The Orchid Affair

by Lauren Willig

  “Hmm.” The American was unimpressed. “Come see this one.”

  Laura drifted to an easel at the other side of the room, staring without seeing. She had a vague impression of color, but she couldn’t have said with any authority exactly what it was she was looking at.

  The Pink Carnation’s message had been clear enough. The Jardins du Luxembourg, tomorrow morning at ten. There must be something important in hand, something very important if the Pink Carnation was concerned enough to break protocol and speak to Laura herself.

  “Laura, my dear.” She started as Daubier placed a fatherly hand on her shoulder and squeezed. There was reddish paint on his fingers, the marks that no amount of turpentine could scrub off. In Laura’s uneasy frame of mind, it looked uncomfortably like blood. “Has André abandoned you already?”

  “He was more than generous with his time.” Laura forced herself into a lightness she didn’t feel. “And with his vol-au-vent.”

  “I’ll say that much for André,” agreed Daubier. “He doesn’t stint on the buffet. So, my girl, what do you think of this lot?”

  He gestured expansively at the easels lining the room.

  Laura’s mouth settled into wry lines. With all the people asking her that this evening, she might as well hang out her shingle as an art critic. Everyone seemed so eager for her assessment.

  She was spared answering by a disturbance at the doorway. Someone was forcing his way into the room, boots clomping against the time-dulled parquet floor. People scattered at his approach, like birds startled from their bread crumbs, hastily taking wing.

  The crowd cleared, and Laura saw who it was. It was that man from the Ministry of Police, the one who had stopped them on the bridge. The one who had pretended to know her.

  For an awful moment, she thought he was making for her, her subterfuge discovered, her death warrant signed. But his eyes passed right by her. He wasn’t on the trail of the Pink Carnation. Laura could see one last swish of her skirt as she strolled easily through the far door, her arm twined through that of her American friend, seemingly oblivious to the commotion being created, as if she were merely the society lady she pretended to be.

  Laura’s relief turned to alarm as Delaroche stopped directly in front of Monsieur Daubier.

  Everyone, including Laura, stepped back, giving the two men a wide berth. They stood alone in their circle of floor, people clustering around at a safe distance, like spectators at the Roman Coliseum.

  “Antoine Daubier?”

  “Yes?” Daubier’s expression was politely quizzical, but there was something beneath it that made Laura’s stomach twist.

  She could hear his voice, from a very long way away, saying, Do you think he—

  Whatever this was about, Daubier knew about it. He knew and he was bracing himself for the blow.

  Delaroche seemed to grow taller. His sallow face blazed with triumph.

  “Antoine Daubier, I arrest you in the name of the Ministry of Police.”

  Chapter 17

  André Jaouen pushed into the circle, breaking the spell.

  “Not in my house,” said Jaouen, his eyes never leaving Delaroche’s. He spoke softly, but there was steel beneath. “Monsieur Daubier is a guest in my home. As are you. You overstep the bounds of hospitality, Monsieur Delaroche.”

  “Monsieur Daubier is an enemy of the Republic.” It cut through the din of the room, slicing through conversations like the blade of the guillotine. “Do you deny it, Monsieur Daubier?”

  Daubier tried for a jovial tone, but there was a gray tinge to his face. “My daubs are not so very unfortunate as that, Monsieur Delaroche. Surely the odd artistic failure is not to be accounted treason.”

  “It isn’t your dabblings in oil which concern the Ministry of Police, Monsieur Daubier. As you well know.”

  To the other spectators, it might have seemed like something out of the Comédie-Française, all innuendo and allusion. But Laura felt apprehension grip her as Daubier shook his head, his face gray. This wasn’t theatre, not to him. “No, I’m afraid I don’t.”

  Delaroche leaned forward. “You deny you have been conspiring against the First Consul?”

  Daubier mustered an attempt at a smile. “I would be a fool not to deny it, even if such a thing were true. Which it isn’t. The First Consul has commissioned a portrait from me. I would hardly go about conspiring against my own patron.”

  Daubier looked about, as if looking for support. None came. The people around him hastily averted their eyes, wary of contamination by association.

  Jaouen finally stepped in. “There has been some mistake,” he said flatly.

  That was all? There has been some mistake? Laura regarded him with sudden wariness. Surely, for a man he called friend, he could muster some better defense than that.

  Unless, of course, he didn’t intend to. Unless he had never intended to.

  It was his party, his guests. Was it also his arrest?

  “There has been a mistake,” agreed Delaroche. He turned to Monsieur Daubier, whose form looked oddly shrunken in his gaudy clothes, as if the bombast had been knocked out of him. “The mistake was yours, Monsieur Daubier, in underestimating the reach of the Republic.”

  “I—” Monsieur Daubier shook his shaggy head. “I do not understand.”

  Delaroche leaned forward. The crowd leaned in, straining to hear. “I think you do understand, Monsieur Daubier. I think you understand very well.”

  Jaouen looked at Delaroche and said, in bored tones, “Must this scene be performed to an audience, Gaston? If you will both come with me—”

  “The only place Monsieur Daubier is going,” said Delaroche, “is to the Temple.”

  The air grew chill.

  “I was going to suggest my study,” said Jaouen mildly. “It is nearer, and the refreshments are better. I am a little short on racks and thumbscrews at the moment, but I’m sure you can make do.”

  A nervous titter ran around the crowd.

  “Do you mock my work?”

  Jaouen raised his brows. “Far from it, Gaston. I admire your artistry. But we have many artists here tonight, all eager to show their works, and this . . . display is impeding their efforts. I suggest,” he added, raising his voice so that it carried throughout the room, “that we all go back to enjoying the arts. Monsieur Whittlesby has a new poem for us, I believe?”

  “In twenty-five cantos!” called out Whittlesby.

  Someone groaned.

  It had been the right thing to say. The nervous tension gripping the room broke. People turned to their neighbors; rustled in their reticules; drifted over to the refreshment tables. As far as they were concerned, the show was over.

  Something dark and nasty passed across Delaroche’s face, and Laura’s stomach sank again. This wasn’t over yet. The audience might have gone, but Delaroche was determined in his purpose, all the more determined now for having been publicly balked.

  Jaouen turned to Delaroche. “My study?”

  For a moment, Laura thought Delaroche meant to agree. Then Delaroche clapped his hands, once, sharply. From behind the thinning ranks of the spectators appeared two men in official costume. Like Delaroche, they were booted and spurred. There was no mistaking them for guests. They moved purposefully towards Daubier, who looked at them with dawning alarm.

  Delaroche pointed a bony finger at Daubier. “Bind him.”

  “This,” Jaouen said, “is a most marked breach of hospitality. Professional courtesy only goes so far, Gaston. Drop him,” he said sharply to the guards.

  The guards looked uncertainly from Jaouen to Delaroche and back again.

  “The ropes,” said Delaroche. “Now. This man is dangerous.”

  Even the guards looked askance at that. Daubier had never looked less dangerous. He looked like what he was. An overweight man well past the prime of his life with unkempt hair, a too-bright waistcoat, and paint on his fingers.

  “I am willing,” Daubier said with effort, “to do whateve
r I can to aid in unraveling this tangle, Monsieur. I will come with you peaceably—wherever you wish me to go. For the Republic.”

  It was a fine sentiment. It had no impact on Delaroche. “You will come as I wish you to come,” he said sharply. “Like the traitor you are.”

  Jaouen let out a short, irritated breath. “One can’t be too careful in dealing with the First Consul’s chosen portraitist. Why don’t we send to my cousin and see what he thinks of these proceedings?”

  “Who do you think sent me?” Reaching into his coat, Delaroche withdrew a rectangular piece of paper. Shaking it free of its folds, he jiggled it in front of his host. “This is out of your jurisdiction, Jaouen.”

  Laura was too far away to make out any words. She could see only the imprint of a very official-looking seal. But whatever it was, it had the desired effect.

  Jaouen stepped back. “My mistake.” He shrugged. “I had thought this was merely your whim, Gaston. But in this case”—he extended an arm towards Daubier—“your prisoner, I believe.”

  How could he sound so completely indifferent? Everyone knew what happened to men in the Temple. Jaouen knew better than most.

  Daubier gave him a sickly smile. “It is quite all right, André. An innocent man has nothing to fear.”

  They all knew that wasn’t true.

  Laura watched as Daubier meekly held out his hands to be bound. She had been away in England throughout the Terror, but she felt, for the first time, that she had an inkling of what she had escaped. The fear. The uncertainty. The helplessness.

  But Daubier wasn’t helpless. Laura caught at scraps. Daubier was said to be a favorite of the First Consul’s wife; he was commissioned to paint a portrait of the First Consul himself. Surely they would intervene on his behalf.

  Or not.

  That hadn’t saved Topino-Lebrun four years back. She had read about it even in England, the painter condemned for his supposed role in the Conspiracy of Daggers.

  She looked at Jaouen, but the man with whom she had bantered about bedsheets, Daubier’s chess partner, Gabrielle and Pierre-André’s father, was gone. He was expressionless, emotionless, all indifference and cold intellect behind the icy lenses of his spectacles. He might never have joked with Daubier or called him friend.

  Laura remembered that whispered conversation in the green marble antechamber. Had Jaouen conspired with him only to draw him on? Had it all been an elaborate trap? The exchange with Delaroche had lacked conviction, almost as though he were speaking lines set out long ago.

  Had they concocted it between them, Delaroche and Jaouen? The supposed enmity, the chance meeting on the bridge . . . It might all be a blind.

  But no. That made no sense. Why put on a show for her? She was only the governess. Jaouen hadn’t known, then, that she had any connection to Daubier. She was thinking herself into circles, as tangled as the rope around Daubier’s wrists.

  Laura backed away, her gray skirts whispering against her legs, fading into the crowd. They would need some sort of proof, she imagined, even in this new regime. There would be at least the semblance of a trial, as there had been in the Topino case. They might torture a confession out of him, but they would have a much more difficult time of it if they couldn’t find physical evidence—letters, instructions, autographed pictures of the Comte d’Artois.

  Laura took a sharp left, into the servants’ passageway that ran along the side of the house. They had been speaking of Daubier’s studio earlier, she and Jaouen. Daubier’s life was conducted out of that studio. If there were anything to incriminate him, it would be there.

  Laura’s steps quickened until she was all but running down the hallway. Whatever else happened, she was determined that Delaroche’s men would not find what they were looking for. That painting with the finch might have been a very long time ago, but she owed him something still, if only for offering to take her in when he no more wanted a daughter than she did a father.

  The memory of that conversation almost made her stumble. He had tried to warn her against Jaouen. Had he suspected the other man of double-dealing with him? Or had it been on general principles only?

  Jeannette had left her cloak by the back entrance, that same entrance to which Jean had directed Laura on that first rainy day a few millennia ago. It was a country woman’s garment—a thick, solid piece of wool held by a tie at the neck, with a deep hood attached—a far cry from the fitted pelisse required by fashion. It also concealed far more.

  Laura caught it up gratefully. With her plain dress and the heavy wool cloak, she looked like someone’s maid. A superior sort of maid, perhaps, but not the sort of person anyone would question. Domestics came and went as they would.

  The Place Royale was only four streets away, but it had never felt farther. The shops were long since closed, their shutters drawn, their awnings rolled up. The streets were deserted, illuminated only by the odd light from someone’s windows. Laura forced herself to make her way with deliberation; she’d be no good to anyone if she slipped and fell in the ice-slick mud limning the unpaved streets. But every instinct urged haste.

  Keeping close to the shadows beneath the loggia that lined the four sides of the Place Royale, Laura conjured the plan of Daubier’s apartment in her memory. It had been simple enough, she recalled. There was a narrow entry hall followed by the studio, a large square room with windows on both sides. Beyond the studio lay his private apartments, all in a row: dining room, drawing room, study, and bedroom. Daubier had let her nap in his bed during some of those interminable parties of her youth. There had been a second stairway, leading out from the bedroom, presumably to a servants’ entrance.

  The concierge was napping at his post, his lantern half-shuttered beside him, the crumbs of his dinner in his lap. Laura slipped past him without a word.

  She scurried up the broad, shallow stairs, past the first two flats. All was quiet. It must be near midnight now, late enough for the good inhabitants of the building to be asleep or engaged in other activities behind closed doors and drawn bedcurtains.

  Daubier’s flat was the third, four stories up. By the time she reached the landing, Laura was breathless with exertion and nerves. By now, Delaroche would have Daubier in a carriage. They might even now be entering the precincts of the Temple. How long before they sent someone to search Daubier’s lodgings?

  They might wait until morning.

  She couldn’t count on that sort of luck.

  Laura tentatively twisted the knob. It turned smoothly, without sticking. Laura’s face twisted into something that was half grimace, half smile. Daubier never remembered to lock his door. There was, he had liked to say, nothing worth stealing.

  It was clever, Laura acknowledged. Clever to hide something treasonous in plain sight, someplace with no locks or bars. Who would think to look where everyone was invited to go?

  The first room of the apartment was a narrow, rectangular entry hall. It was windowless, darker than night without a candle, but Laura could navigate it by touch. Nothing had changed. There was still the same long, narrow wooden table at the center, the same seventeenth-century bench by the far wall. As her eyes adjusted to the dark, she could make out the shadowy outlines of the paintings on the walls. Daubier had always used this space to exhibit the work of his pupils, a generous touch.

  Did Julie Beniet’s work hang here? No doubt. It was too dark to be sure.

  The door to the studio was closed, but a fine line of light showed beneath it. That was like Daubier, too, to leave the candles burning against his return. He had always been careless with such things, burning money as quickly as he earned. He was lucky, Laura’s mother used to say, that he hadn’t burned the building down as well.

  It was disconcerting, all these memories. People, words, conversations she hadn’t thought about for years were flooding back, dogging her steps through the entryway.

  Laura yanked at the door of the studio, tearing it open with a force that made the muscles in her shoulder cry out in pro
test. There were candles burning in all the sconces, dripping wax into the specially designed basins below. It looked almost exactly as she remembered it—props strewn about in careless profusion, a half-finished canvas on an easel, another propped against a wall. The platform at the far end of the room, cluttered with a dizzying selection of drapes and backdrops. Daubier’s paints and brushes, the one exception to his glorious untidiness, lined with meticulous care on their respective stands. And from their perch in an elaborate filigree cage, Daubier’s birds still sang.

  It might have been the studio of Laura’s youth but for one thing. There was a man on the platform, stretched out full-length on the chaise longue. In contrast to the elaborate brocade throw, he was wearing street clothes, an expensive but otherwise mundane jacket and breeches.

  He scrambled to his feet as Laura entered, sending the pamphlet he had been reading skidding to the floor.

  “Hullo,” he said rapidly. “If you’re looking for the artist, I’m afraid he’s out—oh.” He broke off abruptly as Laura pushed back her hood. “I’ve met you, haven’t I?”

  He had. He had bumped into her in Jaouen’s study, weeks ago.

  What was Jaouen’s cousin Philippe doing in Daubier’s studio?

  This night kept getting stranger and stranger. Laura scrambled to make sense of it. If Jaouen had drawn Daubier into a trap, the cousin might be in on it too, put there in the studio as security to make sure no one did exactly what she was doing now. But he didn’t comport himself like a guard, and he wasn’t treating her like a threat.

  “I say, you’re the governess, aren’t you! I remember now.” Philippe bounded down the two steps from the platform. “Did André send you? Do you have a message for me?”

  “He knows you’re here?” said Laura sharply.

  Philippe blinked. “Here? Me? Oh, of course. Of course he knows. I was, er, just waiting for a sitting. Old Daubier’s painting my portrait, don’t you know. A surprise present for my mother.”

  “I see,” said Laura. “A sitting.”

  “Well, you might call it a standing,” said Philippe, with an over-energetic cheer that reminded Laura forcibly of Jaouen and Daubier earlier that evening. “He doesn’t let me do much sitting. It’s deuced tiring. I don’t know how artists’ models manage it.”