Enchantée(26)

15


Camille pulled hard at the lid of the charred wooden box. It refused to budge.

In the room under the eaves, the whispering was insistent, impossible to ignore.

A dark and tricky magic, Camille’s mother had called the glamoire. In their magic lessons, she’d deflected any questions about the burned box. If Camille pressed her, she would say, pitching her voice so no one else could hear: If you don’t like working la magie, you will not like that at all. Stay away from that box.

The candle Sophie carried threw strange, leaping shadows onto the walls and ancient beams of the attic space. Where the roof slanted down to meet the floor, black piles of mouse droppings lay; in the far corner, under the eaves, something scratched. Bats.

“I’m afraid,” Sophie said in a small voice.

“It’s just a box.” It smelled of scorch and it had a kind of warmth to it that made Camille’s skin crawl. But glamoire was just another kind of magic, wasn’t it? Stronger, perhaps, than la magie ordinaire she used to turn cards or nails, because a glamoire turned oneself. Still, the glamoire wasn’t their enemy, whatever Maman had said. She would open the trunk and see what was inside.

“But Alain didn’t take it. What if he knew it was bad luck?”

“Alain knows nothing about magic.” This trunk would be their escape. It had to be.

“If you can’t open it, maybe it shouldn’t be opened,” Sophie cautioned. She was holding the candle as near as she could without stepping any closer.

Sinking back on her heels, Camille dragged the box into the candle’s wavering circle of light. The box’s surface was blistered and ridged, as if someone had shoved it into a fire and then—for whatever reason—regretted it. It had no lock, no visible hinges, only a seam the width of a hair running all the way around the top. Camille worked her fingernails under it, running them back and forth until she felt the lid loosen. As she shoved the lid up, the smell of ashes hung in the air. The hair on her nape tingled.

“Camille, I think you should close it.”

“I’m not afraid,” she said to Sophie—and to the box. The box remained as it was, leaking magic. “Bring the candle a bit closer, would you?”

With a little whine of worry, Sophie held the candlestick over the open trunk.

In the half-light, something glimmered: wide lengths of folded fabric stippled with gold threads. Camille reached in and pulled the bundle out. It was much heavier than she’d thought it would be, the silk threatening to slither out of her hands. And longer, so that she had to take several steps backward before it slid fully from the trunk.

“Oh,” said Sophie in a hush, her hand pressed to her mouth. “It’s a grand habit!”

Such a gown was worn only at the most formal court occasions. Weddings. Easter. All the important events of the court calendar. It wasn’t designed to be beautiful, necessarily, but to be costly, to show how rich the wearer was.

Camille shook out its wide skirt. She coughed as dust—as well as a thick fug of magic—rose into the air. Made up in cloth-of-gold, it was embroidered with bronze ferns that twined among flowers and down the train. Camille removed a matching bodice from the trunk; between the ferns’ curving leaves, crystal anemones glowed.

“This belonged to Maman?” Camille stared at the garlanded and beribboned skirt. What would her mother have done with this?

“Maybe it was Grandmère’s? She lived at Versailles, when Maman was a little girl.”

Camille held the dress up. In her arms it rustled, whispering. Tears in the fabric showed where the trimmings had ripped away; several embroidered garlands dangled sadly from threads. Many of the silk roses edging the hem were dirty, the train’s creamy lining grass-stained.

“It looks like it’s been stepped on by horses.” Sophie rubbed the old silk between her fingers. “It’s so old and worn, it’s practically falling apart. Why ever would Maman save this?”

In Camille’s hands, the skirt felt dangerously alive. As if it had ideas, memories. She blinked and they passed through her in a blur: dewed grass, the press of a man’s body in a dance, the wicked flame of a candle, the black loneliness of the box. “It’s la magie bibelot—magic caught in an enchanted object. I think I’m supposed to wear it.”

A miniature had tumbled out of its folds and lay on the floor. It was so small she could have enclosed it between her forefinger and thumb. Set in a frame of false diamonds, a woman gazed out at Camille with blue, wide-set eyes that could have been Sophie’s. Above her rouged cheeks her hair was tightly coiled and powdered, fat rubies gleaming around her neck. Her crimson lips were parted, as if she were about to speak.

“Who is it? Grandmère?” Camille said, as old resentment flamed to life.

“That’s not Grandmère. Her hairstyle is a hundred years old. One of Maman’s family, I suppose. Back in the time of Le Roi Soleil, Louis XIV?”

“So long ago, during the Sun King’s reign? Whoever she is, she looks just like you.” Camille turned the miniature over and there, in faded ink, was scrawled a name. “‘Cécile Descharlots.’ I can’t read the title—‘Baroness de la Fontaine,’ I think.” An aristocrat. “You think the dress was hers?”

Sophie nodded as she edged closer to the box. “They were all magicians, weren’t they? Our ancestors?”