Enchantée

by Gita Trelease

  “Aurélie was not wrong.” Camille led Sophie down the street, away from the windows of the Hôtel Théron. “We were seen through, that’s what happened. Madame needs money but she doesn’t want ours.”

  Sophie frowned. “But we’re nice people. What could she possibly object to?”

  “She wants money, but more than that, she wants a good name. Quality. Which apparently we can’t offer.” Camille had witnessed enough snubs at court to know what this was: all kindness on the surface, silk over unyielding iron.

  Sophie managed a smile. “Don’t take it so hard. It doesn’t matter. There are other rooms, other places.” She was working hard to conceal her disappointment, but Camille saw it—a little downward tug of her mouth.

  “It isn’t fair, or right,” Camille said. “We have the money, we played our roles. Why shouldn’t we have it?” She had worked so hard to reach a place of safety, only to see it snatched away. Hôtel Théron had everything they needed. Its walls were high, the iron-studded gate unbreakable. Unslip-throughable. There were maids at the doors and gatekeepers to keep out Alain.

  “What about another house in this quarter?” Sophie asked. “There have to be other widows with too many rooms.”

  “They’re all the same,” Camille fumed. “Aristos who think they’re better than everyone else because an ancestor fought a battle in the thirteen hundreds or because their grandparents did a service for the king. With their duels and their titles, they think they’re above the law. It’s ridiculous.”

  As they walked slowly down the street, Camille’s mind raced through the possibilities. There had to be a way. She simply needed to find it. She might write again to Aurélie. She might try to find something in their own neighborhood. It wouldn’t be as nice, but it would be elsewhere—at this moment, an apartment’s most important quality.

  Sophie had come to a stop and was staring at one of the houses on the street. “Do you recognize that one? It seems so familiar but I can’t think why.”

  Right away Camille knew the one Sophie meant: tall and severely elegant, with menacing black ironwork below the windows. The curtains were drawn, just as they had been before. She’d hoped never to see it again. “Grandmère once lived there. I visited her almost two years ago. With Papa.”

  Sophie’s voice was small. “I didn’t know that.”

  “You were only thirteen, Sophie. I was the age you are now.” Papa had known what the visit would entail, and he had spared Sophie the anguish. Camille had known to do the same, and said nothing.

  They had gone in secret. Papa wore his finest suit, she her best dress, a dusty pink one of Maman’s that she’d made over and a hat she’d trimmed with a new brown ribbon. He smiled vaguely when she asked him where they were going. “You’ll see when we arrive,” he said. “It’s not far.”

  The stern old house stood before them, the panes in its windows narrow as eyes. She and Papa were ushered into a formal salon. The furniture was stiff and painted with gold, souvenirs of Grandmère’s time at Versailles. On the wall hung a small portrait of Louis-Dieudonné, the Sun King, astride his horse. He watched Camille from the painting: dark-eyed, arrogant, knowing.

  Grandmère came in and both Papa and Camille bowed deeply, Camille nearly to the floor. “Only a queen deserves such a curtsey,” Grandmère corrected. But Camille saw she was flattered.

  She did not invite them to sit. “What do you wish, monsieur?”

  “I’ve come without Anne-Louise’s knowledge,” he admitted. “You know she would never consent to my coming here.”

  Like a statue, Grandmère waited. A clock ticked in the hall.

  “I regret to tell you this, but I was obliged to close the printing shop,” Papa said into the heavy stillness.

  “It is old news, monsieur. You are lucky the others did not run you out of Paris.”

  “Your fellow nobles?” In his voice was an edge like a blade, and it frightened Camille.

  “You might have been arrested for libel—those anti-Royalist things you printed.”

  Papa said smoothly, “Perhaps those things were true, and needed saying. Perhaps a new world is on the horizon.”

  Grandmère looked at Camille to see if she was listening. “Only through my intercession were you and my daughter spared a court case. Prison.”

  Papa inclined his head. Camille noticed for the first time that a few silver strands laced his hair.

  “But you have come for something else, I see,” she said imperiously. “Out with it.”

  Papa took a deep breath. “Money for our family, for your daughter and your three grandchildren, to take us through the winter.” Camille stepped closer to him, but he held out his hand for her to stay where she was. Her father’s face, Grandmère’s tone, the suffocating stillness of the rooms—Camille wanted to rush out the door and disappear.

  Haltingly, Papa added, “We don’t have enough for wood, or food.”

  “My daughter would never have been in this situation had she married as I chose for her. She would be at Versailles, an ornament to the court. She would want for nothing.”

  “I regret—”

  “You regret nothing.” Her voice was biting and cold as ice. “And because of that, I will never give you a sou.”

  Camille’s breath caught as Papa dropped to his knees on the carpet. No! Get up, get up! she wanted to shout. She wanted to pull him up and away from this place. Everything was upside down. She could not bear to see her proud Papa on the floor, begging, as if he had nothing, as if they had no other choice, while Grandmère stood over him and gloated.

  “I beg you to reconsider, madame. I fear Anne-Louise’s—work—will weaken her to the point of exhaustion. Or death.”

  “You mean, her magic?” Grandmère’s mouth was hard. “What of the girls? How old are you, mademoiselle? Do you work la magie?”

  “I’m fifteen.” The words stuck in Camille’s throat. “I’m learning.”

  Grandmère looked at her more closely then. Camille drew herself up tall, as she knew her mother would want her to do.

  Grandmère said, “She might live with me.”

  Camille shrank back. Never. She would starve first.

  “We might go to court,” Grandmère went on. “I could not give her a title but I might make her a good match. Pity she has red hair.” She sniffed. “It’s unfashionable, but that’s what powder is for, I suppose. But there is another girl, isn’t there? Blond, like my daughter? Pretty?”

  “Prettier than I,” Camille burst out.

  “Stop,” Papa said, warning in his voice. “My girls have no part in this. Ask what you wish of me, but leave them alone.”

  Grandmère put her ringed hand to the bodice of her dress and laughed. The sound was like the scratch of dry leaves across cobblestones. “There is nothing I wish of you, monsieur, except that you had never delivered those printed invitations to my door. Could you grant me that wish? Or this one: that my daughter had never deigned to speak to servants—especially not an upstart printer of cards and invitations who convinced her that her own noble privilege was something corrupt. She ruined her life by marrying you—and for what, exactly? Ask what I wish of you? I wish, monsieur, you had never been born.”

  Camille clenched her small fists. How could Grandmère say that to Papa? Her dear, kind, brilliant Papa, who was full of life and ideas and would do anything—even subject himself to this—to keep them all safe?

  Papa rose to his feet. In his best coat, shiny at the elbows from too much use, his back straight, he stared at Grandmère. Camille stepped close, took his hand. It was damp with sweat, cold and hot at once.

  “Adieu,” he said to Grandmère. He did not bow. “May your pride keep you company when your family is dead.”

  And then they walked through the hall and out into the street, the crowds moving around them like a river. Camille was terrified to see her father’s shoulders shaking. He wiped his tears away. “I wish you had stayed back with Sophie. Did I do wrong to bring you,
mon coeur?”

  Camille pressed her face into his coat. “You have never done anything wrong, Papa.”

  She would never forgive her. She vowed it, there on the street. She would never forgive the aristocrats who doomed the print shop, and she would never forgive Grandmère for thinking of Papa in terms of what he lacked. The only things that mattered to Grandmère were the things that Papa did not have. Power, money, a title—Grandmère’s aristocratic obsession with these things erased him. She could not see him for who he truly was. Camille, too, had come up lacking. It was only magic that gave her any value at all.

  Camille had known even then how wrong Grandmère was, though her prejudices were a sticky web, difficult to get rid of. And this new widow—Madame de Théron—she was just the same. This time, though, Camille had the means to change the game.

  She straightened her back. “We’ll put on something else.”

  “It won’t matter. What else can we do? Our dresses are perfect—”

  What had Chandon said? You must be the Baroness of Pretend. “We must be even more perfect.”

  * * *

  Their apartment in the rue Charlot had shrunk while they were away, the rooms dwindling to cupboards, the chestnut-beamed ceiling bearing down on them.

  After Camille told her what she intended, Sophie gamely stepped into another dress and ran out to Madame Bénard’s for a wig. “If I wear a wig,” she said, “and you change your hair—but not your face—she will have no idea what our true hair color is. Once we move in, we will be free to wear it as we want.” It was a good idea—it meant Camille wouldn’t have to work the glamoire as often.

  When Sophie went out, Camille opened the wardrobe in which the enchanted dress hung. Waiting. She reached out to touch it and felt it shift against her hand, unnervingly alive.

  Once she had the dress on, it laced itself up her back. From the shoulder of the dress she took the teardrop brooch and pierced her skin. One, two, three: the drops of blood slid off her arm onto the tattered cloth-of-gold. Gaudy, she thought to the dress. Costly. A dress only the wealthiest aristocrat could afford. Its power returning, the dress rustled back to life. A wave of purple silk—an expensive color to dye—swept from the hem to her chest. She touched the ebony comb to her hair, fading the red. And though Sophie said Camille should not change her face, she couldn’t help covering the freckles on her cheeks and hands, then brightening her lips.

  Back at the Hôtel Théron, they gave different names to the maid—the Baroness de la Fontaine and her sister, Mademoiselle de Timbault—and were shown in once more. Again, they walked through the lovely rooms, though this time Sophie didn’t coo. Like Camille, she was grimly determined to act disdainful. And again, Madame de Théron waited for them in the black-and-white entry.

  “We liked the rooms, madame,” Camille said, her voice diamond-hard, “though they were smaller than we had been led to believe. I could only offer one month’s rent at this time.”

  Madame batted her eyelashes. “It’s not really necessary! You are just the kind of young ladies I wish to live here.”

  The girls nodded slowly, not chancing to say anything that might break the spell.

  “Well,” said Madame, taking their hands and patting them, as if Sophie and Camille were her granddaughters. “It will make me so happy to have some pretty faces around me.” She went on, in a stage whisper, “You wouldn’t believe how many undesirables have inquired. It’s all the rabble on the streets, calling for this right or that, hanging effigies of our tax collectors in the square—can you imagine?”

  Not your tax collector, Camille thought. Noblewomen didn’t pay those kinds of taxes.

  Camille held out her purse, and this time, Madame de Théron took it, smiling at its weight. “Come as soon as you can, mesdames.” And she curtsied.

  They moved that evening. Camille left their new address with Madame Lamotte, along with strict instructions not to share it with Alain. There was not much Camille wished to take with her in the dray wagon that followed behind them. Among their trunks of dresses and the big basket of Sophie’s trims and notions, Camille packed the burned box, her books, and Fantôme in his wicker basket. She also took Papa’s bagatelles—the ship, the dragon breathing fire in the word LIBERTÉ!—as well as a well-worn pamphlet Papa had written about the education of girls. He’d called the imaginary heroine Camille. The driver and Madame de Théron’s outdoor servants—now Camille’s outdoor servants—carried the trunks up the stairs; a maid came to help them unpack.

  As night crept in, Camille stood by a window, looking down to the street. Somewhere nearby stood Grandmère’s house, still and watchful. In the window’s glass, Camille’s reflection was her own, and even though the glamoire was fading, her face was prettier than it had been, before. The hollows lurking over her collarbones and under her cheeks had all but disappeared. That’s what food would do for a girl.

  Still, her dress was made of enchantments and her hair shone with magic. Who was she without it? She was a girl with hands still red around the knuckles, hands she’d have to disguise—even from the maids—as long as they lived at the Hôtel Théron. She had hoped to at least stop pretending. But in taking rooms in a noblewoman’s house, she traded that freedom for safety. She was protecting herself and Sophie from Alain, she knew. That’s what she’d wanted to achieve, after all. But she had thought she would leave la magie behind.

  Not completely, of course. Still, she had dreamed she could step out of the wearing-down life of magic and into a new one as easily as stepping into a new pair of shoes.

  Not yet.

  33

  “Do you intend to auction your card?” Camille asked an inebriated Lord Willsingham as he threw back another glass of wine.

  “I know not,” he said, flummoxed. “Should I, yes, Monsieur le Comte?”

  Tediously, the Comte d’Astignac began to explain how auctions worked in the game of speculation. At the palace, midnight had come and gone; among the players shouting and crying, the footmen moved noiselessly from table to table, replacing the guttering candles. Gazing around the packed, thrumming room, familiar cards in her hands and louis d’or in her purse, Camille felt safe. Safe enough. Like two sisters in a fairy tale, she and Sophie had escaped from their prison. The beast who’d kept them there hadn’t been able to follow. For the moment, they’d slipped away.

  Still, however safe the house, there was always the street.

  Anyone might come along a street.

  Camille had taken one giant step forward by securing them a house with fortress-high walls and an iron gate. Now she needed more, money that would never be taken from them. Money for a shop of Sophie’s own. She remembered the printer’s apprentice in Papa’s old place, wiping his hands on his apron, and she wondered: if she had enough, could she buy her own press? She was a girl, but—could she not, if she tried, continue what Papa had started?

  As soon as she had enough for all their dreams, she would stop working magic. The problem was she didn’t know how much it would take. And until then, didn’t she deserve to have fun? Turning her three of diamonds into the king of spades while keeping watch on the devious Comte d’Astignac under her eyelashes, Camille sighed. She knew it was more than that which brought her back to Versailles.

  No sooner had Lazare dropped into her life, than he had dropped out. Now all of Paris felt as an empty house does, lonely and full of echoes. She’d reminded Madame Lamotte to tell only Lazare her new address. For three days she waited for him to come and see her. Hadn’t he said tomorrow wasn’t soon enough? She wanted to bask in the warmth of his smile, that one corner of his mouth curling up as the light danced in his eyes.

  But he never came.

  So tired of waiting that her own skin felt too tight, hungry for something to happen, she’d gone to back to Versailles. She almost frightened herself at how easy it’d become. Each quiet dawn her hired carriage clattered to a halt outside the gate of the Hôtel Théron. Each afternoon, when she woke, S
ophie was gone. Camille ate alone at the polished table. The rooms seemed too big without her sister’s conversation, her teasing. While Sophie charmed customers at Madame Bénard’s, Camille wandered, restless, among the arcades at the Place des Vosges, hoping for a glimpse of Lazare.

  “Madame?” Lord Willsingham said.

  Camille startled back into the game and flipped the magicked king faceup. Across the table, the Comte d’Astignac groaned. “You don’t make it easy, Madame de la Fontaine.” He snapped his fingers for more gambling chips. “Pas de tout.”

  Willsingham called for more wine. Neither the comte nor Lord Willsingham was good enough to match her. There was no question that she would win, the question was only when. As she watched the comte organize his chips, something soft brushed Camille’s left cheek. It was Aurélie’s fur-trimmed cloak.

  “Darling!” she breathed. “I haven’t seen you in centuries! Come quickly, won’t you? We’re playing cache-cache at the Green Carpet!”

  D’Astignac scowled. “What are you saying, Madame de Valledoré?”

  “Hide-and-seek on the Green Carpet?” Camille said to Aurélie behind her fan.

  “On the lawn that leads to the Fountain of Apollo. Hurry! The sun’s nearly up and then all the fun will be—pouf!”

  Out of nowhere Chandon appeared, his hazel eyes feverishly bright and his cheeks flushed. He threw her cloak over his arm. “It’s hardly a lawn, nor is hide-and-seek a proper game. Still, it’s bafflingly amusing.”

  “But what about all this?” Camille gestured at the teetering stack of chips in the center of the table.

  “Give someone else a chance,” Chandon said as he tossed her cards on the table. “Come!”

  “But I’m not finished!” Camille laughed as she tried to shake off Aurélie, who only pulled harder.

  “Eh, Monsieur le Marquis, have a care! The game’s not over,” the Comte d’Astignac said, half rising from his seat. “I’ve staked too much for her to go now.”

  Chandon assessed the stack of chips in front of Camille. Grabbing half, he stuffed them into her purse; the rest he divided between the remaining players. “Ça va? My apologies, Monsieur le Comte, for taking the baroness, but we cannot delay one more moment. She’s agreed to help me tend the sick.” He raised an eyebrow. “Who are dying of terrible diseases.”