hush descended over the room as the prosecutor spoke.
Camille rose from the hard wooden chair. The air in the courtroom was stifling. In the gallery, Sophie and Rosier sat close together. Sophie wore a wide-brimmed hat to hide her face, but Camille could still see the frightened crimp of her mouth. Rosier caught Camille’s eye and smiled, his hand clenched tight around his pipe. Both of them seemed prepared for the worst.
Behind them clustered the Lost Girls—the forger Henriette, glaring furiously at the judge; Giselle, nervously plucking at a tricolor corsage on her wrist; the always serious lock picker, Claudine. Otherwise there were not many she knew among the spectators. Two journalists crouched at the end of a row, quills in hand, already writing. An illustrator, his tablet against his knee, studying her and then his drawing paper.
Soon her face would be everywhere. On every street corner of Paris, the criers who’d once shouted the girls’ stories would now shout hers. Wherever Lazare was hiding, was this how he would hear what happened to her?
But she was determined not think of that now. Instead, she would do what her lawyer had advised: speak as little as possible, and let him do the work so she would walk free.
“Camille Durbonne,” she said, clearly.
“Are you not a widow? With a title?”
It was nothing, a title, a name. But the jurors sat forward, waiting. “I am also the Vicomtesse de Séguin.”
“Aha,” someone noted, as if she’d been caught in a lie.
“Madame la Vicomtesse, then.” The prosecutor, a tall man in a white wig, approached. “Let us do this quickly, non? The good people of the jury and the observers in the gallery shall not be kept waiting to see justice done.” With a flourish, he shook out his cuffs, as if to say: Let’s get to work. “To the charge of being a magician, that is, practicing magic and hurting the people of France?”
“What of it?”
“Did you?”
“Did I hurt the people? No.”
One of the jurors swore. Mutterings from the gallery.
“And of magic?” The prosecutor rubbed his hands together. “Be careful as you answer, Madame la Vicomtesse. Consider if you have ever consorted with magicians or owned prohibited magic objects. If you have, in any way, been helped by magic.”
Helped by magic? She wanted to laugh. What did she have but her own magic?
Her lawyer, Dufresne, gave a tiny shake of his head. She knew what she must say, but the wrongness of it grated at her. A few short weeks ago she could have said no. But after Blaise’s murder, how could she? After she had found her voice through magic and used it to advance the cause of the Lost Girls? Magic was not the enemy. She remembered the horror she’d felt in the blur when Blaise’s aunt had threatened to cut the magic from him, as if removing a cancer. But to deny magic would be to deny herself.
Calmly, as if it cost her nothing, she said, “I have not been helped by magic.”
A snicker ran through the gallery. The prosecutor shifted lightly on his feet, as pleased as a street conjuror about to make a final reveal. “I call a witness.”
Like everyone else in the courtroom, Camille’s head swiveled toward the door. Odette strode in, dressed in her usual black riding clothes, her pistols tucked into a belt. Over her coiled red hair, she wore the black hat she’d worn at the march on Versailles. As she took her place at a witness stand, the brim cast her face into shadow.
“Please state your name, mademoiselle.”
“Odette Leblanc.”
“Occupation?”
She squared her shoulders. “Revolutionary. Pamphleteer.”
The gallery gave her a round of applause; the judge called hoarsely at them to refrain.
“Do you know the accused?” said the prosecutor.
Odette nodded demurely. “I have lived in her house.”
Gasps from the jury.
“Why?”
She wheeled toward Camille then. Her face was hard, as if she might grind her to dust with her stare. “Working for the Comité, I infiltrated her house in order to gather evidence about the activities of a club of antirevolutionary magicians.”
Camille gripped the back of her chair, willing her face blank. It had not been just a personal grievance. For many long weeks, she had been working with the Comité to bring Camille down. She did not wear their red cloak, but she might as well have one slung over her shoulders.
“In your role as an investigator, did you find anything of note?”
“I did,” she said. “I gave those items to the Comité.”