The Orchid Affair Read Online Free

the curved sides of the cup warm against one’s palms on a cold day….
    This had been her choice, she reminded herself. No one had placed a knife to her neck and demanded she go. She could very well have stayed in England and done exactly as she had done for the past sixteen years. She could have walked primly down the sidewalked streets, herding her charges in front of her, yanking them back from horses’ hooves and mud puddles and bits of interesting masonry; she could have poured her tea from the nursery teapot, watching the steam curl from the cup and knowing that she was seeing in those endless curls a lifetime of the same streets, the same tea, the same high-pitched voices whining, “Miss Grey! Miss Grey!”
    She didn’t want to be Miss Grey anymore. Miss Grey might have warm hands and dry feet, but she wanted to be Laura again, before it was too late and the stony edifice that was Miss Grey closed entirely around her. It was time to get her feet wet.
    Laura looked down at the soaking mess of her shoes. It was a pity Fate had to take her quite so literally.
    The gatekeeper was waiting for her by the side entrance. He had an umbrella—which he held over his own head. Unlike the main gate, this one was designed for use rather than show, two thick slabs of dark wood leading onto a square stone courtyard. He opened the gate just wide enough for her to wiggle through, in an undignified sideways shuffle. That was, she was sure, quite intentional.
    Rain oozed down the gray stone of the building, seeping through the cracks in the masonry, puddling in the crevices in the paving. Tucked away in a corner, a stone angel wept over the round mouth of a well, raindrops dripping down her face like tears. The long windows were the same unforgiving gray as the stone.
    After the bright, modern town houses of Mayfair, the great bulk of the seventeenth-century mansion looked archaic and more than a little threatening.
    From very long ago, a whisper of memory presented itself, of the fairy stories so in vogue in the fashionable salons of her youth, of castles under curses, their ruined halls echoing to the fearsome tread of the ogre as a captive princess shivered in her tower.
    Laura didn’t believe in fairy stories. Any ogres here would be of the human variety.
    One ogre, to be precise. André Jaouen. Thirty-six years old. Formerly an avocat of Nantes. Now employed at the Préfecture de Paris under the ostensible supervision of Louis-Nicolas Dubois. Commonly known to be a protégé of Bonaparte’s Chief of Police, Joseph Fouché, to whom he bore a distant relation. It was his department through which any word of suspicious personages in Paris would come. It was his job to hunt down and secure these threats to the Republic.
    Which meant that it was Laura’s job to get the information to the Pink Carnation before he could get to them.
    They had dubbed her the Orchid—the Silver Orchid. The Carnation had chosen the name, with her usual perspicacity. It seemed appropriate, thought Laura, for the Carnation to have named her after a flower that drew its sustenance from others, dependent on more firmly rooted flora for its very existence.
    Her mission was simple enough. She was to embed herself into the household of the assistant to the Prefect of Police. There, she was to keep an eye out for suspicious behavior and useful information, taking specific instructions from the Pink Carnation as directed.
    Just a simple little task. Nothing to write home about. She had nothing to do but outwit a man whose very business was the outwitting of others, with no training but sixteen years of governessing and a six-month course at a spy school in Sussex executed in a way that could only be called cheerfully haphazard. The Selwicks had taught her to blacken her teeth with soot and gum (just in case she wanted to play a demented old hag); to ask the way to Rouen in a thick Norman accent; and to swing on a rope through a window without breaking the