As if playing a part meant he shouldered no blame. “He was the one who held your debts?”
“That was how it started,” he admitted. “We had nothing, if you remember, when our parents died. So, like all of Paris, I went to gamble at the Palais-Royal. I was careful and played small at first, low bets, but when I kept winning, I moved to the big tables and the high stakes. And why not?” he said, scowling at Camille. “I was good, and I was lucky.
“Then, my luck changed. I lost. Many times. Still, there were many who were happy to lend me livres or louis to tide me over, so I might play again and win it all back. But something was wrong. I could never win as much as I needed to,” he said, as if it still mystified him. “There was a nobleman who often played, and offered to help. Séguin was rich, and in the beginning he never asked to be repaid. Sometimes he’d beg something small from me in return for the money he gave me. Like that miniature of you and Sophie.”
“You gave him that? When?” Camille demanded. If Séguin had been given the miniature, he would have recognized her and Sophie. From the very beginning.
“What does it matter?”
Lazare was unable to contain himself. “Don’t you understand? Séguin nearly ran over—or pretended to run over—Mademoiselle Sophie in the Place des Vosges!” he exclaimed. “Did Séguin know of her then?”
“Who knows?” Alain said. “Sophie was fine, wasn’t she?”
That was the day she’d run into Lazare outside the apothecary’s. And she’d been to the apothecary because Alain had hit her. And when he’d hit her, and she’d sprawled bleeding on the floor, she’d seen that his watch chain was empty. Séguin had recognized Camille the first time she’d seen him.
“You had betrayed us, even then,” Camille said, her rage icy cold. “Séguin knew what he was doing—if not when he nearly knocked her down, but certainly when he saw her face. Our faces.” Pacing to the door with its broken pane, she tried to gain control of herself. Through the shattered glass, she watched the coachman wiping the carriage wheels carefully, lovingly, clean of mud.
“And then, Alain, let me guess? When your debts were sufficiently large so that you could not deny him his request, he told you he wished to meet your little sister? That he might make her a nice offer of marriage? And then, he’d call it even.”
“It wasn’t like that!” Alain stormed. “Sophie wanted to! She was pleased!”
“I didn’t know what he was, Alain,” Sophie said. “Didn’t you always tell me I’d marry high? I wanted so to believe you. I trusted you. But the vicomte was horrible.”
“That’s enough.” Alain’s chest heaved. “Now that you got your little story, get out, both of you. You don’t belong here.”
Except—Camille suddenly realized—she did.
Standing there in her tattered cloth-of-gold dress, under thirty burning candles, the scent of Séguin’s magic mingling with the lilies’ fragrance, and his cipher woven in gold into a tapestry that hung on the wall, Camille did, in fact, belong.
She spoke to the maid. “When Monsieur leaves the house, lock the door behind him.”
“What the hell?”
Camille blazed at him, defiant. “As it happens, I married the vicomte early this morning. Didn’t you realize that was part of his plan? I’m the new Vicomtesse de Séguin.” The title felt strange in her mouth, but powerful. “The vicomte, however, is dead. This house belongs to me.”
Alain stared, bewildered. “Dead? But I was to have what I wanted! He promised. For what I’d done—helping him get to Sophie, delivering his letters, softening her up—he was to give me the management of his country estate, while he remained in Paris.”
“It’s no longer his estate, Alain. It’s mine.”
“She’s right,” Lazare said. “Your part is finished.”
Alain grabbed the great silver vase, chased with gold, by far the richest object in the hall. “I’ll take this, then. As payment for services rendered.”
Camille shook her head. “You know what I’ll give you in payment, brother? Your freedom.”
“I already had that,” Alain sneered.
“Did you?” Camille said, rounding on him. “The Vicomte de Séguin was a magician. Unlike mine, his promises were cinders that crumbled to ash as soon as you picked them up. How did you not realize this? If I’d refused to marry him, and he’d married Sophie—or kept her as his mistress, his slave—he would have made your lives a nightmare. And he’d never have given you anything. Whatever he might have been once, the Vicomte de Séguin loved power and power alone. He would never have relinquished one atom of it.”
This was the end, then. It was over.
But she might still say what she needed to with love instead of hate. She cleared her throat. “I cannot know what you shall think of me, nor if you ever will wish to see me again. That’s your choice.” Then she gestured out to the streets of Paris. “This is what I am giving you, Alain. It is the finest, and rarest, of gifts. Now go and do something good with it.”
68
On the second floor of the mansion she was still learning to call home, Camille tapped on Sophie’s bedroom door. Her sister slept late these days, recovering from the ordeal that Séguin and Alain had put her through. She didn’t share the details with Camille, and in turn, Camille did not pry. They were Sophie’s wounds, her hurts. Camille only did her best to let them heal.
From inside the room, she heard a bird warbling—a canary Lazare had sent to Sophie to hasten her recovery.
“Come, but don’t let in Fantôme!”
For the first time in many days, Sophie sat up in bed, her hair hanging in a smooth braid over her shoulder, the bird clutching her index finger. “Careful not to startle him!” she exclaimed as Camille came in.
Smiling to herself, Camille took her usual seat by the head of the bed and clasped Sophie’s other hand where it lay on the embroidered coverlet. The bird fixed a suspicious black eye on Camille.
“Don’t worry, little…?” Camille didn’t know if it had a name.
“Louis. The sixteenth.” Sophie’s lips quirked.
“Majesté,” she said to the bird, “I’m not here for an audience with you. It’s Sophie I’ve come to see. I’m so happy to see you better, my darling sister.”
Sophie ducked her head. “I may look fragile, but I’m stronger than I appear.”
Camille kissed her on the cheek. Everything she wanted to say jostled in her mind. If she hadn’t left Sophie alone so much, if she hadn’t focused on life at court and had really listened to her sister, couldn’t all of this have been avoided? “I’m so sorry, Sophie. For leaving you, for not trusting you, for getting so caught up in everything that I lost my way—”
“Enough, Camille!” Sophie burst out. “Yes, you should have dealt better. You should have trusted me. When Maman and Papa died, I did grow up. You just didn’t see it.”
“I am so sorry.”
“You’ve already apologized. Some of it was my fault, too, n’est-ce pas? I wanted to believe I could save us by marrying Séguin. That was wrong.” The bird trilled. “See?” Sophie said, mock-serious. “The king agrees.”
“It wasn’t just you. Alain was in debt to him, completely ensnared.”
“The vicomte enchanted our brother.”
Surprised, Camille asked, “With magic?”
Sophie shook her head. “Séguin was everything Alain and I had been striving for, everything we thought we wanted—don’t you see? Séguin was our fairy-tale ending.”
It wasn’t just Sophie and Alain. Maman, Grandmère, and back before her, people telling and retelling these dangerous stories. Believing in them, and by believing remaking the world in the stories’ image. Until they felt true. Despite the wash of sunlight flooding the room, a chill crept along Camille’s neck. “He would have used you horribly, to increase my sorrow. That was what he intended, in the end. We were to be his way out of suffering.”
With her little finger, Sophie stroked the top of the
bird’s head. “We escaped, though.”
Camille shivered. All that blood, the trampled grass. The magic, and the sorrow. “We escaped with our lives, but just barely.”
“I think we escaped with quite a bit more than that,” Sophie teased. Louis flapped off her finger onto the arm of a candelabra. “We have this beautiful house! We have an enormous estate, which Séguin bragged about endlessly while he held me captive. You should have heard him, telling me how many heads of cattle he had and all the taxes he got from his poor farmers. And somewhere in the attics there’s probably trunk after trunk loaded up with gold louis!” She peeked sidelong at Camille, suddenly serious. “And you have the Marquis de Sablebois.”
“He isn’t a prize!”
“I think he is.”
Camille gave her sister a gentle shove. “You know what I mean.”
“In any case, we are now rich and we escaped a very dangerous magician. Camille,” Sophie said, hesitantly, “you won’t keep working the glamoire, will you? Or turning coins? Now that we have everything we need?”
Camille hesitated. It was true: they had all they needed.
But perhaps magic was more than survival? The queen might have had Séguin banished, or stripped of his estates and money, if he did not cheat for her, as she’d called it. He’d worked magic to survive, just as she had, in the beginning. But why had Chandon used it to win at cards? He had money and he was the best player at court, even without magic. Why endure the sorrow if he didn’t have to? She remembered again the itch of magic on her skin, the way it nearly compelled her to transform herself. Perhaps that was the beauty and the terror of la magie: taking things that no one wanted—bad cards, scraps of metal, sorrow itself—and then making something of them.
Camille said, “We no longer need the money, do we? And the dress was damaged in the duel.”
The bird hopped across the coverlet, pecking at a row of silk tassels.
“I could mend it if you like,” Sophie said. “I’ve done it before.”
This time, though, the dress felt dead. “If I’m not going to work magic anymore, does it matter?”
“I was so envious, you know,” Sophie said then, quietly, “that you could work magic.”
“But why?” When Sophie was silent, Camille pressed on. “I didn’t like having to be the one to do it, but—I’m glad you were spared.”
“Don’t you see what it means, that you could work magic? You missed our parents. I did too, bien sûr, but I also thought everything would come right, in the end. But you understood what we’d lost,” said Sophie. “And from that sadness, you worked magic.”
Magicians needed sorrow. And deep sorrow existed only because of love. That was why Séguin had wanted her, hadn’t he said so? Because she felt deeply. And, she wondered, was it also because there had been something about her that made him feel deeply? Even if it were only his fear at losing her.
“You always wanted to change things, Camille. Our situation, our lives. You even wanted to help Papa change the world.” A proud smile crept across Sophie’s face, as if she were playing her best card. “Et voilà! Now you don’t have to work la magie any longer. You needn’t worry about me, at least for a little while. I have plans.”
“Already?”
“I gave my notice to Madame Bénard. Before Alain brought me here, we stopped at the shop and I told her I was leaving.” Sophie smiled wickedly. “She was not pleased. She knows everyone came for my hats, not hers.”
“Well done! But, Sophie—what if we have to leave Paris?”
“Because of the Bastille?”
Camille was haunted by the wild, righteous jubilation in the faces of the window-breakers that night the Bastille was stormed. And the boys shoving that aristocrat into a dark future of—more beatings? A grisly death? After the Bastille fell, life in Paris had continued on, but the shadow remained. In the way that one can see in a lake the reflection of what’s around it and what’s underneath, Camille sensed the violence of that night was still there. How did everything return to normal, after something like that?
“You’re not worried?”
“Even before the Bastille was destroyed, people were setting fire to aristocrats’ houses,” Sophie said. “Will it really get worse? Is Paris no longer safe?”
Once upon a time, Camille knew what it was to be safe. Or thought she knew: food, shelter, freedom from hurt. All those things were still necessary—there were so many people who had none of them—but this was something else. She didn’t know exactly what it was, but she could feel it, like sun on her face after a long winter. A chance to rise up and catch the light: to be something more than she’d believed she could be.
“I don’t know, but something is happening, Sophie. Perhaps something great—I hope so—but perhaps something terrible. If we stay in Paris, and I start a press, I can do my part in telling the truth about it.”
“You must,” Sophie said brightly. “And things will settle, I know it. I have too much I want to do. The confectioner’s hat shop will be fantastic, non? I’m already imagining a revolutionary hat—it’ll be a lovely one, not one that sticks a brick from the Bastille on top and calls it macaroni.”
Camille laughed. “What’s a macaroni?”
“Someone very fashionable.” She waved Camille toward the door. “Now go! And buy a printing press with all the money you have in the bank, d’accord? And thank Lazare for Louis?”
Camille nodded, blinking back sudden tears. “I will.”
As she opened the door, the canary—in a flash of yellow—settled on top of its bronze cage and began to sing.
69
There was a quick rap on the door and a maid came in. “He’s here, madame. Waiting downstairs.”
Camille stood at the long mirror, wearing a pale yellow dress and pinning her hat onto her elaborately coiffed hair. Working magic had taken its toll on her, but today the shadows were gone from her face. She couldn’t help smiling. “Tell him I’m coming.”
Two weeks had passed since Séguin’s death.
His la magie–ravaged body had been buried, quietly, with no family present. It seemed he had none, or none who came to claim him. Camille had let her maid dye one dress black, for the funeral, but had refused to wear mourning any longer than that. No one had reprimanded her; everywhere there was a feeling as if something had shaken loose, as if slowly the old ways were cracking, if not yet crumbling. Without much fuss, the marriage document was produced and Camille Durbonne, no longer a faux baroness but a true vicomtesse, took possession of a large estate west of Paris and an elegant mansion in town. At first she’d thought to sell it and put everything that had to do with Séguin behind her, but slowly it grew on her, the aristocrat’s house. She decided she’d keep it as her prize.
This morning Camille had been up at sunrise, pouring cream in a dish for Fantôme, checking the weather. The sky was the faint blue of washed silk. No clouds, only a gentle wind.
It would be very fine.
In the corner of her dressing room stood a japanned wardrobe, lacquered black and red. The door hung slightly open. In darkness shone the cloth-of-gold dress. Yesterday Sophie had neatly mended the tear Séguin’s dagger had made and now it was nearly invisible. Camille gently brought a handful of its fabric to her lips. She kissed it, but felt only the weakest trembling of emotion along the woven roses enmeshed in its silk.
“Thank you,” she said.
In response, the silk rustled, a sigh of longing traveling through the cloth in her hand, faint memories of the blazing candles’ heat in the Hall of Mirrors, a dewed velvet lawn, Lazare’s face when he saw that Camille lived. She waited for more, but the dress had once again fallen silent.
The clock on the mantelpiece struck eight. “Madame!” the maid called from the hall.
Downstairs, she found Lazare waiting under the archway leading to the dining room. He had on the same suit he’d worn when she’d first seen him, his hair tied back with a black ribbon. After everything the
y had been through, he was even more beautiful to her than he had been that day.
He bowed deeply, taking her hand. He laughed when he saw her fingers. “You’re covered in ink.”
“You think I do everything by magic?”
Gently, Lazare straightened them out and kissed them.
My heart.
He nodded toward the dining room. “Is this it?”
“It is! Voilà—my printing shop,” she said. “Do you like it?”
Under a magnificent chandelier and between pairs of crystal sconces on the walls stood a small printing press. Containers of ink, type, and cases covered the long dining table that ran the length of the room. Piles of paper teetered at angles. She’d spent long hours printing the pamphlets for today.
“I do,” he said. “Tremendously.” He rubbed his jaw. “You must be the first noblewoman to have a press in her dining room.”
“Suitable for these strange times, don’t you think?” she said as she hefted two twine-tied bundles of pamphlets off the floor. She handed one to Lazare.
“Rosier’s translation is good?” he asked, reading the top sheet.
“I’m sure it is. He limited himself to the second paragraph.”
“Let’s hope there are some readers in the crowd,” he said, tucking the bundle under his arm. “Shall we go?”
Camille felt she might rise on the wings of her own happiness. “I don’t think I can wait any longer.”
70
An enormous crowd had gathered, from apprentices and milliners to university students from the Sorbonne—even nobles and wealthy merchants. Children waved tiny flags with balloons on them. Friends had promised to come from Versailles to celebrate the occasion, and Camille was eager to be together again. At the front of the crowd played a marching band, their horns tipped to the sky, the snare drum quick and merry.
Behind the band, the balloon was tethered to a small platform, its gondola draped in tricolor bunting. Its silk shifted slowly in the wind, revealing new letters that spelled out its name: Heart’s Desire.
Enchantée Page 38