Enchantée(105)

“It is you, then,” he marveled. His expression was uncertain. “Camille.”

“It is.” She exhaled. However awful she looked, she was relieved to finally be done with the hiding. “How long have you known?”

He took her hand, brought it to his lips. She felt his smile against her fingers. “Almost immediately, at the game of cache-cache. I suspected, anyway.”

“And your flirting with the baroness?”

“I thought I was flirting with you.”

He’d known her, under the magic, all this time. It was a strange joy: he’d not been fooled by her masquerade. He had seen her. “Why did you not ask?”

A melancholy expression tugged at his mouth. “I didn’t understand how you did it. Nor why. Would you have told me?”

Behind Lazare, two silhouettes descended the stairs and crunched along the gravel walk. Camille and Lazare stepped off the path to let them pass; they were an older couple, the woman walking with her hand tucked confidentially around her husband’s elbow. They all smiled as they greeted one another. It was like seeing two rare creatures, unicorns or giraffes—a court marriage that lasted.

When they had passed, Camille said, “I couldn’t. The things you said about magic. I thought”—she steeled herself—“you would despise me for it.”

“I don’t like it because of how people have used it. But that’s not important. I was worried about you.” Cautiously, he said, “If I figured it out, don’t you think that others will?”

“But no one else has.” Except the other magicians.

“Are you sure? This is a dangerous game, Camille. Louis XIV, the Sun King, burned magicians at the stake! The National Assembly has promised us a constitution, there’s rebellion in Paris—each day the people’s attacks against the nobles grow. If an aristocrat magician were discovered at court, what do you think our Louis XVI would be forced to do?”

“He wouldn’t kill us.” But she wasn’t sure. A king trying to stay in power might do anything.

“What if killing magicians—the symbol of all that’s wrong with the aristocracy—would make the people of France love him?”

Why couldn’t he understand why she’d done it?

“Lazare, you knew me, in my Paris life.” The glamoire was fading; the trembling was coming on.

His grip tightened on her hand. “But why? Why risk death?”

“Don’t you know?” It was like explaining why she’d saved the balloon from crashing. “I had no choice. My parents died of the pox, my brother took everything we had and gambled or drank it away. He might have killed me, with a knife or his fists. His debts were huge and his creditor wanted recompense. With my father’s press gone, I lost my only skill. Magic was the one other thing I knew to do.”

Once more, a flare of light cascaded over the palace roof.

“But surely, someone could have helped—some other way than this—”

Camille exhaled, exasperated. “Only someone like you would say that.”

“Someone like what?” He let go of her hand, suddenly sober.

“Someone with choices.”

Lazare turned his head to the midnight sky, as if searching for answers there. “You think I have choices?”

“You’re an aristocrat. I saw your parents at the opera—they have money. An estate. Rooms at Versailles. They gave you a tutor!” she said, unable to stop bitter envy seeping out.

“And that means I have choices?” Lazare swallowed hard. “Look at my skin and tell me I have choices. Look at my clothes.”

He pulled off his wig, grabbed hold of his own hair. Its beautiful inky darkness absorbed all the light. “Vous voyez? No French nobleman has hair like this. This is my mother’s hair. My Indian hair. Didn’t you hear what Séguin called me? Sauvage. And the rest of them?” he asked, angrily. “The courtiers ask me if I am the son of Tipu Sultan. They ask me if, when I’m ‘at home,’ I ride on elephants, and if a person can make his fortune simply by collecting huge pearls from the sand in Pondichéry. They think me exotic, like a tiger in the king’s menagerie. The ladies covet my father’s fortune, but only as long I wear a nobleman’s disguise.”

Lazare’s chest rose and fell. White powder drifted on the air between them.

“You feel you have no choices.” She’d believed changing her appearance would free her from the cage she beat her wings against. But somehow, even though she had money and every material thing she needed, she only felt more and more trapped.

“Do I?” His voice was wandering, lost. “I was thirteen when I was brought to Versailles. On the day my father and I arrived, we walked in these gardens. I had a little sailboat with me, its motor one I’d made myself. We passed a fountain, I put it in, but it stalled. So I did what I would have done at home, with élouard: threw off my hat and coat and jumped in to fetch it. When I climbed out, my father was furious. Like an idiot, I asked he if was displeased the boat had failed. He told me he was displeased because a nobleman does not jump into a fountain to fetch a plaything. He didn’t understand when I said it was an experiment, not a toy.”

She felt his pain like a physical thing. “He wanted you to be someone else, an aristocrat.”