She nodded, slowly. The dress was unhappy, its fabric suddenly rough against her skin. But until she had a better idea than the one idea circling in her mind, she had to play along.
“We’ll see Sophie before the wedding, n’est-ce pas?” she asked. “I need to speak with her about everything that’s happened. I’m afraid she won’t be pleased.” If Sophie truly did care for Séguin, she would be furious with Camille. But if that were the price of getting Sophie away from him, she would gladly pay it.
“Bien. We’ll visit her in the morning. But, until then, a glass of wine.” He unstoppered a crystal carafe that glowed garnet from a side table.
She was suddenly very thirsty. “Of course, monsieur.”
He held out two glasses. “You must call me Jean-Baptiste.”
Camille took one and drank. The wine was deliciously rich, somehow alive. She took another sip. And another. It would help steady her.
“Jean-Baptiste.” Her tongue stumbled over the unfamiliar syllables. “When will we see my sister tomorrow? What time?”
“How eager you are! By midday? I can do many things, but I cannot shorten the distance between Versailles and Paris.”
Camille rubbed her forehead. Séguin’s voice seemed suddenly strange, as if it were coming from a far distance. And the carpet seemed to shift under her feet. On the wall, the tapestry’s sad unicorn turned its head to her. The tapestry’s flowering plants twined and twisted. She blinked.
“To think I was once foolish enough to believe you cared for the Marquis de Sablebois,” he mused as he set his wine down. The glass was full.
“Very foolish.” Her words echoed strangely in her head. Séguin cheats. “There is something in the wine,” Camille mumbled. Her head swam, and as if in a dream, she slowly opened her hand and let the empty glass tumble onto the carpet. “What is it?”
“Just something to help you rest, my darling,” he said, catching her elbow. “A bride must sleep well before her wedding.”
She thought she heard the tapestry’s chained unicorn laugh. “I don’t wish to sleep now! I wish to see Sophie,” Camille said, tears in her eyes. “I’ve been so worried about her.”
“Tomorrow.”
She knew what she wanted to say but the right words did not come. “Why did you drug me?” she managed to say. Suddenly, her knees gave way, but Séguin held her up, his hand like iron around her waist.
“Just to be safe,” he said in her ear. “Time is running out mon trésor, and I’ve waited so long.”
A thousand years ago she’d wondered if what he wanted was to push her up against a wall in an empty room, thrust her skirts above her knees. Now he might do anything. If she shouted for help, no one would come. She tried to blink back the tears, but they streamed heedless down her face.
And then Séguin kissed her, on her wet cheek—she felt his teeth and his tongue scrape against her skin. She recoiled, but he had her by the arm.
“What are you doing?” she hissed.
He touched her face. It was almost a caress. “The tears of a magician are too valuable to waste.” Slowly, Séguin licked his fingertips, one by one. “They are the most powerful magic, shed in pain, full of sorrow and lost wishes.”
Camille drew a ragged breath. Underneath his cologne, she smelled cold magic. Cinders. Dead fires. Ash. “Don’t touch me.”
Séguin gently smoothed Camille’s hair back from her face. “Ah, ma chèrie, give it time. It could be your magic, too. This is the way we aristocrats did it before. The queen once showed me a magician’s library, hidden behind a wall in an unused room. In it were grimoires from the time when magicians vied with the kings of France for power. They did not always use their own sorrow. Sablebois was right, that night in the gardens: we used to take the blood of the poor. It was by studying the grimoires that I made Chandon my well.”
“You took his blood?”
“Or his tears. It didn’t matter—I needed his sorrow.”
“With this magic you have nearly killed him, you monster.”
Séguin chuckled. “Chandon is so openhearted that it was too easy. But if he refused, I would have asked the queen to have Foudriard sent elsewhere. Somewhere Chandon could not follow. Say, on a tour of duty in Sénégal? Or in Indochine? It takes months to reach those places. If the boat doesn’t sink first.”
Imagine if he were sent elsewhere and I not allowed to go, Chandon had said.
“I hate you.”
“Come, that’s a little severe, isn’t it? We magicians do what we need to do, and I needed more magic. Alas, I went a bit too far. There were so many things for which I needed the magic that I took too much from him. I won’t make that mistake with you.” He licked another tear off his finger as if sucking at the remains of a caramel. “This time, I’ll be careful.”
“Why do you need more? To avoid the pain?” Camille wobbled backward, her heels catching in the carpet. She groped for words. “You’ll hurt me and take my tears? My blood?”
“Hurt is a strong word. You can be cleverer than Chandon and give me your sorrow willingly. If not, I can always encourage the sorrow to come forth. Your sister might help.”
“You cannot mean to hurt Sophie to give me more sorrow!” Her voice was small, plaintive as a child’s. “I won’t let you.”
Séguin pointed a ringed finger at her. “Now, now! You promised. What is yours is mine, and what is mine is mine. N’est-ce pas? Come, it won’t all be bad. We’ll mix sorrow and happiness.” He put his arm around her and murmured, “Chandon was a nothing. You and I—together we will rise. Victorious. We will be the court’s second monarchs, the King and Queen of Magic.”
He had conjured for her a nightmare of pain and sadness. And he believed it a beautiful thing.
What was it she’d thought to do, to escape this trap? She could not remember. Her mind was numb as stone. Her limbs too heavy. She tried to resist, but the drug had filled her with suffocating oblivion. It was useless. She sank onto the thick carpet.
Somewhere above her, Séguin snapped his fingers. A door opened.
“Monsieur?” the valet asked.
“The next apartment,” Séguin said. “Now.”
62
Séguin and his valet carried Camille to another apartment farther down the long hall. The valet pressed his hand over her mouth. His hand was so large it covered her nose. She was in danger of fainting.
Suddenly, at the end of the hall, a light bobbed: a candle. Someone was coming. Someone would save her.
Camille writhed and kicked to get loose.
“Remember your place, mademoiselle,” the valet said, cuffing her with the back of his hand.
“Attention—not like that, you fool,” Séguin said. “You don’t hurt her.”
“Unless she acts up,” the valet said.
“Unless she acts up,” Séguin agreed.
Woozily, the dress showed her a memory: the deep silence of the charred box. Camille knew what the dress was trying to tell her. She must bluff and pretend. Be silent.
And wait. She let her head loll against Séguin’s silk-clad shoulder.
He reached up and patted her cheek. “We’re almost there.”
* * *
When Camille woke, the moon was a high white coin in the dark sky.
Her head throbbed. She sat up and rubbed her temples, taking in her surroundings. She had slept, apparently, on a sofa in an unfamiliar room. In the dim light, she saw it had been hastily vacated. Dark rectangles on the walls showed where paintings had hung, bureau drawers yawned open, and abandoned clothes lay crumpled on the floor and flung over the backs of chairs. Pieces of broken mirror glinted on the dressing table. It was as if the levelers of the Bastille had stormed in and ransacked this room.
The events of the evening came back to her, memories and conversations like swaths of smoke. She had been so naive. She’d believed Séguin would simply turn Sophie over to her. But he had prepared. The poisoned wine was waiting. He’d found an empty room in whi
ch to imprison her.
Camille rose unsteadily and went to the door. She pressed her ear against it and listened. It was quiet. Slowly she turned the door handle. Locked, of course. How many hours were left before she could see Sophie? At the edge of the horizon, the black sky blurred to deep blue. It was past midnight, then, maybe two or three o’clock. The windows opened, but there was nothing outside—no drainpipe, no ivy—that she could climb down to escape. She could call for help, but who would hear her?
And if she somehow escaped, what would happen to Sophie?
Now that she knew what Séguin wanted from her, she must shuffle the deck, rearranging the cards she’d been dealt and how she might play them.
There had to be another way.
Since Maman and Papa died, there had been no one to help her. There had been no one to take over and say, Sit back. I will take care of you. She’d had to do it herself. La magie had been her tool and in some grim way, an outstretched hand. It pulled her up and out of the despair that followed her parents’ deaths, Sophie’s illness, Alain’s descent into drink and debt. She’d hoped to give it up. But without it, what did she have?
If only she could understand why Séguin needed her. She’d thought it might be love. But not any longer. What he did felt nothing like love. It was instead a desperate need for more magic. But what great expenditure of magic was he making, such that he drained the life from Chandon and was ready to do the same to her? She could not fathom why he needed so much.
She didn’t think she could muster the energy to work the glamoire once more to change her dress. Someone—she hated to think which one of them it had been—had undressed her down to her chemise. Her stays, her hoops, and the court dress lay on the floor. It looked sad and shapeless, abandoned, and she had to turn her back to it to keep from crying. Her mother had worn it, and it hadn’t helped her. Camille had worn it and this was where she had ended up.
In the bluish half-light, though, the dress seemed to shimmer with magic, calling to her. Camille lifted it up, pressed it close, and felt the dress pleading with her, desperate to be worn.
One last time.
As she stepped into the gown, the bodice laced itself. She pricked her finger with the brooch and let three drops of blood fall onto the dress, imagined it pale as morning, silver-gray, almost without color. A mourning gown? A wedding gown? She didn’t know. Listening to her, the dress took her sorrow and transformed, changing its shape, its color bleeding away until it had become the one Camille imagined. It stiffened around her ribs, curving to fit her.
She had no magic brushes to change her face. On the dressing table, among the shards of broken glass, lay a few nearly empty pots of paint, but she didn’t see how being prettier could matter today. Carefully, she reached out to touch one of the pieces of glass. It was long and sharp, an icicle or a dagger.
Dimly, she began to see what she might use her magic to do. Séguin did not want her dead. That knowledge she tucked away, like a weapon. Slipping the shard of glass into her pocket, she went to the window, pulled back the curtains. The trees in the gardens were still only a shadowy suggestion of something yet to come.
She had treated Sophie terribly. Like a child who couldn’t be trusted to make her own decisions. She’d hidden so much from her, worried it would hurt her.
In protecting her, she had rendered her defenseless.
Tomorrow she would tell Sophie everything. She would beg her forgiveness. Camille bit the edge of her fingernail. Sophie might never forgive her. What Camille had done was so terrible Sophie might not want her for a sister.
Camille turned her hands over and held them to the window’s faint light. Up the middle of the palm of her right hand ran the twinned life lines, one of them crossed with a star.
Here are two lines: you and your shadow life. One path is thin, but whole. The other is broken.
When Séguin had read her palm, she’d wondered about his warning. If someone had asked her then which path is the path that is thin but whole, she would have known the answer: her old life, the life in Paris.
But now she wasn’t so sure. It seemed to her that a thin and narrow life was just as unwanted as a broken one.
They came for her hours before dawn.
63
The priest intoned the words of the marriage ceremony, stumbling nervously over the Latin words. His voice echoed around the chapel’s stone walls, slowly at first, and then faster as Séguin tapped his foot on the marble floor.
Camille’s toes were like ice in her thin, beribboned shoes. She focused on the cold, allowing it to keep her awake. Alert. When Séguin and his valet had come for her, she’d greeted them from her dressing table as if she were a great lady taking a social call. In his cobalt suit embroidered with white roses, Séguin had bowed to her, and she’d bitten back her shame and revulsion. Everything hinged on the least amount of resistance.
Séguin had been pleased with the dress she’d conjured. He’d waited, drumming his fingers on the inlaid dressing table, as she put up her hair with another woman’s pins. Her face in the shattered mirror was a ghost’s, smudged with sleeplessness.
“If you won’t work the glamoire for your face,” he said, smoothly, “at least put on whatever powder you can find, mademoiselle.”
Obediently, she lifted pot lids until she found some, then dabbed it on as well as she could with her fingers. She followed with circles of rouge, pushing the paint hard into her cheeks.
“That’s better,” he said, coming closer.
She stiffened. He held something in his hands, and in the strange half-light of the abandoned apartment, it seemed—for a heart-clenching moment—like a garrote to strangle her with. She exhaled when the cracked mirror showed not a wire but a string of gems, which he clasped around her throat: a necklace of pearls studded with tiny diamonds. And then, from a pocket, he produced matching earrings, swaying on their clips. She slipped them onto her ears.
“Beautiful.” He kissed her neck, above the necklace’s clasp, letting his lips linger. Camille tried not to pull away. The dress rustled against her skin, showing her churches and cold rings and years of marriages that had required the strength of every magician who had worn this dress. Wait, it whispered. Be ready.
It speaks? Camille thought with horror.
And then the dress showed her Camille herself, weeping in the locked room, and she understood: it was this last sorrow that had brought the dress fully to life.
“Come, mademoiselle,” Séguin said. “Your sister waits, but now, to church.”
She had protested, begged to see Sophie first, but to no avail.
In the church’s vestibule, Séguin had wrapped her fingers around a quill and, as if she were a child, guided her name at the bottom of a densely written paper. Above her blotted name, he scrawled his own, trailed by a series of titles and houses and estates. Both the sweating priest and Séguin’s valet signed as witnesses and a copy was given to an altar boy who disappeared into the shadows, the white paper winking in his hand. The marriage would be recorded somewhere, copies of that paper made. Even if she ever managed to escape him, that contract would be there, unyielding as a manacle.
The priest reached the end of his recitation and from his pocket Séguin produced two rings, handed one to Camille, and slipped the other onto her fourth finger. An emerald as big as her thumbnail, encircled by tiny pearls.
This is only the form of it, she told herself. You already signed the contract, and your reasons were good ones. The best ones. And now, his ring. She remembered to sway a little on her feet, so that Séguin had to support her by the elbow as he slipped the ring on.
“You have made me happy, Vicomtesse de Séguin,” he said, over the priest’s Latin litany, and pulled her close. As his body pressed against hers, she felt, against her hip, the pommel of his sword.
Everything in Camille wanted to wrench away, to flee down the echoing nave of the king’s chapel, but she told herself to be loose and easy, a doll made of rag
s and no thoughts.
Then he kissed her, full on the mouth. He tasted of ash and power and death.
64
Séguin was silent as the carriage sped away from Versailles. Instead of speaking, he half pulled and resheathed his sword over and over, the biting whine of it making Camille’s stomach churn. She’d asked, again, to see Sophie and he’d waved his hand as if swatting a fly. Soon was his answer to everything. He told her to pull back her cloak so that he might see how the necklace he’d given her lay around her throat and reminded her: now that she was the Vicomtesse de Séguin, she should cast off her other jewels. Camille curved her hand around the teardrop brooch pinned on her shoulder, the one she used to draw blood for the glamoire. “This? It’s been in my family for a long time.”
“A sentimental attachment, then.”
Camille nodded.
“I see.” Séguin straightened the cuffs of his coat, adjusting the lace underneath, and drew the curtains.
In the carriage’s suffocating closeness, Camille sought to prepare herself. She knew what she would say to Sophie. She would beg for forgiveness for all the misguided things she had done. And in case anything went wrong—Séguin did something to stop her, though she could not think what he could do that he hadn’t already done—she had the brooch, the dress, a shard of mirror-glass in her pocket. It was not much, but it was not nothing. She remembered how reassuring the snuffbox’s weight in her pocket had been on her first visit to Versailles, and how easily it had slipped away.
Not this time. She refused to give away what she had. As Séguin’s horses raced toward Paris, in their thudding hoofbeats she heard, Sophie, Sophie, Sophie.
Eventually the carriage slowed, the horses blowing, the traces of their harness jingling. Camille sat up as the carriage rolled to a stop. Outside, a bird warbled its liquid call. She leaned forward, listening intently. She should have heard the rumble of dray wagons and the thump of their horses’ heavy hooves, the cries of vegetable sellers and fishmongers advertising their wares, beggars and street-sweepers and knife-sharpeners and women going to market: all the cacophony of Paris stretching itself and coming awake.
Enchantée Page 35