raised, before diving back under the water. Another one followed behind, swimming sideways beneath the waves, its sweet black eye facing them.
“She sees us!”
Lazare slipped an arm around her waist. “Adventurers, she’s thinking.”
Entranced, Camille watched as the sleek creature kept easy pace with the boat. “She’s going as fast as we are! She must be a dolphin, non?”
“Just like the ones I saw from the balloon when we sailed along the coast from Lille.”
He had kept his promise.
Behind them, the sky was storm and rain. But across the narrow sleeve of water, the light transformed. The clouds had been torn apart by the wind and now the afternoon sun gilded the high chalk cliffs. Rosier was laughing, pulling heavy nets with the fishermen, while Chandon and Foudriard had disappeared to stand at the stern, Chandon’s hands warming inside Foudriard’s coat. It was as if nothing else in the world existed. They seemed hardly to speak, but both were smiling—one grave, one teasing—as the Estelle drew closer to its destination.
“You don’t happen to have that package I gave you?” Lazare asked.
“Of course.” She reached in her pocket and handed it to him. “I carried it with me always … I felt I couldn’t set it aside.”
His inquiring gaze met hers. “You never opened it?”
“It’s yours, n’est-ce pas? I also had the strangest feeling, that if I did as you asked, you’d return to me.”
“And so it came to pass.” His voice was rough, unsteady. “Here, I’ll show you.”
Pulling at the knots, he unwrapped the fabric layer by layer, the ragged ends of it flicking in the wind, until the box was laid bare. It was a tiny silver snuffbox. It would have fit in a circle made by her thumb and forefinger with room to spare. On its blue-enameled lid winked a constellation, each star a tiny, glittering diamond.
Seeing it in Lazare’s hand, his long brown fingers cradling the vulnerable and valuable object, the memory of another snuffbox came to her. The one she’d found on the stairs at Versailles in the spring and lost to Chandon in a gamble she’d hoped would change her life. And it had. She hadn’t known at the time what would happen when she slipped it into her dress’s secret pocket. It had been a golden key that had unlocked everything that came after. Such a small thing, to set her on this path.
Lazare polished the top of the snuffbox against his coat. As he did so, the wind caught in the edge of the fabric and tore it out of his grasp.
“Oh no!” Camille cried.
But the wrapping was gone; they both watched the fabric sail away, winking red, before it disappeared over the water.
“It doesn’t matter,” Lazare said. “What’s important is what’s inside.” He flicked the lid open.
Camille stood on her toes but couldn’t see. “Snuff?” she teased. “Is that what I’ve been carrying all this time?”
He plucked something out of the box and showed her. Between his fingers gleamed a ring of yellow gold, set with a scarlet stone as big as her thumbnail. In the watery light, it flickered like slow fire.
She’d never seen anything like it, not at Versailles or anywhere else. “How beautiful it is!”
“It’s the only one of its kind. It was commissioned by my Indian grandfather, a gift to his daughter on her wedding day. After she died, it was one of the few things that traveled with my father on that long voyage from Pondichéry to Paris.”
“You’re not thinking of selling it, are you?” she demanded. “We don’t need to do that. Not yet.”
“I’ve got another plan for it.” He took her hand, brought it to his lips. “Camille?”
Her heart startled like a bird in her chest.
“There is nothing I love more than you in this world. While we were hiding under Paris, it was so dark, but still we knew the day was over, when night came, for there was a grate through which we could see the first star rise. It told me one more day had passed and that we’d heard nothing, knew nothing, had done nothing … do you know what haunted me then?”
She shook her head only the slightest bit, afraid to break the spell.
“That I would die in that wretched gloom without ever seeing you again.” His breath was ragged and raw. “I could not endure knowing that this revolution—this fight for the things we both believed in—had taken you from me. You had feared the revolution had failed us, and