The Orchid Affair

Chapter 4

It wasn’t silver. There was no such thing as a silver orchid. But it didn’t need to be. Laura knew exactly what it meant.

A thrill of excitement buzzed through her, heady as the champagne she dimly remembered drinking back in her pre-governess days.

“It’s perfect,” she said, and meant it. There would be no need for a page indication this time. She knew what her key word would be. “Silver.” In one fell swoop, the Carnation’s contact had confirmed his status and given her the code for the next message. “Natural history, is it?”

“Many young gentlemen these days are taking up botanical pursuits,” said the shopkeeper blandly.

“Young ladies, too,” Laura said, feeling positively arch.

“So I have been told,” said the shopkeeper, with something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Some may find it unconventional, but I hear that they take to it quite well.”

Laura felt an unaccustomed urge to grin. It was all she could do not to grab the shopkeeper by the hand and shake it, babbling, haven’t we done well? Aren’t we clever?

Instead, she nodded crisply, tapping a gloved finger against the open page of the book. “It will be good drawing practice for my pupils. We’ll take it.”

Without betraying any emotion, the shopkeeper closed the cover, concealing the orchid beneath a nondescript façade of blue leather. “Will there be anything more?”

“I will also need an introductory Latin text,” said Laura. That wasn’t part of the code, but, while she was teaching, she might as well teach. It would be hard to explain her continued presence in Jaouen’s household otherwise. “Do you have the Orbis Sensualium Pictus?”

“The—?” The shopkeeper paused to allow her to fill in the title.

It was a book she had often used to teach Latin before, especially to younger children. Brightly colored pictures were paired with the corresponding Latin and English translation.

“The Orbis Sensual—” Laura ground to a halt as she realized her blunder.

The second language after the Latin in the Orbis Sensualium wasn’t French. It was English.

She had used the Orbis Sensualium Pictus to teach English children in England. How could that not have occurred to her? That was certainly one way to get herself caught in a hurry; go about asking for English books in a French bookshop. She might as well emblazon “SPY” on her forehead. In capital letters. In English. With a Latin translation underneath.

Or she could just bang her head against the counter and wish she had never got out of bed that morning.

Laura glanced guiltily over her shoulder, but the only other person in the shop was the poet, who was, mercifully, too absorbed in poetic reflection to pay any attention to her faux pas.

“Never mind,” she muttered, and affected a cough to cover her confusion. She would have to be wary of slips like that. After sixteen years, she had become far more English than she had realized. So much for doing so well. Pride goeth, and all those other gloomy adages. She would have to be more careful in the future. “Er, do you have any picture books with Latin translations for children?”

Why hadn’t she just asked that in the first place? That was what she got for trying to show off.

“I can see about finding something like that for you,” the bookseller offered dubiously, “But it might take some time. We did have a copy of Aesop’s Fables in a Latin translation. I could have that for you next week.”

“Do you think it would be appropriate for a child of nine?”

“It very well could be,” agreed the shopkeeper. His slow nod of approval made Laura feel marginally less like an idiot. Whatever message the Carnation next wanted to convey would be found on page nine of Aesop’s Fables, corresponding to the code word “silver.”

“That would be very good of you,” said Laura, just as the door opened again with a tinkle of chimes and a blast of cold air.

Three women breezed into the store. Two were obviously ladies of fashion; the third, older by several years, was dressed with puritanical severity except for the truly alarming purple plumes that sprouted from her bonnet like a molting tropical bird. Laura sincerely doubted that any bird, even in the tropics, had ever dared to show itself among the avian haut monde in plumage of that shade.

Laura saw Gabrielle taking in the details of the ladies’ costumes with hungry eyes. With a twinge, Laura remembered what it was to be nine and plain, with that horrible awareness that one didn’t, somehow, look quite right. The child’s clothes were sturdy and well made, but they could not, under any circumstances, be termed anything other than provincial. Laura’s problem hadn’t been quite the same—she had, if anything, always been dressed in far too mature a style for her age—but she could well remember that anxious desire to look just like everyone else, and the squirming humiliation of knowing she didn’t.

She would have to speak to Jaouen about a new dress for his daughter. If books wouldn’t win Gabrielle over, perhaps pretty clothing might. And it would give her an excellent excuse to seek out her employer.

The poet’s sleeves expanded to hitherto unimaginable width as he flung his arms high in the air. Gabrielle hastily retreated back against a stack of books.

“My muse!” he cried, gesturing grandly at one of the ladies, who was magnificently turned out in a tight-sleeved, high-waisted sky blue pelisse finished in fur trim. She wore a bonnet with a silk-lined brim that shadowed her face, although not enough to curtain her from the eyes of her admirer. “Well met by midday, fair Miss Wooliston!”

Laura had to juggle to keep her grip on her book. Fortunately, no one was looking at her. All attention was on the lady in sky blue, the poet’s muse.

Or, as Laura knew her, the Pink Carnation.

Laura felt a tug on her arm. “What’s a muse?” demanded Pierre-André, in a whisper like a foghorn.

“Ah, the muse!” mused the poet, striking a pose like Jove about to throw thunderbolt. “The muse, my dear poppet, is a thing of glory, a flame of fire, a blazing comet of divine inspiration! In short—she!” He wafted his sleeve in the direction of the Pink Carnation.

The pretty lady didn’t appear to be on fire, but Pierre-André prudently backed up against Laura’s side in case she should blaze into divine inspiration and catch them all up in the conflagration.

Undaunted, the poet was courting artistic immolation. “I have just, this very morning, finished my latest ode to your sublime, um—”

“Sublimity?” suggested the Pink Carnation.

Gabrielle’s eyes were like saucers and Pierre-André was tugging at Laura’s arm again, hissing, “What’s sublimmy? And can I have a shirt like that? Can I? Can I?”

Turning back to the shopkeeper, Laura said hastily, “The Greek myths in the front. We would also like a copy of that. If you are a good boy,” she added to Pierre-André, “I’ll read you about Hercules and the snakes later. You’ll like the snakes.”

With a nod, the shopkeeper set off to the front to fetch the book.

Behind her, the poet was in full spate, fluttering his sleeves at Miss Wooliston in a bizarre sort of mating ritual. “Sublimity is too limiting a term to encompass the range of my regard for so rarefied a creature as thou. Which is why, instead of one word, I offer you five cantos.”

From somewhere in the vicinity of his left sleeve, the poet made good his word by producing a very thick roll of paper, beautifully tied with a pink silk ribbon.

“The pink,” he added helpfully, “represents love hopeful. I discuss that at some length in the fourth canto.”

Miss Wooliston eyed the thick roll of paper with comic apprehension. “You flatter me. Again.”

Her friend, a fair-haired woman whose claims to beauty were marred by the length of her nose, came to her rescue, “When will you immortalize me, Monsieur Whittlesby?”

The poet swept an elaborate bow that set all his ruffles fluttering. “You, Madame Bonaparte, have no need of my humble pen to make you immortal.”

Bonaparte. He had said Bonaparte, hadn’t he? If there had been anything in Laura’s mouth, she would have choked on it.

This Mme. Bonaparte was too young to be the First Consul’s wife, so it was presumably his stepdaughter, Hortense, made doubly a Bonaparte through her marriage to the First Consul’s younger brother.

That was a lot of Bonaparte in a very small space.

Mme. Bonaparte’s lips lifted in a rueful smile. “No. My stepfather’s cannon have done so already.”

“And a copy of Caesar’s Wars,” Laura said brusquely as the shopkeeper set down Hercules on top of the botanical treatise.

What was the Pink Carnation playing at? She had known Laura intended to come to the bookshop today; in fact, it was she who had advised her to do so. Why come bearing a Bonaparte? Laura didn’t like surprises, especially not in Bonaparte form.

“Gallic or Civil?” asked the shopkeeper laconically.

“Civil—no, Gallic,” Laura corrected herself.

What was the Pink Carnation doing going about with a Bonaparte on her arm?

Laura supposed it must be an equivalent of the old adage about keeping one’s enemies closer. When it came down to it, it wasn’t all that different from her notion of bringing the children along to provide an air of innocence. No one would ever suspect Miss Wooliston of delivering or receiving treasonous material with a daughter of the First Consul in tow.

Laura might have been teaching for what felt like an eon, but when it came to espionage, she still had a great deal to learn.

“No cannonade more powerful than the grapeshot of your eyes!” declaimed the poet. “No fusillade could match the artillery of your wit, no cavalry charge the pounding of the hearts which beat only for you!”

“We really must get you near a proper battlefield, Monsieur Whittlesby,” said Bonaparte’s stepdaughter with amusement. “Or at least buy you a book on tactics to bolster your metaphors.”

“Ought you to be encouraging him?” Holding out a hand to the poet, Miss Wooliston said, “Give me that ode of yours, Mr. Whittlesby, and from now on apply your pen to worthier subjects.”

Whittlesby gazed up at her soulfully. “What topic could be worthier than love?”

“Digestion,” snapped the older woman without a moment’s reflection.

“Digestion?” Whittlesby clutched his poem protectively to his chest and looked askance at the woman in the purple plumes. “My words are meant to be savored with the eye, not the tongue, Mademoiselle Gwendolyn.”

“I don’t believe she was planning to eat them, Monsieur Whittlesby,” said Hortense Bonaparte reassuringly, patting the poet’s sleeve. “Nobody’s teeth are that good.”

Mademoiselle Gwendolyn, or, in plain English, Miss Gwen, bared a set of teeth that gave the lie to Hortense Bonaparte’s supposition. “You can mock all you like, but that doesn’t change facts. Just look at the chronicles of history here in this shop! The Roman Empire was lost by rich sauces, not by love.”

There was an idea, thought Laura. If all else failed, they could simply feed Bonaparte into submission, one cream puff at a time.

Considering that she had proved her point, the Pink Carnation’s chaperone directed a look of withering scorn at the poet. “Attend to your diet before you talk to me of poetry.”

Whittlesby made a valiant effort to rally. “But poetry is food for the soul!”

“Hmph. If that’s true, your poetry wants fiber. Your adjectives are flabby and your nouns lack substance.”

Radiating offense, the poet made a show of extending the roll of paper past Miss Gwen, into the waiting hand of Miss Wooliston. “I shall let my muse be the judge of that,” he said sniffily. “Good day.”

“Good day, bad poetry!” Miss Gwen called triumphantly after him. The door closed with a decidedly unpoetic bang.

Hortense Bonaparte stifled a smile behind one gloved hand. “Must you torment him so, Mademoiselle Meadows?”

Miss Gwen was unrepentant. “Anyone who writes drivel such as that deserves to have the stuffing knocked out of him. An eye for an eye, I say.”

“Or an insult for an ode?” Miss Wooliston unrolled roughly two inches of her ode. “Oh, dear. He’s gone and compared me to a graceful gazelle gliding gallantly o’er a glassy glade again.” Shaking her head, she rolled it tightly back up. “If he must show his admiration, it’s a pity he can’t just do it with flowers.”

“Roses,” suggested Hortense Bonaparte, whose mother had made an art of cultivating them.

Miss Wooliston tilted her head, as though considering. “I have always been rather partial to carnations.”

“Cheap, showy things,” Miss Gwen said with a sniff. “Rather like that Whittlesby’s poetry.”

“At least he hasn’t published any of his odes to you in the newspapers yet,” contributed Hortense Bonaparte, cheerfully oblivious to botanical subtext. She slid her arm companionably through the Pink Carnation’s. “One dreadful little man did that to me while I was still at Madame Cam-pan’s school. The other girls called me la Belle Hortense for weeks. It was very trying.” Glancing over a display of books as she spoke, she lifted a large volume bound in red morocco from the table, angling it towards Miss Wooliston. “Have you read this yet? I heard it was rather good.”

The Pink Carnation shook her head, making a show of looking around the shop. “I was hoping to find a copy of The Children of the Abbey.”

“Do you mean to tell me there is a horrid novel you haven’t read?” Mme. Bonaparte feigned shock. “I thought you had them all.”

It struck Laura that the Pink Carnation was on remarkably good terms with the First Consul’s stepdaughter. Well, what had she expected? That the Pink Carnation would conduct her career by skulking in dark alleys in malodorous disguises? It was much more efficient to do one’s reconnaissance in a drawing room, properly garbed.

Miss Wooliston accepted the teasing in good grace. “I seem to have missed this one, and I am most distraught about it. Who knows what might be hidden behind those abbey walls? I simply must find out.”

An abbey or an Abbaye?

Taking Miss Wooliston’s statement at face value, Mme. Bonaparte laughed good-naturedly. “I shouldn’t imagine you’ll find anything out of the ordinary. Aren’t those novels all the same?”

Miss Gwen let out a loud and offended harrumph that set her plumes a-wagging. “Only to the uninformed. How many have you read recently, missy?”

Mme. Bonaparte held out her hands in a gesture of defeat. “I was once very fond of La Nouvelle Héloïse.”

“Ha!” exclaimed Miss Gwen. “That drivel! That Rousseau wouldn’t know a proper plot if it bit him.”

Mme. Bonaparte bowed her head in contrition. “I shall eagerly await the publication of your romance, Mademoiselle Meadows.”

“In the meantime,” said Miss Wooliston, neatly bringing the conversation back around. “I must have my Children of the Abbey. I find I am become quite urgent in my curiosity.”

She said it in such a droll way that Mme. Bonaparte laughed, but Laura sensed a deeper purpose. “What do you expect to find?”

Miss Wooliston waved a dismissive hand. “Oh, the usual horrors, as you said. Ghosts, ghouls, strange reversals of fortune, lost princes. . . .”

Was it Laura’s imagination, or had there been an additional emphasis on that last phrase?

“Strange things can happen in abbeys on dark and stormy nights—much like last night.” The Pink Carnation added prosaically, “That must have been what put me in the mood for it.”

Last night. Last night, after their interview, she had heard M. Jaouen direct his coachman to the Abbaye Prison. Something must have happened at the Abbey last night, something the Pink Carnation most urgently wanted to know.

“You couldn’t be satisfied by Otranto?” suggested Mme. Bonaparte with a smile.

“I find I grow weary of my old books.” Miss Wooliston made a face. “I crave more mysterious mysteries and more villainous villains.”

Mme. Bonaparte looked slyly at her friend from beneath her bonnet brim. “What about more heroic heroes?”

The Pink Carnation raised both eyebrows. “Do you know any?” she asked dryly, and Mme. Bonaparte laughed.

“Will that be all?” the shopkeeper asked. It took Laura a moment to realize that he was speaking to her.

Laura hastily reached for her reticule, grateful that the Selwicks had made her take a course on currency at their spy school. She had sorted and resorted sous and louis and livres until she could fumble them out in their correct denominations in her sleep.

“Yes, we’ll have the myths, the Gallic Wars, the botanical treatise and—did you find something, Gabrielle?” she asked, looking down at Gabrielle, who was standing next to her, with a book folded protectively to her chest.

Silently, Gabrielle extended the volume. It was discreetly bound in dark leather, but the title belied the demure exterior. Like the Pink Carnation, Laura’s new charge appeared to have a taste for horrid novels.

Laura took the volume from her, a French translation of Mrs. Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest. “Does your father let you read this?”

Gabrielle hunched her shoulders defensively. “Grandfather did.”

Laura turned the volume over in her hands, giving Gabrielle time to squirm. “I see no problem with your wallowing in ghosts and ghouls so long as you apply yourself to your lessons first.” Laura plunked Gabrielle’s book down on top of Caesar. “We’ll have that as well.”

“You can return it, if it doesn’t suit,” said the shopkeeper. “Just make sure you include the reckoning.”

“Shopkeep!” Miss Gwen pushed past Laura, waving her furled parasol in the air. “Sirrah!”

Pierre-André stared, fascinated, up at Miss Gwen’s headdress. “I like your feathers.”

Miss Gwen favored the small boy with an approving look, an expression that involved the most marginal relaxation in her habitual scowl. “It is reassuring to find that someone in this benighted city has a sense of fashion.” She wagged a finger at the boy. “Never let them tell you otherwise.”

The Pink Carnation managed to look their way without ever looking at Laura, as though Laura were no more an object to be remarked than the table used as a counter or the smoke leaching from the brazier. A servant. Invisible.

It seemed like a good time to take her leave.

“Come along, come along,” murmured Laura, wedging the four fat books under one arm and shooing Pierre-André ahead of her. “Gabrielle! You don’t want to keep these nice ladies from their shopping.”

With a protective eye on her book, which was currently bundled with the others under Laura’s arm, Gabrielle fell into step.

Laura pushed with her shoulder against the door, holding it for the children to precede her.

As the door slammed behind them, she heard the Pink Carnation earnestly asking the stepdaughter of Bonaparte, “What did you think of Madame de Staël’s latest novel?”

“Can I have purple feathers?” Pierre-André’s shrill voice drilled into Laura’s ears.

“Maybe,” said Laura, shifting to readjust the clumsy pile of books under her arm. “What would you use them for?”

“Flying,” he said, as though it were perfectly obvious.

“May I have my book?” interrupted Gabrielle.

“When we get back to the house,” Laura said. “I don’t want to undo the package while we’re walking.” She wondered if there would be another note hidden among the pages of the botanical treatise. She doubted it. The Pink Carnation’s message had been clear enough.

Gabrielle crunched loudly down on a thin patch of ice. “I don’t see why we couldn’t take the carriage,” she muttered.

“Because walking is good for you,” said Laura bracingly. And because she didn’t want the coachman to have a record of where they had gone. While there was no reason for Jaouen to suspect anything amiss about the bookshop, there was also no reason to lead him straight to it.

The road was busier than it had been when they had left, with people making their way home from offices and shops. The early winter dusk was already beginning to fall, tinting everything it touched with gray and lending a curious appearance of insubstantiality to the landscape as they passed, as though the stucco walls of the narrow houses were made of fog. The high walls cast strange shadows into the street, creating wells of darkness in which the shapes of passing people took on an ominous aspect. It might have been the twilight or the children’s flagging energy, but the walk back along the alleys of St. Michel seemed far longer than the walk there.

It was with relief that Laura emerged onto the Seine, holding one of her charges by each hand. Gabrielle had protested the gesture, but Laura didn’t want to risk losing her in the growing dark. The lights from the houses on the Île de la Cité reflected in the river, creating shimmering patterns in the water.

“Stay to the side,” warned Laura, as carriages rumbled past. “You don’t want to get squished.”

“Don’t want to walk anymore,” whined Pierre-André, burying his face in Laura’s waist. Laura had to execute a hasty double-step to keep from tripping over him. “Tired.”

“Just a little bit longer,” she promised. “We’re almost home.”

“That’s not home.” If she had been a few years younger, Gabrielle would have probably been burying her face in Laura’s waist too. Instead, she tugged her hand free and folded her arms tightly across her chest. “It’s just where we live.”

Laura knew what that felt like.

When was the last time she’d had a place that felt like home? Not since she was sixteen. Her parents had never kept a traditional home; they had moved from place to place as her parents’ whims and fortunes took them. Nonetheless, by some strange alchemy of affection, her parents—her excessive, flamboyant parents—had managed to make the series of borrowed rooms and lodging houses feel like home. Wherever they had been, that was where home was. And when they were gone. . . well, here she was.

“Home is where the people you love are,” Laura said, surprising both herself and Gabrielle.

Gabrielle gave her a look. Laura couldn’t blame her. At that age, she wouldn’t have understood it either.

“Home was in Nantes,” Gabrielle said. It was evident that she thought Laura very dim not to understand that.

“Will you carry me?” demanded Pierre-André. “My feet hurt.”

Laura herded the children towards the railing as a carriage drew alongside them, a little out of the ordinary stream of traffic. Instead of progressing, it slowed to a stop, despite the angry cries of the wagon owner behind it.

A man leaned out of the window, ignoring the various speculations on his ancestry being offered by the man behind him. He wore a tall black hat with a broad brim. The material had a threadbare sheen to it in the light of the carriage lamps. “Mademoiselle!” the man in the carriage called.

Laura put a hand on each of the children’s backs and hurried them forward.

“Mademoiselle Jaouen!”

Gabrielle stopped and turned, leaving Laura tugging futilely at the back of her coat. The carriage glided smoothly along beside them. It was a narrow, black conveyance, designed to hold only one passenger, or two at most. “It is Mademoiselle Jaouen, is it not?”

Laura took a tighter grip on the back of Gabrielle’s coat. “The children are not permitted to speak to strangers. Good day, Monsieur.”

“But I am no stranger. I am a colleague of their father’s.” The man leaned farther out the window, arranging his thin features into what he clearly believed to be an ingratiating smile. “And this young man must be Pierre-André.”

Pierre-André slunk back against Laura’s side and buried his face in her pelisse.

“The children are very tired,” said Laura, by way of explanation and apology. “I must get them home.”

The gentleman’s smile broadened. It reminded Laura of nothing so much as wolves in fairy stories. It was not a pleasing effect. “Allow me to assist you. I have the carriage at my disposal.”

Perhaps it was the teeth, but Laura found herself ill-inclined to take him up on the offer. “And very little room in it. We would not want to impose.”

The man held out a hand. “No imposition. Not when the children of a colleague are concerned.”

Something about the way he said “colleague” sent Laura’s hackles up. She pushed the children ahead, forcing them to move. “No need, sir. The walk will do the children good.”

Gabrielle sent her a decidedly baleful look.

“Feet hurt,” whined Pierre-André.

The man settled back in his seat, contemplating the mutinous children with an appraising air that made Laura think of a chef sizing up a joint. Perhaps not for this meal, but later.

“As you will, Madame,” he said. “But do be sure to give my regards to Monsieur Jaouen.”

“Who shall I say sends them?”

The man bared his yellowing teeth in a facsimile of a smile. “Delaroche. Gaston Delaroche.”