The Orchid Affair

by Lauren Willig

  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.

  “What are you doing here, Delaroche?” André asked flatly.

  Delaroche smirked, displaying his yellowed teeth. “Fouché asked me to assist you in this interrogation.”

  Had Fouché set Delaroche to spy on him?

  No. André dismissed the idea as rapidly as he had considered it. Fouché knew that André was his man, not only by marriage but by the bonds of necessity. Any position or power that André possessed came solely through Fouché. Position and power were terms that Fouché understood, tools he employed to grapple men to him. Loyalty, love, ideals—all those were as grass compared to the powerful motivator of man’s self-interest.

  It was far more likely that Delaroche had invited himself along and Fouché had conceded, deeming it an easy way to keep Delaroche out of his own hair.

  “Excellent,” André said briskly, clamping his hat under his arm and striding forward ahead of Delaroche into the foyer. The guards stood aside at his approach, recognizing him by sight. “How very considerate of my cousin to provide me with an assistant.”

  “With assistance,” Delaroche corrected, trotting along behind him. “Not an assistant.”

  “Forgive me,” said André insincerely. “My mistake.”

  He deliberately picked up the pace. He could hear the clip-clop of Delaroche’s boot heels as the other man hurried to catch up. He lengthened his stride, nodding to the guards on either side as he hastened up the worn stone stairs to the second floor.

  “Interrogation,” Delaroche oozed—or wheezed, although he made a valiant effort to turn the sound sinister, even while scurrying to keep up. “Interrogation is an art. One that takes years of study and dedication to perfect.”

  “Or just a small room and a prisoner,” said André heartlessly. “I hope you left your thumbscrews at home.”

  Delaroche regarded André with disfavor.

  The two men came to a halt before a thick wooden door, the panels relieved only by a small, metal grille. In the cell, a man sat slumped on a cot, his bare head bowed. His hair had been carelessly clubbed back with a ribbon, but chunks stuck out at odd angles, as though it had been accomplished without the aid of a brush.

  As the guard unlocked the door, the prisoner sprang up. Hope and fear chased across his haggard face, as though he didn’t know whether to fear to hope or hope to fear. Execution or pardon? The lady or the tiger?

  A deputy sidled through in front of them to take his place at a square, sturdy-legged table on which paper, ink, and pens—several of them—had already been arranged. Nothing had been left to chance. Fouché was determined that Querelle would talk and talk now. He had gone to great lengths to ensure that it would be so.

  “Good evening, Monsieur Querelle.” André positioned himself in front of Delaroche, effectively blocking the smaller man. He needed no assistance from Delaroche for this; he had played through this script before. He wanted nothing more than to get through it as quickly as possible. “I hear that it is the will of the people that you will not be with us much longer.”

  The night before, the prisoner had been hauled out of bed and dragged before a military court specifically convened for that purpose. Still fuddled with sleep, Querelle had been tried and condemned to execution, then shoved back into his cell to contemplate his own imminent demise.

  “The will of the people?” Querelle made the mistake of allowing his scorn to show. “What people? That was no real court.”

  André couldn’t help but agree. Any court convened at three in the morning and presided over by the First Consul’s brother-in-law, a man more famed for his hair than his wit, could hardly be accounted much of an ornament to the French justice system. However, he didn’t think his employers would thank him for sharing that opinion. The law as he had learned it had no place in the new regime.

  “No?” André said quietly. “The consequences, I assure you, are very, very real.”

  Delaroche trod on André’s foot in his eagerness to get to the prisoner. “Have you looked out the window? You will find something there that might interest you.”

  The window was little more than a rough square hewn in the wall, lined with closely set bars that did little to keep out the elements. Frigid night air whistled between the bars, and with it the sound of activity in the courtyard below.

  There was a scaffold already built in the courtyard. A man in a ragged wool vest was spreading
fresh sawdust across the boards.

  André saw the muscles in Querelle’s throat work as he swallowed. To hear that one was condemned to death and to see the instrument of it, oiled and ready for use, were two very different things.

  The Ministry of Police was nothing if not efficient in its work.

  “That is for me?” Querelle asked hoarsely. He had to clear his throat before the last word.

  “Not just for you.” Delaroche folded his arms across his chest, giving the prisoner a superior look. Not hard to look superior, thought André critically, when your opponent was in chains and hadn’t been allowed fresh linen in nearly a month. “Did you think you were the only soul in Paris with more pride than sense? Some of your comrades made the same mistake . . . and will pay the same price.”

  The prisoner looked at Delaroche uncomprehendingly. A sort of dull trepidation could be seen in his expression, as though he had some inkling of what was to come but knew himself to be powerless to ward against it.

  “‘Price,’” Querelle repeated. “Price?”

  “Picot and Le Bourgeois have also been condemned to death,” said André, ending with brutal simplicity what otherwise would have been at least ten minutes of ominous innuendo.

  The two men had been part of the same Royalist network as Querelle, but they had been less fortunate in their captors. Kept in close confinement in the Temple Prison, they had been put to the question in fine medieval fashion. They had begged for death and in the end been granted it, not out of any impulse of mercy, but because Fouché had found what he hoped would be a weaker link: Querelle.

  “Condemned,” confirmed Delaroche, rolling the word lovingly on his tongue. “Condemned to an end on the guillotine. They, too, refused to cooperate with the officers of the Republic. Last night, they were taken before a military commission, tried, and”—Delaroche allowed a brief pause, during which time his gaze went meaningfully to the window—“sentenced. To death.”

  Querelle licked his lips, as though they had gone dry. “So fast?”

  “Justice is swift, Monsieur Querelle. Ah, and there we see it in action. Shall we?”

  It was a command rather than an invitation. In the courtyard, the torches burned sullenly in their brackets against the wall. The rain and wind made the flames sizzle and crackle. The flames cast an eerie red glow over the proceedings, like a medieval painter’s rendition of hell, the red light lapping at the raw wood of the scaffold and glinting off the blade that hung so ominously suspended above.

  From the lee of the building, a man stumbled forward, his hands bound behind him just as Querelle’s had been. His head, too, was bare to the elements. The rain slicked his shirt to his skin. From the second-story window, they could hear him shudder, although whether with cold or with fear was unclear. He swayed as the wind buffeted him, his head and shoulders hunched against the stinging rain.

  There was to be no grand state execution, no glorious death for his cause. Any speech made at the scaffold would be lost in the howling rain, blunted against the bored indifference of the detail of soldiers who were his only audience. They were prepared to dispatch the man as any farmer might dispatch vermin caught poaching on his crops, without mercy or regret.

  It wasn’t Picot. Both Picot and Le Bourgeois had been killed the night before. Tried, sentenced, executed, all within the space of an hour. This man was someone else entirely. A thief, a murderer, a rapist. Expendable fodder from Paris’s overflowing prisons.

  Querelle, of course, was not to know that.

  In the rain, in the dark, one bound and hunched man looked much like another. It was necessary, for the sake of the charade, that Querelle think it was one of his comrades, that he see in the arc of the ax the intimation of his own mortality. To be told, at a remove, in simple, whitewashed words that his comrades were dead would not have at all the same effect.

  It all made André sick.

  “Such brave defiance,” purred Delaroche, his chin practically resting on the prisoner’s shoulder. “Such unwavering insolence. But, as you shall see, Monsieur, Madame la Guillotine will not be defied, not for all the bravery in the world.”

  Despite the freezing air gusting through the window, sweat beaded Querelle’s forehead.

  André spoke, his calm voice unnaturally loud in the waiting hush. “There is, of course, still a chance for a pardon.”

  Outside, two soldiers helped the bound man to kneel. With rough efficiency, they settled his head in the hollowed trough designed for just that purpose.

  “A pardon?” croaked Querelle, never taking his eyes from the figure of the man on the block.

  “A pardon,” repeated André quickly, as Delaroche opened his mouth to say something, undoubtedly taunting, pointless, and time-wasting. “I have a pardon with your name on it. All it lacks is the First Consul’s signature.”

  Querelle’s nails scraped against the stone of the sill as his hands opened and closed, seeking some sort of purchase. He cast an agonized glance out the window, at the man kneeling on the scaffold. He looked back, uncertainly, at André.

  “Should you choose to change your mind, Monsieur Fouché himself would personally obtain the First Consul’s signature on your behalf.”

  Delaroche pushed his way forward. “A throat is made to be used, Monsieur. And, if not, it must be . . . cut.”

  Querelle looked from André to Delaroche and back again. “How do I know you won’t kill me anyway?”

  It was an excellent question.

  “Do you doubt the word of the Minister of Police?” demanded Delaroche.

  Since that was precisely what the man was doing, there was no easy answer to that. Insulting one’s captor might make good theatre, but it made very poor sense.

  André looked quellingly at Delaroche. “Should you do nothing,” he said sensibly, to Querelle, “you will most certainly take your place on that scaffold at dawn. Should you change your mind . . .” He held up the rolled piece of paper, tied with an official-looking red ribbon, letting Querelle’s eyes and mind rest on it and the possibilities it implied.

  The condemned man’s eyes darted back and forth, to the window and back again, like an animal in a snare. André could see the wild thoughts going through his mind. The still man on the scaffold, the knife that hadn’t fallen, the offer of pardon . . . What if it were all a sham: trial, condemnation, execution, all of it? What if it were only a bluff? A gleam of cunning lit Querelle’s bloodshot eyes, gone glassy with fear and a desperate man’s desperate hope. If they were bluffing, he could continue to refuse.... He had held out this long against Fouché, why not longer? They might be lying about Picot and Le Bourgeois. If they killed him, they would never know what he had to tell. They wouldn’t kill him, not now—nor that unfortunate dupe of a decoy in the courtyard, all done up to look like a prisoner. It was a bluff, a sham, it had to be....

  André only wished it were.

  “And what if I don’t?” Querelle said belligerently, just as the low rumble of a drumroll sounded in the courtyard below, like a swell of thunder in the night.

  “Ah,” said Delaroche, his eyes lighting with a feral glow. He turned to the window, leading the others to follow suit. “If that is your choice . . .”

  With a shrill whinny of sound, the blade swooped down, slicing through flesh and bone before landing, with a moist thunk, on the wooden block below.

  Delaroche watched with unmistakable pleasure as the soldiers went about their grim business.

  André could see fear and disbelief warring on Querelle’s torchlit countenance.

  The soldiers on duty barely looked at the head as they picked it up by the hair and tossed it into a waiting basket. Another grabbed the dead man by the legs, making a crazy pattern through the matted sawdust as he dragged the headless torso from the block. There was no roar from the crowd; there was no crowd to roar. This was nothing more than routine.

  In the cell above, the condemned man’s complexion, tanned from years on shipboard, turned an unfortun
ate shade of green, like an unripe olive.

  “There were five of us,” Querelle blurted out, levering himself away from the window with both hands.

  “Five what?” prompted Delaroche, leaning forward.

  Querelle took a deep breath, his lungs laboring as though he had been running. “Five of us who landed in October. In the service of the King.”

  André nodded to the deputy at the table, signaling him to begin writing. There would be an official report of Querelle’s testimony prepared later, one that left out such inconvenient little details as the means employed in obtaining it.

  Pushing away from the window, Delaroche advanced on the prisoner. “I take it this means that you are, at last, prepared to talk to us?”

  Through the bars could be heard the terrible sifting sound of sawdust being swept with a long-handled broom, clearing the scaffold to make it ready for its next occupant.

  With great effort, like a man with the ague, Querelle lowered his head down and then lifted it up again.

  “You appear cold, Monsieur Querelle,” said Delaroche. He gestured to the guard. “You! Fetch our friend a blanket. It wouldn’t do to have him catch a chill. Not now that he has agreed so generously to assist us.”

  Something in Delaroche’s voice made the condemned man shudder harder than ever. Which was, of course, exactly what it had been meant to do.

  Cutting in front of Delaroche, André plucked the blanket from the hands of the guard and handed it to the condemned man. Querelle’s hands shook as he attempted to arrange the square of wool around his shoulders.

  “I do hope you will justify our confidence in you, Monsieur Querelle,” said André quietly. “I should hate to think that you were abusing the generosity of the First Consul.”

  “There was a plot,” Querelle said slowly.

  This was it, the point of no return. André could see Querelle’s hesitation; it leached out of every line of his body. Venal the man might be, but these had been his comrades. He had endured four months of questioning without breaking. The interrogators at the Temple, where Querelle had been held until now, were seldom gentle in their methods.