“Hush!” The marquise slapped his arm with her fan. “They’ll think you’re serious.”
“Of course, I’m only jesting,” he said, but Camille wasn’t certain he was. He passed a piece of paper to Sophie. “If there’s anything,” he said kindly, “anything at all, mademoiselle, please do not hesitate.”
“He needn’t go so far as that,” Lazare said curtly.
“I only go as far as my morals compel me, monsieur,” the vicomte tossed back.
Lazare ignored him, staring over the other boy’s head as if he were suddenly fascinated by the treetops.
Sophie ducked her head. “Merci, Monsieur le Vicomte.”
Good-byes and well wishes were traded and a moment later, the two aristocrats were stepping into the carriage, the breeze tousling their silken garments, the driver closing the gilded door behind them, and the horses stepping out briskly. Camille, Sophie, and Lazare watched as the carriage disappeared down the narrow streets.
Sophie sighed happily.
“Feeling well enough to go home?” Camille asked, as nicely as she could. She didn’t blame Sophie—not exactly. But how could she have taken what must have been the vicomte’s card? To acknowledge a relationship of sorts with a nobleman such as he?
“Perhaps Monsieur Mellais will accompany us?” Sophie tilted her head and smiled at him.
“We couldn’t trouble you—” Camille began. The thought of him coming to their stooped building in the dingy rue Charlot made her cringe. It was like her bruised eye; she wished she were not ashamed of it, but she was.
Lazare’s face fell. “I must be going, in any case. Good day to you, mesdemoiselles.” He lifted his hat and turned away.
Camille watched him walk off with long strides, his coat billowing behind him. Each step he took pulled at her inside until she felt something would snap. But to call him back? To reveal herself that way felt too dangerous when she didn’t know how he felt. She bit the edge of her fingernail, worrying at it.
He was nearly at the street when he stopped. “But you’ll still come to our aeronauts’ workshop, mademoiselle?” he called out.
Hadn’t she wanted something more, the day of the balloon? A bigger life? Then why did saying yes to this boy feel like standing at the edge of a precipice and stepping into air? It should have felt easy, but it didn’t.
“Say yes,” Sophie nudged. “Remember, he likes you.”
Lazare waited, fidgeting with the edge of his coat.
It was just him. It wasn’t a precipice. It was only a tiny step.
“When?” she asked.
A smile spread slowly across his face. “Truly?” He told her where the workshop was and suggested they meet there on Wednesday. “I’ll need the time to prepare Armand,” he said.
“He dislikes me so much?”
He shook his head. “I’m teasing. Though, on second thought, perhaps not.”
“Well, until then,” Camille said, pointedly ignoring Sophie’s look of triumph.
He hesitated. “One thing more, mademoiselle.”
“Yes?”
“If there is any trouble from the person who blackened your eye, tell me. Because, pardieu, whoever he is, he will have to answer to me.”
* * *
“He would have walked us home,” Sophie said once they had left the grassy carpets and plush hedges of the Place des Vosges.
“He was being kind, that’s all.”
“He invited you to his workshop.” Sophie rolled her eyes. “Truly, you are the most resistant to romance of any person I know.”
She didn’t want to respond to that. The less said about the confusing boy the better. There was something she wished to know, though. “What did the vicomte give you, Sophie? Was it his card?”
“Why should I tell you? You’ll only be angry.”
“Show me.”
Sophie opened her hand. In it lay a square of the palest mint-green paper, barely as wide as her palm, with the boy’s names and titles—Jean-Baptiste de Vaux, Vicomte de Séguin—engraved across it, very much like the expensive cards her father had resentfully printed to cover the costs of his pamphlets. It was soft from being clutched in her fist.
“À moi.” Camille held out her hand for it.
Sophie slipped it into her purse. “It’s mine.”
Camille gritted her teeth to stop herself from saying something she’d regret. This was where Alain’s tales about girls swept off their feet by princes led. “You don’t know the ways of the world, ma chère.”
“And you’re an expert?”
“Just—don’t trust as much. Be careful … of things.”
“How specific you are.” Sophie found a clump of grass on her skirt and flicked it off.
“You know what I mean,” said Camille, exasperated.
“Do you mean runaway carriages?” Sophie said, knowingly. “Or is it handsome noblemen we’re to be wary of? What about handsome balloon pilots?” Sophie poked Camille in the arm.
“That hurts,” Camille said, pushing her sister’s hand away. “And don’t think you’re being droll—you’re absolutely not.”
The look in Sophie’s large blue eyes said she knew she was very droll indeed. “Alors,” she said, tucking her hand under Camille’s elbow and giving her arm a squeeze. “I will no longer be droll. But, sérieusement, Camille—how he looked at me! Don’t you see that the attention of someone as important as the vicomte is a good thing? A way out?”
Camille fumed. Couldn’t Sophie see that a rich nobleman was no real security, nothing assured at all? “But it’s not the right way out, Sophie,” she said, feeling she’d never convince her.
“Bah!” Sophie laughed. “In the end, who can say which way is right and which way is wrong, as long as one of them leads to happiness?”
11
On the way home they stopped at a patisserie so that, as Sophie insisted, they could recover from their fright. They paid with turned coins and walked away as quickly as possible. They were so hungry they ate the pastries the way stray dogs would, on the street outside their apartment, while people stared. Camille didn’t care. The buttery flakes and the sweet marzipan tasted like sunbeams. After the pastry was gone, she licked her fingers, too. Her stomach filled, a sense of well-being came to her. They had the medicine they needed; Sophie had not been hurt. All of that was good. And underneath, a secret, almost painful joy: she’d seen Lazare again. She would visit his workshop in three days.
It was a far-off gleam, like a candle in a window. Waiting. Beckoning.
On the winding stairs to the apartment, Camille nearly tripped over Fantôme, who was lounging on the last step. “What’s he doing here?”
“Chat méchant,” Sophie scolded as she scooped him into her arms. “Naughty cats won’t get anything for supper but nasty mice they have to catch all by themselves.” The black cat snuggled against her shoulder and began to purr.
“Sophie.” The door to their apartment stood open a hand’s-width. “You didn’t lock the door.”
“I did.” Sophie frowned. “Is it Alain? Maybe he’s come to apologize.” She pushed past Camille into the apartment.
The little salon was empty.
“Where is he, then?” The apartment was deathly quiet, as if the garret rooms were holding their breath. Even the light felt wrong. “Alain?”
On the table, crumbs lay scattered. Hadn’t she cleaned up the night before? Ashes were heaped in the hearth, a dirty pot of washing water left to cool next to it. Surely she’d thrown theirs out. The air seemed to vibrate around her and from somewhere came that strange, insistent hissing. Perhaps she was losing her mind.
The cupboard yawned empty. “Did you eat the cheese this morning?”
“Of course not!” Sophie pressed shoulder-to-shoulder with Camille to peer at the bare shelves. “Not only the cheese, but the rest of the bread is gone, too.”
The room tightened around her. “Alain came back.”
“Alain might drink too much,” Sop
hie said, “but he wouldn’t have taken our last bit of food.”
There was something worse he could have taken. Much worse.
Camille raced to the bedroom. There the wardrobe door sagged open. It was empty, their best dresses snatched off their pegs. The bed had been made when they left—now the bedclothes lay rumpled, straw loose on the floor. The mattress had a gash in it, like a terrible smile. On the floor in front of the little door that led to the eaves, the loose floorboard lay upturned. The key hung drunkenly in the lock.
Camille clasped her shaking hands. There was no need to fear. Not yet. Alain opening the door to the room under the eaves didn’t mean anything. He still needed the key that opened the strongbox. “Bring a candle, Sophie!”
“Maman said we were never to go in there.”
Camille nearly spit with frustration. “There are many things Maman told us not to do. But we’ve had to do them anyway. Going into this room won’t be the drop of water that makes the vase overflow.” Her hand trembled as she held it out. “The candlestick.”
Once she had it, she stooped and went inside, holding the light up.
The lid of the strongbox was cracked open. Alain hadn’t even bothered to find the key she’d hidden in a notch in the roof beams. She sank to her knees, laying her palm flat against the dusty floor to steady herself.
No money for rent.
No money for food.
Nothing, nothing, nothing.
“You’re white as a ghost, Camille—tell me!”
“The money I’d been saving for the rent?” Her throat was so tight she could hardly speak. “It’s all gone.”
“How did he know where it was?”
Camille looked around the little room as if it might tell her. “He must have guessed, after he was here yesterday. Seen me glance in that direction—”
“Alain knew we weren’t allowed!”
“That wasn’t because of the strongbox. It was because of something she kept in there, to work la magie.” The burnt trunk.
“But what will we—”
“Ne t’inquiète pas.” She didn’t want Sophie to worry. “I’ll get the dresses back. They’re worth too much to let him keep them.”
Camille stood up, brushed the dust from her skirts. She couldn’t bear to stay in the apartment any longer, where every empty space mocked her. She needed to go out. If she were lucky, she’d find Alain at the Palais-Royal.
If she were luckier, he’d have the money. He’d still have their best dresses, heaped on a chair next to him.
And if she were even luckier than that, she’d get it all back.
Tonight, she needed a gambler’s luck.
12
Taking a deep breath, Camille joined the evening crowds thronging the arcaded walk of the duc d’Orléans’ home, the Palais-Royal. She had no powder for her hair, nor her pale green dress, so she made do with her second-best, the chocolate-striped one that she could no longer fill out. Not that anyone here would notice. This was a place where anything went. Like his guests, the king’s cousin loved a good entertainment. And like his guests, he needed money—so he’d opened the arcades and invited everyone in. Here there was no etiquette nor police constables, only the duc’s own men and their own kind of laws.
It was a hectic carnival, a glittering city within a city. Everything was for sale, but none of it was for her. She passed jewelers’ shops glimmering with diamonds and watches, wig shops and hat shops, a puppet theater, a troupe of ballet dancers, a lace maker whose fine work hung like webs in the window. It was said that anything could be bought or sold at the Palais-Royal: political pamphlets, pornography, pretty women. In the arcades and in the garden, aristocrats in costly silks mingled with women who wore the same clothes, only with false diamonds around their necks. In the crowd, no one could tell the difference. Gamblers and cheaters, drunks and magicians. Champagne or opium, girls or boys, cards or dice, dreams or nightmares: at the Palais-Royal, you picked your own delight—or poison.
Camille passed a darkened room where people sat transfixed for a magic lantern show. The heated lamp projected an image onto a screen: Trappers of New France. It showed a scene by a river. Two figures, their black hair in braids down their backs, stood solemnly on the grassy bank. The woman held a swaddling child, the man a quiver of arrows and a bow. In the placid water at their feet floated a strange boat, long and narrow, curved at bow and stern. It was piled high with furs. Enormous trees, taller than any Camille had ever seen, arched their branches protectively over the little family. They were going somewhere far away on that wide river, she was sure of it. Camille waited in the doorway for the next picture, until the barker snapped at her to pay her fee or move on. It didn’t matter, she told herself. She had somewhere else to be.
Camille cut across the gardens, narrowly avoiding a man standing on a table. With his crushed right hand, he waved a political pamphlet above his head. The ink had run, it was barely dry. “Listen, my brothers, my sisters! See my maimed hand!” he shouted. “See how the masters broke it! While we die in the gutters like rats, what do the king, the queen, the nobles do? Nothing! Five hundred louis for a hat with a feather in it? Ten thousand trees planted at Versailles? And for us? Rien!” The clutch of men and women standing nearby roared and hissed. “Only when we are all dead will they care—because there will be no one left to farm their land, to clean up their shit, or to pay their taxes!”
Her father would have applauded. She could hear his ghost whisper in her ear: See? When the taxes go up, when the harvest fails, the bread prices rise: see what happens. If we work together, things will change.
But they hadn’t, had they?
Camille knew she wasn’t the only one struggling to survive. There were countless girls just like her. Girls who were caught, unfairly ensnared by husbands or fathers or brothers; girls who had no voice nor even a free moment to think what it was they might want to say or what to do. It was wrong, and unjust.
In her other ear, Maman whispered: But you, mon trèsor—you have your magic.
What had Maman been thinking? No magic could change anything, not for long. And for the things that mattered—food in their stomachs, a place of safety—magic was as useless as a sieve to carry water.
At the far corner of the building’s vaulted arcade, laughter and accordion music spilled out onto the walk. Two drunk men, their arms around each other’s shoulders, stumbled down the stairs. Behind them came two of the duc’s men, their hands on the pommels of their swords. They were escorting the men out. One of the drunkards was laughing so hard tears traced skin-colored rivulets down his powdered cheeks. Pushed along by the guards behind him, the other man stopped long enough to eye Camille as she tried to slip past. “Attendez, mademoiselle! Wait for us outside the gates!”
As long as she kept to herself and committed no crime, Camille had nothing to fear from them. Or so she told herself. Determined, she continued into a marbled entrance hall and ran up the staircase, her hand barely touching the banister.
If he was here, she knew where to find him.
She passed a room with blue walls where men played checkers and drank wine. Then a candlelit ballroom, where people danced: whether the girls were countesses or courtesans she couldn’t tell. She wandered along a corridor full of landscape paintings hung floor to ceiling, a girl selling roses from a basket, a row of closed doors, one after another.
She heard the room before she reached it.
From it came shouts, groans, and the relentless clickety-clickety-clickety of the spinning roulette wheel. She went in, scanned the crowd for her brother’s amber hair. A few people glanced idly at her, their fans flicking; none of them were Alain. A smaller room was lit by candelabras stuffed with wax candles, the floor soft with Turkish carpets. Here men in silk suits played faro, a card game so dangerously seductive it was banned by the king. It took no skill to play and each round promised a fresh chance to win. But one mistake and all could be lost. Applause erupted and someone exclaimed,
Bravo, bravo! but Camille slipped by without looking too closely: the stakes here were too rich for Alain.
She found him in a dingy back room where tallow candles jammed into wine bottles cast a dim light over a few bare tables and wooden chairs, two of them lying toppled and broken on the floor. In the corners, uncomfortable shadows lingered along with the sickening scent of cheap wine. Her brother lay slumped across a table covered in a confetti of playing cards, as if he’d dropped dead in the middle of a game.
“Alain!” Camille shook his shoulder. “Wake up!” When he didn’t stir, she shook him harder, so that his head wobbled on his arm. Damp hair stuck to his forehead, his eyes were shut tight; from his open mouth a line of spit ran to the sleeve of his coat.
“You are a pathetic excuse for a brother,” she hissed at him. No response. As furious as it made her, if she couldn’t wake him, she would have to go home empty-handed. As Camille prodded him again, a slight figure with ostrich plumes in her yellow hair and a sallow complexion stepped out of the far doorway. “Does he owe you, too, mademoiselle?” she taunted.
Who was this person? There was a hunger in her eyes that made Camille nervous. “What is it to you?”
“Oh, I’m no one important, bien sûr,” she said, swaying closer. She wore two dresses, one on top of the other: a pale mint-green one underneath a rose-colored one. “Someone hit you?”
Camille stiffened. “Where did you get those dresses?”
The girl nodded at Alain. “He couldn’t wait to wager them.”
“They weren’t his to wager! That’s my sister’s dress, the rose one. And mine is the mint green.”
“I won them fairly.” The girl gave a twirl, making the dresses dance. “He can play again to win them back, if he likes.”
Alain snored on. This was a terrible place he had found himself in, and she was sorry he was a fool for drinking and gaming, especially when he had debts, but she was not going to leave empty-handed. Whatever Alain might have won by wagering the dresses was rightfully hers. Holding her breath, Camille stooped over him and slipped her hands into the nearest pocket of his coat. When her fingers touched metal, she scooped the coins out: ten livres, a few tiny sous. It was so little.
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