Everything That Burns Page 20

  “Your mantel clock has stopped, did you know?”

  She felt close to tears. How could he speak about the clock as if nothing were happening? “Is that why you’ve come, to fix the clock—before you leave?”

  He flinched. “She told you?”

  “She fetched me from the square, thinking it urgent. Is it?”

  He didn’t answer, but rapped at the glass with his knuckles, listened, then unhooked the clasp on the case and opened the curved glass. “It just needs winding. Do you have—ah, I see it.” The clock’s key lay on the bottom of the case.

  “Lazare, what is it? Your parents? The balloon corps?”

  “I came yesterday to tell you.” His hand shook a little as he fitted the key into its hole and began to wind. “It started two nights ago, the night we returned from Versailles. A family was walking back and forth near my house. A grandmother, her daughter, and a little boy. In the morning I asked my parents if anyone had moved in nearby, but no one had.” He turned the key again. “Then yesterday, as I was going to oversee repairs on one of the balloons, the family appeared again. The older woman stopped me and asked, ‘Are you not the Marquis de Sablebois?’ She told me she was the Duchesse de Cazalès and that she needed my help.”

  Already Camille dreaded the answer to her question. “For what?”

  He swallowed. “Her son had been wrongfully imprisoned at La Force prison but through some scheme had escaped before his execution. It was clear she feared nothing for her own life, only for her son’s wife and child. Already they’d been warned not to leave Paris before the police could question them about the son’s disappearance. She’d heard there was a nobleman in the balloon corps. It was not difficult to discover my name or where I lived.”

  “And?”

  “She asked me to fly them to England.”

  Surprise—and sudden fear—startled in her chest. “How could she ask that of a stranger?”

  “She believed in our common bond as aristocrats, I suppose.” Carefully, he turned the key a little more. “I met her grandson and his mother. She’d let out her stays—she’s having another child.”

  “Does she know how dangerous it is to fly over the sea?”

  “They are desperate. They tried to give me a diamond necklace as payment! What do you think the boy said?”

  Numbly, she shook her head.

  “‘It’s the least we can do, Sablebois. We will not take charity.’ With his father gone, he’s been forced to grow up too soon. I replied that we had a very serious problem, since I’d take nothing for the journey.”

  The journey? “Lazare, this is madness—”

  He held up his hand. To Camille it felt like a slap. “The Cazalès could be us in a week. A month. Tomorrow.” Carefully, he laid the key back in the case. “After what happened at Versailles, I see what the revolution has become. A poison poured in the wells of all of Paris.”

  It was hard to argue with that. “Why must you go?”

  “Because of you,” he said solemnly. “You are my inspiration.”

  Bewildered, she said, “For this flight across the Channel? I would never do it—it is too dangerous!”

  “I saw what you did for the girls. You saved their lives. And what was I doing? Giving my hard-won experience and knowledge to Lafayette so he might make balloons into war machines.”

  “Surely they are only watching the border—”

  “They are not.” He closed the clock’s case so hard the glass trembled. “Lille, the revolutionary dinner, Versailles: each one was a hole in the defensive wall I’d built to protect me from the reality of what I was doing. What you’d done so selflessly for the girls showed me where I’d gone wrong. You showed me what revolution could be. True rebellion. I can’t live with myself if I don’t take the Cazalès.”

  On a pedestal beside her stood a bust of a long-dead magician. Gripping the corner of its cold marble base, she tried to steady herself. She had done this? Wishing so hard to be admirable, she had set his feet upon this path that would take him away from her? She felt untethered, the room tilting around her. There had to be another way.

  “Can they not go by boat?” she asked.

  “They’re already wanted by the police. Someone, somewhere has their names on a list of possible traitors. They wouldn’t get past the Paris gates.”

  The rumors Sophie had heard were true after all. There were people in Paris keeping score, keeping the tally card of rights and wrongs, and the list would only keep growing. It was frightening, but the terror of him taking this journey was worse.

  What could she say to convince him? “But the balloon corps, they need you—”

  “Lafayette wishes to add guns to the balloons. That’s what I learned when I was called to ‘oversee repairs’ on the balloons.” He raked his hand through his hair. “And I gave them this weapon. I showed them how to build it, how to fly it. And for what?”

  Clouds, she thought wildly. “Science. Progress—the things you believe in.”

  “That’s what I told myself, too. Convenient lies. You know another lie? I never told you that it was my father who invited Lafayette to Sablebois. My parents had lured me to the country just for that purpose, though I didn’t know it. My father was so pleased Lafayette could provide me with a way to use the balloons that made sense to him, in the way my experiments never had. You know what he said?”

  Camille tightened her grip on the statue.

  “‘You could use your balloons for a real purpose.’ That’s all it took for me to agree. My father’s approval was the price of my soul. And I was too ashamed to tell you. That alone should have warned me.” His mouth worked, as if the words were bitter to speak. “But even saying I did it for my father is one more lie. I did it for myself.”

  Oh, Lazare. “Do you remember how hard I tried to sell my father’s pamphlets? I thought that was what I was supposed to do. That what my father thought was best. He wasn’t even alive, Lazare, and still I wished to please him.” But the girls’ desperate need had changed that.

  Magic had changed it.

  “So you understand why I must go?” Hope softened the desperate lines of his face. “I don’t want to be the person my father believes me to be. Someone who cares nothing for science but dreams of a medal on his shirt. A clap on the back that makes him feel secure in knowing his place.”

  “But this is too dangerous,” she pleaded. “Not just the journey over the Channel, which you know aeronauts have died attempting. You’ll be harboring people wanted by the police. They will come for you!”

  “They will not know anything about it,” he said quietly. “Who would tell them? No one knows but you, me, and the Cazalès.” He reached out a hand to her. “If I don’t take them, who would I be to you? You say you want me to stay, but if I did you would slowly begin to despise me. You are too noble—”

  “Too noble?” she heard herself say. “You don’t know who I am if you think that.”

  In the silence she heard the clock ticking, fast as wings.

  “Camille? Say something.” He seemed stricken, as if he might weep. “What do you mean? Who do you think you are?”

  Who was she? She no longer knew. She was becoming … something else. Someone else. Magic was an acrid seed, like the gnarled pip of an orange planted deep inside her long before she’d known it was there. She had watered it with her sorrows, and now whatever this tree would be had threaded its stems and branches through her. It had produced words and pamphlets and changes in opinion. What other fruit would it bear?

  She didn’t know.

  It was frightening not to know. But neither could she pull it out.

  What if she told him the truth?

  He might see the wrongness of what he was doing. It would not, she knew, make him love her more. It would make him despise her. But if it kept him alive, did it matter? She let go of the statue’s pedestal, took a step toward him.

  “All those successful pamphlets? I printed them with magic! It was wit
h magic that they convinced all of Paris. It was magic—magic I once hated—that raised me up and gave me a voice! You wish to sacrifice yourself by flying the Cazalès over the sea so you can be worthy of me? Whatever Rosier says, I’m not a saint. I am, if anything, the opposite.” The little voice she heard in her head—the voice of that magical seed—whispered: You know what you are.

  The room was so quiet she could hear him breathing.

  He did not look at her. He only said flatly, “I believed you when you said it was nothing to you.”

  It is in me, too deep to unroot. “Lazare, it’s like a fever. I don’t know how to manage it—yet.”

  “Yet?” He took a step toward her. “What are you waiting for? You’ve put yourself in terrible danger. If someone were to find out—”

  “No one will find out. We are searching for a way to control it.”

  There was a shell on the mantel, beside the clock, and he clenched it in his hand. “Who is helping you?”

  “Chandon and another magician.” She knew how bad it sounded. How secret. “They’re searching for a book—”

  “A book? A book?” For several long minutes, he looked at the shell as if he would smash it. “Tell me, if I asked you to come with me to England, to escape this place, you would say no?”

  Bewildered, she asked, “That is what you’ve come to ask me?”

  He inclined his head. Beneath his lashes, his beautiful eyes were like dark moons, impossible, unreachable.

  “I can’t leave them without finding the answers. And you see how terrible things are for magicians. They need a way out before the borders close, we are close to finding it, I hope. Besides, I cannot leave Sophie—”

  His face shuttered. “Of course not. I was wrong to dream of it.”

  He turned as if to go, and Camille grabbed his coat sleeve. “Lazare, please listen. What if magic isn’t wrong? I used it to help the girls”—she remembered her mother, clutching The Silver Leaf to her chest—“perhaps it might save me, too.”

  “It will get you killed.” He shook his sleeve free. “You chose it, long before you chose me. I could never compete with it. I was a fool to try.”

  “How am I not choosing you?” she said, bewildered. “I wish for you to stay. To not risk your life.”

  “You have chosen to stay for the sake of magic and the magicians.” But his dark gaze said: You are breaking my heart.

  “It’s not just for them that I stay.”

  “What, then? Why remain in this country that wants neither of us?”

  She did not want to be pushed out. She wanted, for once, to stop running. “For me.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I did stop working it, you know. But it came back, just the same.” Servants stirred outside the door, murmuring in the hall. “What if magic is not something I do, but something I am?”

  “It cannot be.” Lazare looked as if he were trying to pick up the pieces of something that had broken. “You said there might be a way to get rid of it.”

  “Yes—no.”

  “You might continue to use it? To be a magician?”

  Sorrow rose like a tide beneath her skin and suddenly she despaired of making him understand. Tears coursed down her cheeks—tears of sadness and fury and regret so mixed she could not tell them apart. What if, in the end, magic was all she had?

  “I never had a true teacher, not even my mother. I did it alone. Mocked and used by my brother. Lost, hating myself and what I had to do to survive. But no more.”

  She yearned for him to embrace her and say he loved her. But he did not even reach out his hand.

  Instead he said, “It’s rich that you warned me of the danger of taking this suffering family to England. Knowing all the while that you have been putting yourself in danger every day. Pretending to be a printer.”

  “Pretending?”

  “Apparently you have not lost your taste for it,” he said. “How could you do it again?”

  She took an uncertain step back. “And you? Have you not been pretending?”

  “I had been,” he said sorrowfully, “but not anymore.”

  Camille took another step away. “Is that what you object to? My keeping this from you?”

  “I don’t know if it is the magic, or the secret. Nor am I certain I wish to know.”

  His voice was so cold. She had misjudged him, tallied everything up wrong. “Tell me, Lazare: What is magic to you?”

  As if it were very clear, he said, “The thing that will forever keep us apart.”

  She tipped up her chin, defiant. “And if this is the thing that makes me unlovable, unworthy, then you are finished with me?”

  “No.” He unfroze, and with one step he closed the gap between them. He cupped her face between his warm hands, ran his thumb along the slope of her cheek. Anguish contorted his beautiful face. “I love you, Camille.”

  “But you wish—”

  “And am I wrong to wish for it? Isn’t it what you wish for, too?” He sighed as if he were in terrible pain. “I do not want to be second best in your heart.”

  In his dark pupils, she saw herself reflected: insubstantial as a moth. What place did she have in his heart?

  The clock on the mantel began to chime. She could think of nothing more to say.

  “I must leave. If anyone asks,” he pleaded, “tell them I’ve gone to Sablebois. Promise me.”

  Her voice caught on a sob, but she managed to say it. “I promise.”

  “Dieu, this is not the meeting I’d hoped for.” From his pocket he produced a small object, wrapped in faded red fabric. “One favor, if you’ll grant it? Please keep this for me. It’s my father’s and I don’t dare take it up in the balloon.”

  As she tucked it into her sleeve, he stepped close against her skirts, until their bodies were nearly touching. What if there was a kiss that would undo it all, a wave of feeling and desire that could sweep away the words they had said and the pain they had caused? She pressed her mouth to his, desperate and hard and fierce. His answering kiss was angry, desolate, lost. Roughly their hands tugged at one another’s clothes, clutching at collars and lacings as if those were the barriers that kept them apart.

  With a groan, he pulled away. His chest was heaving, and he ran a shaking hand over his face. “How can we be together if there is this thing between us?”

  Something broke inside her then. A shivering crack, as of splintering glass. It was all wrong. Maybe once she’d thought she could stop working magic. But not now. She would not be that moth, insubstantial and too easily torn.

  “If you can’t love me without wanting me to be something other than I am,” she said, “then yes—this thing will keep us apart.”

  Before he could see her hot tears spill, she strode to the farthest window and put her back to him. Though there was only the space of a room between them, it was vast as a chasm. This is who she was: a magician. Cursed, or gifted, she did not know. He could leave her—but she would not let herself feel small.

  “Camille!”

  She would not go to him. She could not say how long they stood there, the house clattering and shifting unhappily around them, but finally he left. Nauseated, she listened to the rapid click of his shoes as he descended the stairs, his polite murmured exchange with Daumier, the doors closing behind him. In the hall, Adèle and Odette were calling her name.

  From the window, she watched him cross diagonally across the street, heedless of the carriages, his hair flying about his shoulders. His beautiful hands, the ones that had just held her, were clenched in fists at his sides.

  She might never see him again.

  Someone might be trailing the Cazalès family. He might be caught before he left France. If not, the balloon could crash anywhere between Paris and Calais. It could tumble into the ice-cold sea. And then—nothing.

  He had reached the park.

  Every movement, every gesture he made as he crossed the faded grass of the Place des Vosges she wished to commit to me
mory. Like an important date, a name, a spell she could use to conjure him again.

  She could not let him go like this.

  Grabbing her skirts, she raced from the room. Past the startled servants, down the stairs, across the street, she ran, her breath ragged, until she reached the Place des Vosges, where she startled a cloud of pigeons into flight.

  But Lazare was gone. All that was left were the trees in the square with their bare black branches, the fallen leaves tarnished like brass.

  32

  In the Place des Vosges, she waited for Lazare until her hands were stiff with cold, hoping he’d turn around and come back. Maybe then there would have been a way to erase what they’d said—what they’d done—and begin anew, the way embroidery could be unpicked from a sleeve.

  But what had happened between them couldn’t be undone. There was no way to unpick it and make it as if it had never happened. It had. She hated how small and powerless she had felt, and she did not wish to feel that way ever again. If it meant being without him, then she would have to find a way.

  She was running lightly up the grand marble stairs of the Hôtel Séguin when she heard, eerily clear, the sound of someone crying.

  It couldn’t be Sophie, could it? Camille searched the house until she found her in her dressing room, holding a gown under her chin. She startled when she saw Camille.

  “Dieu, what’s happened to you? You look terrible!”

  “Lazare has left Paris. But I can’t talk about it now.”

  The fabric slid from Sophie’s grasp. “Why ever not?”

  “Can’t you hear the crying?”

  Bewildered, Sophie said, “Hear what?”

  What was it Blaise had said? That she needed to find a way to listen to the house?

  The heart-wrenching sobs continued. It seemed as if they were coming from the mansion’s older wing. She hoped they weren’t coming from the library, for she didn’t want to go back inside with the rustling books and the enchanted portrait. She followed the sobbing down the long and gloomy hall until she came to a particularly ornate door. The weeping emanated from Séguin’s bedroom.