Лорен Уиллиг: The Orchid Affair

The gatekeeper shrugged, and started to turn away.

Laura resisted the urge to reach through the bars, grab him by the collar, and shake.

“The governess,” she called after him, trying to keep any touch of desperation from her voice. She refused to believe her mission could end like this, this ignominiously, this early. This moistly. “I am the governess.”

“Around the back,” the gatekeeper repeated and spat for good measure.

Around the back? The house was a good mile around. Would it really have been so much bother to have let her in through the front? What had happened to liberté, égalité and fraternité ? Apparently, those sentiments didn’t extend to governesses.

Laura took a step back, landing in a puddle that went clear up to her ankle. She could feel the icy water soaking through the worn kid leather of her sensible boot. At least, it would have been sensible, if it hadn’t had a hole the size of Notre-Dame in the sole. Laura took a deep breath in and out through her nose. Right. If he wanted her around the back, around the back it was. There was no point in starting off on the wrong foot by fighting with the gatekeeper. Even if the man was a petty cretin who shouldn’t be trusted with a latchkey.

Temper, she reminded herself. Temper. She had been a semi-servant for years enough now that one would think she was immune to such slights.

Gathering up the sodden folds of her pelisse (dark brown wool, sensible, warm, didn’t show the dirt, largely because it had already been designed to look like dirt), Laura trudged the length of the street, skidding a bit as her sodden shoes slipped and slid on the rounded cobbles. The Hôtel de Bac was in the heart of the Marais, among a twisted welter of ancient streets, most without sidewalks. During her long years in England, Laura had never thought she would miss London, but she did miss the sidewalks. And the tea.

Mmm, tea. Hot, amber liquid with curls of steam rising from the top, the curved sides of the cup warm against one’s palms on a cold day....

This had been her choice, she reminded herself. No one had placed a knife to her neck and demanded she go. She could very well have stayed in England and done exactly as she had done for the past sixteen years. She could have walked primly down the sidewalked streets, herding her charges in front of her, yanking them back from horses’ hooves and mud puddles and bits of interesting masonry; she could have poured her tea from the nursery teapot, watching the steam curl from the cup and knowing that she was seeing in those endless curls a lifetime of the same streets, the same tea, the same high-pitched voices whining, “Miss Grey! Miss Grey!”

She didn’t want to be Miss Grey anymore. Miss Grey might have warm hands and dry feet, but she wanted to be Laura again, before it was too late and the stony edifice that was Miss Grey closed entirely around her. It was time to get her feet wet.

Laura looked down at the soaking mess of her shoes. It was a pity Fate had to take her quite so literally.

The gatekeeper was waiting for her by the side entrance. He had an umbrella—which he held over his own head. Unlike the main gate, this one was designed for use rather than show, two thick slabs of dark wood leading onto a square stone courtyard. He opened the gate just wide enough for her to wiggle through, in an undignified sideways shuffle. That was, she was sure, quite intentional.

Rain oozed down the gray stone of the building, seeping through the cracks in the masonry, puddling in the crevices in the paving. Tucked away in a corner, a stone angel wept over the round mouth of a well, raindrops dripping down her face like tears. The long windows were the same unforgiving gray as the stone.

After the bright, modern town houses of Mayfair, the great bulk of the seventeenth-century mansion looked archaic and more than a little threatening.

From very long ago, a whisper of memory presented itself, of the fairy stories so in vogue in the fashionable salons of her youth, of castles under curses, their ruined halls echoing to the fearsome tread of the ogre as a captive princess shivered in her tower.

Laura didn’t believe in fairy stories. Any ogres here would be of the human variety.

One ogre, to be precise. André Jaouen. Thirty-six years old. Formerly an avocat of Nantes. Now employed at the Préfecture de Paris under the ostensible supervision of Louis-Nicolas Dubois. Commonly known to be a protégé of Bonaparte’s Chief of Police, Joseph Fouché, to whom he bore a distant relation. It was his department through which any word of suspicious personages in Paris would come. It was his job to hunt down and secure these threats to the Republic.

Which meant that it was Laura’s job to get the information to the Pink Carnation before he could get to them.

They had dubbed her the Orchid—the Silver Orchid. The Carnation had chosen the name, with her usual perspicacity. It seemed appropriate, thought Laura, for the Carnation to have named her after a flower that drew its sustenance from others, dependent on more firmly rooted flora for its very existence.

Her mission was simple enough. She was to embed herself into the household of the assistant to the Prefect of Police. There, she was to keep an eye out for suspicious behavior and useful information, taking specific instructions from the Pink Carnation as directed.

Just a simple little task. Nothing to write home about. She had nothing to do but outwit a man whose very business was the outwitting of others, with no training but sixteen years of governessing and a six-month course at a spy school in Sussex executed in a way that could only be called cheerfully haphazard. The Selwicks had taught her to blacken her teeth with soot and gum (just in case she wanted to play a demented old hag); to ask the way to Rouen in a thick Norman accent; and to swing on a rope through a window without breaking the glass or herself. None of these skills seemed entirely applicable to her current situation.

Laura wasn’t under any illusions as to her qualifications. The Pink Carnation would have been happier inserting a maid into Jaouen’s household, or a groom—someone with more experience in the field, someone less conspicuous, someone with a proven record—but Jaouen hadn’t needed a maid or a groom. He had needed a governess, and governess she was.

If there was one role she could play convincingly, it was the one she had lived for the past sixteen years. She just had to remember that.

Laura looked levelly at the gatekeeper, trying not to wince at the rain that blew below her bonnet rim, plastering wet strands of hair against her face.

“Hello,” she said, as if she hadn’t been forced to walk half a mile in the rain when there had been a perfectly good gate right there. “I am the governess. Your master is expecting me.”

The gatekeeper jerked his head brusquely to the side. “This way.”

There had been a formal entrance on the other side, equipped with a grand porte cochere designed to keep the rain off more privileged heads than hers. No such luxuries for a potential governess. Shivering, Laura picked her way along behind the gatekeeper across the uncovered courtyard, trying to avoid the slicks of mud where the stone had cracked and crumbled, ruinous with neglect. Whatever equality the Revolution had preached, it didn’t extend to domestic staff.

Laura squelched her way down an uncarpeted corridor after the gatekeeper, her sodden shoes leaving damp prints on the floor. If possible, it felt even colder inside than out. Despite the frost on the windows, there were no fires in any of the grates. The Hôtel de Bac was as cold as the grave.

Pushing open a door, the gatekeeper managed to force two full syllables through his lips. “Wait here.”