So many promises.
Camille took a deep breath. A breeze from the street lifted the ends of her hair and twirled them around her face until they flew like banners. Yes, something deep inside her demanded. Say yes to this.
“Alors, if you’ve solved that problem, then yes. I’ll come.”
“Fantastique!” Lazare stretched out his arms like wings, as if he would lift off right there in the street.
26
She found Rosier waiting in the carriage when she came down to join Lazare.
“Mademoiselle!” he said, his words tumbling out. “You will make us a part of aeronautical history! A girl, in a balloon, in the air! Who else has done it? No one, that’s who,” he said, before Camille could respond. She didn’t care one whit about aeronautical history. At this moment, all she cared about was remaining in the balloon without her body flinging itself over the basket’s wall.
“Just imagine the poster we will print!” Rosier sketched a rectangle in the air. “You in the chariot, soaring above the waters of the Seine. Perhaps next time your sister will join us. Sisters Soar Across Paris!”
“Please,” Camille said from between clenched teeth. “Don’t speak of it.”
“What?” Rosier said, chastened. “Have I offended?”
“C’est rien,” Lazare said. “Just leave Mademoiselle be.”
Camille was finding it hard to speak. Her mind hadn’t stopped racing since she’d seen Lazare in the street, and now he lounged on the seat opposite her. Though he’d bent his long legs at an angle to make room for her, his knees still pressed against her petticoats. It felt too hot in the carriage. She wanted to lower the window.
Rosier tapped on the glass, startling her. “Could you draw a map, mademoiselle?”
She shifted in her seat, which only brought her closer to Lazare’s legs. “Why?”
He appraised her, like a thief casing for a heist. “It’s Armand. He doesn’t want you on the balloon, especially his balloon. I’ve tried to tell him that your being there will be a boon to our finances—First Girl in the Air!—but he has no vision.”
“It’s not his balloon.” Lazare tucked an arm behind his head and stretched back against the upholstery. “Not even close.”
“He thinks it is. Therefore, I scheme. If Mademoiselle were to draw a map, one that we might use to raise money for the balloon flight over the Alps—”
“That’s all?” Camille asked. “He won’t have any other objections? Say, that I’m a girl and not a boy?”
Rosier made an irritated noise. “Bah! That you’re a girl? That’s precisely the point! Armand is a fool. His brain’s been addled by fumes. And numbers.”
“He’s not the only one whose brain’s been addled,” Lazare said. He’d thrown his head back against the top of the seat, and Camille tried not to stare at the curve of his throat, the tender spot under his jaw where his pulse beat, slowly, slowly. He was so at his ease and she was so utterly unsettled. It wasn’t just the idea of going up in the air, though, that was her most pressing concern. There was also him.
He was looking directly at her, his gaze a caress on the side of her face. She wondered if a boy—if anyone—had ever looked at her like that before. It was so different than the hungry eyes of the boys on the streets, with their whistles and their fast, rough hands, different than the cool stares of the courtiers at Versailles, who hid their feelings behind double entendres.
Lazare’s gaze was nothing like that. It felt honest. True.
She flushed. She found a spot of dirt on her skirts and rubbed at it with her thumb.
Rosier was still fuming, loosening his cravat and scribbling notes for a conversation he was going to have with Armand that would put him in his place.
“Almost there,” Lazare said. “See?”
The carriage window no longer showed Paris’s gray buildings, but instead, a green field, its brightness topped by a sweep of watery blue sky.
Camille bit the edge of her fingernail. What if the balloon had problems again? What if there was no one like herself waiting around to save them? What if she fell out?
“Have people died?” she asked. “In balloons?”
“People have died sitting in their armchairs,” Lazare said.
Her stomach flipped. She smiled as bravely as she could, and clutched the edge of the seat more tightly.
27
Now that she stood in the woven chariot, gripping a sketchpad tightly in one hand and the chariot’s railing in the other, she felt sick.
When Rosier had handed her into the balloon, Armand had ignored her offers to help or her questions about where she should stand. As she watched him test the ropes and check the fire in the brazier, she felt more out of place than she had at Versailles. What had she been thinking? She shouldn’t be flying in a balloon at all, she told herself, as hot panic spread under her skin. She should be back at court, fleecing the nobles for all they were worth. She should be saving her money, hiding it under the bricks so that Alain could never get it again. Or at least mending her dress. Not sailing in the air.
“Ready?” Lazare beamed at her, the lead-ropes taut in his hands. “Watch your dress, mademoiselle!”
In the center of the gondola, the brazier sparked, the air above it shimmering with heat. Gathering her skirts, she stepped away from the stove, only to feel the hard line of the gondola’s edge against her back. There was nowhere safe to run to, she thought, as she wiped her sweating palms on her skirt. Either she’d be burned alive by the fire or she’d plunge over the edge.
Above her head, the silk of the balloon trembled as if it were alive.
Rosier stood on the rough grass outside the basket, furiously sketching the balloon and its crew. “Do something exciting when you’re up there,” he said. “Anything, really, except falling out. Then come back and tell me all about it.”
Peering up at the underside of the balloon, Armand called, “It’s time to go! The sky stands open!”
“Let us go that way,” the other boys responded in chorus. Rosier rolled his eyes.
With a nod at Camille, Rosier tucked his notebook under his arm and stepped away from the basket. “Bon voyage!”
She hadn’t forgotten when the balloon dropped out of the sky like a shot bird. Nor what it felt like to stand on her roof, only the little railing between her and death. Her hands clawed tight onto the basket’s edge. She had no sense. Why ever had she listened to Sophie?
The basket sloped drunkenly as one set of ropes was released. Camille choked down a scream. The boys who’d come to help were whooping; Lazare pushed past her to do something at the other side of the balloon. One of the ropes had hooked itself on a stake and he worked hard to tug it free. The basket shook.
She shouldn’t be here at all. She might vomit. Or jump out. Because if she died, who would take care of Sophie? If Alain was the only one left, he’d marry Sophie off for money and—Camille stepped across the basket and unlatched the door.
She froze when Lazare yelled, “Don’t leave us now, mademoiselle! We’re going up!”
Beyond the perilously thin edge of the basket, the grass plummeted away. The balloon rose. On the ground, the gang of boys cheered and, hands shielding their eyes from the sun, watched the balloon climb. “More fuel!” shouted Lazare, and Camille dropped to her knees before the little stove and pushed straw and small logs into it until the fire roared.
In a heartbeat, they lifted past the green tops of the trees. In another, they passed the spire of a stone church. Lazare fed the fire as Camille edged away from the center of the basket, pulling her skirts clear of the sparks. Standing at the lip of the wicker basket, Camille dared herself to look down. Below her, Rosier and his helpers’ faces dwindled to nothing larger than stones. Then they were small as pebbles, grains of sand, dust.
The world blurred. Camille gripped the edge of the chariot so hard her arms ached.
“We’re going so fast.” Her voice came from far away; pinpricks of black winked
at the edges of her sight. She felt herself swaying but she couldn’t stop herself. Her cold fingers slipped.
Lazare was suddenly next to her, his hand under her elbow, holding her up. “Steady now,” he said, his breath warm in her ear. “It’s the ascent. Breathe as deeply as you can.”
Camille inhaled, her ribs straining against her stays as she filled her lungs with cool air. Then she exhaled and felt her shoulders uncrimp. She breathed again and again until the world below stopped getting smaller. Now that the balloon had achieved its intended altitude, Armand began taking measurements from the barometer.
“We can go through the clouds, if you like.” Lazare seemed to want her to say yes, but Camille shook her head, once. It was all she could do to hang on.
They were sailing above Paris. There was the river Seine, a dazzling silver ribbon winding through the city. There, the two islands, where the sun flamed in the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. In the other direction, the hilly vineyards of Montmartre, where once she’d picnicked with her family.
“It’s all so far away,” she said. “So small.”
“You might have told me you were afraid of heights.” Lazare rested his elbows on the railing, so close to her that she saw the day’s growth of beard on his cheeks, the inky tilt of his eyelashes. “I wouldn’t have thought any less of you.”
Mademoiselle, your disregard for your own life is apparently equal to mine, he’d said when she saved the balloon. Then, and now, she wanted it to be true. She didn’t want to be afraid.
She tried to loosen her grip on the chariot’s railing. “I’m not frightened.”
He looked away, as if to hide a smile. “Watch now. Everything’s going to change. I’d start sketching before Armand notices that you’re not doing anything,” he said, too low for Armand to catch.
Camille rested the notebook against the gondola’s rim. She stood closer to the edge than she would have liked—it was, in fact, The Edge—but there was nowhere else to go. The wind snatched at the paper. Taking a deep breath, she began, sketching quickly, loosely, as she tried to capture an impression of what it was that lay below.
Paris had become an unfamiliar city. The dark, dank alleyways she ran through were now just lines, the awe-inducing cathedrals of Notre-Dame and Saint-Eustace shrunken small as wooden toys. She rendered the Place des Vosges with its crisscross of paths, thinking, There by the apothecary I ran into Lazare. She drew the mesh of streets around it, and then traced the network of lanes running from the rue Saint-Antoine toward the river. She drew in the landmarks of the grand hôtels, their names those of the noble families who had lived there: Soubise, Sully, Carnavalet.
When she walked past one of these imposing houses, she couldn’t see the whole thing: they were simply too big, their walls too high. Instead, she might glimpse through their iron gates fine horses hitched to gleaming carriages or hear the drift of music from some inner room. But from the air, she could see them—whole, not a world away but side by side with the rue Charlot. “How strange it is, monsieur.”
Lazare came to stand next to her. “What is?”
“On the ground, all the quarters of Paris feel so separate, like foreign countries. The aristocrats in their own fine neighborhoods, we in ours. But up here, it’s different—no one could deny that the houses touch each other.”
“Of course they don’t!” shouted Armand.
“Things are different in the air.” Lazare lowered his voice. “Sometimes I wish I could stay up here forever.”
“With Armand?” she teased. His face was a hand’s width from hers. If the balloon tipped—what would happen? What would it be like to touch him? She was in terrible, wonderful danger: her toes right at the precipice.
Lazare shook his head. “I’m here with you.”
A thrill of happiness ran through her. “Me?”
On the other side of the gondola, Armand snickered. “It’s obvious what he means.”
“Stop eavesdropping!” Lazare called out. “Or I’ll throw you overboard.” He began to shrug out of his coat. “You must be cold.”
“Not at all!” she said, not wanting to be lesser, frailer, more in need.
But Lazare held the coat out and she relented. As she slipped her arms into the too-long sleeves and pulled the collar up around her neck, she caught the scent of leather and horses, the bright note of his cologne, and under it, the warm musk of his skin. Heat climbed Camille’s neck. Wearing his coat was almost like touching him.
Casting about for something to say, she focused on his face: “How did you get that scar? The one in your eyebrow?”
Lazare raised it high. “This? In the country, when I was a child.”
“What happened?”
“A waterwheel I’d put into the stream snapped and one of the blades cut me. I almost lost my eye.” He glanced at hers, where the bruise had been.
“But you didn’t.”
“No. Instead, my tutor, Monsieur Élouard, was punished. His pay was docked, reduced to that of a kitchen maid. My parents hoped he would leave on his own after that.”
The sun-dappled stream she’d imagined was now tainted with shadows. Aghast, she said, “But it wasn’t his fault! You were experimenting—”
A muscle worked in his cheek. “My father always tells me how important it is to be honorable, how that’s the most important quality a person can have. My father is—how can I explain?”
His grip tightened on the gondola’s railing.
Camille waited. Below them, Paris dwindled, insignificant.
“Are you certain you want to hear this?”
“Of course.”
He took a deep breath. “My mother was an Indian woman, in Pondichéry, where I was born. She was beautiful, my father said, and clever. He also told me that she chose him.” The wind pushed a few strands of Lazare’s hair against his forehead; he brushed them roughly back. “I try to imagine that place sometimes—the heat, the hue of the ocean—but I can’t.”
“You resemble her?”
“My coloring. But I have my father’s features.” He ran a finger along his eyebrow, thinking.
It hit her then, the sadness. “Why did you say ‘she was’?”
“My mother died of malaria.”
She wished she dared to comfort him, put her hand over his. “I’m sorry.”
“I never knew her. When we returned to France, my father remarried. He wishes me to be French, with a Frenchman’s sense of duty and honor, whatever that may mean,” he said, scornfully. “My father paid my tutor Élouard to teach me Italian, Latin, horsemanship, dueling. All the things a French boy such as I should know.”
Below them, thin clouds obscured the city. Even the river had disappeared.
“Despite those things, Élouard showed me it was important to dare, to experiment. To forget the rules. It almost drove me mad, his always asking: why? Why this and not that? He took nothing for granted. A different kind of honor, I suppose.”
Camille nodded. Élouard sounded a lot like Papa.
“It was Élouard, not my father, who took me to see the montgolfière, at Versailles. Then back at home, we made our own balloon, a little one.” Lazare paused. “Is any of this interesting?”
“Yes, tell me.” It sounded as if he hardly spoke of this to anyone.
“He wanted to send up a kid goat, but the thought of the goat getting hurt brought me to tears. Élouard teased me for being sentimental, but in the end, I was right—the balloon got stuck in an oak and we couldn’t get it down again. After that, it was all I wanted to do. Build a balloon, get up in the air.”
“To fly away,” Camille said, almost to herself. Hadn’t she thought the same thing?
“Exactly.” His hand moved next to hers on the rail. They were nearly touching.
Camille did not dare move.
“Lazare!” shouted Armand. “Stop talking nonsense and help me release some air! We’ve got to start our descent!”
“I never got to ask you—�
� Lazare said.
Armand’s scowling face appeared next to Lazare’s shoulder. “Quit your gallantry or we’re going to end up flying to England. If we run out of fuel and fall in the water, just know I didn’t bring a cork vest for her.”
Lazare held up his hand. “Calme-toi, my friend. If we fall in the water, she can have mine.” He flicked open the silver case of his pocket watch. “Armand’s right. We’ve got to get going.”
Behind her, Lazare and Armand pulled the rope tied to the release valve. The balloon began to sink almost immediately. Lazare threw a heavy horse blanket over the brazier to dampen the fire. Smoke swarmed out from underneath it, hiding him and then revealing him. He knelt by the basket of instruments, consulting their faces and taking notes on their numbers. He was a long time at it, his back to her as he jotted numbers with a stubby pencil in the notebook he kept in his pocket.
As they sank, the earth rose to meet them. They flew over a pasture, the balloon’s shadow racing along the ground below them. Wild-eyed sheep scrambled ahead of the dark shape, their worried bleats floating up to Camille. Now the brazier smoked worse than ever; Paris disintegrated in a haze of blurred buildings and towers.
She did not want to go back. Not to 11 rue Charlot, not to all the problems that awaited her there. If she had her wish, they would sail all the way to England.
Her stomach clenched as they dropped. Closer and closer, until she could see rocks and footprints in the soil below. “Where are the others?” She tried to sound nonchalant.
“There,” Lazare said, pointing to a cluster of houses from which two boys on horseback emerged at a gallop, one of the steeds Rosier’s tall gray. “They’ll try to catch us now.”
The balloon swept down, the ground rushing closer. Rosier was yelling; the other boy urged his horse on with his heels.
“Come, Armand!” Lazare called out. “We can’t let them get to us before we’re on the ground!”
Armand released the last gasp of hot air. They sank to the earth, touched once, twice, and were still. Rosier flung himself off his horse and ran toward them, already shouting. “What a landing! What skill! The Prince and Princess of the Air!”
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