Лорен Уиллиг: The Orchid Affair

It was comforting to know that the intimidating M. Jaouen had an Achilles’ heel, even if that Achilles’ heel was only a cousin by marriage. It made him more human, somehow. And human meant fallible. Fallible was good, especially for her purposes.

“I will. Sir.”

Jaouen nodded brusquely, her message received and accepted. Hat in one hand, cane in the other, he started for the carriage. At the last moment, just beyond the protective cover of the awning, Jaouen jerked his head back over his shoulder. Laura shot to attention.

“Why did you leave your last position?” he asked abruptly.

“My pupil married.” If he had hoped to shock her into an admission, he would be disappointed. Her pupil had married in June, leaving her once more without a situation. The family had been kind; they had kept her on through the wedding, but there was a limit to the charity she was willing to accept. “She had no need for a governess anymore.”

But the Pink Carnation had had need of an agent.

Rain pocked Jaouen’s glasses as he treated her to another long, thoughtful look. He held his hat in one hand but didn’t bother to put it on, despite the rivulets of rain that silvered his hair and dampened his coat. “An occupational hazard?”

Laura permitted herself a grim smile. “One of the most hazardous.”

She had never thought much of matrimony herself—her parents had set no favorable example—but it had been distinctly unsettling to make a place for oneself only to be flung out into the world again. And again and again. Some of them, the sentimental ones, sent letters for a time, but those generally tailed off within the first year, as the daily demands of the domestic state outweighed sentimental recollections of the schoolroom.

“You shan’t have to worry about that with Gabrielle. Yet.”

She wouldn’t be around long enough to worry about that.

“Indeed,” she agreed. Noncommittal replies were always best in dealing with employers. Yes, sir; no, sir; indeed, sir. It came out by rote.

Jaouen clapped his hat onto his head. “Tomorrow morning,” he said. “The children will be expecting you.”

Jean the gatekeeper slammed the door shut behind Jaouen as he swung up into the carriage. The horses’ nostrils flared, their breath steaming in the cold air as the coachman clucked to them, setting them into motion. Through the rapidly misting glass of the window, Jaouen was nothing more than a silhouette, a blurred image in tans and browns.

That was it. She had done it. She had really done it. Blood surged to Laura’s cheeks and fingertips, sending a rush of warmth tingling through her despite the freezing wind gluing her soaking skirts to her legs. Whatever else came of it, the first step was accomplished; she was a member of Jaouen’s household. She was in.

Between the rain and the sound of hooves against the cobbles, Laura could just barely hear her new employer call out his instructions to the coachman.

“To the Abbaye Prison. As fast as you can.”

Laura swallowed hard, turning her face away from a sudden gust of wind that tore at her bonnet strings and snatched away the very breath from her throat.

Oh, she was in all right. Way over her head.

The carriage rocked abruptly forward and then back as it came to a stop in front of the Prison de l’Abbaye. The stone bulk of the Abbaye squatted sullenly in front of the carriage, the towers set in each side jutting out like a pair of angry elbows. Torches illuminated the entrance, burning greasily against the early dark of a wet winter night.

“So kind of you to finally join us.” A small man in unrelieved black stepped out from under the lee of the portal at the entrance of the Abbaye Prison.

“Us?” André said mildly, taking his time climbing down from the carriage. He’d be damned if he’d hurry for the likes of Gaston Delaroche. “I had no idea this was to be an ensemble event.”

Delaroche positioned himself so that the guttering torches on either side of the entrance cast an eerie glow over the polished silver of his coat buttons, bathing him in an unnatural and unholy light.

Bloody stagy, if you asked André’s opinion, which no one had.

Delaroche liked to claim he had once been the second most feared man in France. André would have put his position at fourth or fifth at best. Voicing that opinion had not endeared André to Delaroche.

“How very . . . unlike you to be tardy, Jaouen.” Delaroche bared a set of unnaturally yellowed teeth. André suspected him of buffing them with tobacco and a side of tea leaves. “It is, I suppose, no surprise that you would be distracted—now that your children are come from Nantes.”

There was no point in asking him how he knew. They were all in the business of knowledge. Any self-respecting senior official in the Ministry of Police employed his own private system of informers, above and apart from those sanctioned by the state. They spent as much time monitoring one another as they did the enemy.

André forced himself to shrug. “A nursery is a nursery, whether in Paris or Nantes. They provide no impediment to my duties.”

Delaroche’s eyes glinted red in the torchlight. “Paris is a far cry from Nantes, my friend. So much more . . . dangerous.”

Rain ran beneath André’s collar from the back of his hat, sending an icy sluice down his spine. André favored Delaroche with a hard stare. “Can any relation of Fouché, however young, be deemed to be in danger? They are not unprotected,” he added pointedly.

Delaroche shrugged, a shrug that made André want to take him by the shoulders and shake him like the little rat that he was. “Even so,” he said.

Even so? Even so ? What in all the blazes was that supposed to mean?

André pictured his children, Gabrielle, with her snub nose, her plump child’s cheeks, her hair that was beginning to lose its baby curl and the eyes that looked so uncannily like his own; Pierre-André with Julie’s open, smiling countenance and hair like the gilded angels’ wings in a church fresco, trusting, open, laughing. He pictured them as he had seen them the night before, asleep in bed, their limbs so small beneath the blankets Jeannette had drawn up over them, their faces smooth and vulnerable in sleep. They were so small, his children, so vulnerable, such tempting hostages to fortune.

Why did Père Beniet have to die? And why did he have to die now ?

André seethed with the same mingled grief and anger that had wrung through him since the news had arrived from Nantes. Grief at the loss of a man who had been more of a father than his own father had ever been: old M. Beniet, first his tutor, later his father-in-law. Anger at Père Beniet’s leaving them, and leaving them at so inopportune a moment. Not that mortality left any man much room for choice. André knew his anger was illogical, but that didn’t stop him from feeling it. How could his old tutor, who had always been so sage, have misjudged so radically at the last?

A chicken bone. Père Beniet had choked on a chicken bone. A great soul brought low by a fragment of fowl. There were times when the divinity had a positively mordant sense of humor. All his knowledge, all his experience, brought to nothing against a splinter of bone lurking between a dumpling and a cabbage leaf in an innocent-seeming bowl of stew.

If that chicken hadn’t been dead already, André could have cheerfully wrung its neck. Gabrielle and Pierre-André had been safe in Nantes, safe and well cared for, well away from the tangled intrigues of Paris. Well away from men like Gaston Delaroche.

André glanced at Delaroche, at Delaroche who resented his ascent, who wanted Fouché’s confidence for his own. There was no point in saying that Delaroche wouldn’t. Delaroche would. When it came to his position, there was nothing Gaston Delaroche wouldn’t do. Especially now.