For six hours, they traveled toward the coast. The landscape was flat, autumn fields shorn to stubble, grapes ripening on rows of leafy vines. Clusters of broad oaks and chestnut and hazelnut, woolly sheep on a hill facing in the same direction. A wide-open sky such as she’d never seen before, only now and then pierced by a church steeple. Every hour, Camille peered through the back window, each time certain she would see the black horses of the Comité storming after them. But for now their luck held.
Only once did they stop. At the inn where they’d waited for fresh horses, running grubby children, guests, the ostlers and stable boys caked with grime, the scullery maids and the washerwoman, her laundry basket on her hip—all of them stared at the players in their white costumes. When they drew close, Camille wanted to rush back into the carriage and hide. The crowd made her skin crawl.
But Rosier made a grand flourish, exclaiming: “We are Les Merveilleux! One week from today, at this inn, we will perform for you—bringing you wonder and delight!”
The people laughed and cheered. Camille and Sophie curtsied deeply, and Camille let her wings unfurl, making the children gasp. But once the new horses were hitched, they scrambled into the carriage, relieved to pull tight the curtains and head west to the sea.
Each little town they passed, Camille searched its narrow streets for a sign. Was Lazare there, somewhere? Were he and Foudriard waiting around some corner, watching for the gilt carriage? She begged Rosier to go slowly, in case the boys were waiting somewhere, anywhere. He obliged her a few times before putting an end to it. “We left word for them, Camille. They know where we are going,” he reassured her. “We’ll wait for them there. Slowing down only exposes us, and we’re already alarmingly conspicuous as it is.”
The farther west they went, the more the towns fell away, until there was only waving grass, the sky’s washed-out dome, and the white road running toward the sea. It was nearly nightfall when in the distance, they spotted a smudge against the horizon. “Could that be it?” Sophie asked.
“Duprès told me we couldn’t miss it.” Chandon had been the one to arrange their lodgings—a favor owed to his mother, called in. “As long as we bore left onto the smaller road, we’d end up at his inn in Wissant.” Impatiently he pushed down the window. A cool sea breeze swept into the carriage. “There’s nothing behind it but endless water and endless sky. It looks as if it might be the very last house in the world.”
For now, their journey had come to an end.
56
The inn at Wissant was a rambling, low-slung building, its thatched roof dotted with windows like sleepy eyes. A towheaded boy was playing with a stick next to a high wall of gray stone. When he saw the carriage, he waved them on, running ahead through an archway opening onto a stableyard. As the carriage clattered over the cobbles, the boy pulled stout wooden doors closed behind them. Only when he lowered a massive wooden bar into place did Camille finally exhale.
Safe for now. They could take off these costumes, wash, edge slowly away from what had happened as they waited for Lazare and Foudriard to arrive. She felt as though she’d been holding her breath since the Paris gate.
Despite everything, there was a bright note of excitement in Sophie’s voice when she said, “This is my first time staying at an inn, did you know, Chandon?”
“I suspect there will be more in your future,” Chandon said, his voice colored with melancholy. “I do hope you like it.”
Where the carriage had come to a stop stood a man well into middle age. His clothes were very fine, but of a fashion already vanished from Paris. He opened the carriage door, and as he handed Camille out, he said, “Welcome to my home, madame, the last inn before the sea. I am Jean Duprès, and this was once the house of my ancestor, the Marquis de la Tourendelle, who was something of a pirate. I do a little in that way, myself, but mostly I am an innkeeper.” His sunburned cheeks said otherwise. “We do what we must, n’est-ce pas?”
Clapping Chandon on the shoulder, and asking after his mother, Duprès brought them all through the stables, where horses nickered softly as they passed. At the front of the inn, the shutters were fastened over the windows. Duprès pointed to a sign hanging on the glossy blue door: CLOSED FOR RENOVATIONS.
“You see? We will not have any trouble, and you will be perfectly at ease here, I trust. Please sit while your baggage—and the cats—are removed to your rooms.” Beckoning them on, he led them to a cozy, low-ceilinged room where a fire crackled in the grate. The ceiling was laddered with chestnut beams; Turkish carpets warmed the flagstone floor. Oil paintings of boats on stormy seas hung on the walls. White curtains trimmed with cotton lace covered the windows. From the kitchen came the rich scent of a roast cooking. A maid came into the room, holding a large tray with wine and tea and soft cakes on it, which she set on a low table by a sofa plump with pillows. Something in Camille’s tight heart eased.
Duprès smiled at them as if they were his own children. “You must be very tired, mesdames and messieurs. The Marquis de Chandon wrote me a little of your troubles. We’re not free of that madness here, but, nevertheless, think not of it now. You will be very safe.”
“Thank you, monsieur,” Camille said, “for all of this.” The inn seemed very large. Wasn’t it possible that in a far wing, Lazare and Foudriard were already resting? “There are two more in our party. Have they already arrived?”
He shook his head. “If they are coming from Paris, rest assured they will be here soon. And if not,” he added, “we will keep their plates warm for whenever they do arrive.”
And what if that is never? He meant to comfort her, but what could he know of what she was fleeing, or her worry for Lazare? They had only just arrived, she told herself. There was time, still. She did her best to remember how grateful she was for this. They had escaped with their lives.
Not everyone was so lucky.
Once they’d washed, they found their way down complicated staircases and narrow halls to the dining room. Supper was laid on a long table where brass candlesticks crowded between sparkling crystal and plates decorated with blue-and-white peacocks. It had not been that long ago she’d seen real peacocks at Versailles.
But all of that was gone. The palace gardens would soon be overgrown, its yew hedges gone shaggy and feral, thorny vines scrambling from the château’s roofs into its windows. The peacocks flown, Versailles’ magic gone and faded to nothing.
Platters of food flowed from the kitchen as Duprès regaled them with tales of pirates and buried treasure. She should have felt relief, but instead she found it harder and harder to smile, to appreciate Sophie’s animated replies or Rosier’s questions about life on the other side of the Channel. Unfailingly her gaze went to the two empty chairs at the table’s far end. Every now and then, she caught a desperate grief in Chandon’s face she recognized as her own.
After dinner, they rested by the fire. Several hunting dogs came in and lay down, resting their long-eared heads on Rosier’s feet. Herbal tisanes were served along with a plate of chocolates in the shape of ships. When it was time to go to their rooms under the eaves, Sophie asked if she should leave a candle lit in their room, or would Camille be coming up now, too?
She attempted a reassuring smile. “I may sit here instead—it’ll only be a few hours until it’s time to get ready to leave again.”
“You needn’t wait,” Sophie replied firmly. “He will come.”
Chandon was the last to go up, as if he’d been waiting to speak to her alone. “Bonne nuit,” he said, stooping to kiss Camille on the cheek. “Promise me you won’t fret? If anyone can arrive here unscathed by the time we leave in the morning, it’s our handsome boys. Try to sleep instead. It’ll be a rough journey over the sea tomorrow.”
She said nothing, too afraid her voice would crack.
“What a fool I am!” He took from his bag a small parcel, wrapped in brown paper. “In the rush I nearly forgot. This was delivered to Bellefleur, addressed to you, moments before we left.
Now might be the perfect time to open it.”
Numbly she wondered why something for her would have been sent to Chandon’s house, and set it next to her on the sofa. On the floor above, she heard her friends saying good night, opening and shutting doors, the floorboards creaking and then fading into quiet. The inn drowsed as the sea wind rattled in the windows. It reminded her of the Hôtel Séguin. It would be missing her, she knew. Searching for her in its rooms. Wondering. Could it know that it had helped save her life, and Lazare’s? That it had shown her who she was? Her throat constricted. The girls would bring it life, but of a different kind. The house would always be waiting for its magician.
Blinking back tears, she picked up the package. As she cracked the wax seals, the paper fell open. Inside lay a small green book that looked as if it had fallen out of her memories. Hardly daring to believe, she ran her fingers over the silvered patterns of twining vines and stars. Just as they had done then, the curving letters of the title—The Silver Leaf: A Primer—seemed to unfurl in the firelight. Underneath was written: As You Water the Roots, So Does the Tree Bear Fruit. The ends of the pages were marbled pale green and blue, and when she held it to her nose, it smelled of burned wood and ash and magic. A book of magic created for small children … or those who’d never learned enough.
A blue ribbon marked a place toward the end, and she opened it there. She expected to find the working for the magic called tempus fugit, but it was not there. Hurriedly she flipped to the page on the veil. Only one short paragraph. As she read, disappointment stabbed at her. There was even less information in The Silver Leaf than there had been in Saint-Clair’s journal. Here were only warnings of how dangerous it was. She supposed it was because it was a book for children. Though, she thought, frowning at the page, weren’t children the ones who most needed to know the dangers?
She turned back again to the place marked by the ribbon. In the margin had been drawn—by Blaise?—a pointing hand that indicated a short passage.
… yet for reasons we do not know, there was a change. In our earliest documents, the source for magic was called “avec-le-sentiment,” because of magic’s absolute reliance on powerful emotion as its fuel.
She knew from the portrait that it was her ability to feel deeply that had drawn Séguin to her. It had also been what had drawn Camille to write about the girls, and so put her in Odette’s sights. Both times feeling deeply had thrust her into grave danger.
Over time, “with-feeling” was seen to come from only one of the strongest emotions, which we call “sorrow.” It is impossible to pinpoint the exact moment when this change occurred; the earliest reference to magic worked from sorrow is in the diary of magician Henriette Louise de Clos in 1475. She ranks all the emotions in terms of their power, and concludes that the source for transformation resides most deeply in sorrow. It was a simple theory, and a dangerous one.
A draft from the window shivered across the back of her neck, and she pulled her cloak higher. One woman and her writings had changed everything.
What had once been sympathy was reduced to sorrow. It was powerful, and therefore taught to children to use in times of crisis. But there was a cost to this change. Instead of a connection to others, magic became a dark thing to be feared. Soon magicians created ways to contain their too-painful sorrow: the veil, or blur, which cut a magician into parts by separating one emotion from the whole; and the sorrow-well, which allowed one magician to use another magician’s pain. In both instances, the magician who relied on these would, in the end, cease to feel. The heart is a muscle that must be used.
Since she was a child, she’d been told the wrong story. And she’d believed it: that magic was wrong. That she was wrong. She’d believed she was doomed to live in sorrow if she used magic. A tear glinted diamond-like on her lashes, and she blinked it away.
Remember, children: the strongest magicians are those who are brave enough to accept the whole of who they are and what they feel.
The last sentence was underscored, and beside it, in the margin, was penned: For Camille. Our secret history.
She closed the book and pressed it to her lips. Merci mille fois, Blaise.
Upstairs, she found her way down the corridor and into her room. Sophie was already asleep. Her golden hair spread over the pillow; gently the coverlet rose and fell. So long ago it felt like a dream, Camille had woken in her own bed to find Lazare sleeping beside her. The sheets had fallen from his tawny shoulder. Around him his hair had flowed, dark as the ink she loved, the fan of his lashes resting on his cheeks. That day, the dawn had been full of promise and hope.
She did not know how to hope any longer.
Beyond the window lay the stableyard, a walled garden, the thatched roofs of the inn’s long wings, pale and vague in the moonlight. Alongside ran the road on which they’d arrived from Paris, like a long white finger pointing home. Great oaks that had grown beside the road for centuries cast deep shadows over it, and she tried to imagine Lazare and Foudriard taking refuge in those pools of gloom. Trying to be invisible, trying to stay safe.
But all she could think of were field mice and tiny voles, hunted creatures that hid from the owl under cover of night, unable even to hear death as it swooped close on silent wings.
57
In the morning Lazare and Foudriard had still not arrived.
As luck would have it, the sea was too rough to make a crossing to Dover, and so it was decided that the travelers would remain at the inn one more day. Like Camille, Chandon did not want to leave without them, but they also feared that, given enough time, the Comité would find their way to Wissant.
Sophie tried to distract her by showing her what she’d packed from the Hôtel Séguin. In one trunk was nestled Camille’s enchanted dress—I was afraid it would try to bite me, Sophie said, but I managed. The other trunks were packed with clothes, a few keepsakes, books, and papers. Then, with a triumphant flourish, Sophie poured onto their bed the contents of a large burlap sack: earrings and ropes of diamonds, necklaces set with pearls and emeralds and sapphires like shards of night, and more bejeweled snuffboxes than she’d ever seen in the house.
“Where did you find all of this?” Camille asked in amazement.
“When Odette first came to stay, what did you think I was doing, sneaking around the house? I was scooping up as much as I could to hide it from her.” There was a note of triumph in her voice. “My suspicions came in useful, as you can see.”
“I should have listened to you.”
“True,” Sophie said. “But you let her in because of your feeling nature, and it’s hard to fault that.” Scooping up a collar set with diamonds in the shape of daisies, she draped it around her throat. Turning so that the morning light dazzled in the stones, she regarded herself critically in the mirror.
“What do you think—shall I wear these at my wedding?” She caught Camille’s gaze in the mirror. “When all of us have arrived in England.”
Camille didn’t trust herself to reply. On the bed also lay the strange little packet, wrapped in faded red cloth, that Lazare had asked her to keep safe. Temptation to unwrap it gnawed at her, but instead she slipped it into her dress’s hidden pocket to keep it with her. A small magic, a charm to bring him back. She imagined how it might be in the seaside town, every day walking the cliffs in the brisk air. Checking the boats in the harbor, searching for a sign that he’d landed. The days ahead of her were a despair of doing nothing, a long gray fog of powerlessness. How could she simply wait?
While Camille tried to keep her despair at bay, Chandon’s mood grew only darker. Never much of a drinker, he was up at dawn with a bottle in his fist, his eyes red-rimmed.
“Bellefleur,” he muttered, “my things, all of that gone—fine. Well and good! Who needs ghastly medieval furniture and portraits of one’s ancestors? Take it all! But my beloved Foudriard? That is a step much too far.” The bright color had gone from his face, and he’d refused to change out of his white wolf clothes, which were n
ow stained and dirty. “I am sad beyond all reckoning,” he admitted to Camille, “and know not what to do.”
After lunch he’d thrown himself onto the bench in front of the pianoforte and begun, idly, to pick out a tune, a saraband by Handel. Its slow, melancholy chords—and the handsome grieving boy playing them—brought the maids to tears. The whole busy house stilled, listening. But when he began to play it a fourth time, Camille couldn’t bear it. She had to go out.
She carried the song’s minor key with her to the cliffs. There the sea breeze was fresh and fierce. Over the sea the sky was the gray of iron, and far off, on the other side where the white cliffs would have been if she could see them, rain fell in heavy sheets. Lazare would have liked to have seen it.
Lazare had told her the sea was like the sky, endless. It was wide and endless, but it was also deep. She sensed the valleys he’d described for her, so far below that they might as well be bottomless. The sea was like a living thing, moving and changing, its currents powerful and unknowable. It was unlike anything she had ever known and yet, it was also very familiar.
Once Papa had told her water rose in droplets from the sea and the rivers and the puddles to be collected in clouds. Then, as rain, the water returned to the sea or the lakes or the Seine before it was drawn up again, over and over, forever. Though we called them by different names, the sea, the rivers, the puddles are all one thing: water.
Magic, she understood now, was like that.
How could she ever have thought to cut her magic from herself? Could you cut the rain from the sea and keep it separate? Just like the sea lived in the clouds, magic lived in her. It would always be there, uneasily tending toward transformation.
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