“Tell me, Timbault—which way did she go?”
7
The river, Timbault had guessed. Camille struck out toward the Seine, following the glow of the flower seller’s yellow dress. Walking fast, the wicker tray now tucked tight under her arm, she soon left the aloof mansions of the Marais behind and was swept up in the evening crowd. Shadows crept around the leaning buildings and narrow lanes, and she kept well away from places where people might be hiding. Driven from the countryside by villagers and farmers, vagrants had come to Paris, restless and hungry.
Another piece of kindling laid on the fire.
Far ahead, the girl’s yellow dress winked in and out of the crowd. She had nearly reached the old Tuileries palace. Like a castle in a fairy tale grown over with thorns, the Tuileries had stood empty for a hundred years, ever since Louis XIV had moved the court to Versailles. There was not much there but dusty pleasure gardens, where she’d walked with Lazare these last few weeks, and a makeshift theater. So many rooms, and no one to live in them.
At Camille’s left hand ran the liquid pewter of the Seine. The river was a restless, quicksilver thing … even more so at night. Dredgers walked its shores, searching for drifting treasure to haul in with their hooked poles. Things cast away, on purpose or not. Wood and canvas, rope and netting, crates of vegetables tumbled from barges, a well-dressed corpse with pockets to pick—all this the river provided. Above it arched the great Pont Neuf. Even at night, the bridge was busy. It crawled with promenaders and police, pickpockets and prostitutes. Silver merchants sold their wares there, as did men who made wooden legs. Acrobats performed alongside letter writers, who composed love notes for a fee. It was a world unto itself, and Camille wasn’t eager to cross it alone.
Too many hands.
But the flower seller didn’t join the throngs on the bridge. Instead, she plunged down the bank toward the water itself. Camille followed as best she could, but the footing was treacherous. Once at the shore, she tramped up and down for a quarter of an hour before she finally spotted girl’s yellow dress underneath the bridge. Did she have a hiding place there, tucked between a stone arch and the river’s edge? Camille ground her teeth in frustration. If this is where the hunt for the flower seller ended, she was out of luck. She was not going beneath that arch.
As Camille took in the muddy flats, the cold, lapping river, the tray still under her arm, a window-shaped light came on under the bridge. Then another, glowing warmly. A dwelling, beneath the Pont Neuf. All Camille had to do was go there and give her the tray back. Then why did it feel so frightening?
It was only the deepening dusk, she told herself. Only the unknown. Still, she felt uneasy as she made her toward the two golden rectangles. At first she could only make out the weathered shutters around the windows. As she drew closer, the house’s hunched outline became visible. It was wedged under the arch the way that bats shrugged themselves into the smallest spaces. The house had no rhyme or reason, but had been cobbled together from bits and pieces that, she guessed, had been scavenged from the river’s banks: mismatched shingles; doors fortified with boards; a circular window set into the roof that looked out on the river like the flat eye of a fish. Smoke drifted from its crooked chimney.
Tucked as it was out of sight, it felt secret and forbidden, like a house in a fairy tale no one was meant to see. As she took in the way the river had left a dark ribbon of silt on its walls from the peak of a flood tide, she tried to imagine what it would be like to live there. Threatened by floods and the traffic on the bridge. A last resort, a house fashioned from broken things no one wanted.
It made her want to leave the tray by the door and run.
Instead, she drew closer as she heard a murmur of voices coming from inside. The flower seller didn’t live alone, then. Perhaps she lived with her family, though when Camille tried to imagine them, she couldn’t. All she could think of was her own brother and how cruelly he’d forced her to use magic to turn coins. How carelessly he’d sent her out into the streets to spend them, knowing the risks she took.
What if it was the same for the flower seller?
There was no way she could turn and go.
Carefully she walked along the planks that led to the front door. As she hesitated on the doorstep, the house went completely silent.
She raised her fist to the door and knocked.
8
The door whipped open. A hand reached out, grabbed Camille hard by the wrist, and yanked her inside.
She stumbled into a lamplit room full of girls. Some were dressed in costly secondhand gowns that had been sliced to fit; others wore pants and jackets, their hair tucked up under a tricorne hat or cut boyishly to their shoulders. Some wore bright stockings and shoes, others were barefoot. A couple had tattoos twining from under their cuffs. Almost all were her own age.
“Let go,” Camille cried, trying to twist loose from the girl’s vise-like grip.
“Not until you tell us what you’re doing here!” the girl said. She was strikingly beautiful in a red dress that set off her light brown skin, freckled from the sun. Her wary stare took in every detail of Camille’s appearance, from her too-extravagant hat to the deep hem of muck on her green dress. The girl gave her arm a last vicious twist, forcing Camille to let go of the flower seller’s tray. It dropped to the floor with a rattle.
“You stole Giselle’s tray!” the girl cried.
“I haven’t stolen anything,” Camille blazed. “I brought it back for her!”
“Giselle!” one of the other girls called out. “Hurry and come here!”
At the back of the room, a curtain covering a doorway was flung aside and the flower seller emerged. Beneath her large, wide-set hazel eyes her pretty mouth fell open in a shocked O. “Dieu, Margot, let her go! That’s the mademoiselle who saved me at Sainte-Chapelle the other day! Remember? When I was attacked by the nobleman who thought he could have me for a louis?”
The girl in the red dress frowned. “She hasn’t come to throw us out?”
Another girl, tall and black-haired, laughed. “Doubt she’s strong enough, Margot. It’s going to take the cavalry to drag us away. That or they’ll have to pry the house loose.”
“She’s the fancy girl?” Margot said to Giselle. “She’s smaller than I’d imagined.”
Beaming, Giselle strode over to Camille. “She is as fierce and brave as any of us.” Gently she pried Margot’s fingers off Camille’s arm. “And see, she’s brought my tray.”
“My apologies, princess,” Margot said gruffly, though she did not sound sorry at all.
Camille rubbed at her wrist as she took in her surroundings. While the outside of the house had filled her with foreboding, the inside of the house was not at all what she’d expected. Instead of stepping into a fearful room from her own past with her drunk brother holding sway, she found herself in a surprisingly cozy place. Beds and trundles and straw pallets hemmed the room, and a fine, if somewhat threadbare carpet covered the packed dirt floor. There were cheerful, mismatched flowered curtains at the windows, and the walls had been newly whitewashed. Hanging on them were tiny but beautiful ink drawings in chipped frames—portraits of the girls themselves, Camille realized—as well as other small objects. Looking closely, Camille made out a door knocker in the shape of a bird and an unusual lock in the shape of an apple, its shank the apple’s stem, the key that sat in the keyhole shaped like a worm. Between the rafters ran lines of laundry hung with red and white petticoats as well as a few printed sheets.
Camille murmured, “It’s so different from how it looks on the outside.”
“Sleight of hand,” Giselle said, pleased. Picking up her tray, she lovingly brushed it off and set it behind a chair. “Thank you for bringing this to me. I cannot make my living without it. I thought your gatekeeper would have me arrested for asking for it!”
“He’s very protective,” she acknowledged. “But how did you know where I live?”
She laughed. “You’re conspicuo
us, with your red hair and your big hats. All us girls know Paris inside and out—it wasn’t hard to find you. I’m Giselle, by the way,” she added. “What name do you go by?”
It was a good question. Neither her title nor her married name suited her at all. “Camille Durbonne.”
“Well, Camille, welcome to Flotsam House!” she exclaimed. “I noticed you were looking at what’s hanging on our walls. Those pretty portraits, they were done by our Henriette.” She nodded at a small girl, blond and whip-thin, who stood by the stove. “Henriette makes things what they’re not.”
Like a magician? “What do you mean?”
Her small girl’s voice was proud. “I can copy anything. A painting, a will, a contract. I can make it appear exactly as it was, but altered so it says what you need it to say. Odette says there will be paper money soon instead of coins. I can’t wait.”
A forger. Camille blinked. “Pleased to meet you.”
“And the apple lock on the wall?” Giselle said. “That belongs to Claudine.”
A girl with wavy brown hair, cut short like a boy’s, made a bow, complete with a court flourish. “That lock was my father’s, and it’s very dear to me.”
“Did he make it?”
Claudine nodded. “I would have learned how too, but—” She shook her head, as if shaking off a thought. “I didn’t. I can slit a pocket or a purse before anyone notices, though.” And then, from her other sleeve, she pulled a set of needle-thin knives in a tiny flannel case. “Mostly I pick locks,” she said, with a dangerous smile. “I haven’t met one in all of Paris that can resist me.”
The others whooped.
“Who can resist me?” said a tall girl with olive skin and black hair who wore a costly dress with a plunging neckline. Fake diamond earrings swayed from her ears, a collar of the same clasped round her swan-like neck.
“Meet Héloïse,” Giselle said. “Best pickpocket in Paris. Tell her how you do it, won’t you?”
“Bien sûr! I walk comme ça.…” Héloïse took a few, hip-swaying steps. “Then—oh là là, pardonnez moi!—I bump into a rich man, my shawl falls aside … and while he’s busy ogling, he’s forgotten all about his purse.” The others roared with laughter. Camille joined in, too. There was something extraordinary about them, their pride and determination.
“And you?” she said to the girl in the red dress who’d dragged her inside.
“I sell fruit, strawberries or oranges, depending on the season. Nothing criminal, in case you’re wondering.”
Giselle gave her a meaningful look. “You’re selling yourself short.”
“Well, I do have a few tricks.” Margot’s voice had a pretty lilt to it, an accent Camille didn’t recognize. “I use ice to keep them fresh—Giselle does the same with her flowers.”
“It’s well done, Margot,” Claudine the lock picker encouraged. “We must live by our wits, for what else do we have?”
“Speaking of which,” Giselle said, waving forward the last girl, who’d hung back in the shadows, “here is our clever Odette. She stayed with us once when she was in trouble. Now she’s on the up-and-up, but she still visits from time to time.”
Camille bit back an exclamation. She’d seen her only once before, when Odette had been a starving girl fleeing barefoot through a crowded street, a tiny roll of bread in her hand, but she’d never forgotten her. Odette was much changed. She no longer looked as if she were stealing food to eat, and as she faced Camille with her hands on her hips, a proud defiance radiated from her. Where the thin, hungry girl Camille remembered had been painted with rouge, her feet bare under her petticoats, this new Odette was dressed in black, a plumed hat on her head, and most startling of all, wore a brace of pistols on a belt around her waist. Underneath her hat, she had Camille’s vivid red hair and the same gray eyes, though hers were iron-dark.
“The two of you could be cousins,” Margot observed.
“I suppose.” Odette made no sign that she recognized Camille. And why should she? If she remembered Camille at all, it would be as someone who hadn’t helped her when she’d needed it. Camille hoped Odette had forgotten her entirely.
“Odette won’t be able to visit us much longer,” Henriette remarked.
“Why, is something wrong with the house?” Odette asked. “Or are you tired of me?”
“Not with the house.” Claudine jabbed an angry finger toward the door, as if a villain lurked outside. “With them.”
“That’s why Margot pulled you inside like that,” Giselle explained to Camille. “We’re worried people will see us coming and going.”
“Why? Who would care?”
“The people who want to clean up Paris.” Snatching a newspaper from the table, Giselle handed it to Camille. It was worn and soft from having been read many times. She tapped at an article toward the bottom of the page. “Read. Odette hasn’t heard it yet.”
Camille cleared her throat.
Such are the Troubles in the Countryside of France that Vagrants and Brigands have become all too Common and Dangerous. Having made Themselves Known to the police in the country for their Nefarious Deeds, they have come to create Trouble in Paris. Camped in Alleyways, Cemeteries, and under our Bridges, these Vagrants seek to Destroy the Rights of Parisians.
“Vagrants?” fumed Odette. “Are we not all Parisians here?”
Therefore, under this Most Recent Decree, the dwellings of such Vagrants will be Removed, beginning with those under the Bridges, but especially those Defiling the Pont Neuf.
Stunned, Camille said, “They’re going to take your house away? But why?”
Odette’s eyes blazed. “They think we’re no better than rats! Les misérables, outcast and reviled. They’d like it better if we Lost Girls didn’t exist. They’d rather have a fake city where everything is shiny and grand, rather than a real city with real people in it living their lives. They have got the idea of revolution all wrong,” she added bitterly.
Margot nodded. “Yesterday a policeman hammered a notice to the house saying we’re to be evicted in ten days’ time.”
So soon? “They cannot do this—”
“Ah, but they will,” Odette said. “They have the power, and those with power do as they like. They bend everything to their desire.”
“I won’t be bent by them,” said the pickpocket, Héloïse, as she drew her shawl close around her daringly cut dress. “We must find a way, if only for Céline.”
“Our littlest,” explained Giselle with a fond smile. “She’s playing outside.”
Eagerly the girls told her how they’d found Céline when she was tiny, climbing a pile of rubbish. And how, when she saw Héloïse in her fancy dress, she held out her arms and cried, “La Belle! Pick me up, Beauty!” They hadn’t been able to resist her and had taken her home with them.
“She reads better than most girls of six,” Henriette said proudly. “And she’s been safe with us, until now.”
“She’s our heart and our hope.” Anxiously, Giselle said, “But without a place to live…”
Anger flared through Camille. The newspapers were full of articles about changes that were coming, all the problems that the National Assembly would address. Thousands upon thousands of words, but not a single one about these girls. But surely anyone who might read about their lives—for Camille was certain that every girl there had a story to tell that would harrow readers’ bones and wring their hearts—would be able to see that something must be done to save their house?
As she thought of their stories, she felt a sudden flicker of hope. “I know of something that might help—”
“Tell us, because if we have to live in the streets,” Giselle said, “it will be terrible. People in Paris are hanging tinkers, beating up vagrants. Why, they would have killed me for refusing to sell my body to that nobleman if I hadn’t escaped! And then there are magicians setting traps for children—”
Even these girls believed that?
“Those magicians are naught but rumor,” M
argot said airily. “I know what a sorcerer looks like, and I haven’t seen one in Paris yet.”
Camille exhaled. “But if you told your stories in a newspaper, people would see that you aren’t vagrants and that you should stay in the home you’ve made.” Wasn’t that what she’d wanted herself, when her brother had taken everything and their landlady had threatened them with eviction? A place of safety that was her own.
Claudine crossed her arms. “How?”
“You’d tell your stories, people would read them—”
“Who’d we tell our stories to?” Héloïse asked. “Who’s going to listen to us?”
“A newspaperman—”
Adamant, Giselle shook her head. “I’ve had enough of men to last me quite a while.”
“Just listen,” she pleaded. “There are newspapers that print three thousand copies—Le Père Duchesne prints eighty thousand. Imagine if fifty thousand people could read what was happening to you—”
Giselle’s face pinched with doubt. “What if those fifty thousand decided we don’t deserve anything? We aren’t saints. Then we’d be worse off than before.”
Perhaps. It would depend on how the stories were told. But she didn’t have time to say that before Odette spoke up. “I know how these people are. It’s too dangerous to reveal ourselves like that. They might arrest us all. And that would be worse by far than losing the house.”
Camille’s heart constricted. How would she convince them now? Odette had given voice to their fears, and murmurs of assent filled the room.
“Don’t take it too hard,” Giselle said. “It was nice of you to try to help.”
She understood their fear that whatever they had was better than what was coming, because in their lives things never got better, only worse. Why ever would they trust her, a stranger? As she knew only too well, the cost of trust was high, and that of hope even higher.
There was nothing to do but go, and as quickly as possible. Trying to hide her disappointment, she could only nod at the girls, open the door, and take refuge in the riverbank’s hazy gloom.
Everything That Burns Page 5