The Orchid Affair

by Lauren Willig

  “Thank you,” said Laura, and went where the nursery maid had indicated.

  It must have been a dressing room in a more affluent time, back before the two large chambers next to it had been requisitioned as nursery room and schoolroom respectively. A fanciful, if faded, scene of elaborate birdcages, brightly colored birds, and lush foliage covered the walls, attesting to the taste of the last Comtesse de Bac. The dressing table was still in place, its ornate, gilt-framed mirror propped over a table topped in delicately veined marble, as was a grand armoire with curving ornaments on top, but a narrow bed had been shoved into one corner of the room, made up with sheets, a blanket, and one very flat pillow.

  Laura stood in front of her new bed in her new room and pondered her options. The idea was risky, but it might just work.

  Opening the armoire, Laura reached for her carpetbag.

  Yes, there it was, among a jumble of similar remedies: a small twist of white powder. It was always best to keep dangerous items out in the open, among similar objects, or at least so the Pink Carnation said. The sleeping draught had been designed to look like an innocent packet of headache powder, just as the powerful emetics next to it had been disguised as bottles of stomach tonic.

  Dosing Jaouen with an emetic that would have him clutching his stomach and writhing would certainly part him from his papers, but just might cause some suspicion. Maiming one’s employer was generally not a wise way to go, especially when one’s employer had daily access to sophisticated instruments of torture. But there was nothing at all out of the ordinary about an already exhausted man succumbing to sleep within a reasonable interval after taking a headache powder. The powder, her tutors in Sussex had told her, generally took about half an hour to take effect. One packet should put a man to sleep for at least a few hours.

  Laura hoped she wouldn’t need that long.

  With hands that were surprisingly steady, Laura tucked the packet away into her left sleeve. The fabric pressed it snugly against her wrist. There were benefits to unfashionable attire.

  In the brightly lit schoolroom, Pierre-André was occupied building a castle out of blocks under the supervision of Jeannette, who was furiously knitting away.

  “Pardon me,” said Laura. “Do you have any headache powders?”

  Jeannette’s needles clacked together with manic speed. “One day with them and you’re already calling for headache powders?” Her tone clearly expressed what she thought of effete Paris governesses who couldn’t even handle two darling angel children for one day without taking to their beds.

  “Not for me,” said Laura. “For Monsieur Jaouen.”

  She almost added “your employer,” but held her tongue. She needed Jeannette right now, even if Jeannette didn’t know it, and it would be easier not to antagonize her.

  Clack, clack, clack went the needles. Jeannette gave her a narrow-eyed look. “And why would you be bringing headache powders to the master?”

  “Because,” said Laura, “he appeared to have a headache.”

  This irrefutable logic was wasted on Jeannette. Adding one and one, Jeannette arrived at forty-two. Stabbing at the wool, she said warningly, “If you’re thinking of wriggling your way into the master’s affections . . .”

  Laura laughed at the sheer absurdity of it. “Can you imagine me as the wriggling kind?” If seduction were what the mission called for, she would still be back in London, listening to talentless adolescents plunking out Italian airs on the pianoforte.

  She conjured up Jaouen’s unshaven, hard-featured face, his thoughts and feelings guarded by more than just a pair of glasses. One might as well attempt to seduce a block of granite. Even if she were the seducing kind, which she most decidedly was not.

  “I assure you, I do not, er, wriggle.”

  “Where are you from?” demanded the nurse. Laura recognized the abrupt question for what it was, a grudging olive branch and, in its own way, an apology.

  “I was raised mostly in Paris.” Both policy and politeness demanded that she answer, but Laura could feel the paper with the drug scratching against her wrist, urging haste.

  “But what about your people?” Jeannette prodded.

  Laura twitched her sleeve down further over her wrist. “My father was from the Auvergne.”

  Exactly what he had been was another story entirely. He liked to claim that he was the illegitimate offspring of a noble family of that region, but Laura suspected that was nothing but a fairy story, part of the legend he had built around himself until he himself believed it. From what Laura had managed to glean, her father was, in fact, the unromantic offspring of legally wed petit bourgeois with a small legal practice somewhere in the Auvergne.

  “Southerners.” The nurse’s Breton accent thickened as she said it with the northerner’s contempt for those lazy, immoral souls down south.

  Laura couldn’t resist needling her just a bit. “My mother was Italian.”

  Her mother really had been the illegitimate offspring of a noble family, the daughter of a Venetian aristocrat and a professional courtesan. She had been everything Laura’s father had wanted to be.

  “That accounts for your looks, then.”

  Laura didn’t bother to explain that her mother had been Northern Italian, fair-skinned and blue-eyed. Her dark looks were entirely the legacy of her French father. “Or lack of them?”

  There was nothing like a bit of self-deprecation to soften up a crusty old servant. “Now, now,” said Jeannette, her voice and joints cracking as she laid aside her knitting and heaved herself up by the arms of the chair, “I didn’t say that. I’ll get you your headache powder. It’s a kind thought,” she added grudgingly.

  “The children will be happier if their father is happier,” Laura said piously. No need to tell her that Jaouen had requested it.

  “Paris is no place to be happy,” said Jeannette darkly, motioning Laura to follow her as she creaked her way across the nursery. “He’s not been happy since he came to Paris, and the children can sense it, poor lambs. He would have done better to stay with them at home and not come gadding about these fancy foreign places.”

  Hiring fancy governesses. “How long has he been in Paris now?”

  Jeannette clicked her tongue against the back of her teeth. “On to four years now. Or was it five? Miss Julie died in ninety-nine, and he didn’t stay long after.”

  From the choice of address, Laura assumed it was a fairly safe guess that Jeannette had been with Mme. Jaouen before her marriage—most likely Mme. Jaouen’s own childhood nurse. The story made a compelling picture: the grieving widower fleeing the gravesite, traveling halfway across the country rather than be faced with the daily reminder of his loss.

  Torturing Royalists probably did make for an excellent diversion from grief, Laura told herself caustically. She had no special sympathy for the old regime, but she did have rather an objection to the breaking and grinding of limbs.

  Laura said what she was expected to say. “He must have loved her very much.”

  “Everyone loved Miss Julie,” said Miss Julie’s old nurse. “Here’s your headache powder.”

  “Thank you.” Laura took the small packet of white powder in a steady hand. She could feel the other packet, the hidden one, pressing against her left wrist. “I’ll take it down to Monsieur Jaouen right away.”

  “You’ll want to give it to him with coffee,” Jeannette called after her. “He likes his coffee.”

  “Thank you,” said Laura again, and, with a purposeful tread, went in search of the kitchens to fix some coffee.

  Chapter 6

  Laura balanced her tray on one hip as she knocked on the door of André Jaouen’s study.

  “Yes?” called an impatient voice from beyond the panel.

  Not exactly “come in,” but Laura chose to take it as such. Grappling for the door handle, she managed to turn it without losing her perilous grip on her tray. The door lurched open four inches as the crockery clattered.

  The study
was as sparsely furnished as the rest of the house, boasting only a desk and a cheap set of bookshelves, crammed with a disorderly collection of volumes of varying height and girth, all with cracked spines and blurred bindings that testified to their having been read again and again. Whatever expensive art had once decked the walls was long gone. The only decorations in the room were a crayon drawing of two children and a framed broadside of The Declaration of the Rights of Man, browning and cracked beneath its protective glass.

  Laura could hear the scratch of Jaouen’s pen as she pushed her way into the room. He was writing busily, an untidy sheaf of papers fanned out to one side as he wrote industriously on another, his short-cropped head bowed. He had a cowlick in the back, like Pierre-André’s.

  He glanced up as she entered, pen poised. “What is it?”

  “I brought your headache powder.” She would have put a flower on the tray too, if she could have found one, but that might have been a bit much. She didn’t want to do it too brown. “Jeannette did have it.”

  There was a discreet rattle of china as Laura set the tray with its cup, coffee pot, and twist of white powder down on the side of the desk, a discrete distance from the sheaf of papers fanned out in front of Jaouen. Lifting the coffee pot, she began to pour into the single cup.

  Jaouen eyed the small twist of white powder. “Knowing Jeannette, I can only hope she didn’t send me an emetic instead.”

  Laura only just managed to keep the coffee from spilling.

  “Aren’t those generally liquid?” she said, as if it were a matter of the most abstract interest. “It would be hard to disguise in a twist of paper.”

  She set the pot down again on the tray, handle and spout perfectly aligned. She made good coffee. It smelled lovely, thick and rich.

  She could see Jaouen breathing in the steam with appreciation. “You would be surprised at what people can do.”

  “Not after years of small children,” Laura told him.

  In an unconscious gesture, Jaouen lifted his glasses to rub his hand across his eyes. One ear-piece was slightly crooked.

  To see Jaouen with his eyeglasses off was a bit like catching Hercules without his club, or Samson without his hair. His cheeks, speckled with a reddish growth of beard, seemed to have sunken into themselves, throwing into prominence the strong lines of nose and cheekbones.

  “You need rest,” Laura said without thinking, as though he were one of her charges.

  Jaouen’s lips curled. “I would never have thought of that myself.”

  Apparently, tired men weren’t so very different from tired ten-year-olds. They all got cranky.

  “Cream?” she asked, reaching for the dainty cream jug, the handle shaped like the wings of a bird.

  “Yes. And three spoonfuls of sugar.” Catching the look Laura gave him, he laughed a rough laugh that wasn’t much of a laugh at all. “My wife always mocked me for it. She preferred to take it black.”

  His wife. The divine Miss Julie. Without a word, Laura stirred the requested sugar into the cup. She made sure they were generous spoonfuls. Among other things, the taste would mask any oddity in the powder.

  She could feel Jaouen’s eyes following her movements as she measured each well-rounded spoon of sugar into the cup.

  Abruptly, he said, “I owe you an apology for snapping at you like that. It was uncalled for. I should have told you what my expectations were.”

  Laura took her time stirring the sugar, around and around, the cream making milky swirls on the dark surface of the coffee. “It is within sir’s prerogative.”

  She could hear the creak as Jaouen shifted in his chair. “Just because one has a prerogative doesn’t mean one should abuse it. We fought a revolution over that.”

  Watching him, his angular face shadowed with sleeplessness, Laura came to a decision. He was trying to deal fairly with her; she could at least make the pretense of dealing fairly with him.

  As she set the coffee down before him, she said, “You were not without cause. Someone did stop us on the way back. He said he worked with you.”

  Jaouen’s hand stilled on the handle of the coffee cup. “Did he give you his name?”

  Laura held out the white twist of sleeping powder to him, feeling like Lady Macbeth about to murder sleep. Nonsense, of course. She wasn’t baring his breast to the blade, just giving him a few hours of unencumbered slumber.

  But in that sleep, who knew what dreams might come?

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Now she was mixing her Shakespeare. He wasn’t banded in a nutshell, and she wasn’t king of infinite space. Enough was enough already.

  Laura surrendered the sleeping powder to her employer. “He said his name was Delaroche. Gaston Delaroche.”

  Jaouen cursed so vigorously that Laura blinked at him in surprise. Heavens. Was that what they were doing in Nantes these days?

  Jaouen grimaced. “Forgive me,” he said. Ripping open the paper, he shook the white powder into his coffee. “I work all day in conditions that—let us say that they do not encourage delicacy.”

  Laura watched the white powder dissolving into the coffee. “There is no need for delicacy. I may spend my days in the schoolroom, but I am no schoolgirl.”

  “No. I can see that.” Jaouen’s attention fixed on Laura with a suddenness and intensity that felt like a stab to the stomach with Miss Gwen’s parasol.

  So that was the trick of it, thought Laura dizzily. A totality of concentration, fixed on one object at any given time. Whatever task André Jaouen had at hand, he gave it his entire and unbroken concentration. To be on the receiving end of that was, to say the least, jarring.

  He shrugged, breaking the connection. “Even so. What did Delaroche say to you?”

  Laura scrambled to recall herself. “He greeted the children by name.”

  Jaouen gave another of those quick, keen looks, like the flash of a bird’s wing on a summer day. “He recognized them?”

  Laura frowned, remembering. “He recognized Gabrielle. He called to her by name first.”

  Jaouen cursed again, but softly this time.

  Laura held up a hand. “You needn’t bother apologizing. Monsieur Delaroche said he was a colleague of yours. He offered us a ride in his carriage.”

  Jaouen pierced her with his gaze. “Which you did not accept.”

  “I did not know if you wished to encourage the association.”

  There had been something off about the man, something that made the hairs on the back of her neck prickle. She didn’t mention that bit. Prickling hairs were hardly a guide for conduct. Next she would be consulting the entrails of birds, like the Ancient Romans.

  Jaouen let out a quick, sharp exhalation. “Well done.” Seeming to realize that some explanation was called for, he said briefly, “I prefer not to mix my professional obligations with my familial ones.”

  That was his explanation? Laura had heard better from four-year-olds with jam still smeared across their faces and bits of broken tart in their laps.

  Jaouen tapped his finger against the side of the coffee cup.

  Drink, thought Laura. Drink, already.

  He didn’t.

  “You did well to tell me of this.”

  “Is there anyone else I should know to avoid?” Laura asked quietly. “Or from whom the children should be kept?”

  Jaouen grimaced. “Everyone?”

  Laura suspected he wasn’t entirely joking. “Shall I bring you anything else? Bread, cheese?” More sleeping powder? “Your coffee must be getting cold. I can bring you a fresh pot.”

  He didn’t take the hint. The cup sat untouched, steam curling harmlessly into the air, cooling by the moment, the precious powder wasted, of use only to the bright-winged cockatoo drowned at the bottom of the cup. Laura hoped it, at least, was enjoying a good slumber.

  “No need.” Jaouen sketched a quick, impatient gesture. “I didn’t hire you to play housemaid.”

  “Someone has to.”

  Jaouen rocked back in his
chair. “Are you saying my staff is inadequate?”

  “Woefully.”

  “Jeannette keeps the nursery clean and comfortable,” he said, as though that were all that mattered.

  “What about the rest of the house? What about you?”

  Jaouen lifted both brows. “We good servants of the Revolution have no need for the baser creature comforts.”

  Laura drew a finger along the edge of the desk, collecting a little pile of dust as she went. “Brutus may have been a brave man, but dust still made him sneeze.”

  “Are you offering to ply the duster?”

  “I’m offering to interview the maids.”

  “Unnecessary,” said Jaouen. “I only entertain guests once a fortnight, and I have a hired staff who come specially. As for the rest”—with one precise flick of the finger, he made short work of Laura’s dust pile—“if to dust we must go, I can scarcely object to a bit of it on my desk.”

  “One might as well say that since we are bound for the grave, we ought to take our rest in a coffin.”

  “Sophistry, Mademoiselle Griscogne.” But she sensed that he was enjoying himself. He was sitting up straighter in his chair, a light in his eyes despite the purple bags beneath them. “Is that what you intend to teach my children?”

  “Rhetoric, Monsieur Jaouen,” Laura corrected. “And I shall, as soon as I have the proper texts at my disposal.”

  “Heaven help us.” His hand hovered for a moment over the coffee cup and went instead to the papers, which he shuffled in a way that signified the interview was over.

  Why wouldn’t he drink?

  “Will there be anything else?” Laura asked in desperation. How could she time the action of the drug if she didn’t see him imbibe it?

  He looked up, abstractedly, a piece of paper half-lifted. Laura tried to read sideways, but all she could make out were the words “question,” “asked,” and something that looked a bit like “squirrel,” but couldn’t be unless the new administration was now after nuts.

  “Tell the children I wish them a good night.” He thought for a moment and came up with, “Wish them sweet dreams.”