“I’m going to take it apart.” Sophie pried loose a tiny papier-mâché bird from the hat ornament and set it aside. “What’s made you so cross?”
Oh, a hundred reasons. “The dress turned too early, again.” She glared at it where it hung lifelessly from its hook.
“That’s all?”
“Perhaps.” There was Chandon’s revelation about Séguin, of course. She’d decided to be on her guard at the palace, and not mention it at home, as there was nothing she could say to Sophie without alarming her further. Sophie had already become disenchanted with Camille’s visits to Versailles. Mentioning that Séguin was a magician would only make things worse.
“Tell me, Camille—what’s wrong? Something’s happened, anyone can see that.”
She took a deep breath, exhaled. “Lazare was at Versailles last night.”
Sophie sat up straight. “Really? What was he doing there?”
“I don’t know.”
“You didn’t talk to him?”
“I did.”
“And?”
“Sophie, he was dressed as an aristocrat! He is an aristocrat!” Camille paced to the fireplace and back to the window.
“Are you sure he wasn’t pretending? Like you?”
“He has a title! He’s the Marquis de Sablebois.”
“Oh là là!” Sophie laughed. “You’re being courted by a marquis!”
Camille leaned her forehead against the window’s cool glass. “Don’t you see it’s a problem? Why did he never say anything to me?”
“Perhaps he thought you wouldn’t like it. And he was right. Even if you are an aristocrat yourself.”
Sometimes Sophie was too perceptive. “It’s about how you behave, not your bloodline.”
“The aristos don’t see it that way.” Sophie began to unravel a long length of silk ribbon. “Alors, what will you do?”
“I don’t know. Why has he kept this hidden? Why is he at court now? He knows all the same people, Sophie. It’s beyond strange.” Unsettled, she remembered how—slowly, slowly—Alain had changed and become someone else. A stranger in her brother’s body. How she’d counted on him for so long and then one day, the person she knew was gone. She wasn’t sure she could endure that happening again. “I want the truth, that’s all.”
“You do realize you are also using a disguise. A magical one.”
“It’s not the same! I can’t afford the number of dresses one needs to be a courtier at Versailles.” She held out her hands. “The redness is still not gone from my fingers, even though we have someone to cook and clean for us.” The longer she held them out, the more they trembled. She let them drop. “I could never pass for an aristocrat without magic.”
“Perhaps he needs the disguise.”
“Why would an aristocrat need to do anything he didn’t wish to?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
What would she say? She imagined seeing him again at Versailles, crossing paths in front of the mirrors in the Galerie des Glaces, calling out to him, “Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur le Marquis!”—and then what? She would have to reveal herself as a magician, and after what he’d said about magic last night, she did not wish to at all.
That kiss at Notre-Dame, among the stars. Those moments in the air, in the balloon, soaring over the city. He was becoming something to her, and now that she knew he was an aristocrat, she was afraid. Afraid that there would be, somewhere inside of themselves, a fundamental mismatch. Afraid that he had a reason for not telling her. Because why would an aristocrat pretend to be someone else, when his position gave him such privilege and power? What could be so terrible that he wished to hide it?
She needed to know.
Whistling out of the summer sky, a pigeon dropped onto the windowsill in front of her and ensconced itself there, shuffling and settling its wings. A second bird came. And then a third, and a fourth, until the sill was full of steely gray birds, cooing.
She knew where to find him.
37
The blue door to the aeronauts’ workshop yawned open.
“Bonjour?” Camille called into the cool, dim hallway. “Anyone there?”
From deep inside the building, a boy shouted, “Come in!”
Camille stepped out of the warm June sun and over the threshold. “Hello?”
Pressing her skirts close, she made her way down the narrow hall, where, in the murky half-light, she promptly stumbled into Armand, jacketless in his shirtsleeves. He skittered away as if she’d bitten him.
“Mademoiselle!” He crossed his arms over his chest. “You weren’t expected!”
“Pardon—I’d hoped I might see—”
“Lazare isn’t here.”
She tried to smooth the disappointment from her voice. “And you don’t expect him?”
Footsteps echoed from behind Armand. “Who are you talking to? Mademoiselle Camille?”
Elbowing Armand aside, Rosier came forward, beaming. His curly hair was even more disheveled than usual. “You are always expected, mademoiselle!” he said, beckoning her with his pipe. “Entrez, entrez!”
As they entered the riding ring, the pigeons rose from their roosts in a thunder of wings, careening through the space before settling on the beams on the ring’s opposite side. Camille was surprised to see the striped balloon, lifeless and strangely small, lying on the floor. Two seamstresses bent over it, each of them sewing an endless seam that ran along one side. A third worked to attach a large, irregularly shaped piece of fabric to the balloon. A letter.
“What’s happened to the balloon?” Camille asked.
“Mice,” said Rosier, crossly. “They chewed up two entire panels of fabric, which now must be treated with rubber and resewn. A foolish expense, when we could have imported a cat instead.”
“Cats make me nervous,” Armand said.
“As if he wasn’t already nervous,” Rosier said, waving his pipe at Armand. “Bah, things are not well in our world of balloons, mademoiselle.”
“Don’t,” Armand said.
“What?” Rosier retorted. “It’s none of your business.” He turned his clever black eyes on Camille. “As I was saying, our balloon adventures have reached a nadir.”
Apart from the balloon that needed mending, everything in the workshop seemed to Camille just as it had the last time she was there. “Why, what’s happened?”
“When you and Lazare went up in the balloon, and were so magnificent? Well, no one came.”
“There was to be an audience?”
Rosier shrugged. “Une très petite audience. Not one that would have bothered anyone, not even Lazare with his scruples about a natural philosopher’s honor and all those things I never can fathom. Besides! What’s the harm with a very small, very quiet paying audience?” He made a tiny space between his thumb and forefinger to show how small it would have been. “Because balloons—especially Alp-ascending balloons—cost a lot of livres.”
How much did a balloon cost: as much as six months’ rent at Madame Lamotte’s? A year’s rent? “Lazare mentioned you needed money for the new balloon.”
Rosier acknowledged this with a fierce nod. “Lazare himself has supplied most of the money, so I do my part by scheming. I printed up posters—the ones you helped us with—and plastered them all over Paris. But only two people came.” He pulled at his hair, making it even wilder. “I was furious! Dumbfounded! But I see now why we failed.”
“Don’t!” shouted Armand.
“Ignore that fool. He should know by now to stick to calculations. In the end, we failed because we didn’t take advantage of what was right in front of us!”
“Which was?” Camille said, not following his train of thought.
“You, mademoiselle! A balloon flight? It’s already been done. It’s passé! But a flight by a girl—now that is something else.” He took a drag on his unlit pipe. “I mentioned it before, didn’t I? But it was too late. Next time, we’ll advertise that you’re going up.”
“Go
ing up?”
“You’re not afraid anymore, are you?” He regarded her quizzically. “Not with your intrepid aeronaut beside you?”
“He’s not my aeronaut,” Camille said. After last night, who or what he was, she could not say.
Rosier’s eyebrows jumped to his hairline. “Well. In any case, I’d like to do a sketch. Of you, in the gondola, if it’s not too much trouble. We’ll put it on the posters before our next flight.”
“Lazare didn’t wish you to do it?”
“He didn’t. Doesn’t.” Rosier threw up his hands in exasperation. “Lazare doesn’t want to do a public launch, with people gawping and shouting things and waving commemorative handkerchiefs. He thinks the balloon should be used for testing the winds and the pressure of the air. For exploration! Knowledge! Which of course it can be. But without an endless river of money—and Lazare’s money is nearly finished—to the public we must appeal. Plus,” he sighed happily, “the people of Paris love a spectacle.”
Here was something interesting. An aristocrat with no money? “Lazare’s money is gone?”
“I didn’t say gone. Nearly finished.”
Could this be why he’d never mentioned his title and all that came with it? It was certainly possible. “Where does his money come from?”
“I’m afraid I don’t know. He never speaks of it.”
Camille suppressed a sigh of frustration. Getting at whatever lay behind Lazare’s decision to hide his noble birth from her might be more difficult than she’d first imagined.
“May I direct your attention this way?” Rosier said, pointing to the balloon’s gondola, which rested on the floor beneath the largest window. It was perfectly placed for a portrait, Camille realized.
“You’ve been waiting for me to visit the workshop!”
“I hoped. And was lucky, as usual.” He smiled as he unlatched the wicker door. “Please? It won’t take long.”
After he told her where and how to stand, with one arm up as if holding onto one of the balloon’s ropes, he took out his notebook and a piece of charcoal. “Now, the drawing! Chin up! Imagine the wind!”
Feeling a bit foolish, Camille stood in the balloon’s gondola while Rosier sketched, talking to himself while he drew. “Bigger!” he said under his breath. “More shadow here! No, no, this way.”
He’d sketched for nearly ten minutes and Camille had begged for a pause to rest her arm when, from the hallway there came the sound of rapid footsteps. Camille tensed as the steps came closer.
Lazare was dressed once more in a plain brown suit, the powder brushed from his ebony hair. His face was flushed, as if he’d been running. Under his arm he held a rectangular wooden box; when he set it unceremoniously on the ground, the top slid off and sawdust rained out of it. “Couldn’t the man have nailed the lid down?” he said, exasperated, as he bent to retrieve it.
Rosier coughed. “We have a visitor today.”
Lazare stood, followed Rosier’s gaze. “Mademoiselle!” For a moment, Lazare only stared. “You’re here?”
“Apparently,” she said, pleased that she’d surprised him for once. “I thought I’d pay a visit.”
When Lazare reached her, he sketched a deeper bow than was truly necessary, his hand grazing his leg in a courtly flourish. She couldn’t help wondering if it were like a gambler’s tell, a sign that he was something other than a boy from a bourgeois Parisian family?
“It’s been too long,” he said with that easy smile. “It’s fantastic to see you again. And in the daylight, too.”
For a heart-thudding moment, she thought: He means to compare last night with today. But then she remembered that the last time she’d seen him as Camille, as herself, it had also been dark on the tower at Notre-Dame. She swallowed. “I heard you didn’t want me to sit for a portrait? Armand seemed determined to prevent it, on your behalf.”
“Armand might have his own, suspicious reasons, but I thought you might not wish it.” Unself-consciously, he began to loosen his linen cravat.
“Mademoiselle!” Rosier chided. “Please; look straight ahead.”
Reluctantly, Camille faced Rosier.
“I have a better idea,” Rosier said. “Lazare, get in the basket, too. It will look very well, trust me!” Rosier waved him on.
For a moment, he simply stood next to Rosier, watching her, with all his lanky grace. Camille’s eyes went as if magnetized to the golden skin at his throat as his deft hands undid the knot of his cravat. Those hands had stroked her cheek, tangled in her hair, on the tower of Notre-Dame.…
He saw her looking, raised an eyebrow. “It is a warm day, non?”
If he took off his coat, she might expire.
“Hurry up,” Rosier said. “My drawing is waiting.”
And then Lazare was letting himself into the gondola, and she was making room for him, the gondola wobbling a little so that he reached out a hand to steady himself on her shoulder. It was only a moment, it was nothing, but it felt like everything. How could a touch be both intoxicating and reassuring?
“Pardon,” he said, as he settled in next to her, but there was something in the way he said it that suggested he’d meant to touch her all along.
“Now, mademoiselle,” Rosier said, “arm up once more, and Lazare, stand right behind her, so I can see your face over her shoulder.”
He did. He was very near, so near she felt his breath on the side of her neck, the heat radiating from him, the rustling of his shirtsleeves against her back.
“Is this close enough?” Lazare said, very seriously.
“Parfait!” Rosier turned to his sketch, his hand shifting rapidly over the paper.
Her intention was to get answers to her questions, but with him standing next to her, she felt less clearheaded and more distracted than she’d imagined she would. She had no idea where to begin her investigation. Start somewhere, Papa had always said, so she took a deep breath and plunged ahead.
“It’s been a while since we last met.” She wanted to add: when we said good-bye outside the courtyard gate on the rue Charlot, you asked me if tomorrow was too early for us to meet again. And that tomorrow never came.
He leaned closer, his elbow brushing against her waist. “Not for lack of trying,” he said. “I went back to the rue Charlot, the very next evening. But your landlady told me you’d moved.”
Camille half-turned, astonished. “What? She didn’t tell you where we’d gone?” All that time she’d spent wondering why he never came: it was because of stubborn, misguided Madame Lamotte?
A smile twitched at his lips. “I was quite persuasive,” he went on, “throwing compliments and money at her, but she refused.” His voice climbed an octave, became wheezy and indignant: “‘I can’t give Mademoiselle’s address to every boy that comes calling!’”
“Mademoiselle! Face front!” Rosier admonished Camille. Reluctantly, she did as he asked.
“I specifically told her—” Camille began.
“That I might be allowed to know your new whereabouts?” he teased. “If so, I’m relieved. I got the impression she’d been warding off a herd of boys, and I was only one of many. Indistinguishable from the rest.”
Whatever he was, he could never be that. “You’ve been in Paris, then?”
“A bit,” he said slowly. “My parents wished to go to Versailles, so I took them there.”
His aristocratic parents, she thought, but she wasn’t supposed to know that. “As tourists?” she asked.
“To visit friends.”
Was there a strained note in his voice?
“Do you often visit the palace?” she asked, as nonchalantly as she could.
A hesitation. “Sometimes.”
She was getting closer to learning why he was so determined to keep his noble birth a secret, she was certain of it. Versailles was somehow implicated in it.
“And what do you do there?”
“Balloon business, mostly. You know how relentlessly Rosier hounds me to raise money.”
“Unfair!” Rosier exclaimed.
She turned, saw Lazare’s dark brows swoop into a frown. “That’s all?”
He shook his head. “My parents wish it. They think I should make my living at court.” He sounded so stricken by this that she reached out—and took his hand.
My title is a suit that doesn’t fit.
She tried to imagine him in the fine court clothes he’d worn the night before. It was nearly impossible. Apart from that tiny flourish in his bow, there was nothing—no sign whatsoever that he had been at Versailles, disparaged magic, argued with the Vicomte de Séguin, or told her about it. Rien.
“Face front!”
Chagrined, Camille dropped Lazare’s hand and turned around. Lazare said nothing, but she could hear the rise and fall of his breathing behind her.
“Why?” she asked.
“Their reasons don’t matter,” he said, roughly. “It simply is. Did no one in your family ever wish you to do something you didn’t want to do?”
She thought of Alain, Sophie, Maman with her insistence that Camille master la magie, even though she had to draw on her own sorrow to do it. Now she could see that Maman had forced her to practice because she was terrified her children would starve. But Camille still smarted from the pain of not being given a say in what was happening.
“Yes.”
He swallowed. “Then you understand.”
No. She did not understand why his parents had anything to do with his sudden appearance at Versailles among her new friends. She did not understand why this fact of his birth, his station in life—this yawning chasm between his place in society and hers—was not something he would mention, even as their conversation circled at its edges. There was too much pretending for this to be nothing. Her frustration mounting, she tried another tack. “Perhaps you’ll take me to Versailles sometime?”
Something shifted. Lazare stepped back. “I couldn’t do that,” he said.
“Why not? Would I not like it?” she pressed.
“I don’t think you’d like being there with me,” he replied. And before she could say anything more, he called out, “Rosier, are you almost finished? I have more business with the instrument-maker.”
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