Everything That Burns Read online

  From behind his back, the young man produced a single red rose.

  “Oh!” someone exclaimed, and was hushed.

  The princess stopped searching, finally seeing him. He gave the rose to her; she planted its stem in the ground. As the violin played faster, the flower began to grow.

  “Regardez!” cried a little girl. “Look, Maman!”

  Camille couldn’t tell how they had done it, but the rose grew and grew until it had become a tree full of red roses. The princess plucked one of the blooms and pricked her finger. A handful of petals were tossed out into the audience as great white wings unfurled from her shoulders. As the crowd gasped, the princess lifted into the air. When the young man examined his own back and found nothing there, the crowd demanded, “Give him wings!”

  “Just as we hoped,” Sophie murmured.

  The princess had landed on a wire, like in Astley’s circus. She teetered one way, then the other, before she reached down and pulled him up. Together they stood on the wire in perfect balance before flying away. Paper snow glittered over them, though where it came from no one could tell. When the curtains swayed closed, the circle of watchers were silent and awed before bursting into applause.

  “Fantastique, Sophie!” Camille exclaimed.

  “Truly marvelous,” Lazare added. “You are to be congratulated on the costumes.”

  “I did more than that,” Sophie said archly. But Camille could see she was thrilled. She had not seen Sophie this happy in a long time. “I must find Rosier before he gives the puppeteers their notes. The princess cannot be mistaken for a snake! And I really do think we need to bring back the bear.” Blowing them a kiss, she hurried through the crowd to the back of the stage. From behind the red curtain, Rosier emerged, pipe in one hand, notebook in the other, as Sophie led him away behind the chestnut trees. The only emotion on their faces was joy.

  “Shall we walk a little?” Lazare offered her his arm, and they strolled away from the torches and gaiety of the puppet theater. Among the walkways, criers shouted the latest news from the Assembly at Versailles, and she and Lazare slowed to listen. It seemed the nobles and the clergy—some of them, at least—were renouncing the hereditary rights that hurt their tenants. “The revolution continues!” the crier said. Nearby a man had set up a table with a metal machine on it, as tall as the top of his head. On the placard it said: EQUAL IN LIFE, EQUAL IN DEATH! A FREE DEMONSTRATION OF DR GUILLOTIN’S EXECUTION MACHINE! As passersby clustered close to watch, the man operating the machine stuck a carrot in the base of it, then let the mechanism go. With dizzying speed, the blade screeched from the top to slice the carrot in half.

  Camille blanched. It felt like death was everywhere. “Have you heard of this machine?”

  “In the Assembly, Dr. Guillotin has vowed there shall be no more hangings,” Lazare said. “All criminals will die as efficiently as aristocrats have been privileged to do, by the sword. I can’t help but wonder, though, if there aren’t more pressing issues.”

  “Like voting rights for women.”

  He nodded. “And freedom for French slaves in the West Indies.”

  They left the guillotine behind just as a commotion broke out. The door of a jewelry shop hung brokenly on its hinges. Shouts rang out from inside as two red-cloaked Comité guards dragged the jeweler into the arcade, stopping in front of a young woman with a tricolor sash around her waist.

  Camille’s heart began to race. This close, the guards were huge, towering over the jeweler. Their dogs growled, showing their teeth.

  The woman waved a pamphlet in the jeweler’s face. Camille caught the first few words:

  MAGICIANS

  TRAITORS

  TREASON

  A knot of fear tightened inside of her.

  “I am innocent!” the jeweler cried. His costly jacket had been torn at the shoulder and his wig was dirty, as if it’d been stepped on. “She has no evidence! Put my diamonds to any test and you will see that they are authentic.”

  “Authentic?” hissed the woman. “What I bought from you is no longer diamonds but dust! You are a magician!”

  Camille froze in horror.

  One of the guards reached out a calming hand to the woman. “Do not trouble yourself any longer, madame. You’ve done the people’s work. We will take over now.” Inside the shop, a pale-faced assistant was locking the door.

  “Camille?” Lazare asked, worried. “Is it the Comité?”

  She kept her voice low, smoothing the terror from it. It was not something she wished Lazare to see. “That woman said the jeweler had cheated her, that the gems she’d bought had turned to dust … but what proof did she show? With this new law, anyone can be accused!”

  The woman’s tale had the ring of truth. For wasn’t that how magic worked, forever fading? But it was also the kind of thing that was printed in pamphlets or on posters like the one the woman carried. Camille didn’t know what frightened her more, that it was true—or that it was not.

  “King Mob will soon rule Paris,” Lazare said, his voice flat, as the guards shoved the jeweler along. “And what will become of our city then? Besides, why would a magician run a jewelry shop?”

  “I don’t know.” But she could guess. Desperate to stop talking about magic, wanting to keep this night a night apart from these troubles, she cast around for something else to do, another place to go. She had no interest in card games anymore, but there was something else: the magic lantern show, where pictures came to life. She’d always longed to step inside the darkened room where a blazing lantern illuminated painted slides of faraway places. It was, Papa had told her, like traveling without setting foot in a carriage. Impulsively, she asked, “Have you ever seen the magic lantern?”

  That lazy smile. “I haven’t, but I would go with you.”

  Heat flushed along her throat. “It’s on our way out,” she said as she steered him away from the difficult things and toward what she’d hoped the night would be, to the gaudy sign advertising the magic lantern show.

  “When did you last come to the Palais-Royal?” he asked.

  “A few hours after we first met, as it happens.” How desperate she had been then, gambling to win back what Alain had taken. “I came to find my brother, who had stolen our best dresses. He’d gambled them away and gotten drunk on the proceeds before I’d had a chance to follow him.”

  Anger thinned Lazare’s lips. “And?”

  Proudly, she said, “I played cards with the girls who’d won the dresses. They cheated, but I beat them anyway.” It wasn’t the whole story.

  “And the magic lantern?”

  “I only caught a glimpse before the barker shooed me away. I didn’t have money for a ticket.”

  Ahead of them, the mesmerizing light of the lantern beckoned from the doorway, just as it had that night in the spring. On the glass window was written in Latin, in curving gold letters: LANTERNA MAGICA. Beneath it was a smaller sign indicating tonight’s show: ALL AROUND THE WORLD.

  As they went in, the same barker who’d once waved Camille off now happily took the coins she gave him before gesturing for her and Lazare to find their seats. The chamber was dark and smelled of the whale oil used in the special lamp—as strong as ten candles together—that lit the slides. A smoky haze hung under the low ceiling. Taking her by the hand, Lazare led her to a small sofa. They squeezed together, Lazare trying to make room for her skirts. “Close enough?” he asked, laughing.

  Was there a close-enough where Lazare was concerned? She didn’t think so. “Perfect.”

  “Silence!” intoned a voice from behind them. “Regard the screen! Your journey around the world begins now!”

  A hush came over the room as the first image flared to life. Ruined buildings, woolly sheep wandering through the weeds. “Rome, cradle of civilization, brought low by greed and corruption!”

  The slide shifted—a blink of night—and then a new picture appeared. Pyramids in a desert. Strange, horse-like creatures standing in front of them.r />
  “What are they?” Camille whispered.

  “I think they must be camels.”

  And so their journey through space and time continued. The lazy canals of Venice, a building with a circle cut out of its domed roof through which rain fell, a wide wall that ran away to a mountainous horizon. A small family standing by a river, their slender boat loaded with pelts. And arching over them, enormous trees. Camille recognized it at once. “A family of Indians,” the barker announced, “preparing to sell their furs to the French on la Rivière Hudson.”

  Lazare shifted next to her. “Not Indians.”

  In the froth of her skirts, Camille sought his hand and interwove her fingers among his. “This,” she said softly, “was the slide I saw that night, when I looked in. How beautiful they are, this little family, n’est-ce pas? See how the trees protect them! When I first saw it, I didn’t hear how the man described it. I imagined—” Suddenly she felt incredibly silly. Why was she telling him this?

  Lazare turned slightly toward her, the light from the projection setting his eyes aflame. “Tell me. What did you imagine?”

  “That they were going on a grand adventure. Somewhere far away. How I envied them!” Her life had become much bigger since then, but the longing remained. “I still do.”

  “I did once promise you a great adventure.”

  They’d talked about many over dinner last week, but there was one above all she wished for. “Over the Alps.”

  She felt his smile against her cheek. “Why not? Or perhaps we might settle into that little boat and paddle it into the unknown. Would you run away with me, Camille Durbonne? So very far?”

  In that moment of velvet darkness when the slide had vanished and before the next picture appeared, she leaned daringly close. He smelled of vetiver cologne, leather and wood smoke, the heat of his skin. He was adventure and possibility, risk and daring and desire. It intoxicated her, and she said into the curve of his ear: “Yes.”

  “Then we must do it.”

  The next slide, a crimson fort ornamented with cupolas and minarets, filled the room with a reddish glow, and out of the corner of her eye, she saw Lazare’s face light with wonder. “This one I know from books,” he said. “We would have to go very far, all the way to India.”

  “I cannot wait.”

  As the next slide slipped into place and Lazare whispered hot in her ear, his breath making her shiver as he told her what he knew of that place, she knew she’d gotten her wish: tonight was an evening of marvels, all darkness forgotten.

  BEWARE

  the

  TREASON

  of

  MAGICIANS

  RISE UP

  AGAINST THE TRAITORS IN OUR MIDST

  CITIZENS!

  BE A PATRIOT

  BE THE EARS & EYES

  THAT CATCH THESE DEVILS

  REPORT THEM TO THE COMITÉ

  LIBERTÉ

  ÉGALITÉ

  FRATERNITÉ

  OU

  LAMORT

  22

  Soon strange notes began to appear at the Hôtel Séguin. At first Camille found them tucked among the everyday letters and bills, though the way they behaved was anything but ordinary. Some notes disintegrated to ash. Others lifted into the air, as if carried by an undetectable wind, and dissolved when they brushed against the ceiling. And there were those that melted in her hands like a marzipan flower held too long.

  Despite the sheer number of notes, the news wasn’t good. Blaise reported he hadn’t yet found a book that revealed the secrets of making the blur, and now that he and Chandon had scoured most of Paris’s bookstores and personal libraries, they would come to the Hôtel Séguin. Let us know when it is safe, he wrote. As the ink faded from the paper and she thought of what she’d witnessed at the Palais-Royal, she wondered: What did he mean by safe?

  Late at night she’d wander the hallways of the old mansion, and as she passed the printing room, hear the pamphlets sighing beyond the double doors. It was obvious even to those who knew little about magic that they were … unusual. Arrestingly beautiful and, as reviewers never forgot to mention, exceptionally persuasive. They had brought fame and money to the girls, and that had saved Flotsam House.

  They themselves had told Camille the story of how it happened.

  Only a couple of days ago, a police officer had arrived at the cottage with a letter. Henriette the forger had read it aloud. By order of the mayor, the letter announced, the house would not be destroyed and the girls would have the right to remain in it as long as it remained standing. When she finished reading, the girls whooped with joy, Héloïse embracing the shocked (but not entirely reluctant) officer.

  Camille tried to convince them to speak in public, to show people with influence in Paris that more help was needed, but they weren’t interested. “They will want to change us, and we are happy as we are,” Henriette said. A copy of the first pamphlet, The Flower Seller, was preserved in a curlicued frame that hung from a nail in Flotsam House. “It is,” Giselle observed, “the piece of paper that changed our lives.” Odette and Margot had grumbled that Giselle put too much weight such a small thing when so much had changed for them—all of Paris was improving because of the revolution—but Giselle, her enormous eyes fixed on Camille, had squeezed her hand and whispered: “Merci mille fois, mon amie.”

  And if magic, however unwilling she was to have it, had made that happen, how could she stop? Wasn’t it worth it, even if the fevered printing felt wrong but also … uneasily right? What she needed, she told herself, was to control her uncontrollable magic. There had to be a way. More than ever, it could not seep out and be discovered.

  Magic must stay hidden.

  For after what she’d seen at the Palais-Royal, the Comité had crept into her dreams. In cloaks dyed red they followed her, their snarling mouths packed with yellow teeth. Once they sniffed out her magic, they tore off her fingers, one by one, and swallowed them whole. Outside her dreams the Comité was everywhere—even the seamstresses at Le Sucre complained to Sophie that red fabric was hard to come by, now that the long capes of the Comité guards required so many lengths of it. And, they said in a hush, the reason they wore red was so that they when they caught evil magicians in the act of whatever … abomination they practiced … any blood spilled wouldn’t show. Sophie had laughed it off, telling them they were being silly, but she told Camille it made her nervous.

  “Don’t worry, it cannot touch us,” she said to Sophie.

  But her nightmares said the opposite. She needed a way forward, and soon.

  Meanwhile, at the Hôtel Séguin, invitations to parties and salons and events celebrating the revolution and Camille’s part in the change arrived like a blizzard of early snow. Unlike the vanishing magical notes, these accumulated in drifts on salvers, on the mantelpiece, and on the escritoire, where they threatened to overwhelm it. Sophie teased Camille that she needed to hire a private secretary to manage her correspondence.

  At first she accepted them all. It was intoxicating to listen to speeches by the wild-eyed Jean-Paul Marat, scientist and writer, who’d started his own newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, and burned with an almost religious fire. His belief that the poorest of the French deserved the most resonated with her own. There was also the passionate lawyer Georges Danton, who stood like a hero on the chairs at the Café Procope and encouraged the audience to rise up. “What else is there?” he shouted. “You must dare to change!”

  Then one day an invitation arrived for both her and Lazare, several tricolor ribbons stuck to it with red wax. They were to be honored at a dinner for the rising figures of the Revolution, the young Parisians who had already made a great contribution: Camille for her pamphlets on the Lost Girls, Lazare for the balloon corps.

  “Why do they want us?” Lazare had wondered. “Surely there are more deserving people in Paris.”

  “I imagine they’ll be there, too. But think what this might do for the girls—and the corps! Surely there’ll be
someone there who can see that balloons can be more than military machines. And, I promise, if it gets dreary, we’ll slip out.”

  “In that case, I’ll be hoping for the dullest, dreariest night I can imagine,” he said, though there was something in the way he said it that made her think he wasn’t convinced they should go at all.

  It turned out he was right.

  There were speeches between the dinner’s many courses. During dessert, men stood up one after another, puffed and proud, speaking loudly to be heard. Camille and Lazare, among others, were asked to stand as their contributions were described to resounding applause. Boys placed laurel crowns on their heads and tricolor corsages on their shoulders. The men in attendance wore plain suits, when at court they’d peacocked in pastel silks along with the nobility. The women dressed in white, with sashes of blue, white, and red draped over their shoulders. The jewels they’d once worn to court adorned their necks and ears only so that they could be tossed into a basket to raise money for the revolutionary cause, the women who made these donations wildly applauded to cries of “Vive la Nation!”

  There was something about it that felt wrong.

  Sitting at a large table littered with half-empty plates and glasses as yet another speaker rose to list the virtues of the revolution, Camille turned to Lazare. “Does it unsettle you?”

  Lazare’s eyebrows drew together sharply. “Do they believe what they’re saying? Or did they just change to suit the times?” He’d finished eating and was folding his napkin into intricate shapes. “Eventually they’ll want to change us, too. Would you do that? Be more … whatever it is they want?”

  She had changed already. Not long ago she’d vowed never to use magic again, and already she had. Not for her own benefit, she told herself, but for the girls. Though as she remembered the applause that had greeted her short speech about the plight of the poor, and the pleasure she’d had at their cheers, what exactly was for the girls and for the Revolution and for herself was more tangled than she’d thought.