Enchantée(80)

Chandon looked up from the long grass. “Except for Foudriard, there’d be nothing else I’d be that desperate to save. And I think he’d get out on his own.”

Aurélie swung her mallet idly at a patch of golden-eyed daisies. “I’d take my jewels and my dresses.”

“Nothing sentimental?” Lazare asked. He had found his ball and was sighting the final hoop.

“Bah! I’m as hard-hearted as they come.” Aurélie winked. “Though there are some letters, tied up with a blue ribbon, from a Monsieur de G—what about you, Cécile?”

A gloomy magical box that whispers at me? “I’m not sure,” she said.

“No jewels?

Settling his feet in the grass, Lazare raised his mallet for a hard strike.

Suddenly, Camille knew. “A music box!”

With a clunk, Lazare’s ball curved wide of the wicket and sank into a wet little hollow in the lawn.

“Tant pis!” Aurélie called. “Sablebois isn’t usually one to miss his shot.”

Lazare looked back at Camille over his shoulder. “What kind of music box?”

Camille swore under her breath. She could not believe she had said it, completely without thinking. She’d come to play paille maille with the intention of finding out something about him, but if she continued like this it would be Lazare who found something out about her. She struggled to keep her face blank, as if it’d meant nothing at all. Lazare kept staring, his eyebrows tilted up, baffled.

She’d slipped. But she wasn’t going to cower.

She beamed at him.

Chandon hit his ball hard. It sailed up out of the rough grass and onto the lawn. He followed after, coughing.

Worrisomely, Chandon’s cough reminded her of Maman’s, the way it had lingered and not improved. If anything, it was getting worse. Still, he was, as usual, full of wit and high spirits. “Are you not well, Chandon?”

“Fine,” he said. “Too many late nights.”

Aurélie frowned. “Then get some sleep, darling. Or I’ll be forced to send my physician to you. He’s very strict, you know, and his medicines are absolutely vile.”

“Please, not that,” moaned Chandon. “It’s your turn, Cécile.”

She settled her foot on her ball, wriggling it into place, and wished Lazare weren’t watching her so intently. She raised her mallet and swung.

“Your music box,” he said, “is it one of those new ones with a melancholy tune?”

Her mallet hit the ball hard, but at the wrong angle, so instead of scudding down the lawn it ricocheted away and blundered through the hedge.

“Oh, too bad!” Aurélie said. “You were so close.”

“I’ll fetch it for you,” Lazare said, leaning on his mallet. “You’ll have to pay a penalty, though, if I do.”

“What kind of penalty will that be, Sablebois?” Aurélie said, a wink in her voice.

“You’re a neutral party,” Lazare said. “You decide.”

“A kiss?” Aurélie suggested.

“If you insist,” he said, smiling. He raised a hand to shield his eyes so he might see Camille better and in the shadow his hand cast, she could see the keenness in his face. “Baroness, are you in?”

She flushed. And she nearly said yes.

It was Baroness that stopped her. With all the talk about the fire and the objects they’d save, and the slip she’d made, she had completely forgotten the other game she was playing, the game in which she was a pretend baroness. The important game she must not lose. With a creeping sense of dismay, she realized that Lazare wasn’t asking for a kiss from Camille—he was asking for a kiss from the Baroness de la Fontaine.

It was one thing to be confident and safe in her disguise, but it was another thing entirely to imagine the disguise was so perfect—so enthrallingly beautiful—that Lazare was ready to kiss this girl he hardly knew.

He could not be falling for the baroness.

“Well?” he said.

Could he?

She desperately needed a moment away to gather herself. “How cheaply kisses are traded!” she said, taking cover beneath her best court manner. “I’ll find it and hit it out myself, thank you.”

She did not wait to see Lazare’s reaction but headed for the yews lining the lawn. Her friends’ bright voices faded as she plunged into the hedge’s shadows. On the other side, a fountain purled, cool and sweet. Peering through the dense branches, she saw gravel paths marking off a basin of water, rows of dusty pink roses, a building of golden stone. Finally she found a narrow tunnel cut into the hedge.

Branches caught at her clothes, and more than once she had to stop and unhook a piece of lacey trim from a twig. In the center of the hedge it was murky and still, except for the scrabbling of birds in the upper branches. She tried to push away her feeling of unease, but it persisted.

In her quest to find out what lay behind Lazare’s secrets—what reason he had for not telling her that he was an aristocrat, why he kept returning to Versailles—she was in danger of revealing her own. She thought again of the frozen Seine, its uncertain safety.

Even if he hadn’t recognized her when she’d mentioned the music box, it was dangerous. And to imagine he might be interested in her shadow self, the Baroness de la Fontaine, was to imagine labyrinths of trouble and misunderstanding and heartache.