Everything That Burns Page 9

  They had to get away.

  Under Camille’s feet, the ground rippled nauseatingly. The skirt and bodice of her dress were splattered with blood. A dark red river covered the cobbles and soaked the toe of her shoe. Her stocking was wet with it. Soon, she thought dimly, his blood will fill it entirely.

  “Camille?” Lazare said urgently. His face was very close, his cheek hazed with crimson spots. She tried to meet his eyes but could not: instead of seeing comfort there, she saw only his fear. She tried to take a deep breath, to steady herself, but her stays were too tight. Black pinpricks swarmed at the edges of her vision, closing in, and she felt herself falling backward—

  “Camille!” Sophie cried.

  “She’s feeling faint!” Lazare said to the bystanders. He had his arm around her, holding her up. “I’ll take her home.”

  Camille clutched at his coat as if it might keep her afloat. “Walk with me,” he said in her ear. “Pretend it is nothing, pretend—”

  Pretend what?

  Pretend she did not live in a magician’s mansion where magic seeped from the walls? Pretend that every object and room in the house was not suddenly a death sentence? What of the pamphlets that sold better than any pamphlets had a right to do? The fever that came upon her when she printed them? She knew she’d felt it before. It was as familiar to her as the beating of her own heart.

  “It was the blood,” she said, though it sounded unconvincing even to her. “That’s all it was.”

  “Please, tell me,” he said urgently. “You have given it up, haven’t you?”

  She had tried. For everyone’s sake.

  But instead she’d somehow unloosed it. And the consequences had been good—things he’d admired her for. Now what? How could she explain it to him? She could not say, Something happened when I printed the first pamphlet. A fever came on me, and I couldn’t stop. How could magic compel someone to purchase a pamphlet, or a newspaper the story was printed in? It made no sense.

  But magic, she knew, had its own logic.

  You are extraordinary, mon âme.

  She had seen the admiration in his deep brown gaze. But in the tension in his shoulders, the vague wariness in the line of his lips, was there not something else? Judgment? Revulsion, or fear? What would he think of her pamphlets if he knew that magic might be involved?

  She knew: she would be extraordinary no more.

  “Of course.” As if by saying it she could make it true, she added, “Magic is nothing to me.”

  15

  She could not wash the blood away. Though they had fled the mob, running back to the Hôtel Séguin, she had not been able to leave it behind. Adèle had thrown away Camille’s shoes and whisked her dress away to be cleaned, but the blood’s dark, iron scent clung to her skin. Lazare had washed his face, but when she looked at him, she still saw the tiny pinpricks of gore on his cheeks.

  The boys stayed for dinner, and as the salt was passed and the soup served, Camille pretended she was not afraid. That what had happened in the square was nothing for her to fear. She pretended to eat her food. She pretended not to see the worried looks that Sophie and Lazare gave each other when they thought she didn’t see. She pretended not to hear as they discussed what the new law might mean. As Camille flinched, Rosier claimed magicians were an easy target and wondered who would be next—foreigners? Jews? Under the hum of their conversation and the clink of glasses and silver, she could hear the relentless rustling of paper, like leaves before a storm.

  It pulled at her like a tide.

  Once the boys had gone home, Lazare kissing her on the forehead and telling her to rest, and everyone in the house had gone to bed, she stole downstairs, down the long hall to the printing room. She set her ear against the door. On the other side, the murmuring grew. The tiny hairs on her arms rose.

  Magic.

  For a terrifying moment, she thought she could hear words in it. Names. She thought of the burned box in which the enchanted dress had once been kept, the way it had seemed to call to her. She could pretend and pretend it did not exist, that she was somehow finished with it, but it was a lie. As long as this magic was here, as long as it wound its way into the pamphlets she printed, the officers of the Comité in their bloodred capes could arrest her for working la magie.

  What would Lazare think of her if the pamphlets failed and the girls were evicted? What would he think of her if she pretended to be someone to whom magic didn’t matter? When he’d told her to pretend, had he meant something more?

  Who would she then betray?

  Lazare?

  The girls?

  Herself?

  You are extraordinary, mon âme.

  The choices felt impossible.

  Crouching stone-still, listening to the sighing of the pamphlets and the restless creaking house around her, she felt like a mouse trapped in its hole. The weight of the Hôtel Séguin’s magic so heavy it would crush her. Whatever was happening, she had no idea how to control it. Why had Maman not taught her more about magic? Had she thought to protect Camille from magic through ignorance?

  The oil paintings in the hall shimmered, the clouds in their landscapes darkening. The faces in the portraits grew watchful, alert. The walls and the floor and the ceiling seemed to draw closer, as if the house wished to hold her in the palm of its hand. Too tired to resist, she gave in to the mesh of magic drifting around her.

  Faintly, a memory tapped against the window of her mind.

  Late at night, cold slinking along the colder floor, tears in her mother’s voice. Firelight wavering. An angry shout.

  What was it that had happened?

  She closed her eyes and the memory fluttered free.

  * * *

  She was small, and had woken to voices.

  Insistent, arguing. They were coming from the little salon in their apartment. Sliding quietly from bed so as not to disturb Sophie, she crept down the hall. The door to the salon stood open, and Camille wedged herself behind it so she might peer through the long vertical opening between the hinges.

  Illuminated by a sinking fire, her parents faced each other on the carpet, stiff as soldiers. Papa’s usually gentle face was ferocious, unrecognizable. His hand was out in front of him, palm up. Waiting. Opposite, Maman’s blue eyes blazed. Clutched to her chest was a small book, clad in green leather and decorated with a silver pattern. To Camille it resembled a forest, all leaves and branches. She’d learned her letters that winter, but she couldn’t read the book’s title. It slid away from her like water.

  “Give it to me, Anne-Louise,” Papa said.

  “So you can throw it on the fire? Absolutely not.”

  Her parents always told her: books are precious. Why did Papa want to destroy this one?

  “You wish to keep a book of magic in this house? After the way your mother treated you—your mother the magician?”

  “You know I renounced her.” Maman’s voice was both angry and sad. “I renounced that entire life for you. For all of us.” She looked so sorrowful then that Camille wanted to run to her, clasp her small hands around her mother’s waist and hold her tight. “You dream of raising up the downtrodden but cannot see we magicians were also persecuted. I don’t deny some magicians have done terrible things. But we are also people, and to be burned, beheaded—”

  “My darling.” Papa took a step toward her. “I’m sorry—”

  “Let me finish.” She was a stern statue, an angel in church with a burning sword. “We will be persecuted again, and you cannot tell me otherwise.”

  “The revolution will bring good times for all of us, Anne-Louise.”

  “If we magicians hide, like we are hiding now.” She gestured at the walls of the apartment, and Camille shrunk back into shadow. “But what if those good times do not come? Or if they come, they don’t come for us?”

  “Anne-Louise, I beg of you—”

  She tucked the book protectively to her chest. “I am annotating it for Camille.”

  Papa g
rowled, “Do not insist on this.”

  “She cannot be left ignorant about her heritage. Let her choose, later, if she wishes. Because I left my family to be with you, my education was cut short. There is too much about magic that I don’t know! Perhaps this book might even save us, if your revolution fails. Had you thought of that? Magic need not be wrong.” In a choked voice, she said, “Didier, am I wrong? Am I evil?”

  Papa’s face crumpled. “Never.”

  “But you won’t accept that I do magic?”

  “It is against everything I believe.” Papa’s voice was flat. “Everything I work for. Doesn’t our Camille deserve more than … magic?”

  “More?” Maman stared at the fire, and Camille could no longer see her face. “Perhaps I’ll never have to teach her. Perhaps this beautiful new world you believe in will come true.”

  Papa wrapped his arms around her, and she dropped her golden head on his shoulder. Camille could no longer see the green book. Maman’s back shook with sobs. She did not want to hear Maman cry.

  Back in her room, the bed was still warm. Her eyelids were closing when her mother knelt beside her. “Bonne nuit, mon trèsor,” she whispered, brushing her lips to Camille’s forehead. “It was just a bad dream.”

  Even then, she knew it wasn’t.

  * * *

  Camille blinked. She was still kneeling on the cold floor outside the printing room.

  Maman had wanted her to know more about magic. It was Papa who had not.

  She hadn’t known what “annotated” meant then, but she knew now: Maman had made notes in the margins for Camille to read. She’d wanted her to know what was written inside. Camille’s throat constricted at the thought of that green book lost. A book like that might have instructions for how to manage her feverish magic. But it was gone.

  The fire of revolution had taken it.

  Wait.

  There could not have been only one copy in all of France. There had to be others. She got to her feet.

  All around her the rustling continued. Louder, more insistent. In it were new voices, as faint and dry as husks. They were coming from the library, the room where the house’s magic was the strongest, the place she’d steadfastly avoided.

  Until now.

  16

  Candle in hand, Camille climbed the marble stairs toward the wing where the library waited. When she’d passed it before, the bitter burn of magic leaking from under the door had sent her hurrying past.

  Now she stood in front of its carved wooden door, inhaling those same acrid fumes. In the skull-shaped keyhole sat a great brass key. She turned it and the door swung back silently into the dark. Holding her candle high, in case—in case of what?—she stepped over the threshold.

  In case something is there, a small voice inside her replied.

  A shutter had blown open and vague moonlight filtered into the room. Adèle had told her the entire library had been pried loose piece by piece from some ancient castle and reinstalled at the Hôtel Séguin. Blackened oak panels ran from floor to ceiling, many of them carved with words in a scrolling language she did not know. She sensed they were wards to keep the books safe. Halfway up the walls, a narrow balcony ran like a ribbon around the room to give access to the books stored there, protected by filigreed metal gates. She squinted at their titles, but the words seem to rush away from her. The silvered spine of Maman’s green book had behaved in the same way. Imagine if she were to find a copy here—

  But first she would close the shutter. She wound her way past a desk, a long table covered with papers, a taxidermized deer. Reaching into the windy night air, she caught hold of the shutter, and pulled it closed.

  On the wall beside the window hung a large portrait of Séguin. In it, he sat beside a table, a crystal globe in his hand. His clothes were doubly gold: pale golden silk fretted with gold embroidery, and his stare was that of a raptor: proud and secretive, handsome and unnervingly cold. At the corner of his eye was painted a tear. His fingers were blackened, as if with soot. Strange. And in the corner of the portrait was a gilt circle with an M inside it, surrounded by five tiny stars. There was something captivating about the stars, and as she leaned in to see better, her hand brushed the portrait’s frame.

  It burned.

  She tried to pull away, but couldn’t. Unwillingly, her hand gripped the frame as a stream of anguished memories rushed through her. Fear, as someone—Séguin? A person he loved?—was carried away by a river. The cloying rose scent of the queen’s perfume. More slowly, other images came. A dried leaf, an empty room, a pitiless expanse of ice, and an aching despair at no longer being able to work magic.

  And then, in a candlelit room, in a whirl of laughter and color, there was a girl in a blue-gray dress who seemed to shine brighter than anyone else. She was cheating at cards. He spoke to her and, as if his wishes were coming true, she held out her hand so he might read her palm. A hunger rose up in him when he touched her, the jump of magic from her hand to his like fire in his veins. How he wanted what she had. The urge to take take take was so strong he nearly sank to his knees in front of her. She is what will save me. But the agony it caused him, to resist, to wait—

  Camille yanked her hand away so hard that she stumbled backward. The girl in the blue-gray dress, the girl full of magic, had been her. Séguin’s desire for her had been for her magic, that she knew. That he had needed it so badly that he’d do anything to get it, she hadn’t guessed. But that was what magic did.

  Pressing her scorched hand to her lips, she went up the staircase to the little balcony that ran around the library walls. As she held up her candle, the lettering on the spines shifted like smoke. Tentatively, she reached out to touch one. For a moment, the swirling stilled. Alchemical History. Another one, bound in pale blue: Essays on the Magical Life. She tried to pull it out but it refused to budge.

  For an hour, she searched the shelves, running her fingers along the spines of the bespelled books. She found several green books—each one set her heart hammering—but none were a copy of the one she was looking for. Or if it was, it was so well hidden by magic that she’d never find it on her own.

  She recalled the scarlet-caped leader of the Comité, standing beside the king. The grim set of his jaw, the cold disgust of his stare. And that badge upon his cloak: a hand surrounded by flame. Its fingers blackened, like in Séguin’s portrait. She did not think it a coincidence.

  Before, her ignorance had been an embarrassment, something to feel ashamed of when someone like Chandon knew so much about magic and its history. But now her ignorance was a danger. Not just to herself and the girls who were counting on her to help them, but also to Sophie and Lazare. She needed answers, and she needed them soon.

  She would go downstairs and write to Chandon.

  As she stepped into the hall, ready to close the door behind her, she glanced back into the library’s gloom. She could have sworn the portrait had wanted to show her something. To remind her of something.

  But what?

  WHAT IS MAGIC

  BUT

  A TOOL

  TO CHEAT AND STEAL

  AND

  MURDER?

  PATRIOTS

  IN THE NAME OF FRANCE

  STAND UP!

  ERADICATE

  THIS

  PLAGUE

  OF MAGICIANS

  17

  Two days later she had printed enough pamphlets to bring to Lasalle’s, and all the way there, she felt as if she were being watched. Though she could not see anyone following her, she still felt exposed, and pulled the collar of her cloak up around her neck. On the lips of passersby she heard the word magician, spat like a curse; on an old wall, freshly printed posters denouncing magic spread like vines. She itched to uproot them with her hands.

  In the bookshop, on the large table where Lasalle displayed pamphlets and posters for sale, she noticed one that compared magicians to a plague. It was long, the entire back of the sheet covered, and unsigned. The type seemed f
amiliar, as did the printer’s mark. “Who writes these, monsieur?”

  “I don’t know. As you see, the writer is anonymous. But they sell well.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Straightforward and to the point. Exciting. People feel safe when they hang them up. My great-grandmother hung garlic, tied with red thread, on her front door. This is … a more modern approach.”

  She gritted her teeth. Magicians were now evil spirits to be guarded against? How could people be so simple as to believe this? With a few well-chosen words, Louis XVI had made things much, much worse. “Do you think magicians are like vampires?”

  “Can a magician slip through a keyhole? Down a chimney? Rumor has them everywhere in Paris. I doubt they even exist. They are the monster under the bed the king uses to make the people behave.” His mouth twitched. “Now! Madame, do you see this?” He pointed to a small metal box with a lock. “Donations for your girls.”

  “Truly?” she gasped.

  He gave it a brisk tap. “Customers have learned of their plight and given money in case it might be useful.”

  “Thank you, monsieur!” The girls could use this, she knew. But more than money they needed their home. “Has your friend at the mayor’s office had any luck?”

  Sagely, Lasalle nodded. “I believe it will happen. The mayor fears an outcry if he doesn’t stop the eviction.”

  “That’s fantastic!” She wanted to throw her arms around Lasalle. “Can I tell them it’s over? That they can stay?”

  He held up his hand. “Another few days. It’s the mayor’s decision.”

  “But I can give them hope?”

  “That you can do.”

  The past few days had been dark and difficult, but now a tide of happiness welled up in her. Revolution was ever spinning, like a many-sided die tossed out in a game—you never knew which side might face up. Now the girls’ luck, at least, had changed. Even Lasalle had been changed, and the thought made her bold. “I have a business idea to propose.”