Enchantée(89)

“Blue eyes, do you mean? The Marquis de Chandon?”

Willsingham nodded emphatically.

“I haven’t. Have you?”

“Obviously not. I was hoping to get up a game. I’m terribly in debt, you know, and need to ah, improve my situation.” Willsingham scanned the crowded room, as if Chandon might suddenly appear. “They say he’s ill.”

Still ill? A finger of worry ran up Camille’s spine. “He isn’t any better?”

“Last I saw him he looked as if he’d aged twenty years. I thought he was pretend. Apparently I was wrong.” He bowed abruptly and moved off into the crowd, lost as always.

“How rude,” Sophie said.

“It’s just because he’s English,” Camille said vaguely, following Willsingham’s progress through the crowd. “Chandon seems only to get worse. Aurélie promised to send her physician but Chandon didn’t think he could help.”

Too much magic. And the uneasy feeling that Séguin had something to do with it.

She needed to find Aurélie.

As they passed among the revelers, servants offered silver trays arrayed with glasses of lemonade and champagne, tiny canapés shaped like acorns, clusters of grapes dusted with gold. Standing under a haze of birch leaves, she sipped champagne, trying to appear as easy and nonchalant as everyone else. It was all very beautiful, but standing at the edge of everything, surrounded by beauty and laughter and twirling motion, Camille felt very alone. At first, the magic had been a way to beat the aristocrats at their own game, to punish them. But after all these weeks playing at being one of them, she wasn’t so sure. She’d become an imposter, both here and at home.

Dancers swept past, none of them her friends. Why had she bothered to come? She’d wanted to please Aurélie, who’d invited her, and to give Sophie a treat. But deep down, she knew. Despite her attempts to scrub her confusion over Lazare from her mind, it remained, darkly impervious to all her deliberate forgetting. And the kiss at the opera had only made things worse. Sophie insisted that his being an aristocrat did not matter, and maybe it didn’t. But the gnawing secrets did. She wished he would say why he had not told her.

Both of them were impostors. She had her reasons. But his? They were unguessable.

An accordion player joined the orchestra and played a few bright notes. It would be a country dance—Marie Antoinette loved to pretend she was a simple country girl. Camille felt a surge of resentment at a queen who could pretend whatever she wanted while everyone else followed happily along.

“Camille!” Sophie whispered. “I think we have partners!”

Two boys, dressed in the blue and white of the King’s Guard, were making straight for them. Over their faces they wore strips of white silk with holes cut out; their only other concession to the masquerade was a sprig of apple leaves pushed through their buttonholes.

“How seriously they’ve taken the theme,” Camille said under her breath.

“Hush.” Sophie’s face glowed with anticipation. “I won’t dance without you, so be nice and say yes when they ask.”

“Sophie—”

But when the guardsmen stopped in front of them, bowed low, and asked for the dance, Camille gave in and took the taller one’s hand. For a moment they stood, holding hands, in a circle of other dancers. He asked her if she was much at court, but before she could answer, the violins joined the accordion and the dance sped into motion. As they promenaded forward, and then backward, his hand lightly holding hers, he said, “You make a very fine magpie, madame.”

“What if I stole the buttons off your coat?”

“You have already stolen my heart,” he flirted, as they stepped together, shoulder to shoulder. “Isn’t that enough?”

It was all a dance. Things were said that had to be said, things were done that had to be done, like steps in a dance, a pattern that everyone followed because—because if they didn’t, what would happen? No one wanted to know. It would mean chaos, collapse. No rules would mean the end of the nobles’ power—so they followed them, assiduously, and laid mighty punishments on those people, like Papa, who didn’t.

Forward and back they went until he spun her away to the man dancing behind them. “When you come back to me in the dance,” the guard said, “I’ll toss salt on your tail. That’s how you tame a magpie, isn’t it?”

“You’ll have to catch me first.” She ducked under his arm and away, clasping hands with her next partner. This one was tall, dressed in black silk, wearing a raven mask and a short cape of glossy dark feathers. He wore his hair fanned over his shoulders and held her hand high between them.

“Madame Magpie,” he said, tipping his head to her so that the feathers on his mask danced.

Lazare.

“Monsieur Raven,” she said, endeavoring to be witty. “Two thieving birds, aren’t we?”

“I stole a kiss,” he said, as they took two steps forward. “It was wrong of me.”

Perhaps. “And what did you think of it, once you had it?” she dared.

“I shouldn’t say.”

“Why not?” They came together, shoulder to shoulder.

“It might be too revealing.”

All these double entendres! Knowing and not-knowing, saying things but not saying them—it was a torment. But she replied, sweetly, “Revealing what?”