Everything That Burns Read online

  Her visit to the bookshop of one Henri Lasalle had not gone well.

  She’d passed the store several times, working up the courage to enter. In its window hung posters announcing the latest actions of the General Assembly, which was meeting in Versailles to create a constitution and rights for the citizens of France. Through the bookstore’s open door came the buzz of enthusiastic arguments. Promising, but also intimidating. Standing on the threshold, she suddenly longed for Lazare—his hand at her elbow and encouragement in his deep brown eyes.

  But Lazare was elsewhere.

  Taking a deep breath, she went in. The shop was not large, but clean and well organized, its patrons browsing the bookshelves or paging through newspapers. One of the men, a baker’s apron tied over his long pants and clogs, was waving a pamphlet at a plain-clothed priest. From behind the counter, the man she took to be the bookseller joined in with a few choice words.

  “Monsieur,” he said, “how can you argue for all men to be equal under the new constitution?”

  The priest looked surprised. “Are not all men equal before God?”

  “Aha!” said the bookseller, as if he’d caught his friend in a trap. “Tell me then, why is the Church itself so rich? Are they so much more equal?”

  “Touché!” cried the baker. “Come, Father Aubain, you must admit there’s a hole in your argument.”

  “Not so fast,” he warned. “Let me explain what the Church does with its money.”

  “Explain the amount of land you own while you’re at it,” the bookseller said good-naturedly.

  As Camille listened to them debate, a smile crept across her lips. At last she had found the right bookseller. The previous three had said no, but they’d clearly been out of step with the times. Here was the debate she’d been searching for. Here was the place where she might step in and make a difference.

  She cleared her throat. “Monsieur?”

  “Ah, mademoiselle!” He smoothed the front of his coat. “Anything in particular you’re looking for?”

  “Not today. Instead, I have something you might be looking for. A new pamphlet.”

  Behind her, the conversation paused.

  Camille held out a copy to the bookseller and was mortified to see that it had somehow become creased.

  He barely glanced at it. “What is it called?”

  “On the Education of Girls. By my father, Jean-Nicolas Durbonne.”

  “Ah!” The bookseller’s attention sharpened. “What kind of education do you mean?”

  “History, philosophy, Latin. Everything that boys—”

  “Non!” He threw up his hands. “Won’t work.”

  “Why not?” Camille said, flustered.

  “If you’d said, ‘The Education of a Girl of the Streets’? People would buy that faster than you could tell them the title.”

  “Scandalous!” scolded the priest.

  “But it sells, Father. ‘The King’s Mistress’? They’d be shaking their purses upside down over the counter.” The bookseller warmed to his subject. “‘Murders in the rue Trianon’? They’d wait outside the shop before it opened, perspiring with anticipation! Accounts of the storming of the Bastille are still popular if they’re grisly enough. Blood filling the moat, innocent citizens tortured. A head cut off with a paring knife. That did happen, you know.” He leaned an elbow on the counter. “Got anything like that, mademoiselle?”

  She had only Papa’s words and what he’d taught her. In their printing shop, he’d shown her how to pull the lever on the press, saying: With one stroke, ma petite, you can change the world. She’d insisted she was just a child and what could she do, being so small? Papa had given her a melancholy smile, as if thinking of something that had happened long ago, and replied: You will do what needs to be done.

  What this bookseller wanted was not what Papa had had in mind.

  “Shouldn’t people be inspired to do better?” Camille demanded. “To change the world?”

  “Your pamphlet’s not going to do it,” laughed the baker.

  “If you read it, you’d find it’s well argued. Convincing.”

  The bookseller shrugged. “I read the first few lines. It won’t sell. It is not au courant. It is not now.”

  Frustrated, Camille said, “But it’s about equality! You were just speaking of it.”

  “Girls—women—will, I’m afraid to say, never become true citizens. Therefore, your pamphlet is not a part of the debate. How else can I say it? It’s irrelevant and dull!”

  “Do we then not matter?” Her words came out choked, humiliating.

  The bookseller must have seen the hurt in Camille’s face, for he added, a bit more kindly, “You’re welcome to leave a few of your pamphlets here, and I will try. Still, I cannot make people buy something they don’t wish to read.”

  She laid the papers on the counter. In that ink was so much work and hope. With a curt nod to the men, she left the shop as quickly as she could, but not before she’d heard one of them laugh, “You can always use the pamphlets to light your candles, Lasalle!”

  Around the corner, alone under the shade of an awning, traitorous tears pooled in her eyes. What was wrong with the pamphlets? What was wrong with her? Those long afternoons printing with Papa, she’d believed those black letters could launch ideas into the world and change things for the better. A good kind of magic.

  She had used a dangerous magic to disguise herself at court, cheating at at cards to keep herself and her sister alive, even while that magic hollowed her out and left her wondering if she would ever be completely free of it. But through determination and daring and pain, she’d lifted herself and Sophie from poverty to a place of safety.

  And yet?

  She hefted the bundle of unwanted pamphlets. She was not satisfied with this.

  In the fairy stories Maman had told them when they were little, the ones that had gotten mixed up in her head with the gilded stories of court life, there would sometimes be a girl who got a wish. Usually she had done something kind, like saving a trout that was really an enchanted prince or helping an old woman find a needle she’d dropped, which turned out to be the thing that released the woman from a terrible spell. And in return, the girl got a wish. Some girls wished well and others wished badly. When they could have had anything, those girls wished for sausages or for their shoes to fit. They had been so desperate for so long that they had stopped wishing for anything big. Anything that could truly change their lives.

  She did not want to make that mistake.

  Solemn and deep, the bells of Notre-Dame began to toll six o’clock. The dry leaves of the oaks rattled in the hot wind that rose from the river. The long afternoon was edging toward evening, and still, the flower seller hadn’t appeared. But surely, Camille reasoned, the girl would return to Sainte-Chapelle in a few days, and she could bring her the tray then. As she stooped to pick it up, a flash of white caught her eye. A piece of paper, nailed to the tree. It had an unusual shape: long and narrow, its bottom edge ragged.

  A notice of some kind? Curious, she began to read.

  It was a list of names. Hastily scrawled, blots and spots marring the letters. Some names were misspelled. To her surprise, there were a few names she recognized from court. The Comte d’Astignac. The Duchess de Polignac.

  Unease gnawed at her. Halfway down was the name of the aristocrat who’d reported Papa’s revolutionary pamphlets to the censors. Below it, Germaine de Staël’s, who held a popular salon on the Left Bank, which Camille had attended with Lazare and Rosier. What was her name doing on this list? But when she came to the end, and saw the names Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette, she understood: it was a list of nobles deemed traitors to the revolution.

  At the very bottom was written: À la lanterne!

  Who gave this person the right to decide who should live and who should die?

  Glancing surreptitiously over her shoulder, Camille tore the paper down.

  Quickly, she left the square, heading home. As she
crossed the river on the Pont Notre-Dame, she dropped the crumpled paper over the side of the bridge. For a moment, the list floated on the Seine’s black water, undulating with the current, and then, like an eye winking shut, it was gone.

  3

  Home—if it could be called that—was the ancient Hôtel Séguin.

  Protected by a cobbled courtyard and a tall, spiked gate, the mansion stood proudly aloof from the rabble of the streets, very much like the aristocrats who had always lived there. Built of honeyed limestone, the Hôtel Séguin’s facade glittered with costly windows, its two wings enfolding a walled garden where a fountain burbled and carefully kept fruit trees grew. Between it and the gate lay the small stables and a carriage house.

  From the outside it looked like the kind of place Camille had dreamed of living in. Elegant, impenetrable, safe.

  It had certainly seemed that way the first time when, with Lazare at her side, she’d arrived in a gown stiff with blood to free Sophie from imprisonment at their brother’s hands. The Vicomte de Séguin had planned to use her as a pawn to compel Camille to marry him, so he could in turn use her sorrow to fuel his own magic. And she had married him, though things had gone differently than he’d hoped. And upon the death of her handsome and villainous husband of a few hours, like the fulfillment of a wish, this grand house and all his other property was suddenly hers.

  As if this shadowy house could belong to anyone.

  As she approached the gate, she noticed something stuck in its iron bars. Reaching down, she wiggled it loose. It was a scrap of paper, printed in a cramped style, as if the writer had tried to put the most words possible onto the page. Some letters were incomplete, ghosts of what they should have been. Papa would have dismissed it as a sorry piece of work. Leave room for the reader to think, she could hear him say. Give the words some air. She was about to crumple it up when a sentence caught her eye.

  soon the MAGICIANS will flee Versailles and their rotting estates and come to Paris where they will insult us with their tricks and snatch the food from between our lips for this is the way that they are, a race apart, sinners and EVILDOERS that must be eradicated like the rats they are—do not the ends justify the means when otherwise we will be killed in our beds?

  There was no author’s name at the bottom, only a stamp resembling a bird. She traced it with her thumb, as if that would tell her something. What was it her friend, the Marquis de Chandon, had said to her in a dusty hallway at Versailles?

  They are frightened of us magicians, because of what we are willing to do.

  She felt a shadow creep over her, as though a storm cloud had covered the sun. But when she looked up, the street was still bright, busy with people going home. Paris was full of people printing things, herself included. Everyone wanted to be heard. Everyone wanted to shift the tide their way. This was nothing more than rubbish, blown against the gate and tangled there by accident. She wanted to let the breeze take it far away, but instead she tightened her grip on it.

  It was too dangerous to let go.

  Timbault, the wizened gatekeeper, nodded at her as she went inside. On the other side of the gravel court in whose center four pointed yew trees stood like sentinels, a low flight of shallow marble steps led to the front door. Behind it would be servants … and possibly Sophie. So she kept to the right, heading toward a battered servants’ entrance that faced the stables.

  She didn’t relish going in that way, but the narrow back hallway led directly to the blue salon, which was, in the peculiar way of the house, always ice-cold. On a steaming day like today, it was her best chance. There was bound to be a fire in the hearth, and she was determined to see the pamphlet burn.

  She found the door unlocked—a relief, since she never knew what the house would do—and went inside. The cramped passage was long and dim, and as she hurried along it, it began to change. Tendrils of mold bloomed on the plaster. The floorboards creaked in a chorus of complaint. And the walls themselves leaned ominously close, as if they wanted to touch her. “Get back,” she whispered, but they did not listen. She walked faster. Doors on either side led to a network of servants’ halls and stairs that tunneled through the house like secrets. In the few short weeks she’d lived there, she hadn’t wanted to explore them. Trying to uncover what was in the rest of the house had been more than enough.

  For the Hôtel Séguin was webbed with an insistent, uncomfortable magic.

  She hadn’t realized it, not in the first week or two. It had come on slowly, step by step, a wary animal edging closer.

  The house was always changing, a corridor appearing where there hadn’t been one before, a door that should have opened onto a bedroom revealing a bricked-up staircase instead. Objects Séguin had enchanted when he was alive had begun to fade, taking on their former shapes: an ornamental sword hanging over a fireplace became overnight the thigh bone of a horse. A vase of what appeared to be Sèvres porcelain turned out to be a rusted urn.

  All of it made Camille uncertain, as if everything around her might turn out to be different than it seemed. Sometimes she woke with the taste of ash in her mouth or caught herself holding her breath as she went from room to room, as if someone were listening. She stayed away from the dim attic where in a great wardrobe her once-enchanted dress hung silent and sleeping. She avoided the library that murmured at night. But it was harder to dodge the wind that idled through the rooms and the sudden shadows she’d catch out of the corner of her eye that she could only guess were ghosts. Hôtel Séguin was a magician’s house with its own intentions, and it didn’t deign to share them with her.

  But Sophie loved it.

  “Imagine!” she’d said when they’d moved the short distance from the Hôtel Théron and stood in the courtyard of the Hôtel Séguin, “we own all this. Our beautiful home.” And she’d thrown her arms around Camille, her blue eyes liquid with tears. “We made it here. This place, can you imagine? And now we will be truly happy.”

  Its unsettling magic was invisible to her.

  Just last week Camille had pointed to a tapestry in the red salon, remarking how sometimes blood seemed to drip from the lance of the knight riding a big white charger. “Look, it’s doing it now!” Camille tried to keep the horror from her voice. “Don’t you see?”

  Sophie had only blinked up from her sewing. “See what?”

  Neither she nor their brother, Alain, had any aptitude for magic. Sophie couldn’t see how the house’s magic seemed to seek out Camille, how it clung like smoke to her hair and clothes, how it felt as if it were always trying to overtake her. For Sophie the mansion was luxury and safety, and she deserved to be happy after what she’d gone through at the hands of Séguin. Camille would do nothing to jeopardize that. Perhaps in a few months—once Paris settled—they might find a place that felt more like home.

  Finally, up ahead, glowed the green-painted door at the end of the passage.

  Relief sighed through her as she stepped out into the wide hall that ran through the middle of the house. Paintings and curio cabinets crowded its paneled walls. And there, just across the parquet, was the blue room, the fireplace visible through the open door. Another minute and the hateful pamphlet would be ash.

  She was nearly inside when a shadow caught her eye.

  It had her mother’s slim, elegant form. Maman’s small delicate neck, her tiny waist. She had no idea what the house could manifest—it seemed capable of anything. Her heart climbed into her throat as she whispered, “Hello?”

  “Are you looking for someone?” The shadow dissolved as Sophie stepped into the hall.

  A thread of loss pulled tight in Camille … but what had she been thinking? Of course it was her sister, whose gold-blond hair, milky skin, and deep blue eyes were just like their mother’s.

  “Just you!” Camille said brightly. In a minute, Sophie would notice what Camille had in her hand. As she hurried toward the fireplace, the carpet beneath her feet curled. She caught her toe on the edge of it, stumbled—and dropped ev
erything. Roses and papers slid from her arms, cascading to the floor. Out of nowhere, the low persistent breeze that murmured through the house began to rise.

  “Merde!” she swore.

  “Oh Camille!” Sophie exclaimed. “Your beautiful pamphlets!” Though she was wearing a striking pink dress and jacket, she dropped heedlessly to her knees to gather them up before they blew away. Heat flamed in Camille’s cheeks as she realized that Sophie would know exactly what had happened.

  Sophie carefully laid the sheets of paper in a pile. “The bookseller didn’t take them?”

  “He took one, in case there was any interest. But he doubted there would be.” She tried to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “He said it’s not exciting enough. Not the right kind of story.”

  “But why ever not?”

  Camille stepped on a pamphlet to keep it from drifting away. “He said it was too dull! Ideas and philosophy. But that’s just the kind of thing Marat is printing in his paper all the time!”

  “Is it?” Sophie asked. “I thought he had a reputation for being … terribly incendiary.” Squaring the sheets she’d gathered, she handed them to Camille. “I must say I agree with the booksellers; after all, you have to give the people what they want,” she said with a wan smile. Sophie’s hat shop, Le Sucre, was quickly becoming one of the most popular in Paris by doing just that. The people’s appetite for everything blue, white, and red seemed insatiable.

  “Oh!” Camille said, surprised. “I thought you didn’t like selling the revolutionary ribbons and cockades—”

  “How lovely these roses are!” Sophie scooped up the bouquet Camille had dropped and brought it to her nose. Then she rang a little silver bell that waited on a nearby table to summon one of the maids. “So what if those revolutionary trims aren’t what I dream of making?” she mused. “Why, just today I hired another seamstress to help us, for we have far too many orders. My tricolor trims are as pretty as it’s possible for them to be. You should see the horrors Madame Paulette tries to sell at the Palais-Royal—”