I nod. “Sorry about Grand-mère’s friend, Papa. That sucks.”
My dad sighs. “C’est la vie.” My mom reaches for his hand and threads her fingers through his own, which seems to give him the strength to smile at me. “We did enjoy meeting Alexandre last night.”
“Sure. It was perfect and not awkward at all.” I have never been able to hide my sarcasm, and I’ve never wanted to, either.
“Well, you did catch us by surprise.” My dad raises an eyebrow at me.
I tense. “It’s not like we were doing anything.”
My mom steps forward. “We know, beta. We do hope we get to see him again. He was certainly charmant.” My mom giggles a little. Giggles. Then she turns to Papa, then back to me, and snaps her fingers. “Oh. I almost forgot to ask! The woman with raven tresses you mentioned? Did you ever find out anything else?”
I shake my head. “Not much. Only that the letters were around the 1840s.” I wonder if I’ve given away my criminal activity, but there is no way my mom could know where we were last night—or what we found.
“That makes total sense,” my mom says.
“It does?”
My mom wags a finger, her favorite way to make an academic point. “I thought it was funny when you mentioned Delacroix and Dumas using the English phrase ‘raven-tressed’ to describe the woman’s hair.”
“Because that’s not proper French. The word for raven is corbeau,” my dad finishes. “Anyway in French, the construction would be—”
“‘The lady with tresses raven,’” I finish for him. “The noun before the adjective. But they constructed it the English way—the adjective before the noun. So?” I shrug and stare between the two of them, at a loss.
My parents exchange a look. “Byron,” they say at the same time.
I frown. “It’s from a Byron poem? It’s definitely not The Giaour.”
“No,” my mother replies gently. “I know how well you know that one. It’s from ‘She Walks in Beauty.’ Not sure what year he wrote it—maybe 1814? 1815? There’s a woman that he describes as having waves in every ‘raven tress.’ The French literati—even three decades later—would surely have been familiar with that poem, as they were with many English Romantics. Maybe that Byron connection to Delacroix and Dumas runs deeper than you think.”
Delacroix’s words to Dumas come rushing back to me: “And see the words of the poet come to life.”
Holy crap.
How did I not even consider this possible connection? Celenia Mondego, head judge, pops into my brain with the answer: slipshod research—a catastrophic inability to grasp obvious facts.
Ugh. Screw you, Celenia. I’m not going to repeat the same mistakes. The puzzle pieces are in front of me, and I swear to God, this time I’m going to make sure they click into place. My heart, my stomach, every cell in my body flutters and buzzes and whatever other words can describe being struck by lightning. I take a breath.
Be calm, Khayyam. Think.
As my parents leave, only one thought occupies my brain: Forget Zaid and Alexandre. I have a date with Lord Byron.
I googled the Byron poem the minute my parents left. But I want to hold the book in my hands, too. Papa always says I am my mother’s daughter, and maybe he’s right, because poetry feels more alive to me when I can touch the page. Besides, it gives me an excuse to visit my favorite bookstore in Paris, and probably the most famous: Shakespeare & Company.
It’s a mostly English-language bookshop on the Left Bank on a small, one-block street that dead-ends on a pretty square a stone’s throw from the Seine. I’ve spent hours here with my mom, and I adore the charm of its uneven floors and the friendly cat that winds its way through your legs or makes its way onto your lap as you’ve sat down to read a book. It’s a crooked, rickety old indie that’s been around since the 1950s. It was built in homage to the original store that opened in 1919 on a different street that was shut down by Nazis when they occupied France. When you meander