far below that they might as well be bottomless. The sea was like a living thing, moving and changing, its currents powerful and unknowable. It was unlike anything she had ever known and yet, it was also very familiar.
Once Papa had told her water rose in droplets from the sea and the rivers and the puddles to be collected in clouds. Then, as rain, the water returned to the sea or the lakes or the Seine before it was drawn up again, over and over, forever. Though we called them by different names, the sea, the rivers, the puddles are all one thing: water.
Magic, she understood now, was like that.
How could she ever have thought to cut her magic from herself? Could you cut the rain from the sea and keep it separate? Just like the sea lived in the clouds, magic lived in her. It would always be there, uneasily tending toward transformation.
She walked on, buffeted by winds but grateful for them. One more day, and then England. One more day for Lazare and Foudriard to arrive. What kept them? Perhaps they hadn’t gotten away. Perhaps he’d had to fight and was now injured, dying. The wind snatched at her hair and she brushed it back. She refused to think those thoughts. He would come. If not today, then tomorrow. And if not then, he would find them in Dover.
Sleek black birds, their necks curved like snakes, drifted on the water until, as one, they dove, disappearing under the waves.
But if he didn’t?
She vowed to return to France. Rosier could stay with Sophie. Perhaps she’d set up another shop, making whatever she wanted. They would be happy together, she knew.
And Camille? She would use her dress and her magic to disguise herself once more. She’d scour the streets of Paris, the prisons, all the hiding places she could uncover. She would be a thousand different people, each one a stranger, inquiring about a tall, brown-skinned boy with hair like a blackbird’s wing. An inventor, she might say to encourage them, miming pockets full of things he’d gathered to fuel his dreams. A cloud-watcher. Elegant, clever hands, and a lazy, swoon-inducing smile. Maybe they’d have seen him, and she would go in the direction they told her. Sorrow would be a lonely companion, but it would fuel her search.
Below the cliffs, waves rolled in. In the moment before they crashed and dissolved on the sand, they became like molten glass, an unearthly blue. One after another, never ceasing.
She too would be relentless. She would not give up.
Even if it took her whole life, she would never stop searching.
58
They left in a skiff at dawn, the tide running out.
Duprès had told them they’d be less conspicuous leaving from the beach below the inn, rather than the harbor at Wissant. From the beach, a smaller skiff would take them to a fishing boat in which they’d cross the Channel. Melancholy and dispirited, they’d followed him down a narrow path that wound through waving grass and rippled sand to the water. Off the beach waited the flat-bottomed skiff, a lone figure at her oars. Duprès had sent their trunks to the dock in town, from which, if all went as planned, the fishing vessel would depart and wait for its secret passengers.
At Duprès’s insistence, they removed their shoes and stockings. Camille and Sophie carried their skirts over their arms, the icy water numbing their feet as they waded to the skiff. They climbed in awkwardly, pants and skirts now soaking wet. As if he’d done it all his life, Rosier walked the boat out until it cleared the sand before he jumped in.
As the sailor put his back into the rowing, and Chandon and Rosier each took an oar and began to pull, Camille waved at Duprès, who stood on the far dunes, solemnly watching them depart. On the strand, the footprints they’d left were already erased.
At anchor, a good way from shore, lay the fishing boat. Her two masts poked like fingers into the brightening sky. On her hull was painted her name: Estelle. As soon as the fishermen spotted the little skiff, they lifted the anchor and began to raise the sails. Camille looked back toward Wissant, the forest of masts in the harbor.
The boys had not come.
With an aching heart, Camille clambered up a rope ladder to the deck of the Estelle. The captain said gruffly that she might find the passage less troublesome belowdecks, for the sea was still