangement.

André plucked at a string. “We haven’t really discussed . . .”

“Beginners, on!” shouted Cécile from somewhere in the wings.

André grimaced. “That would be me.” He looked at her, hesitated, then shook his head. “We’ll talk after.”

After? After they would be managing de Berry, shepherding the children, running for the boat. Their chances of privacy were nil.

“What is it? Just spit it out. Quickly,” Laura added. “Before Cécile gets agitated.”

Cécile never got agitated, but the words seemed to have the correct effect.

André scratched his head, making his wig list to one side. “Once we get to England . . . I’ll be starting over. I won’t have much to offer. There’ll be no Hôtel de Bac. It will likely be hired lodgings at first, while I try to find work of some sort.”

Laura’s fingers itched to re-center his wig, but at the moment that was rather beside the point. Those little domestic gestures would soon be a thing of the past. If he was trying to say what she thought he was trying to say.

He was giving her the sack, wasn’t he? Both as governess and as lover.

“What are you trying to tell me?” she asked flatly. “If this is your way of telling me that we’ll be going our separate ways . . .”

Then what? She found she couldn’t herself finish the sentence. The flippant words jammed together at the back of her throat.

“No!” André said hastily. The wig wobbled. André made a wry face. “Forgive me. I’m out of practice at this whole wooing thing.”

Wooing. Wooing?

“I feel like a besotted fool,” he muttered. “Hell, I am a besotted fool.”

André grasped her hands in his. “I’d get down on one knee, but it seems redundant at this point—and this blasted belly would get in the way.”

“Beginners!” called Cécile.

André didn’t turn around. Holding fast to Laura’s hands, he said urgently, “We’ve done everything all upside down. All I’m trying to say is . . . I don’t want to lose you when we get to England.”

In his brightly colored doublet, the extravagant black wig perched askew on his head, and his mustache wiggling with every word, he had never looked more ridiculous. There were bright spots of rouge on his cheeks and fake hair on his eyebrows and his boots had bells on them.

“What we have,” he said. “It means too much. I never thought—but now that we are—oh, hell. I’m making a mess of it.”

“Emotions are messy, she agreed. Her hands tightened convulsively on his. From a long way away, she heard her own voice saying, in a tone like gravel, “You won’t lose me unless you want to.”

Heedless of the rouge on his cheeks, she reached up both hands to cup his cheeks and pulled his mouth down to hers. André didn’t need to be asked twice. His arms clasped around her with a force that knocked the breath right out of her—although that was partly the doing of Il Capitano’s fake stomach, which whacked into her stomacher with enough force to leave a permanent dent.

Laura didn’t care. Breathing was highly overrated. Her ruff was squished, her greasepaint was smeared, her cap was askew, and she couldn’t have cared less.

All her carefully constructed armor seemed to have deserted her. Laura knew it was folly—not the grand, magnificent folly of her parents’ affairs, but folly all the same—but she couldn’t seem to help herself.

As André had said, why shouldn’t Ruffiana have a bit of a happy ending too?

If Cécile was still calling for beginners, Laura didn’t hear her. But she did notice when André abruptly let go.

“Wha—,” Laura started to say, but broke off when she saw what had arrested André’s attention.

“Gabrielle . . . ,” he began.

Gabrielle’s eyes were round as saucers. Very, very unhappy saucers. She was staring at her father and her former governess with the sort of expression usually reserved for mass executions and invading Viking hordes.

“Cécile sent me to fetch you,” she said in a very small voice. There was a distinctly accusing tone to the words.

Laura took a hasty step back, straightening her stomacher. “Gabrielle,” she said. “It’s not what you—”

She broke off. If there was one thing she demanded of her charges, it was honesty. And what could she say? It was exactly what Gabrielle thought. And probably worse.

Gabrielle backed away, as one might from a house marked with the plague. She cast Laura an accusing look. “Don’t talk to me. I don’t want to talk to you again. Ever.”

André recovered his voice first. “Sweetheart—”

Gabrielle didn’t wait to hear what he had to say. Turning on her heel, she blundered away, knocking into a bit of scaffolding before recovering herself and disappearing in the direction of the front of the house, moving awkwardly, as though she were still reeling from a blow.

“Gabrielle!” Laura started after her.

André caught at her arm. “Gabrielle was going to have to know sooner or later,” he said in a low voice. “I’ll talk to her after the performance. I’ll explain . . . something.”

“Beginners! Capitano, that means you! Not next week. Now.” Cécile might not be agitated, but she certainly sounded miffed.

“She’ll come to terms with it,” André said. He pressed a quick kiss to her head. “We’ll all make it work. You’ll see.”

Laura watched as André hurried off onto the stage, the feather on his hat wagging.

The audience greeted Il Capitano’s appearance with an anticipatory roar of laughter and a smattering of rude comments, which Il Capitano, in character, returned with interest, in the heavy, pseudo-Spanish accent required by the role.

Gabrielle had run off towards the front of the house, where the holders of the lower-priced tickets milled together in the pit. Laura positioned herself on the side of the stage, looking for the little girl in her plain brown dress. There were no women allowed in the parterre—at least, not officially—so that meant that if Gabrielle were there, she would stand out.

There was no sign of her in the pit. Blast.

Laura devoutly hoped that Gabrielle had chosen to nurse her wounded feelings somewhere within the theater. Dieppe was a port town, with all the dangers that implied. A young girl alone on the streets might encounter any number of perils, the likes of which Gabrielle had no inkling. God willing, she never would.

Thank goodness. There she was, taking her appointed place at the ticket table at the front of the theatre.

That’s my girl, thought Laura with a surge of approval and relief.

They might not adore each other, but Laura felt an odd sense of kinship. She understood what it was to be prickly and stubborn. Good girl, not running off and hiding. There was nothing like going on just as usual to kick your adversaries in the teeth. It might be Laura’s teeth being kicked, but she was proud of Gabrielle just the same.

The play was well under way now, Il Capitano making his play for the fair Inamorata while Leandro conspired with the maid, Columbine, to press his own suit for the young lady’s hand. The audience seemed to be enjoying it well enough, laughing in all the right places. They were laughing and shouting, calling back quips to the actors on the stage, tossing the odd apple. One man wasn’t doing anything of the kind. He was staring at the stage, his gaze fixed on one actor alone: André.

There was no mistaking him this time. That was Gaston Delaroche. In their audience. In Dieppe.

It was too much to hope that he was there on holiday.

“Ruffiana!” Cécile was calling her.

Laura hurried onstage, trusting to the familiarity of thirty-odd days’ worth of performance to see her through.

“What ho, lackey!” she called out. The Commedia dell’Aruzzio didn’t demand veracity of dialogue from its practitioners. They spoke a sort of theatrical pidgin, designed to sound vaguely archaic, with modern colloquialisms for humor. “You, over there!”

Harlequin struck an exaggerated pose of surprise. “Me, mistress?”

He sidled sideways, mugging for the audience, sending them into anticipatory waves of laughter.