Enchantée(53)

“We can go through the clouds, if you like.” Lazare seemed to want her to say yes, but Camille shook her head, once. It was all she could do to hang on.

They were sailing above Paris. There was the river Seine, a dazzling silver ribbon winding through the city. There, the two islands, where the sun flamed in the stained-glass windows of Sainte-Chapelle. In the other direction, the hilly vineyards of Montmartre, where once she’d picnicked with her family.

“It’s all so far away,” she said. “So small.”

“You might have told me you were afraid of heights.” Lazare rested his elbows on the railing, so close to her that she saw the day’s growth of beard on his cheeks, the inky tilt of his eyelashes. “I wouldn’t have thought any less of you.”

Mademoiselle, your disregard for your own life is apparently equal to mine, he’d said when she saved the balloon. Then, and now, she wanted it to be true. She didn’t want to be afraid.

She tried to loosen her grip on the chariot’s railing. “I’m not frightened.”

He looked away, as if to hide a smile. “Watch now. Everything’s going to change. I’d start sketching before Armand notices that you’re not doing anything,” he said, too low for Armand to catch.

Camille rested the notebook against the gondola’s rim. She stood closer to the edge than she would have liked—it was, in fact, The Edge—but there was nowhere else to go. The wind snatched at the paper. Taking a deep breath, she began, sketching quickly, loosely, as she tried to capture an impression of what it was that lay below.

Paris had become an unfamiliar city. The dark, dank alleyways she ran through were now just lines, the awe-inducing cathedrals of Notre-Dame and Saint-Eustace shrunken small as wooden toys. She rendered the Place des Vosges with its crisscross of paths, thinking, There by the apothecary I ran into Lazare. She drew the mesh of streets around it, and then traced the network of lanes running from the rue Saint-Antoine toward the river. She drew in the landmarks of the grand h?tels, their names those of the noble families who had lived there: Soubise, Sully, Carnavalet.

When she walked past one of these imposing houses, she couldn’t see the whole thing: they were simply too big, their walls too high. Instead, she might glimpse through their iron gates fine horses hitched to gleaming carriages or hear the drift of music from some inner room. But from the air, she could see them—whole, not a world away but side by side with the rue Charlot. “How strange it is, monsieur.”

Lazare came to stand next to her. “What is?”

“On the ground, all the quarters of Paris feel so separate, like foreign countries. The aristocrats in their own fine neighborhoods, we in ours. But up here, it’s different—no one could deny that the houses touch each other.”

“Of course they don’t!” shouted Armand.

“Things are different in the air.” Lazare lowered his voice. “Sometimes I wish I could stay up here forever.”

“With Armand?” she teased. His face was a hand’s width from hers. If the balloon tipped—what would happen? What would it be like to touch him? She was in terrible, wonderful danger: her toes right at the precipice.

Lazare shook his head. “I’m here with you.”

A thrill of happiness ran through her. “Me?”

On the other side of the gondola, Armand snickered. “It’s obvious what he means.”

“Stop eavesdropping!” Lazare called out. “Or I’ll throw you overboard.” He began to shrug out of his coat. “You must be cold.”

“Not at all!” she said, not wanting to be lesser, frailer, more in need.

But Lazare held the coat out and she relented. As she slipped her arms into the too-long sleeves and pulled the collar up around her neck, she caught the scent of leather and horses, the bright note of his cologne, and under it, the warm musk of his skin. Heat climbed Camille’s neck. Wearing his coat was almost like touching him.

Casting about for something to say, she focused on his face: “How did you get that scar? The one in your eyebrow?”

Lazare raised it high. “This? In the country, when I was a child.”

“What happened?”

“A waterwheel I’d put into the stream snapped and one of the blades cut me. I almost lost my eye.” He glanced at hers, where the bruise had been.

“But you didn’t.”

“No. Instead, my tutor, Monsieur élouard, was punished. His pay was docked, reduced to that of a kitchen maid. My parents hoped he would leave on his own after that.”

The sun-dappled stream she’d imagined was now tainted with shadows. Aghast, she said, “But it wasn’t his fault! You were experimenting—”

A muscle worked in his cheek. “My father always tells me how important it is to be honorable, how that’s the most important quality a person can have. My father is—how can I explain?”

His grip tightened on the gondola’s railing.

Camille waited. Below them, Paris dwindled, insignificant.

“Are you certain you want to hear this?”

“Of course.”

He took a deep breath. “My mother was an Indian woman, in Pondichéry, where I was born. She was beautiful, my father said, and clever. He also told me that she chose him.” The wind pushed a few strands of Lazare’s hair against his forehead; he brushed them roughly back. “I try to imagine that place sometimes—the heat, the hue of the ocean—but I can’t.”