Enchantée(85)

“Then stop,” she said, her voice low.

“It’s not easy to do, is it?” he said pointedly. “And it’s not for my own sake, which makes it harder.” He put up his hand. “No more, please, I’ve come to be distracted.”

She wished he would let Aurélie—or herself—help him. But if he wished to speak of something else, she could at least try to cheer him up. “Will you tell me what’s happening as we watch the performance?”

“Of course, ma petite. There’s not much I love more than the opera.” And he was true to his word. At every important moment, Chandon explained what was happening or what the aria was about.

Camille watched in rapture. The problems of the characters were so familiar, but the singing elevated their concerns, their foolishness, and their heartache until those things felt larger than life—which is how feelings felt. Too big for speaking, they could find their perfect shape in song.

At the end of the second act, after the singers had hidden in closets, jumped out of windows, and come in and out of every door on the stage, the curtain dropped and Chandon stood up, clutching his throat.

“Foudriard and I must get some air,” he croaked.

“Do, darling,” Aurélie said, concerned. “You look terrible.”

It was true. Now that he’d confided in her, she could see it: too much magic. From where she sat, the fine shaking in his hands that came from working sorrow was all too obvious.

“It’s a suffocating tomb in here, that’s why.” Holding onto Foudriard as he went out, Chandon promised to send in some lemonade.

The audience came alive at intermission, people standing up, some waving at their friends. Men left their boxes to call on friends or family sitting elsewhere, food was brought in. Peering at the crowd through her opera glasses, Aurélie spotted the ambassador Thomas Jefferson, in his drab American clothes, and the chandler’s apprentice.

“What circles that chandler moves in, eh?” Aurélie said, gleefully. “Nothing can keep him down!”

Camille cringed. If Aurélie only knew she was sitting next to a printer’s daughter, an apprentice less experienced than the chandler she laughed at, what would she say? Camille asked, “May I borrow your glasses?”

Once Aurélie handed them over, Camille could spy on the commoners, drinking wine and chatting. As fine as everything was in Chandon’s box, she’d have given anything to be down there with Papa. He would have loved this.

Aurélie tapped Camille’s arm. “I think I see someone we know. On the left.”

Camille moved her glasses up and over. “Where?”

“The box where someone’s stood up. Isn’t it the Marquis de Sablebois?”

Here, too?

Her fingers suddenly awkward, Camille fumbled with the glass’s rings.

Lazare was bowing to the others in the box, preparing to leave. He wore a close-fitting suit, its pale blue silk a gleam against his skin. A haze of powder tamed his fiercely dark hair and expensive lace frothed at his wrist and throat. His face, as he said his adieux, was kind. Happy. As if he did not wish to go.

“Dreamy, isn’t he?” Aurélie sat forward, her décolleté on full display. “See his parents? They’re at the front of the box.”

Now, Camille thought, she would have a chance to see the people that compelled Lazare to come to court, the father who’d both traveled to India and, in a fit of anger, had docked the wages of Lazare’s tutor. Through her glasses she saw they were powdered and haughty, though there was something in his father’s straight nose and easy posture that was very much like an older Lazare, though he was white-skinned where Lazare was tawny brown. And next to him, Lazare’s stepmother: disdainful, dripping with jewels. She frowned at the commoners on the floor as if she wished they would be swept away. Camille knew that stare—she had seen it on Grandmère’s face.

“C’est pas possible!” Aurélie gasped. She grabbed the glasses from Camille’s hands. “Do you see who’s in the box with him?”

“Who?”

“That blond ninny, the one who’s practically paved with diamonds. She’s been flaunting her wealth at Versailles while her parents search for a husband.” Aurélie lowered her opera glasses in disgust. “She might as well stuff her dress with gold louis—it’d be more subtle than what she’s up to.”

Aurélie reached across Camille and waved determinedly at Lazare with her fan.

“What are you doing?” Camille protested.

“Not letting that blond fool get the best of me,” she said cheerfully. “Besides, wasn’t it sweet that he offered to get your ball for you at paille maille?”

“In exchange for a kiss? It seemed too easily won.”

Aurélie laughed. “It’s the thought that counts. He was dreadfully sentimental about the constitution at that old tennis court and does tend to go on about how awful and terrible we aristocrats are, but underneath? He’s wonderful. Really, he’s just your type—ready for anything.”

As Lazare was leaving his box, the blond girl tipped her face up to him and smiled, as pretty and self-assured as an angel. While Camille herself felt so out of place that she needed Chandon to translate for her. How fervently she wished that she could see Lazare—elsewhere. Not here, but somewhere in Paris—a boat on the river, the workshop, the Place des Vosges—anywhere she was Camille and neither of them were wearing disguises or webbed in secrets.