The Orchid Affair

Chapter 26

Laura couldn’t figure out what to do with herself.

It was dark in the wagon—true dark, a world away from the diffused light of the city, with the embers of a fire still an orange-red in the hearth. Laura knew that André Jaouen was next to her, knew it from the regular rasp of his breath and the way the pallet dipped off to the side where his body pressed it down, but she couldn’t see him.

Would it have made it better if she could?

It was a very strange thing, this having another person in bed beside her. Maids might have to share quarters, but a governess never did. Laura couldn’t remember the last time she had shared a bedroom with someone, much less a bed, and a bed of proportions that would insult the average pygmy.

André Jaouen didn’t seem to be bothered by it. It was safer to think of him by his full name, using the extra syllables as a wall to ward off the fact that there was no wall between them at all.

Her putative husband, on the other hand, had said his good-night, rolled himself in one of the blankets—they had separate blankets, at least; there was that much between them—snuffed the lantern, and gone to sleep. As simple as that. While she suddenly seemed to have too many limbs, all of which took up far too much space on the narrow pallet. Her elbows extruded, her knees stuck out, her forearms seemed to have expanded until they required an entire mattress unto themselves.

Laura tucked her knees into her chest, lying on her side with her back to the blanket-covered bundle that was André. Her left arm, scrunched up beneath her, was beginning to go numb. She cautiously wiggled her fingers, hoping her bedmate wouldn’t feel the pull on the blankets. In and out, in and out went his breath, peaceful and even.

Laura scowled. How did he manage to sleep so easily? And why couldn’t she?

It had been an exhausting few days. She should be exhausted. She was exhausted. So why wasn’t she asleep? In peasant households, people piled six in a bed for warmth. In this very camp, Cécile was curled up beside Rose, de Berry stacked in with Leandro and Harlequin. She would be willing to wager they were all snoring peacefully away, dreaming their respective dreams, not a one of them lying awake monitoring the movements of the person on the pallet beside him.

Laura eased onto her back, wincing at the crinkle of straw. As pallets went, this one wasn’t too terribly uncomfortable. The straw tick had been bolstered with enough blankets to keep scratchy bits of hay at bay. She had slept on worse over the course of her various employments. But alone. She had always slept alone.

One would think, in the dark, André Jaouen would be easy enough to ignore. It wasn’t as though she could see him, other than as a shadowy blob of blanket. But she was ridiculously aware of his presence, of his breath, his smell, the warmth of his body through the blankets. He made the small space seem even smaller, the walls narrower, the roof lower—as though there weren’t enough air for both of them to breathe.

Laura clamped her elbows against her ribs, making herself as narrow as her limbs would allow, neck stiff, legs straight down, arms at her sides. Breathe in . . . breathe out . . . breathe in.... If they made decent time on the road, they were to have their first rehearsal the next evening. Cécile had filled her in on the scenario, which was simple enough: Leandro was in love with the fair Inamorata, who was, in her turn, being courted by Il Capitano, whose suit was favored by her father, Pantaloon. In . . . Out....

Her neck hurt.

With a sigh, Laura rolled over again, trying to pummel the pillow into some semblance of comfort. The feathers had all but disintegrated with age. Whatever ducks had given their feathers for this pillow had died so long ago that their ponds had probably already silted over. The pillow felt like it was filled with grit. Maybe it was. Maybe she was just being difficult.

For heaven’s sake, why couldn’t she sleep?

“Laura?” The voice came from the next pillow over. It was little more than a murmur, but it sounded unnaturally loud in the small space.

Laura stiffened, instinctively playing dead. Was it too late to pretend to be asleep?

Punching the pillow had probably not been the brightest idea.

“Yes?” she said cautiously.

She could hear the rustle of blankets as he rolled over. Laura scooted even farther towards the end of the pallet.

“Is something wrong?” André’s voice was heavy with sleep.

Was something wrong? They were on the run through the countryside with two small children, a royal duke, and an injured painter in their care, and he wanted to know what was wrong?

“I can’t sleep,” she said, and felt like a child. A cranky, petulant child. What was wrong with her? She hadn’t been that sort of child when she was a child. “This bed is very . . . crunchy. And it’s cold.”

Better that than admitting the real reasons. And it was cold. She could feel the tip of her nose turning blue.

“What about you? Why aren’t you asleep?”

“I was,” André said pointedly. His jaws stretched in a long, uninhibited yawn. Hitching himself up a bit, he unfolded one arm, stretching it out along the top of the pallet. “Here.”

Here what? Laura could see the shadowy outline of his sleeve, pale against the darker skin beneath. He had elected to sleep in his shirt, the strings untied at the throat, the cuffs open and folded back along his forearms.

She, on the other hand, was still entirely fully clothed, with the sole exception of her shawl. That was another problem. Her blouse itched.

When she didn’t respond, André stretched out his fingers. “Come here.”

Laura regarded his arm suspiciously. His arm couldn’t possibly be less comfortable than the pillow. But... “Why?”

Although she couldn’t see very well, she was fairly certain that he rolled his eyes. “For warmth,” he said, “only for warmth. And because your fidgeting is keeping me awake.”

Laura lowered herself cautiously into the crook of his arm, from sheer fatigue, she told herself, rather than anything else. They both needed their sleep. “All right. But I don’t—”

His hand pressed against the back of her head, smushing her face against his chest.

“—fidget,” she said into his shirt.

“Mmph,” said André into her hair. It wasn’t so much agreement or disagreement as a shorthand for All right, that’s all very well, can we go to sleep now?

Shaking free of his hand, Laura turned her face so that she could breathe. Asphyxiation was seldom the route to a good night’s sleep. She could feel the rub of much-washed linen beneath her cheek—like an old sheet, she told herself. It was best for all concerned if she thought of him simply as an extension of the mattress. A much warmer and firmer portion of the mattress. In fact, he made a much better mattress than the mattress. Mattresses, after all, seldom came with their own heating agents.

She scooted gingerly closer, finding a comfortable spot somewhere below his arm and above his ribs.

André moved obligingly to make room for her, adjusting the angle of his arm around her shoulders and tucking his chin against the top of her head.

His shirt smelled of soap and spilled coffee, thin enough that she could feel the faint prickle of the hair on his chest.

“Better now?” he asked sleepily.

“Certainly warmer,” conceded Laura, and felt his chest rumble with something that might have been a chuckle.

“Good,” he murmured. She could feel the dip of his chin against her hair. “Sleep.”

To her own surprise, she did.

It wasn’t a rooster that woke them, but Harlequin, shouting with appalling cheerfulness, “Wake up, lovebirds! It’s morning!”

Laura blinked her gummy eyes open just in time to see his head disappearing back through the curtains. Doors. Doors were a good thing, she thought hazily. Much less permeable than curtains.

She yawned, feeling her eyes drift shut again, every fiber of her body resisting the imperative to wake up. She was heavenly warm and incredibly comfortable, curled up on her side, cradled in a nest of blankets. Laura stretched, and felt the blanket stir in response.

“Mmm?” said the blanket, and Laura came jarringly and fully awake.

That wasn’t a blanket, that was a man. A man with one arm under her head and another around her waist. At some point in the night, they must have rolled over, because they were sleeping like two spoons in a drawer, the curve of his body mirroring hers, her back tucked up intimately against his front.

Very intimately.

It had been some time since Laura had had personal experience of the more masculine portions of the male anatomy, but she was fairly sure that wasn’t his knee.

Laura bounded out of the bed, trailing half the blankets with her. Her blouse had come unmoored during the night, and she hastily yanked it back up over her shoulder.

“Good morning!” she babbled. “Time to wake up!”

André groaned, burying his head in the pillows, which all seemed to have bunched up on his side of the bed. Bizarre that there was already a “his” side and a “hers” side, but his side it was.

“Are you always this terrifyingly energetic in the mornings?” he inquired.

“No, it’s just a special treat for our first night together,” she snapped, then realized just what it sounded like. Deciding to quit while she was ahead, she said hastily, “Thank you. It was very kind of you to serve as pillow for me.”

André propped himself up on one elbow. “It wasn’t entirely selfless,” he said. “Where did you put my portmanteau?”

“There.” Laura pointed to the bundle she had packed for him. She did her best to sound nonchalant. “Not entirely selfless?”

André paused in the act of digging through the bag. He cocked a brow. “It stopped you thrashing about.”

Laura plunked down on the small stool in front of their one table. “I wasn’t thrashing. I was just . . . restless,” she said with dignity. “It’s been an unsettling few days.”

“No argument there.” André yanked his old shirt up over his head, revealing an expanse of chest lightly fuzzed with dark hair.

Laura swiveled around on the stool, reaching for her hairbrush. What with one thing and another, she had forgotten to braid her hair before going to bed, and it was a snarled mess. She attacked a chunk at random, wincing as the bristles hit knots. “Do you think Monsieur Delaroche is after us yet?”

André’s head emerged through the top of the fresh shirt. He pulled the ties together. “I would be very surprised if he weren’t. He’ll be itching to get his hands on Daubier.”

“And you,” Laura pointed out.

“And me,” André agreed.

“You seem surprisingly unconcerned.”

“I slept well.”

Laura made a face at him.

“I’m not unconcerned. Believe me,” André said with feeling, “I couldn’t be farther from unconcerned. But I did take some precautions before we left.”

Despite herself, Laura was intrigued. She lowered the hairbrush. “What sort of precautions?”

“I planted a few false trails. Delaroche should be getting reports of a man answering my description heading with two small children in the direction of Austria.”

“Austria?”

“In the fireplace of my study in the Hôtel de Bac are the charred remains of a series of letters with the Austrian foreign minister, bargaining for safe conduct. Such a pity the fire went out before it could burn down completely.”

“Isn’t that too obvious? Won’t he suspect?”

“Trust me, it’s very artful charring. He’ll also receive conflicting reports about a fishing boat.”

“Meaning,” said Laura, “that he’ll assume that the Austrian documents are a façade, but the fishing boat is worth following.”

André looked smug. “Or the other way around. Delaroche’s mind is just twisted enough to assume that the obvious falsehood must be real and the real-seeming option false. There should be enough there to keep him busy for some time. You, by the way, have accepted new employment in Provence and are on your way there even as we speak. It’s a very old family. And very hard to find, given that they died out two generations ago.”

“And Daubier?”

“Went to ground, presumably with Cadoudal. Someone is going to go to his studio to make it look as though he snuck back to get necessaries for himself.”

“Someone?”

“I do still have some friends in Paris. The point is that it ought to look as though we’re all in separate groups, with Daubier still somewhere in Paris. They won’t be looking for us all together, and certainly not here.”

“Unless Governor Murat saw,” Laura countered.

“After your extraordinary efforts to prevent him doing so?”

André’s voice was mild enough, but Laura felt a rush of warmth at the memory. After a night spent pressed together, body to body, it was absurd that the recollection of a bit of playacting could make her blush. That was all it had been, playacting.

Now, if only her body would remember that.

“There was nothing so extraordinary about it,” Laura muttered. “Anyone would have done the same.”

“Somehow,” said André dryly, “I doubt Jeannette could have pulled that off in quite the same way.”

“Well,” said Laura. She tossed her brush aside and rose from the stool. “Let’s hope my acting skills prove equally good on the stage.”

“Nervous?” asked André.

“Nonsense,” said Laura. “All one has to do is act out a scenario. What can possibly be so hard about that?”

“Ruffiana? If you could, a little to the right?” called Pantaloon, for at least the third time in ten minutes. “You’re blocking Harlequin.”

Laura moved obediently to the right, knowing that it would be the left next time, or the middle the time after that. No matter where she was, it wasn’t where she was supposed to be.

Apparently, dissembling and performing weren’t quite the same skills after all. Leading a double life didn’t seem to have prepared her for the exigencies of the stage. Lying one’s way into someone’s household didn’t necessitate such skills as projecting one’s lines or remembering to cheat out towards the audience. Upstage, downstage . . . Laura’s head swam with it.

None of the others seemed to be having the same problem. André, it seemed, was a natural on the stage. She would have accused him of practicing on the sly but for the fact that he hadn’t known about the acting troupe until after she had. It must be his background in debate, Laura decided. Like Commedia dell’Arte, being a public representative was an art form that demanded thinking on one’s feet and speaking very, very loudly.

Being a governess didn’t provide quite the same training.

Excuses, excuses. No matter how she attempted to parse it, the result was the same: She was an unmitigated disaster on the stage. Even de Berry had done better than she. He, at least, remembered to address his lines downstage.

“Shall we begin the scene again?” suggested Pantaloon wearily.

“What makes him think the tenth time will make any difference?” murmured Rose to Leandro.

Leandro blushed and scuffed his feet, torn between his innate good nature and the attentions of his goddess.

“Is it time for supper yet?” Laura asked hopefully.

Harlequin checked his watch. “It’s four o’clock.”

Blast.

Pantaloon sighed and rose from his perch on an overturned log. “Again, I think. We must have something to perform when we reach Beauvais.”

Beauvais was to be their first stop, roughly a week hence. They were rehearsing in the open, in a clearing in a wooded copse. It had been deemed a good place to camp, largely due to the small pond nearby.

From Leandro, who did manage to string together complete sentences as long as Rose was out of eyeshot, Laura learned that they were taking something of a detour. Under normal circumstances, the troupe would have traveled by the major roads, stopping to give performances along the way, staying as many as three nights if the town were large enough and the take good. With so many new troupe members, Pantaloon had decreed it more prudent to take to the back roads, using the opportunity to put the new cast members through their paces. By avoiding the inns, they broke even. There was no revenue, but little in the way of cost.

It also meant they had no witnesses. There was no one to comment on the man with the strangely broken hand, the actor with the oddly aristocratic accent, or the two small children who just happened to have the same names as the small children of a wanted man.

According to Leandro, the decision had been Pantaloon’s. Pantaloon was, after all, the nominal head of the troupe. Laura had a fairly good idea who had first broached the plan.

Laura wondered how much the Pink Carnation was paying Cécile. Whatever it was, she deserved double.

Laura thought back over the rehearsal. Make that triple.

“From the beginning, then,” said Pantaloon. “Ruffiana, you have intercepted Harlequin, who is returning from a rendezvous with Columbine, who has given him a note from Inamorata to be delivered to Leandro. You want him to play go-between on your behalf with Il Capitano, but first you must feel him out to make sure he won’t betray you to your husband. Understood?”

“Perfectly,” said Laura. It wasn’t the scenario she had trouble with. She could summarize it perfectly well. It was acting it that was the problem.

Apparently, one couldn’t just walk up to Harlequin and say, “Hello, young messenger. Would you carry this letter for me?” No. One had to work around to it and make it sound natural. Preferably with sufficient double entendre to keep the audience amused, interspersed with a well-worn repertoire of physical gags.

André had been brilliantly comedic as Il Capitano, the blustering Spanish officer simultaneously attempting to seduce young Inamorata and repel the advances of her mother, Ruffiana. Even de Berry had been adequate as Leandro’s two-faced best friend, who pretends to aid in the courtship of Inamorata while secretly wooing her for himself, although Laura did wonder how much of that was acting and how much the prelude to an actual seduction.

They began the scene again. Harlequin strolled “onstage,” hands in his pockets, whistling a merry Mozart tune, only to be intercepted by Laura. She gave an exaggerated start of surprise. “You! You there!”

“I, Madame?” Harlequin waggled his eyebrows in a way that managed to be effortlessly comedic.

“Yes, you.” Blast. What next? Molière this was not. Next time she escaped from Paris, it was going to be with a classical theatre troupe, where one could simply memorize one’s lines. Memorization, she could do. “You have the look of a lackey. Can you carry a letter for me?”

“For a beautiful woman”—Harlequin made the word “beautiful” a joke in itself, in complicity with the imaginary audience—“there’s very little I can’t carry.”

“Er, good. Um. I have need of your skills. Your letter-carrying skills.”

Pantaloon dropped his head into his hands.

“Where did you say you performed again?” said Harlequin jokingly, dropping out of character.

“I’m sorry,” said Laura wretchedly. “I don’t know where my mind is today. I must have offended one of the muses.”

She meant to make a joke out of it, but it fell flat. The others exchanged significant looks.

“We’re all tired,” said André quickly. “After being based in Paris for so many months, none of us are used to this much travel anymore. It saps the creative energy.”

It hadn’t seemed to hurt his creative energy.

Laura mustered an unconvincing yawn. “Please forgive me,” she said. “I didn’t sleep much last night.”

“Didn’t you?” murmured Harlequin. He winked at André. “You’re a lucky man, Capitano.”

She hadn’t . . . Oops. Laura bit down on a quick negation. In any event, at least this furthered the pretense that they were married. She could cling to that small reassurance, at least.

It was a new and unsettling sentiment, feeling this incompetent. She didn’t like it, not at all. She might not be particularly talented or inspired, but she had always at least risen to the level of competence.

“We’ll have an early night tonight and resume again tomorrow,” said Cécile briskly. “Everyone has a bad day now and again.”

Laura trailed after her out of the clearing. One bad day, yes. But what happened when she failed again tomorrow?

How long before the other actors smelled a rat?