Everything That Burns Read online

  The Lost Girls who live under the bridge stopped me. Instead of dying, they said, I might pretend I was dead. So when a corpse washed up on the banks of the Seine, its hair like mine and its face half-gone, we dressed it in my clothes and filled the apron with stones again, in case he came looking. And then we pushed that copy of me into the water.

  IT SANK. I ROSE.

  13

  While Camille was caught up in the strange magic of telling the girls’ stories, Les Merveilleux had become decidedly more marvelous.

  If Camille mistakenly called it a circus, she got a scowl from Sophie and a lecture from Rosier. Jabbing the air with his unlit pipe, he implored: “S’il te plaît, don’t say circus! Say instead: An Amazement! A Spectacle!” In only a week, it had transformed from something like a puppet show put on by street urchins hoping to earn a few sous to something resembling a dream. A fairy tale, all glitter and beauty, but with darkness underneath. At first, Sophie had insisted that the costumes all be red. But Rosier felt it was too bloody. “Is there not already too much gruesomeness in Paris?”

  Only the most radical of revolutionaries would disagree.

  Yesterday a frightened Adèle had told Camille a vagrant had broken into a house two streets over. A mob then dragged him into the street. When the police arrived, nothing was left but an arm torn off at the shoulder, its sleeve slick with gore. The girls too might be called vagrants, and it set Camille’s heart uneasily racing. After she’d comforted Adèle, she wrote to Lasalle, demanding to know if he’d heard anything about the girls’ eviction. There were only a few days left before they’d be out on the street. People do care, he wrote back. The pamphlets are a wonder. Send more stories. Subscriptions growing. Speaking to a friend in the mayor’s office tomorrow. News when I have it.

  And so the red costumes had been sent back to Le Sucre to be reused in tricolor sashes and something new had been invented. Today they’d gathered at the workshop for its unveiling.

  The puppet theater had grown, as had the height of the curtains. As they slowly parted, light snow made from tiny pieces of silver paper began to fall. The puppets came out, one by one, seeming to float in their white costumes. They too were taller, nearly the height of human beings. Behind the two lovers—or so Camille thought of them—lumbered a bear puppet, its large head swaying from side to side, snow sparkling in his fur. It was enchanting. And slightly spooky, which was just the effect, Sophie declared, she’d intended.

  “They are beautiful,” Camille said. “The girl reminds me of a swan.”

  “Hopeful as a blank slate?” Rosier said as he admired one of the puppet’s feathered wings. “A vision of the future?”

  “Exactement,” Sophie said, pleased.

  “And the story?” Lazare asked.

  “Too abstract!” Rosier consulted his notebook. “We are rewriting it.”

  “We’re moving the story to the forest, in winter. Do you remember, Camille, the masquerade at Versailles? That woodland feeling,” Sophie said dreamily, “is what I hope to achieve. A feeling of being transported to a place that’s familiar, but more beautiful.”

  “What’s next for Les Merveilleux?” Lazare wondered.

  “We perform at the Palais-Royal very soon,” Rosier informed them. “Imagine the audience we will enrapture there! Huge crowds! People from all walks of life! The word of mouth alone will be extraordinary.”

  Camille glanced at Lazare. Perhaps she could tear him away from his balloons to attend? “When will it be?”

  “When it’s ready.” Rosier winked at her. “I am usually all for rushing, but not in this case.”

  * * *

  Outside the workshop, the sky had darkened. Ragged edges of pewter clouds gathered behind church towers and spires, threatening rain. A cool wind smelling of moss and stone buffeted the russet chestnut leaves strewn along the rue Saint-Antoine. Camille tucked her arm around Lazare’s elbow, using the excuse of the sudden chill to draw closer to him. He walked with his hands in his coat pockets, a pensive turn to his mouth.

  “What’s wrong?” Camille asked. “Do you not find Les Merveilleux as marvelous as the lovebirds do?”

  “Lovebirds?” he said, surprised.

  Rosier and Sophie strolled up ahead, their heads angled toward each other.

  “Something’s changed,” Camille said conspiratorially. “She hasn’t been out with her suitor, the Marquis d’Auvernay, in at least a week, and this morning she told me she’s letting her seamstresses make the revolutionary trims so she can have more time to work on the costumes. She loves designing them. Perhaps that will lead to something?”

  Up ahead, Sophie laughed, sweet and bright.

  He gave her a swift look. “What’s to say it hasn’t already?”

  “Touché,” she acknowledged as a large orange leaf sailed by her shoulder. “Tell me—are the balloons ready for the launch?”

  “Just as I was about to ask you about the Lost Girls! I won’t be diverted, you know.”

  “You must promise to tell me about the balloons after. It’s been going very well, and Lasalle has promised to take up their cause with a friend in the mayor’s office. Though he needs to hurry.” She explained that it was becoming a series, and he listened intently as she recounted the details of Henriette’s forger life. “Like Sophie with her costumes,” Camille said, “Henriette is a true artist. Can you imagine if she had a chance to do something more—portraits, perhaps, like Vigée Le Brun, who paints the queen?”

  “Why not? Aren’t these revolutionary times, when who knows what doors might open? What you are doing is extraordinary, mon âme.” He reached out and gently tucked a wayward curl beneath her hat. “You are extraordinary.”

  Heat warmed the place where his finger had grazed her skin. “It’s the least I can do, with what I have,” she said modestly, but secretly she was pleased. Seeing herself in his eyes was intoxicating. Not simply because it was Lazare—his burning touch, the promises she sensed behind his words—but because in his eyes she was who she wished to be. Not a starving girl who’d used destructive magic to survive. Not a girl feverishly printing pamphlets in a magic-filled, malevolent house, avoiding thinking about the consequences.

  “Now you must tell me what’s happening with the balloon corps.”

  He kicked at the fallen leaves so they sailed into the air. “Do you remember what Lafayette said at the salon?”

  “He proposed to make military use of the balloons. I also remember how you reacted.”

  “Hotheadedly, I bet,” he said in an off-hand way. “He came to the training for the new pilots I held the other day.”

  Overhead, the chill wind rattled through the trees. “He doesn’t mean to send you to war—”

  “In a balloon?” Lazare frowned. “I doubt it. He worries about unrest. Here in Paris, of course, but also at the borders. As the king hesitates, calculating how to respond to the Assembly’s demands, other countries think of invading or plotting to help the king and queen flee. Austria might do it.”

  “You’d said the balloons would be used for surveilling. Does that now mean … spying?” She could not put her finger on it, but there was something unsettling about the whole affair, like the nap on a jacket brushed the wrong way.

  “Gathering information,” he corrected. “Which reminds me.” He smiled then and it was as if the sun had come out. “He’s promised every team will take measurements when they go up.”

  That sounded more promising. “What kind?”

  “Barometric, atmospheric … it’s the clouds that interest me. Do you remember them in the distance when we went up together the first time? Or the way they were when the balloon plummeted to the ground, only to be saved at the last minute by a brave and lovely girl?”

  “Storm clouds,” she answered. She would never forget their speed, nor the drenching rain that fell.

  “They intrigue me because they’re always changing. One day, who knows? We might have the ability to predict the weather. Imagine h
ow it would help the farmers and sailors—all of us. My theory is that clouds are like the play of emotions across a face”—his gaze went to her cheeks, then dropped to her mouth—“and can tell us what forces are behind changes in the sky.”

  Camille flushed. “Are you saying I am easy to read?”

  “Not at all.” Some shadowy emotion moved over Lazare’s face and was gone.

  She smiled up at him, though her thoughts circled back to Lafayette’s plans. “But if the balloons were used for spying at the border, where there was unrest, you would not have to go, would you?”

  “I’m pleased to see that doesn’t make you happy.” He tucked her hand tighter around his arm. “I will stay in Paris. Firmly on the ground.”

  It made her glad, though a knowing voice inside whispered: feet on the ground does not sound at all like Lazare.

  “A few more training sessions and then Lafayette hopes to demonstrate the balloons on the Champ de Mars. He wants it to be a success. Rosier will be pleased. We’ll finally have the big balloon spectacle he’s always wished for.”

  “But that’s wonderful—”

  “It is.” But he did not look at her.

  “I was wondering,” she said lightly, “your father’s friendship with Lafayette—”

  “Camille!” Sophie was racing toward them, her hand clamped to her hat to keep it from blowing off. Behind her loomed the open space of the Place de Grève, half-full with a jostling crowd. “It’s the king!” she shouted. “Hurry, you two! They are saying he will make a speech!”

  14

  “Vive le Roi!” someone shouted.

  Louis XVI, king of France, shuffled toward the front of the stage. At Versailles, courtiers snidely said that when he wasn’t wearing court finery, Louis could be mistaken for a gardener. But today he had dressed the part. Across his creamy gray suit was wrapped a wide blue sash, the Cordon Bleu. Lace fluttered at his thick throat and pinned to his coat, next to a silver star, was a tricolor cockade just like the ones sold at Le Sucre. His hair was tied with a plain black ribbon, as if he were a man of the people. But everyone knew he ate two chickens for breakfast and gorged on delicacies starving Parisians could only dream of.

  Shouts rippled through the crowd as Marie Antoinette appeared behind him. She wore a saffron silk gown à la française, embroidered with sprays of tiny white flowers. Simple, but costly. Her hair was gray, but not from powder, and the radiance of her skin, which had been the envy of the court when she was a girl, had faded. Séguin had kept her looking young with his magic, but now that he was dead, it was as if all of the sorcery he’d lavished on her had vanished. She now seemed no different than anyone else.

  “The queen is much changed,” Camille remarked. “I can’t understand why she would have come.”

  Lazare wondered, “And of all the squares in Paris to choose the Place de Grève, with its terrible history?”

  “I can’t think it an accident,” Rosier remarked as someone onstage called for the people’s attention. “In any case, we are about to find out.”

  From the stage, the king blinked at the crowd. A tall, pale-faced man, dressed in black and wearing a red cloak that billowed behind him, handed the king a piece of paper. The wind snatched at it, threatening to tear it away.

  “Our people!” he read. “How happy we are to be in Paris with you! We have been too long separated.”

  Applause and jeers jangled in the square. “Send your wife back where she came from, the Austrian whore!” someone yelled.

  “As the National Assembly does its crucial work,” the king intoned, “we have come to Paris, in our duty as the father of our people, to warn you of a great danger.” Camille could feel the crowd’s attention sharpen. The king must have felt it too, for as if overcome with emotion, he pressed a heavy hand covered with rings against the rich fabric of his coat. “My people, listen! There are dangerous, traitorous magicians who dwell in our midst.”

  The crowd rumbled, low and ominous.

  The king’s words echoed in her ears. What could he mean?

  “For centuries France has lived with this plague of magicians. Our great-grandfather, Louis XIV, was the first of our family to fight them.” The king puffed out his chest. “He could not bear that they preyed on the blood of honest and hardworking French people, worse than any feudal lord or aristocrat.”

  A wave of revulsion rolled over Camille. Chandon had told her that magicians—perhaps even her own ancestors—had tortured the poor to gain their sorrow. Just like Séguin, they’d done it to lessen magic’s toll on themselves while maintaining their well-being and power through others’ suffering. It horrified her.

  But Louis XIV was no crusader. He had brought the magicians to Versailles to ward his palace with spells that would entice the nobility, and so keep them under his thumb. But when the magicians’ status at court had begun to rival his own, he’d turned on them, executing those who didn’t flee in time. In killing them, Louis XIV hadn’t wanted to help the people. He’d only helped himself hold on to power.

  In the face of revolution, his great-grandson was doing the same thing.

  “Down with the magicians!” someone shouted. “Bloodsuckers!”

  “Regardez!” The king gestured theatrically to Marie Antoinette, who stood behind him. “Even her majesty the queen was a victim of an unscrupulous magician!”

  The queen—a victim? It was for the queen’s sake Séguin had tried to enslave both her and Chandon by making them his sorrow-wells!

  Around her, people grew restless. It was just the same as it’d been with the flower seller: one word could ignite them. The people were hungry for something more. Someone else to blame. Something worse.

  “Magic,” Louis continued, “is against our new Republic. It makes a mockery of freedom, of brotherhood, of the happiness of the French people.” A crooked, big-lipped smile. “Our great-grandfather made the magicians stand trial, even though many were his noble courtiers. He did not flinch when the guilty were executed. The first step toward freedom from magic is putting our intentions into law. Therefore we, in our sacred duty to protect the people of France, do hereby decree: magic is henceforth outlawed.” He raised the paper in his hand to peer at it, his diamonds glittering. “On pain of death.”

  Silence, a held breath. Beneath the shadow of her hat, Marie Antoinette smiled.

  The people roared. As the crowd shoved forward, Camille lost her footing. She thought for a moment she would be crushed and then she felt Lazare’s strong arm under her elbow, keeping her standing. “Are you all right?”

  “Lost my balance, that’s all.”

  “I see his game now,” Rosier said grimly. “A masterful—terrible!—stroke of genius to lay everything at the feet of magicians.”

  “How dare he tell that false story!” Camille exclaimed. “Especially when his own wife was complicit—”

  “Hush!” Sophie glanced at the people around them. “You mustn’t—”

  But she could not stop. “He blames magicians when he and the queen are the ones who have caused all this suffering!”

  The crimson-cloaked man who’d given the king the paper came forward. His face was stern, his bearing that of a military man who would ride for weeks to hunt a criminal and bring him to justice. An executioner. On his cloak was embroidered a hand surrounded by yellow flames, in its center a black C and M intertwined. He raised his arm for silence, and waited until it came.

  “His Royal Majesty Louis XVI does hereby proclaim that anyone possessing magical objects or practicing magic will be arrested by the newly formed Comité des Récherches Magiques. He will be charged as a traitor to France. He will be tried as any other traitor and given no special privileges, no matter his class or rank.”

  Camille curled her hand tighter around Lazare’s arm. No one must see my fear, she thought. No one can know.

  At that the crowd erupted into applause, chanting “Mort aux magiciens! Death to magicians!” Then one lone voice rose above the others
: “À la lanterne, les magiciens!” and the crowd roared even louder in response.

  “Magicians don’t exist!” a burly man growled. He stood only an arm’s length from Camille, wearing a workman’s trousers and clogs, his fair hair gritty with stone dust. Shaking his fists at the king, he cried, “It is the king who is at fault!”

  “Liar! Shut up!” A man in a dingy butcher’s apron shoved him so hard the workman stumbled back. His coarse mouth twisted with fury. “It’s the magicians that bewitch our wives and lay curses on our children!”

  Another man tried to pull him back. “Come away, Paul. You’ll make things worse—”

  The mason strode toward him, fists raised, shouting: “You defend the king? Can’t you see he takes no responsibility for what he’s done?” Wild-eyed, he spat at the butcher. “You are a traitor to the revolution!”

  In the butcher’s hand was suddenly a long knife.

  “Stop him!” Rosier shouted.

  Arms reaching, the crowd closed around the butcher—but not before he managed to force his knife into the mason’s side. The stricken man collapsed to his knees. Blood bloomed across his shirt, thick and fast.

  Camille could not move.

  “Call the police!” a woman screamed. “Fetch a surgeon!”

  Bracing his foot on the mason’s shoulder, the butcher yanked his knife loose. Gore welled from the wound. The crowd fell back, muttering and afraid.

  “This frightens you, does it, cowards?” The butcher raised the red blade above his head. “You want revolution? You must get used to the sight of death! Magicians and the traitors who support them will be the first to die!”

  “Paul!” his friend shouted. “Come away!”

  On the stage, the scarlet-cloaked man from the Comité signaled to one of his guards, who threaded his way toward the stabbed man. The butcher grinned as he wiped his knife on his apron. “He’s coming to congratulate me, I don’t doubt! Any other magician-lovers I can take care of?”