The Orchid Affair

Chapter 14

Before joining Serena for drinks, Colin and I went for a stroll along the Seine.

At some point over the course of the afternoon, the sky had cleared. As if repenting of its earlier behavior, it was treating us to a truly spectacular sunset. The spires of Notre-Dame floated in the water of the Seine against a backdrop of red and purple as fantastical as anything from an artist’s absinthe-flavored imagination.

Strolling beside Colin, handsome in his dark blue sport coat and flannels, I felt like something out of an old Audrey Hepburn movie.

I winced as my inadequately shod foot landed in a puddle. All right, scrap the Hepburn bit. One could put on the black cocktail dress, but the whole grace and charm thing was harder. And a puddle was still a puddle. The rain might have cleared, but the ground hadn’t. My open-toed heels kept slipping and sliding on the cracked and damp stone of the street.

We were meeting Serena at a café in the Place des Vosges, only a few yards from the gallery where Colin’s mother’s party was being held, but in the meantime we were both content just to walk, breathing in the cool, fresh air of a March evening after rain. Across the way, the long façade of the Louvre glowed golden in the setting sun, and next to it, the empty space where the Tuileries Palace had once been. Somewhere on the far bank, to the right of the palaces, set farther back from the river, was the house that had once been the Hôtel de Bac, where Laura Griscogne had played her dangerous game of infiltration. I wondered whether it was still there now, turned into a museum like the Cognacq-Jay or broken into flats and offices. Or, perhaps, like the Tuileries or the Abbey Prison, gone altogether now, leaving not even a blue plaque behind to mark its passing. Look on, ye mighty, and despair?

“Crap!” I’d lost the end of my pashmina again. So much for deep thoughts. I lurched for it, hoping to catch it before it trailed its way into a puddle.

Colin, more efficient than I, scooped up the errant end and tucked it up for me, anchoring it under his arm.

“Thanks,” I said.

“All part of the service.”

I looked over at my boyfriend, who was watching the boats go by on the water, and felt a deep surge of gratitude that we were where we were, with all the afternoon’s accidents and alarums behind us. “I’m sorry to have been such a brat earlier.”

“I wouldn’t have said you were a brat.”

Nice save, there. Brat was an Americanism. “Shrew, virago, harpy . . .”

“I should have checked the reservation.” We were still in the warm and gooey make-up stage, where everyone is guiltier-than-thou and a bit of self-flagellation is par for the course. “It never occurred to me that they would put Serena in with us.”

“And especially in that room!” I chimed in.

“I’ve grown rather fond of it,” said Colin blandly, and my cheeks went pink. We’d had a very nice little make-up session there before changing for the party. Not to mention while changing for the party.

Not appropriate thoughts with just an hour to go before meeting his family.

“Well, anyway, I’m sorry for being cranky at you. I’m just a little”—I sketched a gesture in the air—“I don’t know.”

Colin’s lips twisted in a wry expression. “So am I,” he agreed. “Just a little.”

“Are you . . .” I had no idea what I was trying to ask. “Nervous?”

When it came down to it, I didn’t have much of an idea of how Colin felt about his mother and stepfather. We’d skirted around the topic, when circumstances had made it impossible to ignore, but Colin had deflected any attempt to extract anything resembling emotion. All I knew were the bare bones of the situation, not how Colin felt about it.

I got the impression that all wasn’t exactly warm and cozy, but not because Colin had ever precisely said so. It was the little comments; the twist of the lips, the unguarded expression—all such ephemeral things, like the play of light on water, there one minute, gone the next. If I asked him about his family, Colin clammed up. It was only when I didn’t ask that he volunteered.

It was like playing that child’s game—red light, green light, one, two three—creeping and freezing, sent back to the starting line if you tried to move too fast.

This time, I could practically see the light flip to red. “These art dos always make me nervous,” said Colin lightly. “I’m afraid I’ll spill champagne on a Klimt. Look—have you seen the booksellers?”

Accepting the tacit change of topic, I let him draw me in his wake to the kiosks lined up along the side of the walkway, the green metal booths bolted into the stone walls. If he didn’t want to talk about it, I wasn’t going to force him.

If, however, after several drinks, he chose to make his feelings known, that was another matter entirely.

But what if, contrary to everything I’d been taught in every after-school special, talking about things didn’t make them better? What if it only made them harder? There was something to be said for the stiff-upper-lip model. By discussing something, one made it real, gave it—in the words of Shakespeare—a local habitation and a name. There was no ignoring it after that. Maybe it was better for both of us to let Colin display to me the person he wanted to be, not the person circumstance forced upon him.

“May I ’elp you?” The stallholder eyed us suspiciously, as though suspecting us of having untoward designs on the merchandise.

I put down the book I was holding, though not before sneaking a quick glimpse at the price tag. Eek. This was an antiquarian bookseller, not a junk shop, and the extra zeros reflected that.

“Did you see this?” asked Colin, undaunted by the bookseller’s glare or the price tags. He held up a small book with torn paisley paper covers. It was an edition of Ronsard’s poems, a very old edition judging by the bindings.

“Mmm,” I said, scanning the rows. Old books exert a strange fascination for me—their smell, their feel, their history; wondering who might have owned them, how they lived, what they felt. I spotted several early editions of Dumas and Hugo, as well as authors I had never heard of before. They were fairly bulky things, those nineteenth-century tomes, most in several-volume sets.

There were some smaller books among them. I reached for one at random, pulling it out. It was a slim volume, the red leather cover worn in places, the pages yellowed and spotted with age. The gold lettering on the cover had flaked away, making it impossible to read.

I flipped to the title page.

Venus’ Feast. Chiara di Veneti. Chansons d’Amor.

A chill went down my spine. That was—well, too much of a coincidence. Chiara di Veneti had been, by modern academic standards, a minor poet of the eighteenth century. She had also been the mother of Laura Grey, the Silver Orchid.

I wouldn’t have heard of her but for my research on the Selwick spy school, which led me to Miss Grey, aka Laure Griscogne. She wasn’t the sort generally included in AP French exams, partly due to the extreme raciness of some of her subject matter. Admittedly, it had been a racy era, but di Veneti put the author of Dangerous Liaisons to shame.

It boggled my mind that she had been the mother of prim and proper Miss Grey, described by Lady Henrietta Selwick as “a forbidding, gray-toned thing who played the piano as though she were solving a mathematical equation, all logic and no passion.”

I thought of Colin’s mother and the pictures I had seen of her. A free spirit, Colin’s great-aunt had called her, and not in a complimentary way. I looked at Colin, solid and dependable beside me, having assumed his parents’ cares as well as his own. He kept an eye on his sister, looked after his aunt, made sure the family home wasn’t run into the ground. At the same time, I certainly wouldn’t call him all logic and no passion. The four walls of Room 403 could definitely attest to that.

I looked back down at the little red book in my hands. André Jaouen’s wife had possessed a copy of Venus’ Feast. Several contemporaries had mentioned it, and the droll illustrations with which she had decorated the margins. Moving very carefully, as if afraid to scare away the pictures, I slowly turned a page.

The pages were pristine, unmarked. Well, if by pristine you mean aside from the inevitable brown of mold and some tears around the edges where the old paper had ripped with time and turning.

I suppressed an entirely unreasonable sense of disappointment. Did I really think I was going to stumble on Julie Beniet’s copy of Venus’ Feast at a secondhand stall on the Seine? All by sheer felicity? Felicity would really have to be working overtime there. The Beniet copy was probably in a museum somewhere. Either that, or long since scribbled in by small children, eaten by mice, or dropped in someone’s bath. It was coincidence enough finding any copy of the poems. I wasn’t sure it was the same edition—according to the quick encyclopedia search I had done on Laura’s mother, Venus’s Feast had been a runaway bestseller, rocketing through multiple printings in the course of just a few years—but if it wasn’t, it was close.

“Excellent condition,” said the bookseller in a thick accent. “Very rare.”

“Not so rare,” I said. “Didn’t Veneti go through multiple printings?”

“What did you find?” asked Colin, putting down his own book to come up behind me.

“Oh, just some old poetry.” I made as if to put it down. “Sentimental stuff of the late eighteenth century. Nothing too exciting.”

“Very good price,” said the bookseller.

Colin consulted his watch, looking as bored as it was possible for anyone to look. “We should be going. We’re going to be late for drinks.”

We were early for drinks. I flashed the bookseller an apologetic smile, flipped the corner of my pashmina back over my shoulder, and started to turn.

“For you,” said the bookseller, “forty euros.”

The price on the sticker was fifty. Eighteenth-century poetry must be selling particularly poorly this year.

Colin got him down to thirty. Before I could extract my wallet from my impractical, beaded evening purse, he had paid the man and tucked the book into my hand.

“Happy birthday,” he said.

“My birthday was in November.”

“Consider it a deposit on next year’s birthday,” he said, with that little crinkle at the corner of his eyes that still made my heart go flutter.

I liked the sound of “next year.” Technically, I would be back at Harvard by next year . . . but I didn’t want to think about that, not right now. It was enough that he was thinking ahead.

We had turned to cross one of the many bridges that span the Seine. Don’t ask me which; I can never remember things like that. This one had little alcoves along the sides, with circular stone benches running along their circumference. We paused midway along the bridge, settling down on the still-damp stone of the bench.

Colin nodded at the book in my hands. “What is it?”

“It really is eighteenth-century love poetry. The woman I’m researching, one of the Pink Carnation’s agents—her mother wrote it.” I turned the small, red volume over in my hands. “Finding it seemed like a good omen.”

“I won’t turn up my nose at a good omen,” said Colin somberly. It was another one of those moments, one of those red-light, green-light moments. It didn’t take a crystal ball to divine that he was thinking of the evening to come. But should I press him on it? Or just let it go?

I went with the latter. “As methods of divination go, books are tidier than pigeon entrails. You know, like the ancient Romans.”

“Have you eviscerated any pigeons recently?”

Even then, even after five months, his smile still had the power to make me go giddy. “Not for months. I’ve been relying on my Magic 8-Ball instead.”

“Read me some poetry,” Colin suggested.

“What a cliché,” I scoffed, “love poetry on the Seine.”

I opened the book anyway, flipping it open at random to a page somewhere in the middle. That was another superstition for you: the old medieval tradition of sortes—letting a book fall open at random to see what wisdom the page would bring. My finger landed on like a fortress betrayed from within, my heart—

Maybe I shouldn’t be looking for omens, after all. Sortes was a very unreliable method of divining the future. Pigeon entrails might be more accurate, at that.

I closed the book over my finger. “Maybe later? I’d rather get a drink before the party.”

“Fair enough,” said Colin. “You can read me love poetry later.”

I leaned over and pressed a quick kiss to his lips. “Don’t expect any peeled grapes.”

“What about the dancing girls?”

“They’re against the fire code,” I said serenely, discreetly shaking out my damp skirt. I giggled, remembering an old Cole Porter song. “They’re too darn hot.”

We amused ourselves the rest of the way to the Place des Vosges singing bits and pieces of the Kiss Me, Kate score.

We were so busy entertaining ourselves that at first I didn’t notice the woman sitting at the table outside the Café Le Victor Hugo. She rose to meet us as we approached, the heat lamp striking orange glints off her smooth, dark hair.

The last time I had seen her, her hair had fallen past her shoulders; now, it was cut short, in a modified flapper bob. The style made her seem even thinner and more fragile, her eyes wider and darker, like a fashion plate from the 1920s. She looked like a member of the Brideshead Generation, those lost souls trapped between World Wars I and II.

“You got a haircut!” I exclaimed. And then, belatedly, “Are we late?”

Serena dropped her cigarette and ground it under one heel before hugging me. “No, no,” she said. “I’m early. I just wanted a little time to . . .”

Her thin hands floated through the air, white against the gathering darkness.

She had saved a table for us, at the far end of the outdoor seating area, a marble-topped thing surrounded by three deep wicker chairs. There was a champagne flute in front of her, three-quarters empty, with a sticky residue on the sides that suggested it had been a champagne cocktail of some kind rather than straight-up bubbly.

Colin nodded at the cigarette butt. “I thought you’d given it up.”

Serena looked away. “Drinks?” she suggested, dropping down into a wicker chair. “We’ll need them.”

I wished they would stop saying that.

I made small talk with Serena while Colin dealt with the important matter of ordering the drinks—white wine for him, kir royale for me. When that was all set, I leaned my elbows on the table and looked from one sibling to the other. “Tell me more about the party tonight. What should I expect?”

All I knew was that it was being hosted by Colin’s mother’s Paris distributor—part birthday party, part private sale.

The combo seemed a little crass, but then, so did Colin’s stepfather. Jeremy struck me as the sort of guy who would filch the fillings from your teeth and then sell them back to you at a markup. On the other hand, what did I know? Maybe it was Colin’s mother’s idea. All I knew of Caroline Selwick-Selwick-Alderly was what Colin’s great-aunt had told me, and Mrs. Selwick-Alderly couldn’t exactly be called an unbiased source.

“Lots of Eurotrash,” said Colin. “And Americans. Art people.”

Apparently, André Jaouen wasn’t the only one to have gatherings of artists.

I grimaced at Serena, who worked in an art gallery. “Do you want to be offended or shall I?”

Serena mustered an unconvincing smile and took another drag on her cigarette. She was fidgeting. I had seen Serena sick; I had seen her flustered; but I had never seen her fidget.

I looked quizzically at Colin. “What is your mother like?”

There was an awkward silence. “She can be very charming,” said Colin guardedly.

“When she wants to be,” murmured Serena.

That was another first. I’d never heard Serena utter a nasty word about anyone, and she’d been given some provocation in the time I’d known her.

Serena took a long drag on her cigarette. “I shouldn’t worry if I were you.”

What was that supposed to mean?

“What she means,” said Colin kindly, “is that Mum only notices people when she wants something from them. Usually men.”

Serena ducked her head, her bird’s wing hair falling gracefully over her brow. “I didn’t say that.” She twisted to look over her shoulder, her thin fingers toying with the stem of her glass. “Do you see the waiter? I think I’d like another.”

The empty glass rocked and nearly went over, but she caught it just in time. I wondered if she’d eaten anything today. One drink on an empty stomach went a long way.

“Do you think we could get some snacks?” I said, too loudly. There was an uncomfortable quality to the silence, everyone trying to catch or avoid someone’s eye, the mist from the earlier rain heavy in the air. “Do we have time for that? I’d love to get something to sop this up before I meet your mother. I don’t want her thinking I’m a total lush.”

Colin flagged down the waiter, ordering another round of drinks and some snacks high in carb and calorie content.

Serena drained the last three drops from the bottom of her glass, shaking it to make sure she got every last bit.

I tried to catch Colin’s eye, but his attention was on his sister. “Are you all right?” he asked quietly.

“Fine. Perfectly.” She slid another cigarette out of its crumpled paper case and jammed it against the tabletop. “Why shouldn’t I be?”

“How are things at the gallery?” I asked quickly.

“I’ve been promoted.”

I lurched across the table to hug her, nearly colliding with the waiter, who had appeared with Serena’s glass of bubbly. “That’s wonderful! Congratulations! I’m so happy for you!”

She suffered herself to be hugged and then twitched away. “It isn’t anything to make a fuss about.”

“Good on you,” said Colin heartily. “When did you find out?”

Serena’s eyes were fixed on the elaborate ballet of bubbles swirling and pirouetting in her glass. “I heard on Wednesday.”

Colin looked genuinely confused. “Why didn’t you say?”

Serena shrugged, the sharp lines of her shoulder blades showing through her shawl. “I didn’t want to make a to-do about it.”

“Does that mean that we get to make a to-do on your behalf?” I said, bouncing a bit in my chair for emphasis. I lifted my glass. “A toast! To—”

“No!” Serena hastily cut me off. She seemed, for whatever reason, genuinely distressed. “Don’t. It’s not official yet. I won’t know for sure until Monday.”

“Oh, right!” I said. That, I understood. “Okay, I won’t jinx it by talking about it. Still, it’s all very exciting.”

Serena bit her lip. “Yes,” she agreed. “Very.”

“Speaking of excitement . . .” Colin nodded to the right, to the covered path that led along the side of the Place des Vosges. A woman was climbing out of a taxi on the Rue des Francs Bourgeois side of the Place des Vosges, taking her time about it, extending one long leg, then another, like a movie star in an old film. “There’s Mum.”

She didn’t see us. She was too absorbed in her own toilette. She finished unfolding herself from the cab, twitching her scarf into place, adjusting the crystal earrings that cascaded like chandeliers from either ear. Her dress was shorter and tighter than either mine or Serena’s, but there was nothing tarty about it. It didn’t hurt that it screamed couture. There was a subtle pattern of diamond-shaped cutouts that stretched from one shoulder to the opposite hip.

I only hoped I looked that good at almost fifty.

A man followed her out of the cab, pausing first to pay the driver. This man I knew. I had met him once at a party in London, but I had seen numerous photos of him in the albums in Mrs. Selwick-Alderly’s flat in London. It was Colin and Serena’s second cousin, Jeremy, their mother’s husband.

Colin drained his glass. Pushing out his chair, he held out a hand to me. “I think this means it’s time to get this party started. Coming?”

“I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.