Enchantée(93)

“Don’t I? Everything is for you. Everything. You have magic, I trim hats. You go to court to make money for us—well and good. We have enough now, don’t we?” Her voice bristled with splinters and pain. “But still you go, wearing yourself out with magic. What if I lost you, what then? You’re as bad as Alain, gambling and having fun while I sit here alone.”

“But don’t you like designing hats?” Had she been wrong, all this time? Camille stumbled on, grasping at what she thought she knew. “We’ve signed a lease on the shop.”

“I like it now. I’m good at it. But hats were what I did to pass the time,” she said, scornfully. “So I didn’t lose my mind, sitting and waiting for you! You never even thought of that, did you, when you were drunk on la magie.”

Sophie’s words stung. Camille had left her alone, so many times. Too many. She had become caught up in the game, no different from card-obsessed Lord Willsingham.

“Lazare will never send me anything again,” Camille said bitterly. “I think he’s found someone new.”

“Don’t try to change the conversation. Of course he hasn’t found someone new. And if you’d never used magic and pretended to be someone else—if you’d been honest and told him who you were, you wouldn’t be worrying about this now.”

Camille’s throat burned as she willed her tears not to fall. She ached for Sophie to comfort her, to say that she didn’t believe what she’d just said—even as Camille herself was starting to believe it—but Sophie remained standing on the other side of the room, immoveable.

“I’m sorry, Camille.” There was no sympathy in her voice. “I’m going to take a promenade with Madame de Théron. As for the Vicomte de Séguin, I’m not going to marry him tomorrow, if that’s what you are worried about. But if you love me, you will not try to stop me from having a little fun.”





47


Downstairs, someone was knocking as if to break the door down.

It was an unfamiliar sound at the H?tel Théron, to say the least. Camille laid her book on the table beside her as, in the hall below, the footman’s shoes clicked unhurriedly to the door.

The huff of the door opening, a rumble of noises from the street. Male voices, insisting.

She shifted to the edge of her armchair.

Then the footman’s clear voice, asking for a card.

Two minutes later, he was knocking at the little salon’s half-open door. “There are some boys below who wish to speak to you. They say it is urgent.” He added witheringly, “They have no card.”

“From Versailles?”

“I doubt it,” sniffed the footman.

In the mirror, her reflection wavered. She smiled, rubbed roses into her cheeks. It had to be Lazare.

Finally, a chance to see him as herself.

The white-blond girl, the talk of kisses: two days had passed since the masquerade and she’d put the girl out of her mind. Mostly. But she couldn’t forget what Sophie had said about magic. If Camille hadn’t used the glamoire to begin with, she wouldn’t be worrying about Lazare now. Maybe it was time to stop. Maybe it was time to tell him the truth.

He might wish to never see her again. But wasn’t there enough between them to overcome it? There had to be.

Smoothing her skirts, she followed the footman down the curving stairs.

There, on the patterned marble of the foyer, stood Rosier and Lazare. Rosier, restless, his hat clamped under his arm, and Lazare, leaning lazily against the wall in a serious breach of etiquette. The contrast between them—Rosier ill at ease in the richly decorated mansion, Lazare at home—could not have been clearer.

She nearly laughed. He didn’t have to tell her he was an aristocrat. It was obvious.

When he saw her, his face lit with joy.

And suddenly she could think of nothing except that she hoped Madame Théron was out visiting friends and that the boys would linger a while.

“Mademoiselle!” Rosier said. “This is your home?”

“We are only renting rooms here,” she said, remembering how worried she’d once been that they would see the dirt under her fingernails. Now she knew neither of them would have cared. How much had changed since she’d been ashamed to let Lazare come to the leaning house on the rue Charlot. Looking at them standing there, she felt almost dizzy at how far she’d come. “How lovely to see you both! Won’t you come in?”

Rosier shifted uneasily. “No time to sit, I’m afraid,” he said. “To be blunt, please help us.”

She had never seen Rosier like this. Worried.

“What’s the matter?” she said, quickly. “Help you with what?”

“There is still a difference of opinion about what that is, exactly,” Rosier said, with a glance at Lazare. “To be brief, we need money to fund a public launch for the balloon.” He nodded at Lazare. “Go ahead. Tell her.”

She glanced from Rosier’s expectant face to Lazare’s. He looked up for a moment, caught sight of the garish putti painted on the ceiling. “Those are hideous.”

“Truly,” she said, laughing, and Lazare did, too—the warmth of it was like sunshine. “Tell me, what’s happening?” she asked again.