like a long white finger pointing home. Great oaks that had grown beside the road for centuries cast deep shadows over it, and she tried to imagine Lazare and Foudriard taking refuge in those pools of gloom. Trying to be invisible, trying to stay safe.
But all she could think of were field mice and tiny voles, hunted creatures that hid from the owl under cover of night, unable even to hear death as it swooped close on silent wings.
57
In the morning Lazare and Foudriard had still not arrived.
As luck would have it, the sea was too rough to make a crossing to Dover, and so it was decided that the travelers would remain at the inn one more day. Like Camille, Chandon did not want to leave without them, but they also feared that, given enough time, the Comité would find their way to Wissant.
Sophie tried to distract her by showing her what she’d packed from the Hôtel Séguin. In one trunk was nestled Camille’s enchanted dress—I was afraid it would try to bite me, Sophie said, but I managed. The other trunks were packed with clothes, a few keepsakes, books, and papers. Then, with a triumphant flourish, Sophie poured onto their bed the contents of a large burlap sack: earrings and ropes of diamonds, necklaces set with pearls and emeralds and sapphires like shards of night, and more bejeweled snuffboxes than she’d ever seen in the house.
“Where did you find all of this?” Camille asked in amazement.
“When Odette first came to stay, what did you think I was doing, sneaking around the house? I was scooping up as much as I could to hide it from her.” There was a note of triumph in her voice. “My suspicions came in useful, as you can see.”
“I should have listened to you.”
“True,” Sophie said. “But you let her in because of your feeling nature, and it’s hard to fault that.” Scooping up a collar set with diamonds in the shape of daisies, she draped it around her throat. Turning so that the morning light dazzled in the stones, she regarded herself critically in the mirror.
“What do you think—shall I wear these at my wedding?” She caught Camille’s gaze in the mirror. “When all of us have arrived in England.”
Camille didn’t trust herself to reply. On the bed also lay the strange little packet, wrapped in faded red cloth, that Lazare had asked her to keep safe. Temptation to unwrap it gnawed at her, but instead she slipped it into her dress’s hidden pocket to keep it with her. A small magic, a charm to bring him back. She imagined how it might be in the seaside town, every day walking the cliffs in the brisk air. Checking the boats in the harbor, searching for a sign that he’d landed. The days ahead of her were a despair of doing nothing, a long gray fog of powerlessness. How could she simply wait?
While Camille tried to keep her despair at bay, Chandon’s mood grew only darker. Never much of a drinker, he was up at dawn with a bottle in his fist, his eyes red-rimmed.
“Bellefleur,” he muttered, “my things, all of that gone—fine. Well and good! Who needs ghastly medieval furniture and portraits of one’s ancestors? Take it all! But my beloved Foudriard? That is a step much too far.” The bright color had gone from his face, and he’d refused to change out of his white wolf clothes, which were now stained and dirty. “I am sad beyond all reckoning,” he admitted to Camille, “and know not what to do.”
After lunch he’d thrown himself onto the bench in front of the pianoforte and begun, idly, to pick out a tune, a saraband by Handel. Its slow, melancholy chords—and the handsome grieving boy playing them—brought the maids to tears. The whole busy house stilled, listening. But when he began to play it a fourth time, Camille couldn’t bear it. She had to go out.
She carried the song’s minor key with her to the cliffs. There the sea breeze was fresh and fierce. Over the sea the sky was the gray of iron, and far off, on the other side where the white cliffs would have been if she could see them, rain fell in heavy sheets. Lazare would have liked to have seen it.
Lazare had told her the sea was like the sky, endless. It was wide and endless, but it was also deep. She sensed the valleys he’d described for her, so