The Orchid Affair

Chapter 13

Having satisfied themselves that the room contained no further items of interest, Delaroche and André went their separate ways, Delaroche to lay his own intricate plans, André to write up his report.

He would be wanted at the Prefecture, he knew. Not necessarily by the Prefect, but by Fouché, who would expect André to monitor the questioning of Cadoudal’s manservant, not so much for the edification of the Ministry as for that of Fouché. André reported directly to Fouché; Dubois, the Prefect, didn’t.

It was going to be another long night.

André directed the carriage to drop him at the Hôtel de Bac, instructing the coachman to be ready to depart again within the half hour. If he was to spend the night at the Prefecture, he could at least have a change of linen.

“Did Daubier leave any message for me?” he asked Jean as he came in.

Jean spit in negation.

Fair enough. He would see Daubier next Wednesday, for the monthly meeting of the gathering of the artists. Daubier, who, it appeared, had once dandled André’s governess upon his knee.

Now, there was an image.

Shaking his head, André found himself making his way not to his own rooms, but to the suite given over to the children. Terrifying to think that such an insubstantial thing, one life—his—stood between his children and desolation.

A fire crackled in the schoolroom hearth when he entered, but the children weren’t there. He could hear their voices through the door in the far wall, the one that led to the nursery. From the sounds of it, Jeannette was scrubbing away the debris of the day, complaining bitterly about the durable nature of ink on skin.

In the schoolroom, there was only Mlle. Griscogne, her head bent over a book. Her hair was pulled back, revealing the nape of her neck as she leaned forward over her book.

It made her, thought André, seem surprisingly vulnerable, with the short wisps of hair dark against the paler skin beneath. Or maybe it only seemed so now that he had seen her without her usual armor, surprised into humanity.

That armor was off now. She was entirely absorbed in her reading, her hands braced on either side of the book, leaning forward as though intent on absorbing the words with her whole body rather than just her eyes.

Was it Aesop’s Fables? Mlle. Griscogne’s arm blocked his view, but he could see that this book was smaller and thinner. The cover was red rather than blue. It was older, too, the leather worn off along the edges.

“What are you reading?” he asked.

“Sir!” Slamming the book shut, Mlle. Griscogne twisted around. Her cheeks were flushed, warm with either embarrassment or the wind.

“Is it a romance?” He had trouble picturing his professionally prim governess wallowing in gothic fantasies. On the other hand, it appeared that little about his governess was as it seemed. Michel de Griscogne’s little girl, indeed.

“I leave those to Gabrielle.” Mlle. Griscogne kept her hand pressed protectively to the cover of the book. “Were you looking for Gabrielle and Pierre-André? If you wanted them, the children are in the nursery.”

That was just what he had wanted, but André paused for a moment. “Why didn’t you tell me that you were the daughter of one of the foremost sculptors of our generation?”

“And a beautiful woman who made beautiful poetry,” she reminded him.

“Daubier is nothing if not exuberant in his descriptions,” André agreed. “But that doesn’t answer the question.”

She lifted her hands in the universal gesture of negation. “It didn’t seem relevant to my employment. You were employing me, not my parents.”

André’s gaze dropped to the book on the desk, the gold curlicues outlining the name of the volume and the author. Good Lord, where had that come from? Memory stirred, of Julie, sitting in Père Beniet’s garden, the apple tree in bloom above them and the sun slanting through the leaves, coffee and iced cakes on a small stone table, as he read aloud to her from the poems of Chiara di Veneti.

Chiara of Venice.

What had Daubier called his governess’ mother? Chiaretta? My mother was Venetian, Mlle. Griscogne had said. Chiaretta of Venice.

Following his gaze, Mlle. Griscogne made an abortive grab for the book. “I didn’t mean to pry,” she said quickly. “Gabrielle brought the book down. I thought—”

André interrupted her. “Your mother was Chiara di Veneti?”

He still couldn’t quite get his mind around it. Those lush, sensual verses of love had been written by Mlle. Griscogne’s mother?

“It might be good for her to—what?”

“This. You.” André tapped a finger against the cover of the book, the elaborate curls that framed the author’s name. “You are Chiara di Veneti’s daughter.”

Mlle. Griscogne bit her lip. “You say it as though it were strange.”

Strange? It was inconceivable. “You don’t know how many times I read those poems. They were—”

“Awe-inspiring?” she provided. “Groundbreaking? Life-changing?”

The words sounded obscurely familiar, but André couldn’t quite place why. “All of that. What in the devil are you doing as a governess?”

Mlle. Griscogne turned away from him, busying herself picking up Pierre-André’s discarded toy soldiers. “They were my mother’s poems, not mine. One can’t eat a memory. I had to get my living somehow.”

There was a wooden box open on the floor. Picking it up, André held it out to the governess. With a nod of thanks, she dropped the soldiers into it. “How old were you when they died?”

“Sixteen,” she said crisply, closing the lid on the toy soldiers. “Old enough.”

Considerably older than his children, but still. What would Gabrielle do in a similar situation? The very thought of it made the sweat start beneath André’s arms, the prickling sweat of fear.

“Was there no one who would take you in?”

Mlle. Griscogne’s lips lifted slightly at the corners. For a moment, he could see her as she had been in Daubier’s painting all those years ago, the girl with the finch, wide-eyed and alive with possibility. “Monsieur Daubier just offered,” she said.

“Now?”

She nodded.

“A bit late, isn’t he?” said André, trying not to be annoyed.

Mlle. Griscogne scanned the rug for stray soldiers. “It was a kind impulse.”

“Depriving me of my governess?”

His children’s governess, technically. Despite the fact that she had lived under his roof for more than a month now, that was all he had known of her, that she was a governess, that she wore gray, that she came well recommended. He had never imagined that she might be the daughter of a poetess, or the girl with the finch—because he had never bothered to ask. But for that chance encounter with Daubier, he would never have known.

It was, as she had pointed out, not exactly relevant to her employment, but André couldn’t help but feel that it was relevant all the same.

She seemed less formidable, somehow, and not just because their earlier encounter had knocked her hair loose. He remembered the feeling of warm flesh beneath his fingers, the curve of her back beneath his hand, not made of steel but of skin and bone.

On impulse, André asked, “Did you have a Christian name, in this past life of yours?”

Mlle. Griscogne bent down to pick up a cavalry horse, the mane missing. “A name, but not a very Christian one. They called me Laura.”

“After Petrarch’s muse?” It made sense for one poet to nod to another.

Mlle. Griscogne bedded the horse down among its fellows. “They were thinking more of the laurel crown,” she said wryly. “The coronet of victors and the artist’s reward. I think they hoped it would encourage me to garner laurels.” She busied herself sorting soldiers. “They were disappointed.”

“Julie gave Gabrielle a paintbrush before she could talk.” André wasn’t sure where the words had come from, they just came out.

“What happened?”

“She chewed it,” said André dryly.

He surprised a laugh out of her, a proper laugh. André found himself laughing with her, although at the time it had been anything but comical. He wasn’t quite sure what Julie had expected from a teething child, but she had taken it as a personal affront.

“Monsieur Daubier was always terribly kind about my daubs,” Mlle. Griscogne said reminiscently. “But I could tell he was thinking, Poor girl, her paintings will never hang in the Royal Academy.”

André chuckled, as he was meant to, but he wondered about the little girl she had been. “Did you want them to?”

The question seemed to catch her off guard. “No,” she said, after a moment. “Having grown up with two artists, I’m not sure I would want to be one. It isn’t a very orderly life.”

That was one way of putting it.

He looked around the schoolroom, all the books in their places, all the toys in order. The only thing out of place was the scarlet volume of poetry, a relic from another time and place: her childhood, his youth.

“Once a month, I hold a salon of sorts,” André said abruptly. “It’s nothing terribly formal, mostly artists of various sorts. Painters and poets and writers.”

“How nice,” she said politely.

André clasped his hands behind his back. “It all started when Ju—when my wife was alive. I’ve kept it up since, more out of habit than anything else.”

Mlle. Griscogne was all that was professional. “Would you like the children to come down and recite? I’ve been teaching them excerpts from Racine and Corneille. Gabrielle does a lovely job with the Count’s speech from Le Cid.”

“No!” André said quickly. That was all he needed, to draw more attention to the presence of his children. “No. It wouldn’t be appropriate. My guests are not always the most . . . circumspect of people.”

“You mean they drink and curse,” said Mlle. Griscogne calmly. Her matter-of-fact manner made an odd contrast with her demure façade. But then, she had grown up with Chiara di Veneti.

“They also recite love poetry.” André nodded towards the red book on the table. “Instructive for the children, but not for a few more years, I think.”

“If you want me to make sure they stay out of the way, that can be easily arranged,” she said. “The house is certainly large enough to keep them well out of your way.”

He was making a muddle of this. “No, no,” he said abstractedly. “Jeannette can manage that.”

Mlle. Griscogne looked at him quizzically. “Then . . . do you need assistance with the refreshments?”

André took a deep breath, feeling like a green boy asking a girl into a garden. Absurd, since there was no garden. And Mlle. Griscogne was certainly no girl. There was no need to make a to-do about a simple invitation.

“What I meant to ask was whether you would like to come. To attend. As a guest.”

She looked genuinely confused. “You’re inviting me? To attend?”

“That generally is what ‘guest’ means.” André retreated towards the nursery, speaking rapidly. “The invitation is there, should you choose to accept it. It certainly isn’t a requirement of your job. I thought Daubier might be glad of a chance to see you, that’s all. And you might find other acquaintances of your parents there.”

Stopping abruptly at the door of the nursery, André shrugged. “I leave it to you. It’s your decision whether you want to attend or not.”

He reached for the handle of the door. From the sputtering noises inside, Jeannette was rubbing down Pierre-André’s face, cleaning off the day’s accumulation of dust, jam, and anything else that might reasonably or unreasonably adhere to the face of an active five-year-old boy.

Mlle. Griscogne’s voice arrested him just as he put his hand to the handle.

“It’s very kind of you,” she said. “But you needn’t do this just because my father was the foremost sculptor of his generation.”

André looked at her for a long moment, at the woman who used to be the girl with the finch.

“I’m not doing it for him,” he said, and went to join his children.