It had previously been a confectioner’s shop, and as Camille and Sophie walked through the echoing, empty space, assessing its possibilities, their shoes kicked up a fine layer of powdered sugar, which drifted in the air like sparkling dust. While Sophie peered into storerooms and display cases, asking the landlord if they could be refashioned to show off a line of staggeringly beautiful hats, Camille watched with quiet pleasure at Sophie taking charge. Camille stayed silent and only offered her opinion when it was asked for.
Standing at the sugar-coated windows, she absently traced a spade, then a diamond, in one of the windowpanes. Rent for this shop was fifteen louis a month, and they almost had that to spare.
Camille exhaled. It felt as if she were shaking off a shadow that had followed her too long.
Alain was wherever he was, and to Camille it didn’t really matter where he was, so long as he was not here. Paris was endless crooked streets, mansions and cramped attic spaces—and more than six hundred thousand people. Alain might well try, but he would never find them.
Where that shadow had once been, there was now a tiny spot of light. She might dream again. Not the dreams that had fueled her for so long, the desperate need for a full belly and shoes without holes and safety, but dreams of things that might be. After the meeting of the National Assembly at the tennis court, she saw how she might have a role to play in the changes that were coming. She dreamed of a printing press with which she could publish people’s thoughts, tell the truth of what was happening.
And she dreamed of the balloon. She could write about their preparations, their hopes and their disappointments, their final triumph when they sailed over the Alps as no one had ever done. In secret, she let herself imagine such a life: each day something new, another adventure, she and Lazare together.
In the dream, the secrets they were keeping from each other did not exist.
In her waking life, she couldn’t reconcile them. But perhaps it was possible. A balloon might be big enough to carry all their hopes.
“Camille?” Sophie said. “Are you ready to go?”
Having given the landlord a deposit, Camille and Sophie left the sweet shop, their clothes scented with almonds and vanilla, and returned to the Hôtel Théron. It was early in the afternoon, but Sophie was already getting ready to go out for the evening. She’d promised to dress a visiting countess from Bavaria, who was staying with one of Madame Bénard’s best customers, for a party. Sophie would be at the fashionable lady’s house well past midnight, but Sophie’s face was bright as she prepared to leave. She nearly hummed with happiness. “I’m going to charge her double for every feather and scrap of lace I stitch onto her. And do you know what?” Sophie said, as she kissed Camille good-bye. “She will happily pay. If I charged her less, she’d feel cheated.”
Camille listened to Sophie’s light footfall as she went down the marble stairs and said good-bye to Madame Théron. The great house fell silent. Camille picked up a book—Les Liaisons Dangereuses—and thought about beginning it again, but none of the characters appealed. Instead she wandered to the mantel in the salon. Tucked behind the carriage clock was a folded note the size of her palm.
It had arrived yesterday. She unfolded it again and glanced over the words, though she already knew what they said:
Ma chère Cécile!
Paille maille in the afternoon—meet us at the back steps of the Grand Trianon at three o’clock.
Don’t say no!
Je t’embrasse
Aurélie
Of course she would go.
What had she to keep her here, in Paris? Surely she could stop using magic another time. Perhaps Lazare would be there. Perhaps she might learn the reason he had kept his noble birth a secret from her. Perhaps, among his friends, he might let something slip.
Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.
40
Chandon was waiting by the high yew hedge, swinging two mallets like windmills.
And next to him, in the cool of the shadows, Lazare.
The lush green branches cast complicated patterns on his skin, rendering him mysterious, half-seen, and her first thought was that she had dreamed him there. After what he’d said about only sometimes coming to Versailles, why he was here again?
He was trying to balance his wobbling mallet on the palm of his hand, taking steps back and forth to keep it from falling. When he saw her, he caught it neatly and bowed. Once again, he seemed completely at home at the palace, in his suit of pale yellow silk, green embroidery scrolling down the front of his coat. If he was unhappy to be here, forced by his parents to come to Versailles, as he’d claimed, he didn’t show it.
A finger of unease curled up her back. She thought she’d wanted revelation, but now she wasn’t sure. What if she learned things she didn’t actually want to know? Flustered, Camille curtsied to the boys.
“As always, I’m thankful you’ve arrived. Otherwise Aurélie complains about being outnumbered,” Chandon said, grinning so that his dimple showed in his cheek. “Here’s yours,” he added, handing her one of the mallets and tossing a wooden ball, painted with blue stripes, across the grass. It rolled to a stop against another ball, this one mint striped. “That green one’s mine—careful you don’t hit it.”
The rules of paille maille were simple. Hit the ball down the lane of grass, smacking others’ balls out of the way when it was possible and generally creating chaos. The first ball through the iron arch was the winner. She shaded her eyes, squinting to see it. “You’ve put the arch very far away.”
“So we can play forever,” Aurélie smirked. “Or at least until Guilleux arrives from Paris.” She waved at Camille’s ball. “Go on, give it a try.”
Camille smiled to herself. Setting her embroidered shoe on top of her ball, she thwacked her mallet into it, the force of her blow jettisoning Chandon’s ball across the lawn so that it bounced into the high grass, where it promptly disappeared.
“What have you done?” Chandon sank to his knees. “I am finished!”
“Oh, come,” Aurélie said as she dragged him up. “It’s only paille maille, not the end of the world. Fetch a gardener to trim the area around your ball and voilà, you can hit it out.”
“And if I can’t find a gardener?” Chandon bared his teeth. “I suppose I’ll have to chew it off?”
Lazare laughed. “Or get one of the queen’s sheep to do it for you.”
“We’ll let Chandon have an extra turn, won’t we, Aurélie?” Camille said.
“Bien sûr.” Aurélie strolled to her ball and slammed it so hard that it scudded violently down the long stretch of grass. She smiled triumphantly. “As long as we’re winning he can have an extra go.”
Chandon waded slowly into the meadow. “I don’t see it.”
“Can you believe,” Aurélie called out, “a grand mansion in Paris was set on fire by a mob? The lady of the house ran in to save a trinket and nearly lost her hair.”
“What was she thinking?” Camille said. “To have escaped with her life and then to run back inside?” In her mind, she recalled all the things in their new apartment. She found most of them not worth the trouble of saving. Except the burned trunk. She would have gone back for that—as someone once, in the past, probably had. But that was not something she could mention.
Chandon looked up from the long grass. “Except for Foudriard, there’d be nothing else I’d be that desperate to save. And I think he’d get out on his own.”
Aurélie swung her mallet idly at a patch of golden-eyed daisies. “I’d take my jewels and my dresses.”
“Nothing sentimental?” Lazare asked. He had found his ball and was sighting the final hoop.
“Bah! I’m as hard-hearted as they come.” Aurélie winked. “Though there are some letters, tied up with a blue ribbon, from a Monsieur de G—what about you, Cécile?”
A gloomy magical box that whispers at me? “I’m not sure,” she said.
“No jewels?
Settling his feet in the
grass, Lazare raised his mallet for a hard strike.
Suddenly, Camille knew. “A music box!”
With a clunk, Lazare’s ball curved wide of the wicket and sank into a wet little hollow in the lawn.
“Tant pis!” Aurélie called. “Sablebois isn’t usually one to miss his shot.”
Lazare looked back at Camille over his shoulder. “What kind of music box?”
Camille swore under her breath. She could not believe she had said it, completely without thinking. She’d come to play paille maille with the intention of finding out something about him, but if she continued like this it would be Lazare who found something out about her. She struggled to keep her face blank, as if it’d meant nothing at all. Lazare kept staring, his eyebrows tilted up, baffled.
She’d slipped. But she wasn’t going to cower.
She beamed at him.
Chandon hit his ball hard. It sailed up out of the rough grass and onto the lawn. He followed after, coughing.
Worrisomely, Chandon’s cough reminded her of Maman’s, the way it had lingered and not improved. If anything, it was getting worse. Still, he was, as usual, full of wit and high spirits. “Are you not well, Chandon?”
“Fine,” he said. “Too many late nights.”
Aurélie frowned. “Then get some sleep, darling. Or I’ll be forced to send my physician to you. He’s very strict, you know, and his medicines are absolutely vile.”
“Please, not that,” moaned Chandon. “It’s your turn, Cécile.”
She settled her foot on her ball, wriggling it into place, and wished Lazare weren’t watching her so intently. She raised her mallet and swung.
“Your music box,” he said, “is it one of those new ones with a melancholy tune?”
Her mallet hit the ball hard, but at the wrong angle, so instead of scudding down the lawn it ricocheted away and blundered through the hedge.
“Oh, too bad!” Aurélie said. “You were so close.”
“I’ll fetch it for you,” Lazare said, leaning on his mallet. “You’ll have to pay a penalty, though, if I do.”
“What kind of penalty will that be, Sablebois?” Aurélie said, a wink in her voice.
“You’re a neutral party,” Lazare said. “You decide.”
“A kiss?” Aurélie suggested.
“If you insist,” he said, smiling. He raised a hand to shield his eyes so he might see Camille better and in the shadow his hand cast, she could see the keenness in his face. “Baroness, are you in?”
She flushed. And she nearly said yes.
It was Baroness that stopped her. With all the talk about the fire and the objects they’d save, and the slip she’d made, she had completely forgotten the other game she was playing, the game in which she was a pretend baroness. The important game she must not lose. With a creeping sense of dismay, she realized that Lazare wasn’t asking for a kiss from Camille—he was asking for a kiss from the Baroness de la Fontaine.
It was one thing to be confident and safe in her disguise, but it was another thing entirely to imagine the disguise was so perfect—so enthrallingly beautiful—that Lazare was ready to kiss this girl he hardly knew.
He could not be falling for the baroness.
“Well?” he said.
Could he?
She desperately needed a moment away to gather herself. “How cheaply kisses are traded!” she said, taking cover beneath her best court manner. “I’ll find it and hit it out myself, thank you.”
She did not wait to see Lazare’s reaction but headed for the yews lining the lawn. Her friends’ bright voices faded as she plunged into the hedge’s shadows. On the other side, a fountain purled, cool and sweet. Peering through the dense branches, she saw gravel paths marking off a basin of water, rows of dusty pink roses, a building of golden stone. Finally she found a narrow tunnel cut into the hedge.
Branches caught at her clothes, and more than once she had to stop and unhook a piece of lacey trim from a twig. In the center of the hedge it was murky and still, except for the scrabbling of birds in the upper branches. She tried to push away her feeling of unease, but it persisted.
In her quest to find out what lay behind Lazare’s secrets—what reason he had for not telling her that he was an aristocrat, why he kept returning to Versailles—she was in danger of revealing her own. She thought again of the frozen Seine, its uncertain safety.
Even if he hadn’t recognized her when she’d mentioned the music box, it was dangerous. And to imagine he might be interested in her shadow self, the Baroness de la Fontaine, was to imagine labyrinths of trouble and misunderstanding and heartache.
She’d gone too far. She needed to be more vigilant, to maintain somehow the distinction between her two selves. When she first came to Versailles, she’d never dreamed that she would need to create a self so different from her own. If she’d thought at all about it, she’d imagined the baroness would be like her own self, but better: perfected by the glamoire and polished by etiquette.
And of course, she thought, as she shoved through a break in the hedge, she’d never dreamed Lazare would be here to witness it.
Her ball had come to a stop at a rose bed. She was so intent on grabbing it and making it back to the game that she did not hear anyone approach until she stood up and found the Vicomte de Séguin standing in front of her.
Camille stiffened.
“Bonjour, madame,” he said, smoothly bowing. “Fancy seeing you here.”
Camille curtsied, the threads in her gown agitating against her skin. “Monsieur le Vicomte.”
As always, the Vicomte de Séguin appeared supremely confident, dressed in a costly, dark-blue suit: everywhere there could be a gold thread or glass bead, there was. Though it had not rained in days, and the garden paths billowed with dust, his clothes had not a speck on them. A thread of richly scented cologne hung about him, frankincense and cold marble, and under it, the faint smell of smoke. The skin on her neck prickled.
Magician.
Séguin works so much magic he positively reeks of it.
What did a magician like him do with his magic, when he was already so powerful, so rich? Certainly not pretend to be someone else, as she did. As far as she knew, Chandon used his magic for cheating at cards, but what Séguin did with his, she could not guess. A small voice inside her said: perhaps you do not want to know.
“Surprised to see me?” he said.
“A little.” She showed Séguin her ball. “We were playing paille maille on the other side of the hedge. I missed my shot.”
“Or you were fated to see me today.” He raised a perfect eyebrow. “Despite my not being invited to play.”
“I’m sorry—I didn’t know.”
“It’s nothing new,” he said, as if regretful. “Sometimes I say the wrong things. Do the wrong things. It’s not always easy to be oneself, n’est-ce pas?”
“No, it isn’t,” she agreed. She was torn by the desire to get away from him with his unnerving stare, and not to reveal that he unsettled her. “What do you have there?”
Séguin opened his hand: in it was a fresh plum. In the dappled light, it glowed a deep amethyst. “I spoke to the king just now, in his fruit garden. He loves to see what his gardeners grow at Versailles. He yearns for the simple things, did you know?”
She shook her head. On the lawn, the others were waiting. “I must be getting back.”
“Stay a moment—it won’t take me long to peel this.” From his pocket, he removed a knife. Camille flinched. Setting the blade to the fruit, he remarked, “Remember when we played cards, when you first came to court? You never took me up on my offer to help you with the traps.”
“I didn’t find them to be so terribly dangerous after all.”
“Oh?” His knife gleamed as he tossed a peel into the rose bed. “Some are so finely woven you cannot see them, like magic. Court gossip has you engaged to half a dozen people. I thought I’d missed my chance.”
He was jesting—wasn’t he? “Hardly
. I much prefer to keep control of my money. Husbands tend to get in the way of that.”
His bronze gaze flickered over her face. “And if you could guarantee that wouldn’t happen, would you marry?”
Camille took a hesitant step backward. This was not at all what she’d expected. “Monsieur—”
“You and I, for example. We would be magnificent together.”
Two magicians, was that what he meant? “And how is that?” she asked, pointedly. “When I am only a simple baroness from the provinces?”
His thin lips twisted into a smirk. “Some things are more than what they seem, aren’t they? The way sand becomes glass. A piece of grit becomes a pearl.”
Transformations.
As close to saying magic as one could come without speaking the word. Séguin must suspect she was a magician. And he wanted her to know that he knew, and that he thought her magic a prize.
Something he wanted.
Her dread was paralyzing, a rush of icy water before drowning. She tightened her grip on the ball in her hand. “I’m sorry to say, monsieur, that as much as I’d like to be, I’m not any of those things.”
A half-laugh, as if he couldn’t believe she’d deny it. “One bit of advice, madame.”
“Is it about the traps?” she said, as lightly as she could.
He inclined his head, as if to say yes. “I’ve learned that the worst thing at court is to be seen.”
What a strange thing to say about Versailles, where not to be noticed was to be forgotten. Doomed. “Everyone at court wishes to be seen. Isn’t that the point?”
He shrugged. “Coming out of the hedge as you did, fetching your ball, and returning to your game before I could see you—it was like a game of hide-and-seek. As if you’d wanted to remain invisible.”
That was exactly what she had wanted. Instead she stood there as if compelled, paralyzed like prey under his golden eyes, watchful as a hawk’s. All-seeing. As if he were telling her: even in your glamoire, you are not invisible to me.
The knowledge was a pulse of fear. Steady, she told herself. She needed to go, and quickly. “The others will wonder where I’ve gone.”
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