Everything That Burns Read online

  Sophie fell suddenly silent.

  Camille followed her sister’s gaze to the ragged anti-magician pamphlet that lay on the carpet like a stain. She lunged for it, but Sophie was too quick. “Give it to me!” Camille demanded. “It’s just a piece of trash I intended to burn—”

  Sophie gleefully held it out of reach. But when as she read it, a worried V appeared between her brows. “How can people print these terrible things?”

  “It’s nonsense, just ravings—” But a little voice deep inside her whispered: Is it?

  Sophie sighed and handed Camille the scrap of paper. “My customers are breathless with the same kinds of malicious rumors. Magicians are causing the drought. Magicians are hoarding grain, so there’s not enough bread. Magicians are making the rivers flow backward. Oh, and Marie Antoinette dyes her gowns red with the blood of the French. Never mind that would make her dresses brown.”

  “Magicians can’t even do those kinds of things,” Camille said with more certainty than she felt, for both Chandon and Séguin had revealed her knowledge of magic to be a very meager thing. “At least the ones I know.”

  Sophie glanced sidelong at Camille. “I can hardly tell them that my sister’s friend the Marquis de Chandon is a very charming magician.”

  Behind Sophie appeared Adèle, the youngest housemaid. She wore a black dress with a starched white apron and a cap over her wavy, coffee-colored hair. The expression on her face was often one of incredulous and barely hidden surprise at something Camille had done. It was, in fact, the expression she now wore. In her hands, she held a folded length of fabric, which she laid on the little table. “Mesdames?”

  “Adèle, would you put these roses in water? And while you’re passing by the printing room,” Sophie added, gesturing to Camille, “leave Madame’s pamphlets there.”

  The thought of those failures waiting for her sickened her. She did not want to have to face them tonight. Or tomorrow. Or even the day after. She would never be satisfied with them, not now. Shoving the densely printed page that had unnerved her into the middle of the stack, she tucked them tight under her arm. “I’ll take care of them.”

  “So you’ll make a fresh start with your pamphlets?” Sophie said approvingly as Adèle disappeared down the hall.

  Camille grasped them tighter. “I will.”

  “Good. And now I’m afraid I must go.”

  A surge of disappointment rose in Camille. But just as quickly, she reprimanded herself. Wasn’t this what she wanted for her sister: happiness, independence, a full life? “I did think you were dressed too well for dinner at home.”

  Sophie ducked her chin and smiled. The undernourished look she had for so long was vanished, like a bad dream, and had been replaced with rosy cheeks and laughter. She wore her newest silk dress topped by a short, sapphire-blue coat, its collar and deep cuffs embroidered with chrysanthemums. Her golden hair waved becomingly over one shoulder, and the pretty flush in her cheeks showed that the ordeal she’d suffered at the hands of Séguin three weeks ago was finally behind them. This, Camille thought, was something to hold on to. And if it meant living in this uneasy, watchful house full of magic, she would do it.

  “Where are you going?” Camille asked.

  “First, to Le Sucre.” Sophie showed her the folded cloth Adèle had brought. “A client is desperate to have this shawl for a patriotic banquet tonight. All the tricolor tassels had my fingers aching! But since it’s done, I might as well give it to her, and get paid. And then,” she added happily, “the Marquis d’Auvernay has promised me cake at a decadent café run by Russians. They will be dressed as Cossacks, he tells me—it will be terribly romantic.”

  Camille couldn’t help but think of the crowded streets, the flower seller, the nobleman who’d whipped up a mob for his own benefit. “Just be careful.”

  “In the streets?” Sophie lowered her voice. “Or with d’Auvernay?”

  “You are terrible!” Camille laughed. Though Sophie was only fifteen, since the events of the spring, she’d come into her own. She suddenly seemed capable of handling anything. “I trust your heart is in no danger?”

  “Hardly! He is rich and handsome, and that is all. And fear not, the footman Daumier will come with me to Le Sucre, and when the shawl has been paid for, d’Auvernay will fetch me in his carriage.”

  Camille’s throat constricted when she thought how overjoyed Maman would have been to see Sophie looking so well. “He will not be able to keep his eyes off of you.”

  “It just goes to show how getting a dastardly magician out of a young lady’s life can make things so much better.” In the mirror, she caught Camille’s eye, suddenly serious. “All of that is behind us now, n’est-ce pas?”

  “Of course.” Séguin was dead, and with him, her old life. This new one was full of possibility—a couple of raving pamphlets and a list nailed to a tree did not change that.

  Sophie leaned in to give her a kiss. “Oh, I nearly forgot! An invitation arrived for us a few hours ago. It’s waiting for you in the printing room.” With a wink in her voice, she added, “I bet it will raise your spirits.”

  4

  Nevertheless the uncomfortable feeling persisted as she passed smoke-blackened paintings and cabinets crowded with Venetian paperweights and ancient coins before she reached the dining room. From its ceiling hung an enormous chandelier, dense with cut-glass crystals. Underneath it stood a wooden printing press.

  She’d sought out an old one, like her father’s. When she ran her fingers over the worn wood, or held the smooth iron lever that seemed to fit her hand perfectly, she thought of all the people who’d owned the press before. Had they printed invitations and revolutionary posters, like Papa? Etiquette manuals? Histories of far-off places? Or advertisements for the spectacles Paris adored? There was no way of knowing, but she imagined that somewhere inside its metal and wood, the press remembered.

  Around the room stood cabinets covered with stacks of paper and containers of ink. Above her head, lengths of rope ran from glittering sconce to glittering sconce, making a spiderweb from which she’d hung freshly printed copies of On the Education of Girls to dry.

  Failures, all of them.

  Papa would have folded them into dragons or queens or boats—something to prove her work wasn’t worthless. As she began to unpin the useless sheets, she could almost feel the paper warming in her hand as she imagined the words becoming compelling. Entrancing.

  How much magic would it take to make it right?

  None, she told herself sharply.

  Magic was not easy to get rid of. The more she’d used it, the worse it had been, and even when she’d stopped, the disquieting hunger for more had been hard to quell. Despite everything, there was something in her that yearned for magic’s dark transformations—even though it had nearly killed her and threatened the lives of everyone she loved. The way magic still tugged at her reminded her of her brother’s inability to stop gambling, and its power frightened her.

  But in the weeks since Séguin’s death, one thing more than any other had healed her hurts: an ebony-haired boy who made her feel. It had been Lazare she’d turned to when her memories were too much, when she feared she might never truly recover from having used so much magic. He’d needed to convalesce from his own battle with Séguin, and together they’d ambled in the dusty gardens of the Tuileries. He brought her sweet pastries from Stohrer’s, and sat with her in the shade of the fruit trees in her own garden. Leaning against the trunk of a plum tree, his long legs stretched out in front of him and his dark head tipped back, his face was alight with enthusiasm. For hours they talked of inventions and revolution, balloons and the journey they planned to take over the Alps. In his dreamy, amber-flecked eyes, she saw herself differently: not as a desperate magician, but as the best version of herself. It had gone a long way toward mending what was broken.

  She wanted to hold on to that feeling of hope and possibility, of a future free of magic’s dark taint. For she wanted nothin
g to do with its wild unpredictability, the uncomfortable feeling that it wasn’t she who was working the magic, but rather, that the magic was working her.

  She unpinned the final sheet and tossed it on top of the others. Perhaps Papa’s pamphlets were too theoretical. After all, how would one of Papa’s pamphlets help the flower seller? It would take years for the ideas to trickle down from debates in the National Assembly and become law. The flower seller and the starving children of Paris needed a better life now.

  She carried the pamphlets—including the hateful one she’d found stuck to the gate—to the back of the room and dropped them into the fire. Instantly long tongues of flame leaped up to devour the pages. Soon they would be coal black, their edges gone to ashy lace, drifting up into the chimney’s blackened mouth. She’d thought printing would be her future. She’d vowed it to herself at the tennis court in Versailles, when she committed to doing what Papa hadn’t been able to.

  She had tried, but it hadn’t been good enough. Not even close. She needed to do more.

  But what?

  The breeze slithered through the room, whispering, but it said nothing she could understand. She was about to blow out the candles when she remembered the invitation.

  It lay on the table, folded into the shape of a star. Sophie’s and her names were spelled out in extravagant purple ink and sky-high capital letters. In her hand, it felt like hope, the perfect antidote to her failed pamphlets, violence in the streets, and troubled magic.

  Camille unfolded it and pressed it flat. Inside was written:

  Mes Amis!

  Please join me for the launch of a marvelous adventure!

  Wednesday, 2 o’clock sharp-ish

  At the workshop

  Just below, scrawled so boldly that the final “r” ran right off the page:

  Charles Rosier

  And at the bottom, a final note:

  P.S. Lazare has promised to attend!

  Camille laughed out loud. Of course she would go.

  Knowing Lazare had returned to Paris, she could never stay away.

  5

  From her dressing room Camille heard Sophie’s light step in the hall. “You’re home already? Come quickly—we’re to meet Lazare and Rosier in an hour and I need help!”

  “I closed the shop early.” Sophie was smartly dressed in a gray-and-blue flowered cotton dress and a straw hat festooned with silk periwinkles. In one arm, she was carrying her black cat, Fantôme, who was purring loudly.

  Camille lifted the lids of several enormous hat boxes. “Tired from your adventures with d’Auvernay?”

  “Cake and boys are never tiring. It’s my customers’ choices that are exhausting,” she said, giving Fantôme a kiss. “Why does no one want a hat trimmed in sky blue? Or a rich green, like you’re wearing?” She sighed. “Revolutionary ribbons are not why I opened Le Sucre.”

  At least, Camille thought with a twinge of envy, Sophie made hats and ornaments people wanted. But the sad set of her shoulders made Camille instantly regret it. “I wish you could sell only your fantastical hats, ma chèrie. I hate that your original ideas are going to waste.”

  Mollified somewhat, she asked, “What hat will you wear?”

  Camille looked despairingly around her chaotic dressing room. “I don’t know!”

  “I do believe you’re nervous,” Sophie observed.

  “I’m not!”

  Her gaze went to the tiny balloon-shaped music box Lazare had given her. It was a souvenir of the two times she’d gone up with him in the balloon—and that gossamer night he’d taken her in his arms at the top of Notre-Dame, the city’s rooftops far below.

  But last week he’d left Paris abruptly to visit his parents at their estate of Sablebois. And though he’d been away only a handful of days, his sudden absence had left her feeling unmoored. Unsure. For so long she had tried to hold on to the things she loved only to have them slip like water through her fingers. What was to say it could not happen again?

  Lazare was true, she knew. He did not willingly keep secrets. Still, it rubbed at her, like a seam sewn wrong.

  “Ne t’inquiète pas! I’ll find the perfect hat,” Sophie said, setting the cat on the floor. He disappeared immediately under the bed. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”

  Casting a critical eye at the mirror, Camille examined her emerald-green dress, embroidered with ribbon roses in various shades of pink. Over it she would wear a pistachio cloak with a wide ruffle and shoes that matched. As she smoothed her skirts flat, she thought for a moment of the other dress, the enchanted one that always made her look beautiful and compelling, hanging quiet and alone in a wardrobe in the attic—

  “You should wear this.” Sophie handed her a hat she’d unearthed from a pile of Kashmiri shawls. “The dotted ribbon will go nicely with your cloak.”

  Just as Camille was settling it over her hair, Adèle appeared in the hall, her cheeks very pink. “Monsieur Mellais has arrived in his carriage! He wishes to offer you a ride to the workshop.”

  Lazare, here? “I thought we would walk! I’m not at all ready—”

  “Apparently he couldn’t wait,” Sophie remarked. “I wonder why.”

  Camille’s fingers fumbled with the hat’s ribbons, but even she could see how prettily her gray eyes sparkled, how becomingly her skin flushed. She bit her lip and smiled.

  “You look absolutely delicious. He will devour you like a pastry.”

  “Hush!” Camille swatted at Sophie with a fan. “Adèle, would you let him know I’ll be there in a moment?”

  * * *

  When she came downstairs, the doors to the courtyard stood open. Lazare was leaning against the door of his carriage. His beautiful face was turned away, but Camille could never mistake his tall shape nor his elegant, lanky ease, the gloss of his long black hair. Lazare being in the country at Sablebois hadn’t agreed with Camille, but it’d certainly agreed with him—his skin had deepened to a bronzy brown across his cheekbones, as if the sun now lived inside him. His tricorne hat tucked negligently under his arm and head tipped back, Lazare seemed to be absorbed by a flock of swallows swooping across the cloudy sky. The way he looked at things made her want to see what he saw, or, she thought, be seen by him.

  Etiquette said to be coy, but she didn’t care. Instead she ran across the cobbled court. Five steps away, then three. Two. One—and he turned and pulled her to him.

  Her heart was pounding ridiculously fast. “You’ve returned,” she said—and instantly felt foolish for saying this most obvious thing. With him in front of her, she was suddenly shy.

  “Seeing you, I understand why each moment in the country felt like an eternity.” Slowly, he kissed the back of each of her hands, one by one, before releasing them. It would have been chaste, not violating any of etiquette’s rules, except for the way he looked at her. Hot, as if his gaze could kindle flames. The brush of his lips thrilled—a hand kiss from Lazare was much, much more than such a small thing had a right to be.

  “Oh,” breathed Camille. Why go anywhere else, when he was here? Absently, she straightened a fold of his cravat, her fingers grazing his skin. “Do you think … would Rosier really miss us? Could we not perhaps sneak away?”

  “There is nothing I would rather do,” he said in a way that made her feel like she was flying, “though he would certainly be disappointed. But now that I’m returned to Paris, nothing will induce me to be parted from you.”

  Her fingers curled against the warm skin of his neck, she imagined a different autumn in Paris. Not the one that she’d been living, disturbed by the house’s magic and dissatisfied by her destiny.

  Instead, it could be this.

  She pulled herself back to the moment. “And your parents? Are they well?”

  She remembered them from the opera—his bejeweled stepmother’s disdain; his distant father, a pale inverse of Lazare. Lazare’s warm coloring and inky hair came from his father’s first wife, an Indian from Pondichéry, whom he’d met while vis
iting his family’s spice plantations. When she’d died of malaria, he and a very young Lazare had returned to France. Whatever India had been to his father, it was no more. That door was firmly closed, even to Lazare. His father insisted, Lazare had told her, that he be more French and less Indian. It hurt and bewildered him.

  At the mention of his parents, a muscle in Lazare’s jaw tightened. “Well enough. Some angry peasants had threatened to burn down a neighbor’s château. They’d managed to work themselves into a fright by the time I arrived. Anywhere, they said, would be better than Sablebois.”

  Lazare loved Sablebois, she knew. “They’re not thinking of becoming émigrés and leaving France?” After the storming of the Bastille last month, some noble families, following the lead of the king’s brother, had fled to England or Austria. She couldn’t imagine turning her back on her home, and she knew Lazare felt the same.

  “They haven’t gone quite that far,” he replied. “But they did decide it was safer in Paris, where at least they could rely on the police. Which means they returned with me and are now settling in.”

  She had the feeling both she and Lazare would have preferred them to stay in the country. “You did tell them that it’s hardly better here?”

  “They wouldn’t listen.” One corner of his mouth rose up. “Perhaps they wish to keep an eye on me.”

  “Why would they do that?” she teased. “What secrets have you been keeping?”

  “Nothing worth knowing.” He took her hand, traced her knuckles with his thumb, and then, drawing closer, brought her hand to his lips.

  Camille’s breath caught. She found herself wishing his mouth was … elsewhere. “Don’t you know hand-kissing has been deemed too gothic for this revolutionary age, like wigs and rouge?”