The Orchid Affair

by Lauren Willig

  André followed after her. “None of them are there. They’re all putting up playbills. Laura—”

  She didn’t want to hear what he had to say. “What if they’ve returned already?” She was already backing out of the alleyway. “I wouldn’t want to add tardiness to my other shortcomings.”

  André stopped short in the middle of the alley. He looked at her quizzically. “Are you running away?”

  Who was he to talk about running away? And what was he thinking, going about kissing her like that? Did he think she wouldn’t care?

  “I’m not your wife,” Laura announced. Her voice was pitched too high. It made her wince to hear it. That wasn’t her talking. It was someone else, someone briefly inhabiting her body, someone who had been kissing André Jaouen as though she meant it.

  Her breasts still ached with it. What was her body thinking? That was the bother. It didn’t think, it felt. It was her job to do the thinking, no matter what her body wanted or thought she wanted.

  “What are you saying?”

  Laura held up the paste pot to ward André off. “No matter what we’ve been pretending”—her voice sounded unnaturally loud in the small alleyway—“I am not really your wife.”

  “I was aware of that,” he said.

  He seemed to be missing the point. “This past week—sharing as we have—” Laura’s voice had gone raspy. She coughed to clear her throat. The paste pot hung heavy from her hand. “Perhaps this wasn’t the best idea after all. I hadn’t thought . . .”

  “Hadn’t thought what?” he pressed.

  There was still a lump at the back of her throat, as though a whole pool of toads had bred and spawned in there. Her lips felt sore and swollen from his kiss, both her brain and lips slower and clumsier than usual.

  “I hadn’t thought that I would grow so accustomed to you. That’s all. Here. You can put up the rest of the playbills.”

  Pushing the paste pot at him, she set off at a pace that was practically a jog. He didn’t try to follow. Or, if he did, she didn’t see it.

  Only Pantaloon and Leandro were in the common room of the inn, sharing a carafe of the house wine, when Laura came in.

  “The children are already in bed,” Pantaloon informed her kindly. “Jeannette put them up an hour ago. You might want to do the same. A good night’s sleep, always a good thing before a performance. That’s what I told the others as well.”

  “Mmmph,” said Leandro, into his wine.

  “Well, good night, then,” said Laura vaguely as she took up a candle from the table and scurried up the stairs.

  It was a good-size inn for a good-size town, although all but empty in the off-season. The troupe had almost entirely taken it over. There were eight doors on the hall, three opening off on either side. The inhabitants of the first room on the left had made the mistake of leaving the door slightly ajar.

  Through it, Laura could hear the crinkle of a straw mattress and a voice whispering breathily. “I shouldn’t . . .”

  “But you want to,” said de Berry confidently.

  There was the rustle of clothing being either removed or displaced.

  Rose let out a squeal. “Throw myself away on a penniless actor?” she demanded coquettishly.

  More rustling. “You’d be surprised at what I have to offer.”

  “But I imagine”—rustle, rustle—“you’re going to offer to show me.”

  Oh, for heaven’s sake. Laura knew it was nearly spring, but did that mean everyone had to mate?

  She made to hurry past, but was slowed as she spotted Harlequin, standing in the open door of the opposite room.

  Catching her eye, Harlequin made a wry face. “Leandro will be sobbing over his wine again tonight.”

  That was a safe enough prediction. “He already is. I don’t see what he sees in her,” Laura added waspishly.

  “Don’t you?” Something in the way Harlequin said it made Laura wonder if it was entirely on Leandro’s account that Harlequin was concerned.

  “I don’t,” said Laura firmly. “He’s worth ten of her, and you can tell him I said so. Besides, Gabrielle will be devastated if he doesn’t wait for her.”

  Gabrielle would be nothing of the kind. For all that Leandro was a decade her senior, she treated him with the sort of patient condescension usually reserved by empresses for their underlings. But it seemed the right sort of thing to say.

  Harlequin smiled faintly. “I’ll let him know.”

  Laura continued on down the hall, to the room she was to share with André. Would he come to bed at all? Or would he emulate Leandro and spend his night on a settle by the hearth, regretting the impulse that had led him to offer consolation in the form of a kiss? Laura tried to imagine the paths of thought that might have led to it. The governess is whining, must shut her up. Oh, well, best stop her mouth. Or perhaps it had been some lingering memory of Suzette, the girl men couldn’t forget, before he remembered that in real life the beguiling Suzette was nothing more than plain Laura Griscogne, who balked desire simply by being herself.

  That hadn’t been the case once upon a time.

  She might not have been the prettiest girl in the group—and even then she had shown a dampening inclination to actually think things through, an attribute not considered an asset among her parents’ set—but she had been young and nubile and curious. Antonio had been a sculptor, come to study with her father. They had conducted several intriguing anatomy lessons down by the pier, with the stars glittering on the water. Laura had never been quite sure whether her parents knew or not.

  There had never been any talk of love, although, like any fifteen-year-old, she had imagined herself in love, just a little bit.

  But then the commission had come from England, and they had left Lake Como for Cornwall, where the stars were dimmer and the waters colder and the sea leapt up and swallowed up all there was of youth and joy and desire.

  She had been a very different girl, that Laura, the one who had dallied with Antonio in Como.

  She had thought she was done with that, that she had frozen it out of her blood. That was what was so terrifying—not the memory of desire, but the reawakening of it, like fire in the blood.

  When André had kissed her, up against the wall, she had wanted to take him by the ears and yank his head back down to hers.

  Laura let herself into her room. It was a simple enough accommodation, but it had amenities she had all but forgotten, like a proper bed with proper sheets and a fireplace with real logs in it. There was even a mirror on one wall, dirty and tarnished, but still a mirror. Laura grimaced at the sight of herself. There were sweat stains under the arms of her blouse and mud on her skirt. Her hair had been washed—water was one thing they hadn’t lacked along the way—but the damp air had turned it into a frizzy tangle. She looked like a gypsy. Not just a gypsy, but a gypsy who had fallen on hard times.

  Someone had brought up her meager bag and placed it on a chair. After six days of wearing the same clothes, Laura ferreted through, marveling over the items she had so naively packed before leaving the Hôtel de Bac. There were three dresses—gray—and chemises and stockings. There were two nightgowns and, beneath those, a slim, paper-bound volume of poetry.

  Ronsard. He who believed in gathering one’s flowers while one may.

  Well, one could seize the day in multiple ways. Laura untied the strings at the neck of her blouse. It felt like heaven, peeling off the stiff, dirty fabric. There was a basin on the nightstand, with a cloth beside it, and Laura gratefully sponged off some of the dirt of travel. The tapes on her skirt followed. Should she be worried that the skirt could practically stand by itself by now?

  It felt almost decadent to let the nightdress slide down over naked flesh, even though, like all her clothes, the nightdress was heavy and serviceable, made of thick, opaque cloth. There wasn’t anything the least bit suggestive about it.

  It was ridiculous that she wished there was.

  It might be rather nice to be Suze
tte for a bit, rather than Laura, to seize her pleasure where she could find it and think nothing of the morning. What did she have to lose, after all? She had no family, no obligations. There were no chaperones to wag their fingers or employers to threaten her with dismissal. She was utterly afloat in the world, and that circumstance might be as freeing as it had formerly seemed constraining.

  Laura made a face at herself in the mirror. Yes, that was all very well, but with whom? She doubted André would be coming to bed. Not tonight.

  And even if he did . . . well, he was coming to bed, not coming to bed.

  This was what came of associating with actors.

  On an impulse, Laura took up the book of poetry as she clambered into the high, tester bed. She could always read about it if she couldn’t live it.

  Ah, time is flying, lady, time is flying / Nay, tis not the time that flies but we . . . Be therefore kind, my love, whilst thou art fair.

  So much time already gone. So many dull and dry and barren years. Ronsard, dust now these two-hundred-odd years, had known that.

  Shall I not see myself clasped in her arms / Breathless and exhausted by love’s charms....

  Laura plumped up the pillows behind her, finding them less comfortable than she had before. The fire was burning down again. It seemed symbolic. That was the problem with poetry. It made everything seem symbolic.

  Why hadn’t she just grabbed him and kept kissing him while she had the chance?

  Laura grimly turned her eyes again to her book. Sermons, that was what she should have brought with her. Or political economy. Not this, not flowers and kisses and breathless embrace.

  She skimmed the next few lines. Kissed by desire . . . breast to breast . . . quenching fire . . . Goodness, it was warm, wasn’t it?

  A squeaking noise sent her bolting upright against the pillows, the book clamped shut over one finger.

  The door eased open.

  Chapter 28

  My mouth fell open.

  Colin looked as though someone had just socked him in the stomach. Around us, the other party guests obediently lifted their glasses in a toast to Selwick Hall and then drifted on, returning to their drinking, their gossiping, their posturing, entirely unaware that a grenade had just been lobbed into their midst.

  “Selwick where?” I heard one woman murmur to another.

  The other shrugged, showing off her narrow shoulder bones to good advantage. “Jeremy’s family place, I think.”

  Jeremy’s family place? Admittedly, he was a Selwick too, if only on his mother’s side, but it sure as hell wasn’t his. He didn’t live there. And he didn’t have the right to promise it to some film company.

  At least, I didn’t think he did. Did he?

  Colin stepped up to Jeremy, taking care, even in the midst of chaos, not to make a scene. “You can’t do that. You have no authority to contract for the use of Selwick Hall.”

  Jeremy took a cool sip of his champagne. “I might not. But your mother does.”

  And where was Colin’s mother? Didn’t she realize how this decision would have gutted her oldest offspring? Selwick Hall was his home—more than his home. I peered around for her. She was still there—she hadn’t slunk off to wash the blood from her hands or go hide behind an arras or whatever it was that disloyal Shakespearean queens were meant to do—happily chattering away at the center of a circle of adoring friends.

  “. . . lovely this time of year,” I could hear her saying. I didn’t think she was talking about Selwick Hall. The tan she was sporting didn’t come from spring in Sussex.

  “My mother only has a third share.”

  “Legally,” said Jeremy, “that’s irrelevant. Any one tenant has full rights to the whole.” His teeth were too white. They sat too straight in his smiling mouth. “But let’s not talk of the legalities. Legalities have no place among family.”

  “Did you tell your solicitor that before or after you phoned him?” said Colin curtly.

  Jeremy’s smile didn’t falter. “I’d be a fool not to dot the I’s and cross the T’s on a deal like this.”

  “There is no deal,” said Colin. “I may not have consulted my solicitor, but I feel fairly safe in guessing that letting out the house to a film crew doesn’t constitute normal enjoyment of the property.”

  Not knowing much about English law post-1815, I couldn’t have said whether he was right or not, but it certainly sounded good.

  “As I was saying,” said Jeremy, with the sort of chiding tone more appropriate from governess to pupil than from lying snake to stepson, “even assuming your mother doesn’t have the right, on her share alone, to promise Selwick Hall, wouldn’t you agree that majority vote rules?”

  “Since when is one-third a majority?” I blurted out.

  “One-third may not be a majority,” said Jeremy, never taking his eyes off Colin. “But two-thirds is. You can’t argue with that.”

  If Colin had one-third and Colin’s mother had one-third . . . It was like a Sesame Street math problem, only one in which the Muppets had gone rogue, quibbling over the ownership of the letter S.

  I didn’t need a map to point the way to the owner of the deciding one-third interest. It would have been obvious, even if Serena hadn’t looked as though she were trying to disappear into her own shawl. Guilt was written all over her face.

  “Serena?” Colin turned to his sister. “You don’t know anything about this. Do you?”

  It was clear that he expected the answer to be in the negative, despite all indications. My heart ached for him. Don’t tell me organs don’t work that way; I could feel it as a physical squeeze in my chest. I wanted to wrap Colin up in my pashmina and whisk him away from the whole gruesome scene, transport him safe and whole to Selwick Hall.

  Which wasn’t, it seemed, entirely his, or entirely safe.

  Did this also mean the others could sell it if they took the notion? It was a truly alarming thought. For them it was all a lark—a source of status and prestige or, in this case, spare cash. For Colin, it was home.

  After his father’s death, Colin had given up a successful career in the City, given up his flat and his job and a regular salary to try to make something out of the old family home. While Colin’s university friends were out at wine bars, playing with their BlackBerrys, he was calculating crop yields. Admittedly, no one had held a gun to his head; it had all been his own choice, but from what I gathered, without that choice there wouldn’t have been much of a Selwick Hall for Jeremy to rent out.

  Serena, for all her other neuroses, had her work at the gallery, a small but expensive flat in Notting Hill, and a fairly active social life in London.

  What did Colin have?

  “It’s for the best, you’ll see,” Serena was saying, speaking too fast, her lashes blinking rapidly. “We’ll all share the money equally. You can use yours on the Hall.”

  Colin was still a step behind. I was reminded of people stumbling out of the doctor’s office after those drops that dilate your eyes, squinting at everyday objects in an attempt to reconcile the distorted images to their regular forms.

  “Then . . . you did know?” He sounded incredulous, as though he still didn’t entirely believe it.

  I thought of all the times Colin had looked out for her, all the times he’d cut short our dates, all the times he’d seen her home, and I wanted to slap her. All she’d had to do was say no, that was all. Was that really so hard?

  Serena’s thin hands twisted together. “It’s only for a month, they say. They’ll pay well.”

  Colin said, very slowly, “That promotion. This is why you didn’t tell me about it. It was a quid pro quo, wasn’t it?” Colin turned to his stepfather. “You fixed it with Paul. Serena’s agreement in exchange for a new title and a thicker pay packet.”

  I could feel the satisfaction coming off Jeremy in waves, like cheap cologne.

  “It wasn’t quite like that,” Jeremy said smugly, and I understood, for the first time, that it wasn’t just that Je
remy was uncomfortable with Colin; Jeremy actively disliked Colin. He wanted to hurt him. And he had. He had hit him in the two places he was most vulnerable: his sister and Selwick Hall.

  “It really wasn’t,” Serena chimed in, inadvertently making matters worse. Just what Colin needed. For her to side with Jeremy. Again. “With the money the film company is paying, Paul is letting me buy into the gallery. He’s making me a partner. A junior partner.”

  And whose idea did she think that was? I’d met her boss. He wasn’t much of a wheeler-dealer. Paul had gotten into art in the seventies because he’d been hanging out with the artists in pot-infused lofts, experiencing the colors in a psychedelic haze. Now that they were older, their work practically sold itself, leaving very little for Paul to do other than reminisce fulsomely about the old days before calling in Serena to do the paperwork and close the sale.

  To be fair, Paul did scout out new artists, and according to Serena, he had a genuine eye for what would sell and what wouldn’t, but he certainly wasn’t the sort to take any proactive business decisions without a Lady Macbeth giving him a shove between the shoulder blades. Or, in this case, a Mr. Macbeth.

  Colin turned to his sister, struggling to understand. “If you needed the money, why didn’t you come to me? I’d have found it for you somehow.”

  Beneath their layers of carefully applied makeup, Serena’s eyes were haunted with ghosts I couldn’t even begin to comprehend. Nor, I suspected, could Colin. For all his reticence, Colin’s world was a pretty straightforward one. He did what he said and said what he meant, end of story.

  “I couldn’t,” Serena whispered. “It wouldn’t have been my own.”

  “As opposed to doing it this way.” Colin sounded like he was still trying to understand, taking in the betrayal piece by piece.

  Serena nodded. “Yes.”

  Colin’s face settled along bitter lines. “Behind my back. You might at least have told me.”

  Serena had all but shredded the end of her shawl. She twisted to look at her stepfather. “I didn’t know,” she said desperately. “I didn’t realize Jeremy planned to announce it like this. I had thought—”