Enchantée(40)

“Pardon?” she asked, incredulous. He’d been thinking of her? All these days, just as she had?

Rosier winked. “Don’t mind me. It’s my role in life to exaggerate.”

The creaking door slid open to reveal a vast, high-ceilinged room. It was an old riding ring, with a viewing stand trimmed with faded bunting and full of something that looked like furniture. Where the ceiling met the wall ran a row of clerestory windows. They were dusty from years of neglect but let in enough light. Pigeons nested in the rafters, cooing and occasionally startling across the empty space. Tables of different sizes stood haphazardly on the dirt floor, paper littering their surfaces, as well as large felt-lined boxes of instruments, their lids splayed open. All of this Camille could have imagined, based on her father’s shop and his various inventions. But she hadn’t imagined a group of older women, mobcaps covering their hair, sitting at a huge table in the corner, sewing together long pieces of fabric. One of them tsked loudly at Camille.

She flushed and pretended to be invisible. And in turning her back to the seamstresses, she saw Lazare.

He was standing by one of the long tables. He wore no coat over his vest, only a white shirt underneath, open at the neck. He was not looking at the drawings scattered on the table beside him but up, through a spyglass, at pigeons resting in the rafters. With his left hand, he scribbled notes on a piece of paper, not taking his eyes from the birds. The rapt way he looked at the ordinary pigeons, as if there were nothing in the world that was beneath his notice, made her smile. It reminded her of the way he’d looked at her when they’d stood by the balloon’s chariot. As if she were the only still point in a spinning world, the only thing that mattered.

Rosier cleared his throat. “Look who’s come to pay a visit.”

Lazare lowered his glass.

His face changed when saw her; she felt his recognition like a stab of joy.

When she’d been up on the roof on the rue Charlot, hoping for a glimpse of his balloon, she’d never truly believed she would see him again. When once more he appeared out of thin air at the Place des Vosges and invited her to come here, she’d feared it was to be kind, because of her eye. She’d even worried she would come to the workshop and it would be closed. Or the address would be wrong. It was hard to hope when things hadn’t gone well for such a long time. And yet, here they were, she and Lazare, standing in this strange room, dust motes dancing overhead. It was suddenly beautiful to her.

“Et voilà,” Lazare said, beaming. He grabbed his coat from a chair and shrugged it on, apologetic. “We’re a bit informal here, as you can see. The ladies don’t seem to mind.”

Camille guessed that they didn’t mind at all.

Lazare bowed low, adding an elegant flourish of the kind she’d seen the courtiers use at Versailles. “Would you like a tour, mademoiselle?” He stepped next to Camille and for a moment she thought he might take her hand. He didn’t—probably worried she’d hide her hands as she’d foolishly done before.

Rosier trailed after them as they walked. “Wait until you see what we’ve been doing,” he said. “C’est magnifique! And why shouldn’t it be? Aren’t we living in a time when anyone might try his hand at anything?”

Maybe we are, Camille thought as Lazare stood next to her, so close that his sleeve brushed hers as he pointed out how the seamstresses shaped the rubberized silk that made up the balloon’s membrane. The women beamed at him, called him their brave boy, but had only frowns for Camille. She could guess what they were thinking—a girl among all these boys—but she didn’t care. Not now, standing here with him.

When she asked Lazare what was in the jumbled heap in the viewing stand, he sighed. “Do you truly wish to see? They’re the worst.”

She did. The winglike oars poking out of the heap had been intended to help with steering, he told her, as had two rudders, one the size of a small boat’s, the other bigger than Camille.

“What’s wrong with them?” she asked.

Lazare squinted at the strange machines as if trying to see them better. “They’re all mistakes. I have a book by Leonardo da Vinci that shows how water is full of currents. We thought we could steer through the air the same way.” He shook his head regretfully. “Absolutely wrong.” He gestured at an object that resembled a miniature windmill. “And that one’s called a moulinet. It’s supposed to help with navigating the air currents. That didn’t work, either.” Lazare rubbed his forehead as if just thinking about them gave him a headache. “Failures, every last one. You must think me a fool, mademoiselle.”

“Hardly.” She thought of all the botched prints she’d made when she first worked as her father’s apprentice, the ones that became fuel for the stove—or folded bagatelles—once she’d ruined both sides. “I did the same when I first learned to print—”

“You print? Paper?”

Camille bit her lip. Having just passed the shop, it was more in her mind than usual, but also more fraught, like a hole in the ice she didn’t want to go too close to. “I did, before. My first attempts were worse than any of those windmills. And I was just trying to do something that had already been done! I wasn’t inventing anything.” What she’d wanted to say was getting away from her, now that he was looking at her so intently.