Enchantée(63)

And then they walked through the hall and out into the street, the crowds moving around them like a river. Camille was terrified to see her father’s shoulders shaking. He wiped his tears away. “I wish you had stayed back with Sophie. Did I do wrong to bring you, mon coeur?”

Camille pressed her face into his coat. “You have never done anything wrong, Papa.”

She would never forgive her. She vowed it, there on the street. She would never forgive the aristocrats who doomed the print shop, and she would never forgive Grandmère for thinking of Papa in terms of what he lacked. The only things that mattered to Grandmère were the things that Papa did not have. Power, money, a title—Grandmère’s aristocratic obsession with these things erased him. She could not see him for who he truly was. Camille, too, had come up lacking. It was only magic that gave her any value at all.

Camille had known even then how wrong Grandmère was, though her prejudices were a sticky web, difficult to get rid of. And this new widow—Madame de Théron—she was just the same. This time, though, Camille had the means to change the game.

She straightened her back. “We’ll put on something else.”

“It won’t matter. What else can we do? Our dresses are perfect—”

What had Chandon said? You must be the Baroness of Pretend. “We must be even more perfect.”



* * *



Their apartment in the rue Charlot had shrunk while they were away, the rooms dwindling to cupboards, the chestnut-beamed ceiling bearing down on them.

After Camille told her what she intended, Sophie gamely stepped into another dress and ran out to Madame Bénard’s for a wig. “If I wear a wig,” she said, “and you change your hair—but not your face—she will have no idea what our true hair color is. Once we move in, we will be free to wear it as we want.” It was a good idea—it meant Camille wouldn’t have to work the glamoire as often.

When Sophie went out, Camille opened the wardrobe in which the enchanted dress hung. Waiting. She reached out to touch it and felt it shift against her hand, unnervingly alive.

Once she had the dress on, it laced itself up her back. From the shoulder of the dress she took the teardrop brooch and pierced her skin. One, two, three: the drops of blood slid off her arm onto the tattered cloth-of-gold. Gaudy, she thought to the dress. Costly. A dress only the wealthiest aristocrat could afford. Its power returning, the dress rustled back to life. A wave of purple silk—an expensive color to dye—swept from the hem to her chest. She touched the ebony comb to her hair, fading the red. And though Sophie said Camille should not change her face, she couldn’t help covering the freckles on her cheeks and hands, then brightening her lips.

Back at the H?tel Théron, they gave different names to the maid—the Baroness de la Fontaine and her sister, Mademoiselle de Timbault— and were shown in once more. Again, they walked through the lovely rooms, though this time Sophie didn’t coo. Like Camille, she was grimly determined to act disdainful. And again, Madame de Théron waited for them in the black-and-white entry.

“We liked the rooms, madame,” Camille said, her voice diamond-hard, “though they were smaller than we had been led to believe. I could only offer one month’s rent at this time.”

Madame batted her eyelashes. “It’s not really necessary! You are just the kind of young ladies I wish to live here.”

The girls nodded slowly, not chancing to say anything that might break the spell.

“Well,” said Madame, taking their hands and patting them, as if Sophie and Camille were her granddaughters. “It will make me so happy to have some pretty faces around me.” She went on, in a stage whisper, “You wouldn’t believe how many undesirables have inquired. It’s all the rabble on the streets, calling for this right or that, hanging effigies of our tax collectors in the square—can you imagine?”

Not your tax collector, Camille thought. Noblewomen didn’t pay those kinds of taxes.

Camille held out her purse, and this time, Madame de Théron took it, smiling at its weight. “Come as soon as you can, mesdames.” And she curtsied.

They moved that evening. Camille left their new address with Madame Lamotte, along with strict instructions not to share it with Alain. There was not much Camille wished to take with her in the dray wagon that followed behind them. Among their trunks of dresses and the big basket of Sophie’s trims and notions, Camille packed the burned box, her books, and Fant?me in his wicker basket. She also took Papa’s bagatelles—the ship, the dragon breathing fire in the word LIBERTé!—as well as a well-worn pamphlet Papa had written about the education of girls. He’d called the imaginary heroine Camille. The driver and Madame de Théron’s outdoor servants—now Camille’s outdoor servants—carried the trunks up the stairs; a maid came to help them unpack.

As night crept in, Camille stood by a window, looking down to the street. Somewhere nearby stood Grandmère’s house, still and watchful. In the window’s glass, Camille’s reflection was her own, and even though the glamoire was fading, her face was prettier than it had been, before. The hollows lurking over her collarbones and under her cheeks had all but disappeared. That’s what food would do for a girl.

Still, her dress was made of enchantments and her hair shone with magic. Who was she without it? She was a girl with hands still red around the knuckles, hands she’d have to disguise—even from the maids—as long as they lived at the H?tel Théron. She had hoped to at least stop pretending. But in taking rooms in a noblewoman’s house, she traded that freedom for safety. She was protecting herself and Sophie from Alain, she knew. That’s what she’d wanted to achieve, after all. But she had thought she would leave la magie behind.