Enchantée(44)
On the back, in turquoise ink, Chandon had scrawled:
Jean-Marc étienne de Bellan, Marquis de Chandon
Thursdays after eight
Madame du Barry’s rooms
Please come was underlined twice.
With her finger she traced the words, GAMES AND PLEASURES, feeling where the type had bitten into the heavy paper. It was beautifully and expensively made. In her hand, the tiny square felt curiously alive, substantial but almost weightless. She lifted it to her nose.
It smelled of vetiver and, faintly, of blown-out candles.
She slipped it into her pocket. From the room under the eaves, she took the little painted nécessaire from its burned box and propped the foggy mirror on her bureau. The apartment was quiet; Sophie had left for Madame Bénard’s and though Camille couldn’t say why, exactly, it felt better that Sophie wasn’t here. Working the glamoire felt almost shamefully private.
When she heard the coachman shouting from the street, she took the brooch from its place on her bureau. Instead of worrying about how the dress appeared to relish her blood and seemed in fact to be lying in wait for it, she let her mind go to the pure heedless thrill of winning, the cool stacks of louis d’or piled on the gaming tables, and—though she’d intended for them to be her enemies—the young aristocrats she’d met last time. With that churn of conflict in her mind, she steadied the point against the skin on the inside of her elbow, hidden beneath her sleeve, and pushed it in.
23
She’d shown the pink card to a footman who told her the rooms in question were on the top floor, and directed her to go down one corridor and along another. Empty wine bottles, each with a sunny daisy in its mouth, had been left behind on a window ledge; by a closed door lay a pair of peacock-blue shoes, kicked onto their sides. In the wainscoting, mice scratched and squealed, the hallway’s floorboards creaked, and on the ceiling, paint was peeling, but she ignored it, focusing on the laughter and shouts of the gaming party drifting toward her.
In an instant, the hall’s dimness gave way to a series of cream-and-gold rooms, full of nobles in their fine clothes, trembling with feathers and ruffles, rich in lace and glinting with diamonds. The rooms buzzed with conversation and laughter; hundreds of pale pink candles—in the chandeliers, on the tables—burning as brightly as the animated faces. Camille suddenly wished she were outside in the garden, inhaling the cool evening alone, and not here in the crush. She did not belong here.
But the ancient magic in the dress refused to listen. It urged her on, its pleasure at being among the glittering crowd a steady thrum in her blood. It murmured to her of the seductive pressure of legs against petticoats, the rustle of hot breath across silk, and warned her of coming too close to the candles. Most of all, though, it showed her coins nestled in her lap, cool against its fabric. Camille touched a hand to the bodice and felt it tighten around her in response. She was here to win. All the rest meant nothing—or so she told herself as she wove her way into the first room.
Pausing on the threshold, she took in the unfamiliar, polished faces. There was only one she recognized at first glance: the queen’s, sitting at a far table, dressed in the deceptively simple white dresses she favored. A ribbon twined through her hair, her face was lightly powered; she wore jewels at her throat and on the fingers that held her cards. The king was not there; his lack of interest in gaming was well known. But there were plenty of handsome men at her table, and women, too, including the blond one with the nearly white hair and good marriage prospects. She’d left her lamb elsewhere tonight.
All of this was just as Chandon had promised. Still, that didn’t make it any easier to enter the room, to pretend that she belonged. What had she been thinking? That Chandon would be waiting for her by the door? Casting about the room for a familiar face, she wondered if she would even recognize him. Like half the men there, he had light-brown hair, but he didn’t wear his heavily powdered. At least he hadn’t the last time. She had no idea what he might look like tonight.
Settling her shoulders, she moved farther into the crush, begging pardon as she went, lifting a glass of champagne from a tray that sailed by on a footman’s palm. In the next room, shouts erupted, followed by a ripple of applause. “Encore une fois, Chandon!” someone called out. “Just once more!” Camille found a space between two courtiers and slipped through.
She found herself in a large room with painted panels of mythological scenes fitted into the walls. The room was filled with green baize-covered tables surrounded, several rows deep, by aristocrats who watched the games unfold. An older man pushed away from the card table, shaking his head. “Pas encore,” he muttered. “Who can play with the likes of you young people?”
Chandon, wearing a wildly patterned waistcoat and a beauty mark next to one of his lively hazel eyes, tipped back in his gilt chair, beaming with triumph. Camille could have thrown her arms around him, so relieved she was to have found him.
“Suit yourself, Monsieur le Comte,” he laughed. “There are plenty of people who will play with us. Aren’t there?” A few courtiers shuffled away from the table, smiling and shaking their heads. Chandon nodded to the boy sitting across from him. “I do believe they’re afraid of us.”
“Of you, perhaps,” the golden-haired Vicomte de Séguin replied. Neither of them had noticed her. She stood frozen, waiting. Perhaps they wouldn’t remember her. Nor would it matter if they did, she scolded herself. This was not about making friends. It was about making money.