“Encore une fois, Sophie?”
“Prepare to lose,” Sophie said as she squared the cards, shuffled them, and dealt. She started with an ace of diamonds, a seven of hearts. Camille had two elevens, one facedown. If she could turn one eleven into a face card, she’d have a “natural”: twenty-one without taking a hit. An immediate, instant shock of a win.
In the apartment, the light was changing. At this time of day, Camille couldn’t not see the dark rectangles on the walls where Maman’s paintings had once hung nor the black soot along the fireplace and ceiling that she couldn’t scrub away, the way that everything in the apartment had been thinned down to just one thing for each of them: one chipped glass, one cup, one plate, one chamber pot, one book. Maman had insisted magic would save them, but Papa had tried to solicit help. Not from strangers, but from people, like their grandmother, who could have helped. Should have helped, Camille thought, anger and sadness unfurling in her chest as she remembered her father’s humiliation.
She needed a face card. A dark knight to carry me away, she wished, holding onto the welling sorrow as she pictured Lancelot, the knave of clubs. He resembled Lazare with the gloss of his thick black hair and the hooded falcon on his shoulder. Then she turned the card.
Lancelot’s brown eyes met hers.
“Vingt-et-un!” Camille shrieked. “I did it!”
“You need not shout,” Sophie sniffed. “Encore?”
Again and again they played, and each time Camille brought forth the winning card. She had it now. She practiced winning with three cards, and with two, claiming the natural four times in a row.
After the last one, Sophie slapped her hand down over the cards. “How are you doing it?” she demanded. “I thought you hated using magic.”
“It’s just like turning coins—nothing more.”
“You’re going to go back to the duc’s and play cards like this? Trick people? Don’t you think someone will know what you’re doing?”
The knave of clubs continued to stare up at her with his unfathomable eyes.
One magician knows another, Maman had said patiently when Camille asked once again why she—and not Sophie or Alain, who tried so hard to do it—had to work magic, when it hurt so much and was so hard. You are one of very few, mon trésor.
But how many was very few? How many magicians, if any at all, were there in Paris, and what were the chances she’d be seen through? Maman had been a magician. Her mother, Grandmère, had been, too. Was it passed through families by blood? Stung by regret, Camille wished she’d asked these questions while Maman still lived. Before, when there was still time for asking questions. Perhaps Maman would have relented and told her what she wished to know.
Camille met her sister’s gaze. “I’m going to Versailles.”
“The Palace?” Sophie scoffed. “You won’t be able to get in.”
“But at the Palais-Royal, it was easy to—”
“Versailles is not the Palais-Royal.”
Camille couldn’t stand the way Sophie was looking at her: knowingly, as if hiding a sly laugh. This was Sophie’s forte, after all—court ways and etiquette, fashion and rank—and in her dream to eventually become an aristocrat, she’d learned as much as she could. From Maman, who’d grown up at court but renounced it all when she fell in love with Papa and his revolutionary ideals, from the courtly invitations Papa printed to bring in money, from the customers Sophie waited on at Madame Bénard’s.
“But we went to Versailles for the balloon launch with Papa. And you’ve been there with Alain, haven’t you?”
“We were only visitors then, and the private rooms were roped off, guards posted at doors and stairs. It’s the home of the king and queen. The Hall of Mirrors, the gardens—there are hundreds of rooms, suites, hallways. Most of them private.” With her hands, Sophie traced labyrinths in the air. “You won’t be able to simply slip in there and play cards.”
Camille didn’t wish to play cards. She wanted to steal things. She wanted to cheat, and not care—take as much as she could, pawn it all, and get away from this place and leave behind the cracks in the plaster, the empty fireplace, her numb fingers, her hunger. Most of all—though she couldn’t think of it without guilt—she wanted enough money to get away from her brother.
“I must find a way,” Camille hissed. She was horribly gratified to see Sophie flinch.
“What about Grandmère? Couldn’t she help us? I remember she let me play in her jewel box when we visited her, when I was little. She had an enormous house,” Sophie said, warming to the subject. “You’re certain that Grandmère is … dead? When Maman told us stories of when she lived in a grand château and went to court, wasn’t that with Grandmère?”
“I suppose.” The stories of Maman’s childhood, told while she brushed their hair or tucked them into bed, had felt so real. Costly dresses, a tiny lapdog, a diamond-fretted bracelet she was allowed to wear when she was six. Beautiful stories as if cribbed from Perrault’s fairy tales. But Maman had willingly given all that up when she met Papa. In the end that fantasy childhood was nothing but sweet and fleeting dreamstuff, like the fluff Alain fed Sophie now. “I wrote to Grandmère, you know.”
Sophie stared.
“After Maman and Papa died. I found a letter from her, from before we were born.” Camille had unearthed it at the bottom of her mother’s bureau. Written in an exquisite aristocratic hand, on thick paper, the letter informed Camille’s mother that since she had disobeyed her own mother’s wishes and married a printer—the word underlined so savagely Camille could feel the gouge with her finger—she was to consider herself cut from the family. “I hoped she would help us,” Camille said as the old hurt resurfaced, its nails still sharp.
“She said no?”
“The letter was returned, unopened. Maybe she sent it back, or maybe she’s dead,” Camille said, taking a shaking breath. A memory surged back: a closed door, a crowded street, her father’s shattered face.
“But Alain—”
“Forget Alain! If you had seen him, Sophie—” The Alain who had been her brother, juggling plates to make her laugh, was gone. “He can’t help us. He can’t even help himself. The rent is overdue. Madame Lamotte said she would throw us out. Now she will. I know it. Sophie, there are girls on the street, younger than you, selling themselves in a doorway for a livre or two,” she said grimly. “That cannot be us.”
“Then what?” Tears hung in Sophie’s blue eyes. “What will we do?”
It was easy, and it was not. “We will survive,” Camille said. “I’m going to Versailles to gamble.” Seeing Sophie’s shock, Camille pressed on. “The man who holds Alain’s debts is from Versailles. That’s where the stakes are the highest, that’s where people play the richest games. And there are no duc’s men ready to throw me out.”
“At Versailles, you must be an aristocrat—and you can’t pass for one.”
Couldn’t she? Putting her hand to her throat, Camille pulled a fine gold chain out from under her chemise. A tiny golden key swung on it.
“Not the glamoire.” Sophie shook her head. “Maman said it was wrong. Too dangerous.”
Nothing was more dangerous than the path they were on. They’d first put their feet on it when Papa began to print his revolutionary pamphlets. At night, in secret. The money he made by printing invitations and cards and books for the wealthy men and women of Paris paid for all of it. And for a long time—long enough for Camille to learn how to help him print those pamphlets—it worked. He’d pulled the wool over the eyes of the aristos, and he reveled in the deception. He had not, however, expected to be seen by the Vicomte de Parte as he nailed up a pamphlet outlining reasons for abolishing the aristocracy. The vicomte told everyone. Papa’s rich clients vanished without paying their bills. Then the shop disappeared. And soon after, Papa and Maman too were gone.
What Papa had done was right. It was the world that was wrong.
But she’d not walk this crooked path any longer.
She would change it, just like she changed the cards and the scraps of metal she dug from the dirt, until it no longer resembled anything she knew.
She would change herself.
15
Camille pulled hard at the lid of the charred wooden box. It refused to budge.
In the room under the eaves, the whispering was insistent, impossible to ignore.
A dark and tricky magic, Camille’s mother had called the glamoire. In their magic lessons, she’d deflected any questions about the burned box. If Camille pressed her, she would say, pitching her voice so no one else could hear: If you don’t like working la magie, you will not like that at all. Stay away from that box.
The candle Sophie carried threw strange, leaping shadows onto the walls and ancient beams of the attic space. Where the roof slanted down to meet the floor, black piles of mouse droppings lay; in the far corner, under the eaves, something scratched. Bats.
“I’m afraid,” Sophie said in a small voice.
“It’s just a box.” It smelled of scorch and it had a kind of warmth to it that made Camille’s skin crawl. But glamoire was just another kind of magic, wasn’t it? Stronger, perhaps, than la magie ordinaire she used to turn cards or nails, because a glamoire turned oneself. Still, the glamoire wasn’t their enemy, whatever Maman had said. She would open the trunk and see what was inside.
“But Alain didn’t take it. What if he knew it was bad luck?”
“Alain knows nothing about magic.” This trunk would be their escape. It had to be.
“If you can’t open it, maybe it shouldn’t be opened,” Sophie cautioned. She was holding the candle as near as she could without stepping any closer.
Sinking back on her heels, Camille dragged the box into the candle’s wavering circle of light. The box’s surface was blistered and ridged, as if someone had shoved it into a fire and then—for whatever reason—regretted it. It had no lock, no visible hinges, only a seam the width of a hair running all the way around the top. Camille worked her fingernails under it, running them back and forth until she felt the lid loosen. As she shoved the lid up, the smell of ashes hung in the air. The hair on her nape tingled.
“Camille, I think you should close it.”
“I’m not afraid,” she said to Sophie—and to the box. The box remained as it was, leaking magic. “Bring the candle a bit closer, would you?”
With a little whine of worry, Sophie held the candlestick over the open trunk.
In the half-light, something glimmered: wide lengths of folded fabric stippled with gold threads. Camille reached in and pulled the bundle out. It was much heavier than she’d thought it would be, the silk threatening to slither out of her hands. And longer, so that she had to take several steps backward before it slid fully from the trunk.
“Oh,” said Sophie in a hush, her hand pressed to her mouth. “It’s a grand habit!”
Such a gown was worn only at the most formal court occasions. Weddings. Easter. All the important events of the court calendar. It wasn’t designed to be beautiful, necessarily, but to be costly, to show how rich the wearer was.
Camille shook out its wide skirt. She coughed as dust—as well as a thick fug of magic—rose into the air. Made up in cloth-of-gold, it was embroidered with bronze ferns that twined among flowers and down the train. Camille removed a matching bodice from the trunk; between the ferns’ curving leaves, crystal anemones glowed.
“This belonged to Maman?” Camille stared at the garlanded and beribboned skirt. What would her mother have done with this?
“Maybe it was Grandmère’s? She lived at Versailles, when Maman was a little girl.”
Camille held the dress up. In her arms it rustled, whispering. Tears in the fabric showed where the trimmings had ripped away; several embroidered garlands dangled sadly from threads. Many of the silk roses edging the hem were dirty, the train’s creamy lining grass-stained.
“It looks like it’s been stepped on by horses.” Sophie rubbed the old silk between her fingers. “It’s so old and worn, it’s practically falling apart. Why ever would Maman save this?”
In Camille’s hands, the skirt felt dangerously alive. As if it had ideas, memories. She blinked and they passed through her in a blur: dewed grass, the press of a man’s body in a dance, the wicked flame of a candle, the black loneliness of the box. “It’s la magie bibelot—magic caught in an enchanted object. I think I’m supposed to wear it.”
A miniature had tumbled out of its folds and lay on the floor. It was so small she could have enclosed it between her forefinger and thumb. Set in a frame of false diamonds, a woman gazed out at Camille with blue, wide-set eyes that could have been Sophie’s. Above her rouged cheeks her hair was tightly coiled and powdered, fat rubies gleaming around her neck. Her crimson lips were parted, as if she were about to speak.
“Who is it? Grandmère?” Camille said, as old resentment flamed to life.
“That’s not Grandmère. Her hairstyle is a hundred years old. One of Maman’s family, I suppose. Back in the time of Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV?”
“So long ago, during the Sun King’s reign? Whoever she is, she looks just like you.” Camille turned the miniature over and there, in faded ink, was scrawled a name. “‘Cécile Descharlots.’ I can’t read the title—‘Baroness de la Fontaine,’ I think.” An aristocrat. “You think the dress was hers?”
Sophie nodded as she edged closer to the box. “They were all magicians, weren’t they? Our ancestors?”
“I suppose,” Camille said, slowly. Her idea of what she’d once thought la magie to be was changing. When she was little, she’d thought it was just something her mother did and something she’d learn from her, the way that Sophie learned needlepoint and singing. But it turned out to be worse than needlework, and much harder. There was so much about it she had never been taught. She imagined the world of magic stretching away from her, far into the distance, like a long shadow just before dusk.
“How beautiful it all is!” Sophie said as she peered into the box. “Can you imagine how our ancestresses lived, with all of these lovely things?”
They lived by magic, Camille thought as she removed a silver-edged mirror and a folded fan trimmed with feathers. Its plumes waved lazily, as if in a breeze. She took out a pair of curved-heel silk shoes, embroidered to match the dress. And at the bottom of the box, cushioned by a woolen cloak, lay a brooch and small makeup box, a nécessaire. Darkened by age and smoke, its lid was decorated with shepherds and shepherdesses dancing around a fountain. In the clouds was painted a Latin phrase: Tempus Fugit. Time flies.
Her hands clumsy, Camille fitted her tiny key into the nécessaire’s lock. When it opened, it made a noise like a chime. Where fingers had brushed against it, the soft nap of the lining was worn thin. The compartments held tiny crystal jars, an ebony comb, and several brushes, including one made from a white rabbit’s foot. As she touched each of the objects, warmth surged against her skin, as if she were putting her hand to a flame. With this makeup—she was certain of it—she was supposed to paint her face. To turn it.
The mirror had lost most of its silvering; she saw herself in it as if underwater. Or only half-there. Her startled gray eyes, the pale brows above them, the mouth her mother called stubborn, her constellations of freckles, the fox-red of her hair. She took a deep breath and watched her collarbones rise like wings, and settle. Shadows collected in the hollows of her neck and under her cheeks.
“How thin I am,” she murmured. Sophie squeezed her shoulder in sympathy. “Do you remember how Maman used to tease me, saying I couldn’t leave the house because my curves would make the boys follow me home?” Not anymore. Her thinness said hunger. Hunger, and sorrow. Waves of sadness lapped at her.
Bien, she told herself, let it come. There was no room for fear.
“What are you going to do?”
“Paint myself.” Camille picked up the rabbit’s foot, and, opening one of the containers, dipped it into the white face powder. As she strok
ed it across her skin, her freckles faded—and then vanished. Her skin became luminous, snow-white. She ran the brush along her forehead and her cheeks; her purple bruise dimmed, then disappeared. If only she’d known how to do this before she’d gone to the Place des Vosges, Lazare would never have seen her eye. Camille allowed herself a wicked smile. What if he could see her now?
Sophie gasped. “Mon Dieu.”
With a thrill, Camille ran the brush along the tops of her hands, and there, too, the skin whitened, its redness fading, her cracked fingernails growing whole and smooth and clean.
“Incroyable,” she said, examining her hands in the candlelight. “It’s as if I’ve never washed dishes or scrubbed the floor.” As if the lean years after Papa lost his business were themselves disappearing. She touched her palms together: her skin was so soft, like a small child’s. With a narrow sable brush, she darkened her eyebrows; from a pot she rubbed on rouge.
“Not too much,” Sophie warned. “Only the old court ladies still wear those big red circles on their faces.”
“You know better than I do.” Camille couldn’t tear herself away from her reflection. “Ma chèrie, would you put up my hair?”
“I thought you’d never ask,” Sophie said as she set down the candle. Deftly she gathered Camille’s chestnut hair into a subtle pouf like the marquise had been wearing at the Place des Vosges. She coiled a few curls at the nape of Camille’s neck. “And now for hair powder.”
Sophie opened the box; a cloud of powder danced in the air. “But where’s the little bellows for blowing it on? And the cone?”
Then Camille remembered: the ebony comb. In her hand, its fine black teeth were smooth and warm. As she’d done with the rabbit’s foot, she dipped the tips of the comb’s teeth into the powder and touched them to her hair. Instantly, her unfashionably red hair whitened to frost.
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