“Oh, that’s too bad,” the girl said, but she didn’t sound at all sorry.
Ignoring her, Camille reached across Alain’s back and into his other pocket. This one felt even emptier than the first. She shoved her fingertips into the lining, checking for any coins caught in the seams.
“Nothing there?” The girl strutted closer. “You’re lucky to have found what you did.”
Camille shook Alain again. She wanted to kick him.
“Dieu, he’s too far gone to wake up. Besides, he’s got nothing. Spent it all, foolish boy.”
“If that were true—”
“Don’t believe me? Ask around.” As if she were a magician herself, the girl gestured in the air and a second girl, just as pale and insubstantial, slipped into the room. She wore a raspberry-pink wig, tall and frizzed. On her powdered face, one of the circles of rouge was smudged. “Tell her, Claudette.”
Claudette smiled. Pockets of darkness showed where teeth once had been. “My friend Sandrine is right, mademoiselle,” she lisped. “That one there’s got a rich friend, and now, poor thing, he’s in that man’s debt. Whatever he makes—and it isn’t much, for he’s not the best at games, is he?—it goes to him. The other one.”
Camille looked from one girl to the other. “Who is he? This other one?”
“You think I would tell you, even if I knew his name?” The ostrich plume in Sandrine’s hair wobbled as she shook her head. “Not worth it to me. He’s not kind.”
“I’m not afraid of him. He’s young, handsome,” Claudette said, eagerly. “Wears a ring with a stone in it. Blue, maybe green? Filthy rich, of course.”
“Where might I find him?” Perhaps if Camille told this rich man what Alain had done, he might help.
Claudette gave Sandrine a knowing nod. “Who knows? Perhaps he’ll come by.”
“And in the meantime,” Claudette said, “I’ll give you a chance to get your dresses back.” Watching for Camille’s reaction, Claudette swept up the scattered cards and deftly squared the deck.
“Those dresses don’t belong to you. Why should I play to have them back?” The money clenched in Camille’s fist wouldn’t pay for one of the dresses, let alone two.
“That’s a no, then?” Sandrine asked.
“I’ll play, too, m’selle,” said Claudette, pulling out a purse and shaking it so the coins clinked together. “Sweeten the pot a little.” She flounced onto one of the chairs and propped her elbows on the table. “Come on! Now or never.”
The coins Camille had would buy a little food. But they would not come close to paying the rent. And the rent was overdue. Alain had stolen their last good dresses and gambled them away as if they were nothing. He’d hit her. And whatever he’d gotten for them—he’d thrown that away, too. Worse, he was in debt to someone these girls were loath to tell her about.
Claudette emptied the contents of her purse onto the table. Four gold louis gleamed among the silver livres and sous. Sandrine flashed her pocked smile. “See?”
Camille wiped her sweaty palms on her skirt. She was certain that if she sat down at the table, she’d see the cards were marked. Foxed, or creased. A flame of anger sparked as Camille watched Sandrine shuffle the cards. As if she didn’t know that someone with two good dresses doesn’t wager them for a handful of coins unless they were going to cheat! She saw the knowing glances the girls cast between themselves, the smiles that crimped the edges of their mouths. They were relishing what an easy mark she would be: That idiot’s sister—coming in here and demanding the dresses, as if they were hers. As if she had a right to them. We’ll take what she’s got just for the fun of it.
Camille couldn’t wait to make them regret it.
13
“Take off the dresses and lay them here.” Camille pointed to a chair at the next table.
“Fine.” Sandrine shimmied them off, one after another, and sat back down, wearing only her chemise and stays. “You going to play standing up?”
“What game?”
“Vingt-et-un.”
It took until the third round before Camille caught Claudette. A small pile of coins, including the gold louis, had grown in the middle. But neither Claudette nor Sandrine had lost a single hand; even more suspicious, their cards consistently beat hers. In front of Claudette lay an eight and a seven. Fifteen.
“Another card?” Camille asked.
“Think about it carefully,” Sandrine said.
As Camille pretended to consider the dresses, Sandrine pulled a card—a ten—from her sleeve to switch it for one of the cards in her hand. Quick as thought, Camille grabbed the girl’s wrist.
“Tired of your cards already?” Camille snapped.
“This?” Claudette simpered. “I must have dropped it.”
Caught red-handed and yet she’d deny it? “How dare you—”
Sandrine’s eyes glinted. “Play our way or don’t play at all, mademoiselle. We at the Palais-Royal have our own rules, n’est-ce pas, Claudette?”
Camille gritted her teeth. What else had she expected? It wasn’t as if she could call on some authority to help her.
“If you say so.” Releasing Claudette’s wrist, Camille tossed her last ten livres on the pile. Her determination dipped when the coins settled, but she pressed on. “A side bet, then. I’ll keep playing, but if I catch you again, all this is mine.”
“Fine,” the girls said in unison as they tossed more livres onto the pile. Thirty livres. Another six in the main stake, along with the three gold louis, each of those worth another twenty-four livres. Rent was two hundred livres—even if she won all of this she would not even come close—but it would be something, at least, to hand to Madame Lamotte to show that she didn’t have to throw them out.
But by the end of the next round Sandrine had scooped all the coins into a pile next to her. Claudette didn’t seem the least bit concerned—more confirmation that they were planning this together. Worry coiled in Camille’s gut.
“We’re done then, aren’t we?” said Sandrine. It was hardly a question.
“The cheat stake—” Camille said, her hand closing on it.
Sandrine slapped her away. “I cheated? How, pray tell?”
Camille had no idea how the girls had done it. It was one thing to have a card waiting in one’s sleeve, another to hit twenty-one like this. Camille bit at the edge of her fingernail and felt the despair well up in her. This was not just a loss. It was a staggering one. She would have to go back to Sophie with nothing.
“Ah, she doesn’t know!” Claudette laughed, showing the few good teeth she had. “Go home, little fool.”
The rasp of Claudette’s laughter woke Camille from her fog. She was not ready to give up yet. “I won’t leave without the dresses.”
“Losing badly and she still wants to play,” Sandrine said, scooping up the cards and handing them to Claudette. “Want to win them back, m’selle? All right. You deal.”
In the other room, the roulette wheel ticked like a clock.
Camille dealt and again—somehow—the girls bested her. Sandrine had nineteen and Claudette eighteen. Either of them could win, but both would be unlikely to take a third card. Camille had an eight of spades, which lay hidden, facedown, and a ten of hearts facing up. Eighteen.
On the nearby chair lay the dresses. The pretty hems Sophie had pleated with Maman’s help were already grimed with dirt. Her throat tightened when she remembered how, at the draper’s shop, her mother had held a length of mint-green silk to Camille’s face and nodded approvingly. This will be like magic on you.
She exhaled, steadying herself. To win, she needed a three. It would be easy to go over. “One more.”
Claudette took a card from the deck and placed it faceup in front of Camille. The ace of diamonds.
Her blood went cold. Counting the ace as one only gave her nineteen. And with a tie, the dealer won. “Will you take another hit?” she asked.
“Perhaps,” Claudette lisped. “First tell me what happened t
o your face. Your husband beat you? Or your father, peut-être?”
“I bet it’s that lout of a brother of hers,” Sandrine said. “I bet he takes whatever she makes and drinks it away. N’est-ce pas, m’selle? And if you say anything? It’s like this.” Sandrine smacked her fist into the palm of her other hand.
“It’s not like that at all.” Camille’s voice trembled. But of course, it was like that. Her mind spun back to the clouded blankness in Alain’s eyes when he’d shouted at her, the way the cords in his neck tightened and bulged, how she fell, so slowly, so slowly, the crack of her head on the floor. Her body still ached, but woven into the pain’s fabric was fear: the broken strongbox, the worry that she would never escape.
“In that desperate place he is, family doesn’t matter.” Behind Sandrine’s earlobes, dirt speckled her skin gray. “Drunk on cheap wine and laudanum, what does he care? Bah! Not his problem. I know someone who sold his daughter to get out of debt.”
No.
“Or that monsieur who shot himself, remember? In the Bois de Boulogne?”
Despair and hopelessness clenched Camille’s throat. Had it really come down to this, a card game? Why didn’t she have the ten of spades instead of the eight? She could see it in her mind, how eight of its pips were arranged like two walls facing one another, the other two pips in the middle. Like she and Sophie, trapped.
She shook her head. “My brother wouldn’t do those things.” He wouldn’t go that far.
Sandrine pressed her hand to her mouth in pretend shock. “You came here thinking he’d give you back everything he’d taken, didn’t you? And now you think he wouldn’t do worse than what he’s done?” Her laugh was harsh. “I pity stupid girls like you.”
“You going to hold?” Claudette said, elbowing Sandrine. “I’ve got eighteen, and you’ve got nineteen, Drine. Chances are, m’selle is under. You want the rose dress or the green?”
Blood thrummed in Camille’s ears. This was not the world she wanted: dank gambling dens and pain and these girls laughing while they cheated her. Damn them to hell.
She flipped her last remaining card faceup and waited for their jeers.
Silence. Their mouths fell open.
“Merde! How is it possible?” Sandrine swore.
Next to her two red cards—the ace and the ten—lay a ten of spades. So much like the eight, but with two wonderful pips in the middle. The eight of spades seemed to have—vanished? Tentatively, Camille touched her fingertips to the ten. It felt as real as any other. But she knew it wasn’t.
She had turned it.
Just as if it were a scrap of metal.
Quickly, she scooped up the coins, shoving them into her purse.
“Wait! One more game!” the girls shouted as Camille snatched up the dresses, hugging them close. She had staked everything and won. Her pulse jumped in her throat, keeping time with the question that raced through her mind: how? How? How? But she knew.
She’d thought la magie ordinaire could only turn coins.
Apparently it could do so much more.
The girls pushed away from the table. Claudette jabbed a wine bottle at Camille. Her voice was hard. “Sit down and play, m’selle. This isn’t close to over.”
“Désolée,” she said, though she wasn’t sorry at all. Camille backed away toward the door. “I’ve had enough.”
Her mind blank with fear that the girls would catch her, she elbowed past the gamblers watching the roulette wheel while the croupier cried, “Les jeux sonts faits!” No more bets could be placed now. As the wheel spun, the ball slipped from its position on the rim of the wheel and began to race, red blurring into black as the wheel whispered its promises: riches, luck, transformation.
Dodging a pair of the duc’s guards, Camille vanished into the crowds.
14
“Count it,” Camille said as she tossed her purse on the kitchen table. The back of her dress was soaked with sweat. She’d come home from the Palais-Royal running the whole way, as if the two girls would come after her, their dirty fingers reaching into her purse to take back what they thought was theirs.
Sophie began sorting the coins into piles. “There’s not so very much,” she said, a tiny V forming between her eyebrows. “Only sixty livres. Alain didn’t give you any more?”
“Alain was dead drunk,” she said, wearily. “There were two girls there—”
“What girls?”
“The kind of girls who gamble with people like Alain.”
Worriedly, Sophie rearranged the coins on the scarred surface of the table.
There was no use pretending, not any longer. “Alain gambled away all he’d taken from us and our dresses, too.”
“He didn’t,” Sophie said, but the downward arc of her mouth showed she knew it might be true.
“He took all the money we’d saved for the rent.” Camille paced to the window that gave out over the tilting roofs and chimneys of Paris. Down there, somewhere, was the running girl Camille had seen the night Alain pulled his knife, the girl Camille would do anything not to be. Perhaps she was safe, hiding in a hole with her crust of bread. Or perhaps she was caught, in prison, plagued by rats and cold puddles and hard, grabbing hands. Who would help you when you were brought that low? No matter how hard you toiled, you would never rise, never have enough for a safe bed, a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes. Because in every instance, the cards were stacked against you. When you were that poor, no one cared if you lived or died. Not even magic could save you then.
Fierce tears trembled on Sophie’s eyelashes. “How could he think he could make money at cards?”
“That doesn’t matter now. He lost.” Unlike Camille, who could find no printer willing to take her on, even for the smallest tasks, or Sophie, whose work at Madame Bénard’s shop earned her only a meager salary, Alain had a job. He should have been collecting a salary from the Guards, and the knowledge that he threw this away made her insides burn. “And the rent is due.”
“What should we do?”
“What those girls did.” They’d tried to cheat her and she’d bested them at their own game. All the way home, running along the river, she’d been buoyed by the thought of it. Her mind had built the idea, tested it, polished it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. A chance.
“You mustn’t, those men at the Palais-Royal—” Sophie’s voice quavered to a halt.
“What?” Camille pretended to be shocked. “Oh, not that.”
“What then?” Sophie’s thin shoulders hunched as if she were readying herself for more bad news. “Tell me.”
On the mantel sat a stack of playing cards, tied with a scrap of ribbon. Papa had made them when Camille was a little girl; she remembered how quickly he’d painted the cards, sketching the girls’ faces as the queens. What kind of queens would you be, mes filles? he’d wondered aloud. A beautiful and kind one, Sophie had said. And you, Camille? he'd asked. I’d be a just and righteous one who helps her people, she'd replied, very serious. Papa had turned away so she wouldn’t see his tears.
Scooping up the worn, familiar cards, Camille sat down at the table with Sophie.
“Cards?”
Camille nodded as she began to shuffle, hand over hand until the cards blurred. Years of playing with her sister and Alain had made her fingers sure and deft, the softened cards slipping through her hands like water. Playing cards and gambling was one thing. To turn the cards as she’d done at the Palais-Royal was another. Excitement throbbed in her chest—fear, too. If she couldn’t get coins to keep their shape, how could she keep the king of clubs that she wanted from turning into a four of spades that she didn’t want at all?
Cutting the deck carefully three times, she stacked the cards. Her fingertips rested on the top one for a moment as she tried to sense its shape and color. Absolutely nothing appeared in her mind.
Frowning, she placed the deck in front of Sophie. “I’ll show you,” she said, with more confidence than she felt.
Sophie sighed.
“What are we playing?”
“Vingt-et-un. You deal.”
Sophie dealt Camille two cards, one facedown, one faceup: the ten of spades. Then she dealt one for herself, faceup: the eight of hearts. “Hearts is my favorite suit.”
“How am I not surprised?” Camille teased. Stealthily she bent a corner of her facedown card. The six of diamonds. Sixteen points in total. Even if Sophie took another card, the highest value it could have would be eleven, if it were an ace, which would put her at eighteen points. It was a risk for Camille, too. Unless, of course, she had la magie at her disposal. Determined, Camille took a coin from the small pile on the table and laid it in the center. “I’ll bet a livre.”
“Oh là là,” Sophie said with a smirk as she tossed another livre in the center. “How high we play today.” She dealt Camille another card, faceup: the seven of spades.
Merde—at twenty-three Camille was well over. She was disappointed but she mastered it: this was the moment. The precipice. She would turn the six of diamonds to a four of diamonds to make vingt-et-un.
Camille placed her fingertips on the card. “Your play.”
Next to her eight of hearts and ten of spades, Sophie placed a two of diamonds. “Twenty! Can you beat that?”
Bien sûr. Her fingers on the six of diamonds, Camille cast her mind back to the Palais-Royal, the way those girls had treated her as if she were prey, Alain’s slumped shape on the table, running the memories over and over in her mind until the bitter trickle of sadness welled up inside her. Holding that sorrow, she saw in her mind the four of diamonds, the symmetrical arrangement of the red pips, each little diamond in its own corner. And smiling a little to herself, she turned the card.
The six of diamonds.
“You’re over!” Sophie crowed. “I win!” And she scooped up the two livres and set them beside herself.
Camille stared at the unchanged card. If her plan was to succeed, this could never, ever happen again. She’d imagined the card as vividly as she could. Which could only mean she hadn’t brought up enough sorrow to fuel the magic. She had to try harder—hurt more—or else her plan would fail.
Enchantée Page 7