The Belles (The Belles #1)(65)

“I need to speak with you.” Her nervous energy radiates out like the rays of a too-strong sun.

“And I have a question for you. Why didn’t Arabella return home?” I ask, before she can lecture me about whatever it is.

Ivy bristles. “How do you know about her?”

“Is she one of your sisters?” I say. “I saw her.”

“No, she’s from the generation before me. She’s the queen’s favorite Belle. She kept her at court to work with Princess Charlotte.”

“She’s been at court that long? Du Barry allowed it?”

“The queen gets what the queen wants,” Ivy says.

Servants push in breakfast carts overflowing with hard-boiled eggs, grilled-meat and fruit tarts, pastries, fried bacon, and sweet toast, but Ivy shoos them out, then races to Elisabeth’s office door. She knocks three times and presses her ear against the wall. The door doesn’t swing open.

“Good, she’s gone.” Ivy hovers over me. “What happened last night?” she asks. “With Sophia?”

“How did you know about that?” I pluck a cheese tart and plate from the cart and sit on a chaise.

“I’m supposed to know all things when it comes to you and your transition to court.”

“Like a spy?” I tease, trying to make her smile and relax a little.

“Like an older sister.” She sweeps the plate from my hands and sets it on the table. “I need you to focus and tell me exactly what happened.” She furiously knits her lace-gloved hands.

“Sophia brought me to her workshop. I saw her—”

“The portraits.” She flattens her hands on her waist-sash as if she’s nursing a stomachache. “It’s starting again.”

“What is?” I reach for my plate.

She slams it to the table.

I jump.

“I need you to focus right now. Her issues. Her obsessions. I thought she’d gotten better. I thought I’d helped her,” she says.

“You talk about her as if she’s ill.”

“She is unhinged.”

“A bit, yes. She’s pressured, anxious. She wants to be the most beautiful,” I say. “I think I can help her, too.”

Ivy freezes. Her stare burns. “I thought that, too. Foolishly. You can’t tell? You don’t sense it?”

“Sense what?”

She squeezes down next to me on the chaise, so close I catch a scent of the lavender cream she wears. “I’m not supposed to poison your thoughts. Du Barry and the Beauty Minister gave me strict instructions not to tell you things.” Her voice quivers. She pauses as doors open and shut in other parts of the Belle apartments.

“Tell me what?” My pulse flutters.

Ivy glances over her shoulder. Breakfast attendants fill teapots with piping-hot water, and set down carafes of snowmelon juice. “Wait,” she whispers to me. “Leave us, please,” she tells them. “I’ll ring the bell when you can return.”

They scurry out.

“Sophia has dark impulses.” She is as still as stone. “When I was named the favorite, she had just turned thirteen. One of the queen’s ladies-of-honor gave her a teacup crocodile. It was a tiny little thing named Pascale, with sharp teeth and a long tail that dragged behind him like a train of pearls. But Sophia had had her heart set on a teacup dragon. Those had become increasingly rare a few years earlier. Royal breeders couldn’t get one to survive beyond a few hours after hatching.” Ivy takes a deep breath. “Sophia forced me to do beauty work on Pascale.”

“We worked on our teacup dogs and the stray teacup cats at home,” I remind her.

“Yes, but we only changed the color of their fur, for arcana practice.” She eyes the front salon doors. “Sophia made me break his back”—her voice cracks—“and refashion the bones into a pair of wings.”

My hand goes to my mouth.

“I had to snap his neck and stretch it out so he looked more like a dragon than a crocodile. Then she tried to make him fly.”

I raise my hand. “I don’t want to hear any more.”

“She dropped him off a balcony. She killed him.”

“Ivy, I told you I didn’t want to know.” I leap up from the chaise.

“You have to know.”

“She was just a child.”

“This was only a few years ago. What if those impulses have grown with her, rather than diminished?”

“I don’t want to talk about this anymore.” I storm out of the main salon.

“Camille,” Ivy calls out. “Camille.”

Inside my bedroom, I slam the door, then step onto my terrace. A cool breeze carries leaves across the floor like a prism of windy-season makeup colors—marigold, chestnut, scarlet, apricot. I wish the breeze could sweep away what Ivy just told me. Whisk it off to some other place.

A bright leaf gets caught on the abacus on my desk. I rescue it and rub it between my fingers. I smell it and I think of Maman. When the warm months turned windy, she would take me around the edges of the forest that surrounded Maison Rouge de la Beauté, and we’d hunt for leaves, collecting only the most beautiful, the brightest, still rich with color. Back in our room, she’d show me how to use them to make natural-looking pigments and mix hair shades, and we’d press them between tomes of fairy tales to keep them as records of our adventures.