Enchantée(56)

Back in Paris, her winnings paid for food and clothes. Now that they had a steady supply of food, Sophie gained back much of her strength. Her cough disappeared; the laudanum bottle no longer needed replacing. Developing ideas for hat designs from Camille’s dreamy descriptions of Versailles’s gardens, Sophie became an asked-for designer at Madame Bénard’s, and the prices she commanded rose.

Soon they’d have a maid to dress them, a cook to make their food, and scullery maids and housemaids. Now that they paid their rent on time, Madame Lamotte did all she could for the girls. As if she knew they had a foot out the door. When Camille stumbled home at dawn, weak and shaking as the glamoire leaked out, she sometimes found Madame Lamotte drowsing outside her apartment door, waiting.

“And where have you been tonight?” she’d say to Camille, her voice dim with sleep. Her great-grandfather had been a nobleman’s companion during the Years of Gold, in the second half of the seventeenth century when Louis XIV was the Sun King and Versailles the center of Europe. When she learned Camille was going to court—Camille never told her how she went, not exactly—Madame told her stories her great-grandfather had told her, of when an elephant escaped the king’s menagerie, or when miniature armadas battled on the Grand Canal.

“How was the Life,” she asked, voice quavery, “the glory of it all?”

“Incroyable as always, madame.” Camille smiled wanly, pulling her cloak over her tattered dress. What should she tell Madame? Something pretty. “When I was leaving, the nightingales were singing in the lin den walks. The queen had hung Chinese lanterns in all the trees around the Petit Trianon, as if fairies danced among us.”

“I hope you did not gamble too much, my dear. My great-grandfather didn’t like it. ‘Only death and duels will come of it,’ he would say. ‘Death and duels.’”

“No, not too much gambling,” she replied, bobbing a curtsey before she scooped up her skirts, heavy with hidden coins, and climbed the rest of the stairs.

She was rising, and it was glorious to rise.





29


Coming home late from the dressmaker’s and wearing a leaf-green silk dress she’d bought with her own earnings, Sophie flung herself into a chair and kicked off her shoes. Fant?me wound around her shins as she massaged her feet. “All that standing is making my feet grow.”

“Madame Bénard’s working you hard, now that you’ve been feeling better?”

“Pas de tout. She could hardly care less about my health. It’s the customers. The husbands want me to model the dresses so their wives can decide. They want me to walk back and forth in front of them.”

“And you think it’s so they can see the dresses?”

“Very funny.” Sophie frowned.

Camille remembered the time she’d stopped by Madame Bénard’s and Sophie had already left, with a man—or so Madame had said. “Do they ever want to walk you home?” Camille asked.

“The customers?” Sophie bent to pull off a stocking. “Never.” She flung it over the arm of her chair and started on the next one. “By the way, someone’s downstairs charming the wrinkles off Madame Lamotte.”

Camille looked up from the ledger in which she kept their accounts. Sophie’s gossip was usually about Madame Bénard’s and which dashing gentleman had paid Sophie blush-worthy compliments. “Someone you know?”

Sophie smiled as if she had a secret. “Shall I give you a hint?”

“Please,” Camille said, rubbing at her eyes. She’d returned to Paris in the small hours of the night, stumbling from the carriage and pulling the hood of her cape over her head to hide her red-rimmed eyes. It was always this way after the glamoire. A fatigue she felt deep in her bones, an ache at their very centers. And it only became worse, it seemed, the more she did it.

Only coffee ever helped.

Sophie cleared her throat. “The one downstairs. He’s very handsome.”

“And?” Camille placed her finger on a column of numbers. She wasn’t about to be goaded into curiosity by Sophie’s tales.

“He likes redheads. And balloons.”

Camille shot up from the chair. “He’s come for me?”

“And why not? You’ll only see him if he’s in a balloon?”

“What will I wear?”

“It’s nearly dark. He’ll hardly see you. Though you may wear my petal-of-rose cloak hanging by the door if you wish. What?” she said as Camille paced the room. “All he wants is a walk. He hasn’t asked you to marry him.”

As if marriage were the most important thing. On her way out of the apartment, Camille rubbed some color into her cheeks. Her skirts in her hands, she raced down the stairs. One flight from the bottom, he called up to her. “Mademoiselle Durbonne!”

He was waiting with a foot on the first broken step, his cocked hat tucked under his arm. His tawny skin was burnished, as if he’d been out in the sun. “You are something to behold,” he said.

Camille flushed.

“A new dress?” He hesitated. “I didn’t know if you’d come—it felt like centuries were passing, mademoiselle.”

For someone who’d grown up in the country, he had a pretty way with words. “It has been a long time, monsieur.”