Enchantée(23)

Just as if it were a scrap of metal.

Quickly, she scooped up the coins, shoving them into her purse.

“Wait! One more game!” the girls shouted as Camille snatched up the dresses, hugging them close. She had staked everything and won. Her pulse jumped in her throat, keeping time with the question that raced through her mind: how? How? How? But she knew.

She’d thought la magie ordinaire could only turn coins.

Apparently it could do so much more.

The girls pushed away from the table. Claudette jabbed a wine bottle at Camille. Her voice was hard. “Sit down and play, m’selle. This isn’t close to over.”

“Désolée,” she said, though she wasn’t sorry at all. Camille backed away toward the door. “I’ve had enough.”

Her mind blank with fear that the girls would catch her, she elbowed past the gamblers watching the roulette wheel while the croupier cried, “Les jeux sonts faits!” No more bets could be placed now. As the wheel spun, the ball slipped from its position on the rim of the wheel and began to race, red blurring into black as the wheel whispered its promises: riches, luck, transformation.

Dodging a pair of the duc’s guards, Camille vanished into the crowds.





14


“Count it,” Camille said as she tossed her purse on the kitchen table. The back of her dress was soaked with sweat. She’d come home from the Palais-Royal running the whole way, as if the two girls would come after her, their dirty fingers reaching into her purse to take back what they thought was theirs.

Sophie began sorting the coins into piles. “There’s not so very much,” she said, a tiny V forming between her eyebrows. “Only sixty livres. Alain didn’t give you any more?”

“Alain was dead drunk,” she said, wearily. “There were two girls there—”

“What girls?”

“The kind of girls who gamble with people like Alain.”

Worriedly, Sophie rearranged the coins on the scarred surface of the table.

There was no use pretending, not any longer. “Alain gambled away all he’d taken from us and our dresses, too.”

“He didn’t,” Sophie said, but the downward arc of her mouth showed she knew it might be true.

“He took all the money we’d saved for the rent.” Camille paced to the window that gave out over the tilting roofs and chimneys of Paris. Down there, somewhere, was the running girl Camille had seen the night Alain pulled his knife, the girl Camille would do anything not to be. Perhaps she was safe, hiding in a hole with her crust of bread. Or perhaps she was caught, in prison, plagued by rats and cold puddles and hard, grabbing hands. Who would help you when you were brought that low? No matter how hard you toiled, you would never rise, never have enough for a safe bed, a loaf of bread, a pair of shoes. Because in every instance, the cards were stacked against you. When you were that poor, no one cared if you lived or died. Not even magic could save you then.

Fierce tears trembled on Sophie’s eyelashes. “How could he think he could make money at cards?”

“That doesn’t matter now. He lost.” Unlike Camille, who could find no printer willing to take her on, even for the smallest tasks, or Sophie, whose work at Madame Bénard’s shop earned her only a meager salary, Alain had a job. He should have been collecting a salary from the Guards, and the knowledge that he threw this away made her insides burn. “And the rent is due.”

“What should we do?”

“What those girls did.” They’d tried to cheat her and she’d bested them at their own game. All the way home, running along the river, she’d been buoyed by the thought of it. Her mind had built the idea, tested it, polished it. It wasn’t perfect, but it was something. A chance.

“You mustn’t, those men at the Palais-Royal—” Sophie’s voice quavered to a halt.

“What?” Camille pretended to be shocked. “Oh, not that.”

“What then?” Sophie’s thin shoulders hunched as if she were readying herself for more bad news. “Tell me.”

On the mantel sat a stack of playing cards, tied with a scrap of ribbon. Papa had made them when Camille was a little girl; she remembered how quickly he’d painted the cards, sketching the girls’ faces as the queens. What kind of queens would you be, mes filles? he’d wondered aloud. A beautiful and kind one, Sophie had said. And you, Camille? he'd asked. I’d be a just and righteous one who helps her people, she'd replied, very serious. Papa had turned away so she wouldn’t see his tears.

Scooping up the worn, familiar cards, Camille sat down at the table with Sophie.

“Cards?”

Camille nodded as she began to shuffle, hand over hand until the cards blurred. Years of playing with her sister and Alain had made her fingers sure and deft, the softened cards slipping through her hands like water. Playing cards and gambling was one thing. To turn the cards as she’d done at the Palais-Royal was another. Excitement throbbed in her chest—fear, too. If she couldn’t get coins to keep their shape, how could she keep the king of clubs that she wanted from turning into a four of spades that she didn’t want at all?

Cutting the deck carefully three times, she stacked the cards. Her fingertips rested on the top one for a moment as she tried to sense its shape and color. Absolutely nothing appeared in her mind.