the glow of the flower seller’s yellow dress. Walking fast, the wicker tray now tucked tight under her arm, she soon left the aloof mansions of the Marais behind and was swept up in the evening crowd. Shadows crept around the leaning buildings and narrow lanes, and she kept well away from places where people might be hiding. Driven from the countryside by villagers and farmers, vagrants had come to Paris, restless and hungry.
Another piece of kindling laid on the fire.
Far ahead, the girl’s yellow dress winked in and out of the crowd. She had nearly reached the old Tuileries palace. Like a castle in a fairy tale grown over with thorns, the Tuileries had stood empty for a hundred years, ever since Louis XIV had moved the court to Versailles. There was not much there but dusty pleasure gardens, where she’d walked with Lazare these last few weeks, and a makeshift theater. So many rooms, and no one to live in them.
At Camille’s left hand ran the liquid pewter of the Seine. The river was a restless, quicksilver thing … even more so at night. Dredgers walked its shores, searching for drifting treasure to haul in with their hooked poles. Things cast away, on purpose or not. Wood and canvas, rope and netting, crates of vegetables tumbled from barges, a well-dressed corpse with pockets to pick—all this the river provided. Above it arched the great Pont Neuf. Even at night, the bridge was busy. It crawled with promenaders and police, pickpockets and prostitutes. Silver merchants sold their wares there, as did men who made wooden legs. Acrobats performed alongside letter writers, who composed love notes for a fee. It was a world unto itself, and Camille wasn’t eager to cross it alone.
Too many hands.
But the flower seller didn’t join the throngs on the bridge. Instead, she plunged down the bank toward the water itself. Camille followed as best she could, but the footing was treacherous. Once at the shore, she tramped up and down for a quarter of an hour before she finally spotted girl’s yellow dress underneath the bridge. Did she have a hiding place there, tucked between a stone arch and the river’s edge? Camille ground her teeth in frustration. If this is where the hunt for the flower seller ended, she was out of luck. She was not going beneath that arch.
As Camille took in the muddy flats, the cold, lapping river, the tray still under her arm, a window-shaped light came on under the bridge. Then another, glowing warmly. A dwelling, beneath the Pont Neuf. All Camille had to do was go there and give her the tray back. Then why did it feel so frightening?
It was only the deepening dusk, she told herself. Only the unknown. Still, she felt uneasy as she made her toward the two golden rectangles. At first she could only make out the weathered shutters around the windows. As she drew closer, the house’s hunched outline became visible. It was wedged under the arch the way that bats shrugged themselves into the smallest spaces. The house had no rhyme or reason, but had been cobbled together from bits and pieces that, she guessed, had been scavenged from the river’s banks: mismatched shingles; doors fortified with boards; a circular window set into the roof that looked out on the river like the flat eye of a fish. Smoke drifted from its crooked chimney.
Tucked as it was out of sight, it felt secret and forbidden, like a house in a fairy tale no one was meant to see. As she took in the way the river had left a dark ribbon of silt on its walls from the peak of a flood tide, she tried to imagine what it would be like to live there. Threatened by floods and the traffic on the bridge. A last resort, a house fashioned from broken things no one wanted.
It made her want to leave the tray by the door and run.
Instead, she drew closer as she heard a murmur of voices coming from inside. The flower seller didn’t live alone, then. Perhaps she lived with her family, though when Camille tried to imagine them, she couldn’t. All she could think of was her own brother and how cruelly he’d forced her to use magic to turn coins. How carelessly he’d sent her out into the streets to spend them, knowing the risks she took.