Enchantée(79)

“Camille?” Sophie said. “Are you ready to go?”

Having given the landlord a deposit, Camille and Sophie left the sweet shop, their clothes scented with almonds and vanilla, and returned to the H?tel Théron. It was early in the afternoon, but Sophie was already getting ready to go out for the evening. She’d promised to dress a visiting countess from Bavaria, who was staying with one of Madame Bénard’s best customers, for a party. Sophie would be at the fashionable lady’s house well past midnight, but Sophie’s face was bright as she prepared to leave. She nearly hummed with happiness. “I’m going to charge her double for every feather and scrap of lace I stitch onto her. And do you know what?” Sophie said, as she kissed Camille good-bye. “She will happily pay. If I charged her less, she’d feel cheated.”

Camille listened to Sophie’s light footfall as she went down the marble stairs and said good-bye to Madame Théron. The great house fell silent. Camille picked up a book—Les Liaisons Dangereuses—and thought about beginning it again, but none of the characters appealed. Instead she wandered to the mantel in the salon. Tucked behind the carriage clock was a folded note the size of her palm.

It had arrived yesterday. She unfolded it again and glanced over the words, though she already knew what they said:

Ma chère Cécile!

Paille maille in the afternoon—meet us at the back steps of the Grand Trianon at three o’clock.

Don’t say no!

Je t’embrasse

Aurélie



Of course she would go.

What had she to keep her here, in Paris? Surely she could stop using magic another time. Perhaps Lazare would be there. Perhaps she might learn the reason he had kept his noble birth a secret from her. Perhaps, among his friends, he might let something slip.

Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.





40


Chandon was waiting by the high yew hedge, swinging two mallets like windmills.

And next to him, in the cool of the shadows, Lazare.

The lush green branches cast complicated patterns on his skin, rendering him mysterious, half-seen, and her first thought was that she had dreamed him there. After what he’d said about only sometimes coming to Versailles, why he was here again?

He was trying to balance his wobbling mallet on the palm of his hand, taking steps back and forth to keep it from falling. When he saw her, he caught it neatly and bowed. Once again, he seemed completely at home at the palace, in his suit of pale yellow silk, green embroidery scrolling down the front of his coat. If he was unhappy to be here, forced by his parents to come to Versailles, as he’d claimed, he didn’t show it.

A finger of unease curled up her back. She thought she’d wanted revelation, but now she wasn’t sure. What if she learned things she didn’t actually want to know? Flustered, Camille curtsied to the boys.

“As always, I’m thankful you’ve arrived. Otherwise Aurélie complains about being outnumbered,” Chandon said, grinning so that his dimple showed in his cheek. “Here’s yours,” he added, handing her one of the mallets and tossing a wooden ball, painted with blue stripes, across the grass. It rolled to a stop against another ball, this one mint striped. “That green one’s mine—careful you don’t hit it.”

The rules of paille maille were simple. Hit the ball down the lane of grass, smacking others’ balls out of the way when it was possible and generally creating chaos. The first ball through the iron arch was the winner. She shaded her eyes, squinting to see it. “You’ve put the arch very far away.”

“So we can play forever,” Aurélie smirked. “Or at least until Guilleux arrives from Paris.” She waved at Camille’s ball. “Go on, give it a try.”

Camille smiled to herself. Setting her embroidered shoe on top of her ball, she thwacked her mallet into it, the force of her blow jettisoning Chandon’s ball across the lawn so that it bounced into the high grass, where it promptly disappeared.

“What have you done?” Chandon sank to his knees. “I am finished!”

“Oh, come,” Aurélie said as she dragged him up. “It’s only paille maille, not the end of the world. Fetch a gardener to trim the area around your ball and voilà, you can hit it out.”

“And if I can’t find a gardener?” Chandon bared his teeth. “I suppose I’ll have to chew it off?”

Lazare laughed. “Or get one of the queen’s sheep to do it for you.”

“We’ll let Chandon have an extra turn, won’t we, Aurélie?” Camille said.

“Bien s?r.” Aurélie strolled to her ball and slammed it so hard that it scudded violently down the long stretch of grass. She smiled triumphantly. “As long as we’re winning he can have an extra go.”

Chandon waded slowly into the meadow. “I don’t see it.”

“Can you believe,” Aurélie called out, “a grand mansion in Paris was set on fire by a mob? The lady of the house ran in to save a trinket and nearly lost her hair.”

“What was she thinking?” Camille said. “To have escaped with her life and then to run back inside?” In her mind, she recalled all the things in their new apartment. She found most of them not worth the trouble of saving. Except the burned trunk. She would have gone back for that—as someone once, in the past, probably had. But that was not something she could mention.