Enchantée Read online

  “Then go earn it. Show up for duty for once. Pay the rent.” She didn’t move. Everything in her was shouting at her to run, but she would never let him see her fear. Never. “I can’t keep on like this.”

  “Oh, I’ll do my part. And in the meantime,” he said, so close that Camille was forced to inhale the sour stink of his breath, “do the only thing you’re good for. Go work la magie.” Dropping the knife, he stumbled toward the door and flung it open.

  Furious and heartsick, she listened as his stumbling footsteps echoed down the stairs. Working magic would be easy now, thanks to him. The petty magic of la magie ordinaire took all the skill she’d honed under her mother’s supervision—and it took sorrow. Without sorrow, there was no transformation, no magic.

  Tonight she would have plenty to spare.

  4

  That night, nightmares tore through Sophie’s sleep. They’d begun when she was sick with the pox. Sometimes in her dreams, she’d told Camille, she went back in time, six months, a year, to when their parents were alive, kind and happy. Other times they only seemed alive, for when Sophie embraced them, they crumbled to ash in her arms. Or it was three months ago, when they were dying of smallpox, and Sophie had to retch up whatever scrap of food she’d managed to eat in order to feed them. It was an endless horror of fear, guilt, and anguish.

  Perched on the edge of Sophie’s bed, Camille watched as Sophie’s eyes seesawed under their bluish lids and tensed each time Sophie drew a shuddering breath. When she was close to waking, she gasped for air, like someone drowning.

  Then she woke, her eyes pinched tight. “Please,” she begged. “My sleep medicine.”

  Camille held the brown bottle of laudanum up against the candle flame. It was nearly empty. She spooned the last few mouthfuls between Sophie’s lips. It didn’t take long before the drug worked its drowsy lull. Her eyelids fluttering, Sophie sank back into the pillow. “In my dream, Maman had no fingers,” Sophie mumbled. “She had sold them all for food. Stay with me, Camille, so the dreams don’t come back.”

  Holding Sophie’s thin hand, Camille tucked her knees up under her chemise and rested against the wall. Sophie’s coverlet rose and fell, rose and fell, as her breathing slowed, grew even. When the fire sank to embers, Camille pulled the blankets from Alain’s empty bed and tucked Sophie under them all. Her black cat curled himself against her stomach, his low-pitched purr thrumming in the air. “Ah, Fantôme,” Sophie breathed, letting go of Camille’s hand to clutch at his fur.

  “That’s right. Sleep now, ma chèrie.” Camille smoothed Sophie’s sweat-dark hair off her forehead. Her hair would need washing in the morning. For that, they’d need more wood to heat the water. More wood, more money, more medicine, more magie.

  She tentatively touched the place above her collarbone where Alain’s knife had cut her. It had already stopped bleeding. It could have been worse, she told herself as she fingered the wound. Sometimes she hoped he’d never come back. It would make Sophie sad, of course. Camille knew she should pity Alain, or have sympathy for him, since he’d tried, at least in the beginning, to feed and clothe them. It wasn’t his fault that he couldn’t work magic; Dieu, he had wanted to. But all that came after? How he seemed to take refuge in the gambling and the drinking? That wasn’t the brother she knew.

  Perhaps her real brother was never coming back.

  Alain had little money in his pockets but that wouldn’t stop him: soon he’d be shouting out his bets at the gaming rooms at the Palais-Royal, the grand Parisian palace belonging to the king’s cousin and notorious gambler, the duc d’Orléans, who’d opened his house to the public. There Alain would stake whatever he had to win whatever he could, drinking on credit until he could no longer sign his name. She knew how the story went. In a week or two the collector would be standing on their threshold, Madame Lamotte peering in behind him, the man jabbing a grimy bill in Camille’s face.

  This was a certainty.

  Leaving Sophie sleeping, Camille padded barefoot into the other room and paused at its far end, where a small door led to a room beneath the eaves. Slipping a key from its hiding place beneath a loose floorboard, she turned it in the lock. The little room was wallpapered with a faded pattern of cabbage roses. In the half-light, the flowers gawked at her like a crowd of faces. A few rolled-up old carpets, too worn to sell, lay in the gloom, and next to them, two wooden trunks. One of them looked as if it had been burned in a fire, its charred black surface greasy in the candlelight. Camille stepped past it, trying to pretend it wasn’t there. Though of course that was impossible. Because just to think of it was to hear Maman’s warning in her head—Do not touch the burned box, for it is more dangerous than you could ever imagine—and to feel a haunted breath along the back of her neck.

  Maman had taught her that there were three kinds of magic. La magie ordinaire, for changing things. La glamoire, for changing oneself. And la magie bibelot, for imbuing objects with magic, making them sentient.

  It was ridiculous to think the burned trunk was looking at her, but it felt that way. She pulled her shawl closer.

  The other trunk was a strongbox, bolted to the floor.

  From a secret pocket she’d sewn into the seam of her skirt, Camille took out a handful of coins: the change from the magicked louis she’d used at the chandler’s shop. Twenty whole livres. Alain had drunk up the money she’d given him for the chicken. But he hadn’t gotten any of this, the real money. She felt a twinge of regret as she dropped the coins into the box and locked it. Sophie certainly needed strengthening. But money for the rent was more important than meat, and she had only a few days to get another hundred and eighty livres.

  Though her body swayed with fatigue, sleep felt like a distant country. There was so much to do. Closing the little door and locking it behind her, Camille stepped through the pale lozenges of moonlight that lay on the floor to kneel by the fireplace and warm her hands over the embers. From a stack nearby she took a handful of smudged proofs—Rise Up, Citizens, one of the pamphlets encouraged, Our Day Is Come!—left over from her father’s print shop and tossed them on the coals. Flames stretched up through the paper, bright and hungry, illuminating the mantel. The costlier curios that had once stood there—a porcelain shepherdess, a Chinese lacquerware lion with a wavy mane—were sold when her parents died. Now only a few paper figures tilted against the wall. She picked up a tiny boat and blew at the sails so they billowed.

  Bagatelles, Papa had called them—little nothings. Queens with towering wigs and milkmaids dangling pails from their hands, knights with lances and dragons breathing flame: all made from inky test sheets for the pamphlets Papa had written. Even now, his words marched across the schooner’s sails: It Is Time We Act. The flames sparking from the dragon’s mouth spelled out Liberté! though the L faced backward.

  She prickled with embarrassment, remembering. It took skill and practice to set the type backward into the frame so that all the letters came out facing the right way, or so Camille had learned when she’d begged Papa to let her be his apprentice. He’d swept her up in his wiry arms and swung her in a circle when she asked, his face a blur of joy and pride. It was hard labor for a little girl. It wasn’t just the hours standing on a stool while she set the type, but also rubbing the type with ink balls so it was black as black, hanging on the lever that brought the plate down so the inked letters kissed the paper. And inevitably she made mistakes: mixed-up letters, blots and streaks. She didn’t want Papa to see, but he found the sheets where she’d hidden them. He knuckled away her tears and told her: To try is to be brave. Be brave.

  So she wouldn’t feel like her smeared test sheets were worthless, he folded them into ships, cut them into wigs, or made them into dancing bears. Most of the bagatelles had worn out long ago. The paper didn’t hold. One icy night someone had burned most of them for fuel. But a few survived.

  She kept them so she’d never forget.

  She’d never forget the way Papa taught her his craft and art so th
at she might one day be the best printer in Paris, even though all the printers were men.

  Nor the way his pride gleamed when her broadsheets hung drying on the line. She’d not forgotten the thrill when the paper went from blank to black, nor the excitement that came from knowing Papa thought her old enough and clever enough to think about the world they lived in. And by setting letters into a printing frame, to change it. A printing press took the thoughts from someone’s mind and inked them onto a piece of paper anyone might read. It was a kind of magic. A magic to alter the world.

  But that was all put away. Sometimes when she tucked into the bed next to Sophie, her feet aching from tramping and her soul bruised from working magic, she’d console herself that she’d get a chance at it again one day. Yet each day, that someday raced further and further away until she couldn’t see it anymore. She tried to press the rising sadness down but it raked at her ribs, her throat. She could even feel it throb in her little finger: a pulsing ache.

  She didn’t want to do it—not now, she was so tired—but she had no choice. If she was awake, she might as well.

  Setting down the paper boat, she fetched a heavy hatbox that rattled with metal bits. In it was broken type from the printing press. She ran her finger along the letters’ curves: their metal edges remained unbent. They’d come from an experimental border she’d been working on before Papa had to close the printing shop and sell the press. How empty the workshop had been when everything—presses, paper, cases, type—was gone. All that was left were dust motes hanging in the light and the liquid scent of ink.

  Empty, empty, empty.

  As Camille remembered, sorrow rose in her and ran like wine or laudanum, dark and bitter and relentless. She didn’t try to stop it. She didn’t tell herself that one day, things would be better.

  Instead she worked the broken type between her fingers until it warmed and began to lose its shape. She smoothed it, over and over, while she held the memory of her parents’ deaths in her mind. How the first spots had pricked their skin like bites before they swelled. How the angry marks were followed by weeping sores on her mother’s arms and chest, and how her father raved as his fever swallowed him up. How lonely Camille felt when Maman told her she would have to work magic now, that it was up to Camille to tap the source of her sorrow and use it to keep the family alive.

  She hated la magie, but it was all she had.

  Sitting at the worn table, Camille went back, again and again, to the shadowy, bottomless well, to the memory of their deaths and beyond that, to her memories of their lives as they used to be. Then she reached past even those for a deeper sorrow, one that glimmered darkly, like a silvery fish deep in a black pond. Maman. Papa. Alain, too, the brother who’d held her safe on a window ledge to show her a swallow’s nestlings, was gone into that fathomless water. Tears came but she kept working the metal, until what once had been broken took on the hard, useful shape of a coin.

  5

  In the morning, Sophie’s cough was better. She’d been up before Camille, rekindling the fire in the stove, deftly toasting ragged ends of bread and heating old tea leaves for breakfast, which she brought in and set on the floor next to the chair in which Camille had fallen asleep.

  “It smells like summer.” There was a tiny, unexpected thrill in Sophie’s voice.

  Camille sat up and squinted. Sunlight poured in through the little window above the eaves. “What time is it?” She touched Sophie’s hair where the sunlight warmed it to gold. “You’ve washed your hair.”

  “Clever of me, wasn’t it?” Sophie fanned it across her shoulders. “And it’s nearly dry.”

  “Alain carried the water up this morning?”

  “Last night. Before you came home.” Sophie’s face clouded. “Do you think something’s happened to him?”

  Beyond drinking himself into a stupor? Wishing she had sugar for the tea, Camille swiveled the cup so the chip faced away and drank. “No.”

  “But imagine if he were pickpocketed at the Palais-Royal? It happens there all the time, he told me. Or—what if he’s fallen into the Seine?”

  “I’m certain he’s somewhere safe, sleeping off his … mood.” In her hand, the teacup shivered on its saucer.

  “You’re shaking.”

  “A little tired, that’s all.”

  Sophie stretched her fingers toward Camille’s throat, but she didn’t touch the wound. “It’s not right.”

  Camille raised an eyebrow. It wasn’t like Sophie to see anything negative in her big brother. “He frightens me, sometimes. I don’t know what’s happened to him to make him like this.”

  “Not that it’s an excuse,” Sophie said, “but he gets so angry about our situation.”

  “Does he?” Camille bit back the rest of her words. Once, Alain had been a real older brother who’d cared for her. A brother she’d adored. But now he was a burden, one she seemed to bear the brunt of more and more.

  “You needn’t have turned coins last night. It takes too much from you. I know Alain will bring us his winnings.” Sophie squeezed Camille’s hand. “Écoute-moi. I have an idea—let’s go out and have fun, just this once? I don’t mind walking however far we need to. We both need new shoes.”

  Camille drank the last of her weak tea. “You want new shoes.”

  “I need them. How else can I look becoming? S’il te plaît?” She draped her arms around Camille’s shoulders and whispered in her ear: “Please.”

  “Someday soon, ma chère,” Camille said. “And until then, you do know you’re becoming no matter what, don’t you?” Camille slipped out of her sister’s arms and stood up. Through the doorway she could see the table, and on it, the scratched green tin that served as their money box. Last night she’d used all the dented type in the hatbox, and even that wasn’t enough; in the end, she’d resorted to prying nails out of the walls.

  “But we’ve got so much now—”

  “We don’t!” The words burst out, meaner than she’d meant. “I’m sorry, darling. Madame Lamotte stopped me yesterday when I was coming up the stairs. The rent is past due. And Alain—”

  “Fine.” Sophie pushed her shoulders back stiff and tight, like a toy soldier’s. “So where are we going to go?”

  6

  At the edges of Paris, the tall buildings shrank, and the cloud-dark sky reasserted itself. The houses, a few with thatched roofs, stood close to the road, sometimes separated from its dust and mud by stone walls. Peering over them, Camille spied the green relief of gardens: bright leaves of apple trees, a tangle of peas twined with pink blossoms.

  Sophie tilted her head up and wrinkled her nose. “It was so nice earlier. Now it feels like it’s going to rain.”

  “We’re almost there.” Attached to one of the larger houses was a farrier’s shop, its back built into the wall that ran along the lane. Smoke drifted over the roof; from inside the workshop door sparks flew out to fizzle in the dirt yard where horses were shod.

  “Here?” Sophie looked as if she were expecting handsome apprentices to hand them boxes full of metal scraps.

  Camille laughed. There was no point in being frustrated with Sophie. Tucking her skirts behind her, Camille squatted in the dirt. Digging with a fingernail, she pried a bent nail out of the earth and held it up to Sophie. “See? No need for apprentices.”

  “I disagree,” Sophie said petulantly, but after breaking off a couple of twigs from a branch that hung over the wall and giving one to Camille, she too sank to the ground and started digging.

  Slowly, slowly a dingy pile of scraps grew between them. It wasn’t hard work, but it was dirty, and it would be days before their fingernails were clean again. With each shard of metal, each nail she tossed onto the pile, Camille’s resentment simmered toward boiling. Alain never helped dig. Nor did he wander the streets, eyes on the muck, ready to paw through it when metal glinted there. He didn’t need to. He was full of puffed-up promises—when he rose through the ranks of the Guard, there would be plenty for them al
l! Camille pried a long nail out of the earth and flung it on the pile. Alain couldn’t even keep his uniform clean. He seemed hardly to report for duty. How would he ever rise through the ranks? And his gambling debts only grew bigger and murkier, though he insisted they were nothing.

  She continued to dig in the dirt, wrenching the metal bits free and hurling them at the bag, where they clinked dully together. Alain’s promises were as worthless as the pieces of paper Papa’s noble customers used to sign. They meant nothing. And it always fell to her to make something from that nothing.

  “Any more and we won’t be able to carry the bag home,” Camille said, hoisting the flour sack they’d brought with them.

  “Grâce à Dieu,” Sophie muttered as she stood up. “We need gloves, Camille. There’s so much dirt under my nails they hurt.”

  A horse cart rumbled toward them along the lane, kicking up clouds of dust. Before it’d even passed them, Sophie was bent over her knees, coughing.

  “Shh, now.” Camille hugged Sophie close. “Are you all right?”

  “My lungs—not quite—better,” she gasped.

  Nearby a low wall ran toward an open field. On the other side of it, farmhands were cutting an early crop, their sickles flashing. A low wind billowed in their shirtsleeves. Behind the men, a band of trees crouched under a darkening sky. Camille dropped down onto the wall, pulling Sophie close beside her. Through the thin cloth of Sophie’s dress, her shoulder blades jutted out; her breath hitched in her throat in a way that made Camille wish she could breathe for her and spare her the pain. With Sophie’s fair head tucked against her neck, Camille closed her eyes and wished hard: somehow. Someday. Soon.

  A moment later Sophie was kicking her heels dully against the stones.

  “You’ll ruin your shoes that way.”

  Sophie shrugged as if to say, They’re already ruined. “I could take in more work from Madame Bénard. She’s always saying I’ve got clever hands for trimming hats. I might even wait on customers in the shop.”