“A delivery for Mademoiselle Durbonne,” the maid announced.
A footman in navy-and-citron livery stood on the landing, his face hidden by the potted orange tree he was holding. The maid waved him forward.
Sophie sat up expectantly in her chair. “This is early, isn’t it?” she said.
“With all respect, I do not make these decisions, mademoiselle,” the footman said as he staggered in.
“Is there a card?” Sophie asked.
“I must set this down. Immédiatement.” The servant lunged forward, the pot braced against his hip. “Where?”
“By the window will be best,” Camille said. They both watched as he lowered it to the floor and spun the gilded pot so that its prettiest side faced them.
“It’s lovely,” Camille mused. It was clearly a costly gift. The tree glowed with tiny fruits the size of a baby’s fist. She recalled her first day at Versailles, when she’d looked out over the orangerie where the gardeners were working. Now she knew firsthand how, when the trees bloomed, their sweet perfume made the palace a paradise. A gift from someone at Versailles, then?
“Who—?”
From a pocket, the footman presented Camille with a small, folded note. The thick paper was pale gray, her name curving across it in black loops: Mademoiselle Durbonne.
“At your service, mademoiselle.” In a moment he was gone, the door clicking shut behind him.
“Do you know, I dreamed of oranges last night?” Sophie squeezed in next to Camille on the sofa. She ran her fingers across the swirling letters. “Oh, how romantic, Camille! To have something from Lazare!”
Camille held the note out to Sophie. “You open it.”
“Why? It’s for you.”
With slow fingers, Camille lifted the wax seal and unfolded the paper. The handwriting was unfamiliar. She cleared her throat and read.
Mademoiselle,
No blossom could smell as sweet, nor any fruit, entice as sweetly as you.
In memory of that enchanted evening—
Your Most Ardent Admirer
Sophie gasped, her hand over her mouth.
Camille frowned. “What does it mean?”
“Oh, Camille, I’m so sorry,” Sophie stammered. “I think it’s for me.”
“For you?” A hot blush crept up Camille’s neck. “But how?”
Sophie reached for Camille’s hands and clasped them tight. “Don’t be angry, please.”
“What evening could this boy possibly be talking about?”
“The ball?” There was a sudden edge to Sophie’s voice.
She hadn’t seen all of Sophie’s partners last night, but she’d seen the one who mattered. Only Séguin would do this, trying to turn a girl’s head. “You may absolutely not accept his gifts. He will get the wrong impression—”
“What a fantastic idea!” Sophie crowed. “The more I refuse, the more intrigued he will be.”
“That is not a fantastic idea!” Séguin cheats, Chandon had said. She thought of the time that Séguin had suggested—hadn’t he?—that Camille marry him, on that warm afternoon when they were playing paille maille. She felt again the deliberate, repulsive caress of his fingers when they’d danced. What game was he playing with Sophie?
“He’s not to be trusted. Once, at Versailles—”
“I’ve heard enough about your experiences at Versailles. What I say to the vicomte is none of your business.” Sophie crossed her arms. “You’re simply jealous it’s not from Lazare.”
Her words were a slap. Camille felt the blood rise in blotchy spots in her cheeks. “You have no idea.” She wished desperately to tell Sophie all the things that unsettled her about Séguin, that Chandon had warned her about him. But what good would it do to tell her he was a magician? Nothing could overturn her belief that money and a title were what mattered in a husband.
“Don’t I? Everything is for you. Everything. You have magic, I trim hats. You go to court to make money for us—well and good. We have enough now, don’t we?” Her voice bristled with splinters and pain. “But still you go, wearing yourself out with magic. What if I lost you, what then? You’re as bad as Alain, gambling and having fun while I sit here alone.”
“But don’t you like designing hats?” Had she been wrong, all this time? Camille stumbled on, grasping at what she thought she knew. “We’ve signed a lease on the shop.”
“I like it now. I’m good at it. But hats were what I did to pass the time,” she said, scornfully. “So I didn’t lose my mind, sitting and waiting for you! You never even thought of that, did you, when you were drunk on la magie.”
Sophie’s words stung. Camille had left her alone, so many times. Too many. She had become caught up in the game, no different from card-obsessed Lord Willsingham.
“Lazare will never send me anything again,” Camille said bitterly. “I think he’s found someone new.”
“Don’t try to change the conversation. Of course he hasn’t found someone new. And if you’d never used magic and pretended to be someone else—if you’d been honest and told him who you were, you wouldn’t be worrying about this now.”
Camille’s throat burned as she willed her tears not to fall. She ached for Sophie to comfort her, to say that she didn’t believe what she’d just said—even as Camille herself was starting to believe it—but Sophie remained standing on the other side of the room, immoveable.
“I’m sorry, Camille.” There was no sympathy in her voice. “I’m going to take a promenade with Madame de Théron. As for the Vicomte de Séguin, I’m not going to marry him tomorrow, if that’s what you are worried about. But if you love me, you will not try to stop me from having a little fun.”
47
Downstairs, someone was knocking as if to break the door down.
It was an unfamiliar sound at the Hôtel Théron, to say the least. Camille laid her book on the table beside her as, in the hall below, the footman’s shoes clicked unhurriedly to the door.
The huff of the door opening, a rumble of noises from the street. Male voices, insisting.
She shifted to the edge of her armchair.
Then the footman’s clear voice, asking for a card.
Two minutes later, he was knocking at the little salon’s half-open door. “There are some boys below who wish to speak to you. They say it is urgent.” He added witheringly, “They have no card.”
“From Versailles?”
“I doubt it,” sniffed the footman.
In the mirror, her reflection wavered. She smiled, rubbed roses into her cheeks. It had to be Lazare.
Finally, a chance to see him as herself.
The white-blond girl, the talk of kisses: two days had passed since the masquerade and she’d put the girl out of her mind. Mostly. But she couldn’t forget what Sophie had said about magic. If Camille hadn’t used the glamoire to begin with, she wouldn’t be worrying about Lazare now. Maybe it was time to stop. Maybe it was time to tell him the truth.
He might wish to never see her again. But wasn’t there enough between them to overcome it? There had to be.
Smoothing her skirts, she followed the footman down the curving stairs.
There, on the patterned marble of the foyer, stood Rosier and Lazare. Rosier, restless, his hat clamped under his arm, and Lazare, leaning lazily against the wall in a serious breach of etiquette. The contrast between them—Rosier ill at ease in the richly decorated mansion, Lazare at home—could not have been clearer.
She nearly laughed. He didn’t have to tell her he was an aristocrat. It was obvious.
When he saw her, his face lit with joy.
And suddenly she could think of nothing except that she hoped Madame Théron was out visiting friends and that the boys would linger a while.
“Mademoiselle!” Rosier said. “This is your home?”
“We are only renting rooms here,” she said, remembering how worried she’d once been that they would see the dirt under her fingernails. Now she knew neither of them would have c
ared. How much had changed since she’d been ashamed to let Lazare come to the leaning house on the rue Charlot. Looking at them standing there, she felt almost dizzy at how far she’d come. “How lovely to see you both! Won’t you come in?”
Rosier shifted uneasily. “No time to sit, I’m afraid,” he said. “To be blunt, please help us.”
She had never seen Rosier like this. Worried.
“What’s the matter?” she said, quickly. “Help you with what?”
“There is still a difference of opinion about what that is, exactly,” Rosier said, with a glance at Lazare. “To be brief, we need money to fund a public launch for the balloon.” He nodded at Lazare. “Go ahead. Tell her.”
She glanced from Rosier’s expectant face to Lazare’s. He looked up for a moment, caught sight of the garish putti painted on the ceiling. “Those are hideous.”
“Truly,” she said, laughing, and Lazare did, too—the warmth of it was like sunshine. “Tell me, what’s happening?” she asked again.
Lazare took a deep breath, his dark eyebrows drawing together, and then the words tumbled out in a rush. “We need your help to secure funding for the balloon. We’ve run out of money.”
“No surprise,” Rosier said. “That said, there are many ways of raising funds.”
“I have some money—” Camille began.
Before she could finish, the boys were holding up their hands, horrified. “Never,” they said together.
“We’re going to try one last thing before the public launch,” Rosier said, exasperation creeping into his voice. “It’s the only scheme that’s been approved of by him. Just barely.”
Begrudgingly, Lazare said, “I agreed to it, non?”
Outside, in the courtyard, someone shouted. Lazare swore under his breath. “Already? I told your driver we would be a few minutes.” Opening the door, he strode down the low flight of steps and into the courtyard where a small, open carriage waited. When he saw Lazare, the driver began to gesticulate at the gate.
Camille lowered her voice. “Is something wrong between you two?”
“Between us?” Rosier ran his hand through his hair. “Nothing. But this business with the balloon has unsettled him, mademoiselle.”
Through the doorway, she could see Lazare making soothing gestures at the driver.
“I’ve tried to convince Lazare of the public launch many, many times. You’ve heard me! He says it is not in the interest of natural philosophy.” Rosier pulled at his cravat as if it were choking him. “I tell him, then, that the salon is the only answer, and he replies that he does not wish to debase himself by asking for charity!”
Camille began to suspect what was coming, but she couldn’t fathom why they’d ask her.
“You’re going to a salon? To raise money with a subscription?”
Rosier nodded. “Madame de Staël’s, on the other side of the river.”
Papa had told her of salons where the wealthy gathered to speak of ideas, literature and philosophy, the events of the day. He’d avoided them, certain that they would never invite a printer, whatever provocative and brilliant pamphlets he might write. Madame de Staël’s was one of the most famous. It was said at court that she and her husband, and their guests, were a particularly revolutionary crowd.
Camille hesitated. However revolutionary they were, would they not dismiss her, a printer’s daughter? “I want to help, of course, but I’m not certain—”
“But it’s just the kind of thing you would like! Enlightened conversation! Interesting ideas! Debate!”
“Why not take someone like Armand,” she proposed, “who knows so much about the balloon?”
Rosier groaned. “He should calculate things, not form words and speak them. We need your pretty face. We need you to tell your story.” He frowned at his watch. “In less than one hour.”
In the courtyard, Lazare was clapping the driver on the shoulder, turning back to the house. She needed to know. “Why my story?”
“I believe something happened to you on that flight. Didn’t something change?”
Everything changed.
“Perhaps you can’t see it,” Rosier went on, “but your wonder will get them to open up their purses. A girl, describing what it is like to fly—no one in a salon has ever heard that before. It will be a first, and they will want to fund an adventure like ours.” Rosier held out his hand, a hardworking hand with only one plain ring on it, his thumb and forefinger ink-stained. “Remember your flight. Us, your friends. Save us again, Mademoiselle Camille.”
Lazare was approaching the stairs. His beautiful face was expectant but also somehow protected against the possibility of defeat. It hurt to see it.
Even if she did not fully understand her feelings about Lazare, she did love the balloon. The roar of the brazier’s fire, that moment of supreme lightness when the balloon lifted free of the earth, how she could see everything, the city below as pretty and as painless as a painting, the bright air, the closeness of him—
“I’ll fetch my hat, Rosier.”
48
When Rosier’s carriage clattered into the rue du Bac, its passage was thwarted by a long line of others waiting ahead of them. “Promising,” he said. “Lots of pockets to pick.” He winked and let himself out, waiting at the tiny iron steps to help Camille down. Rosier led the way to the entrance of the grand house; Lazare walked next to her, thoughtful.
As they came to the stairs, Lazare took her hand. “Are you nervous?” he asked, low enough that Rosier couldn’t hear.
“Yes,” she admitted. On the way, in the carriage, she’d remembered how terrified she’d been to go up in the balloon for the first time. It felt a bit like that. “Are you?”
“Ridiculously nervous.” He smiled warily. “I’d rather fly across the English Channel without a cork vest than do this.”
She hadn’t known he could be nervous. “I don’t know if I’d go quite so far,” she replied. “It’s just asking for money—and if we don’t get it, there will be the public launch.”
Lazare nodded. “Though for that we’ll have to sell several hundred tickets.”
Hundreds? “Will there be many people here?” she asked Rosier.
“Probably closer to seventy-five. We would do well to persuade forty subscribers to fund us.”
So many people, there to listen to her. She wished suddenly, desperately, that she’d thought to change into her dress. Its enchantments would have been a comfort.
At the door, footmen stood at attention. Camille, Lazare, and Rosier brushed past the fronds of potted palms and came into a crowded entry hall. Men and women mingled there, greeting one another. Camille noticed men in uniform, noblemen in gaudy suits. But there were men in plainer dress, too, wealthy merchants and other members of the bourgeoisie. And, by the window, three black-skinned men, bewigged and dressed in sorbet-colored silk of mint and lemon, heavy gold necklaces about their necks. Most of the women in attendance had affected the deceptively simple cotton gowns the queen wore, though there were some still in silk. All their conversations and laughter came together in a buzz of anticipation.
“And my role is what, exactly?” Camille asked Rosier and Lazare.
“Simply to speak about the balloon, if the opportunity presents itself,” Rosier said.
“And if it doesn’t?”
“How funny you are. It will—trust me. Let’s see if we can gauge the mood of the room.”
As she waited awkwardly just inside the door, Camille spotted Aurélie standing next to a man in military uniform. Thrilled to see her familiar face, Camille waved. To her dismay, Aurélie only responded with a formal bow. She had no idea who Camille was—she didn’t recognize her as Camille and turned away.
“Come in, come in,” said a stout man with frizzed gray hair. He clapped his hands together briskly. “Voilà les aeronauts! Entrez, entrez! Mesdames, messieurs,” he called out to those assembled in the room, “certainly these daring young men of the air might weigh in on the ques
tion at hand?”
“And a daring young woman,” added Rosier.
“What question is that, Monsieur Clermont?” Lazare said.
“The most pressing questions of natural history, bien sûr,” a woman said. She was older than Camille; her height and intelligent eyes made Camille think of a kind of queen. Her jewelry was simple, her brown hair unpowdered. She held out her hands to Lazare.
“Madame de Staël,” Lazare said, “let me introduce to you my friends and flying companions. Mademoiselle Durbonne and Monsieur Rosier, both of Paris.”
“How wonderful that you have included a woman in your ranks.” Madame de Staël nodded approvingly at Camille. “Are you an aeronaut as well, mademoiselle?”
“I am.”
“And?” Behind Madame de Staël, a group of people moved closer. “I think I speak for all my friends when I say that I am so eager to know what it is like to fly.”
Camille cleared her throat. She remembered the wind rushing through her hair, the sleek chill of the air, the clarifying perspective she’d had over everything. She tried not to think of how Lazare had stood so distractingly close, his mouth by her ear. “It’s everything you might imagine. More, even.”
“Go on,” said a man with an enormous lily in his buttonhole. He flapped his arms in the air. “Take us with you!”
Rosier raised his eyebrows encouragingly.
Camille took a deep breath, steadied herself. All she needed to do was to tell them how it was. Show her wonder at the experience, wasn’t that it?
“I was afraid, at first,” she admitted. “I’d never dreamed of going up in a balloon.”
The man nodded, encouragingly.
“One goes up so fast, n’est-ce pas? One moment one is on the ground, and the next moment, the faces of your friends become tiny white stones. Trees shrink down to handfuls of herbs, ponds and fountains to puddles—even the Seine becomes a trickle of water. The higher one goes, the flatter things become. I’d never experienced anything like it.”
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