at Versailles? That woodland feeling,” Sophie said dreamily, “is what I hope to achieve. A feeling of being transported to a place that’s familiar, but more beautiful.”
“What’s next for Les Merveilleux?” Lazare wondered.
“We perform at the Palais-Royal very soon,” Rosier informed them. “Imagine the audience we will enrapture there! Huge crowds! People from all walks of life! The word of mouth alone will be extraordinary.”
Camille glanced at Lazare. Perhaps she could tear him away from his balloons to attend? “When will it be?”
“When it’s ready.” Rosier winked at her. “I am usually all for rushing, but not in this case.”
* * *
Outside the workshop, the sky had darkened. Ragged edges of pewter clouds gathered behind church towers and spires, threatening rain. A cool wind smelling of moss and stone buffeted the russet chestnut leaves strewn along the rue Saint-Antoine. Camille tucked her arm around Lazare’s elbow, using the excuse of the sudden chill to draw closer to him. He walked with his hands in his coat pockets, a pensive turn to his mouth.
“What’s wrong?” Camille asked. “Do you not find Les Merveilleux as marvelous as the lovebirds do?”
“Lovebirds?” he said, surprised.
Rosier and Sophie strolled up ahead, their heads angled toward each other.
“Something’s changed,” Camille said conspiratorially. “She hasn’t been out with her suitor, the Marquis d’Auvernay, in at least a week, and this morning she told me she’s letting her seamstresses make the revolutionary trims so she can have more time to work on the costumes. She loves designing them. Perhaps that will lead to something?”
Up ahead, Sophie laughed, sweet and bright.
He gave her a swift look. “What’s to say it hasn’t already?”
“Touché,” she acknowledged as a large orange leaf sailed by her shoulder. “Tell me—are the balloons ready for the launch?”
“Just as I was about to ask you about the Lost Girls! I won’t be diverted, you know.”
“You must promise to tell me about the balloons after. It’s been going very well, and Lasalle has promised to take up their cause with a friend in the mayor’s office. Though he needs to hurry.” She explained that it was becoming a series, and he listened intently as she recounted the details of Henriette’s forger life. “Like Sophie with her costumes,” Camille said, “Henriette is a true artist. Can you imagine if she had a chance to do something more—portraits, perhaps, like Vigée Le Brun, who paints the queen?”
“Why not? Aren’t these revolutionary times, when who knows what doors might open? What you are doing is extraordinary, mon âme.” He reached out and gently tucked a wayward curl beneath her hat. “You are extraordinary.”
Heat warmed the place where his finger had grazed her skin. “It’s the least I can do, with what I have,” she said modestly, but secretly she was pleased. Seeing herself in his eyes was intoxicating. Not simply because it was Lazare—his burning touch, the promises she sensed behind his words—but because in his eyes she was who she wished to be. Not a starving girl who’d used destructive magic to survive. Not a girl feverishly printing pamphlets in a magic-filled, malevolent house, avoiding thinking about the consequences.
“Now you must tell me what’s happening with the balloon corps.”
He kicked at the fallen leaves so they sailed into the air. “Do you remember what Lafayette said at the salon?”
“He proposed to make military use of the balloons. I also remember how you reacted.”
“Hotheadedly, I bet,” he said in an off-hand way. “He came to the training for the new pilots I held the other day.”
Overhead, the chill wind rattled through the trees. “He doesn’t mean to send you to war—”
“In a balloon?” Lazare frowned. “I doubt it. He worries about unrest. Here in Paris, of course, but also at the borders. As the king hesitates, calculating how to respond to the Assembly’s demands, other countries think of invading or plotting to help the king and queen flee. Austria might do it.”
“You’d said the balloons would be used for surveilling. Does that now mean … spying?” She could not put her finger on it, but there was something unsettling about the whole affair, like the nap on a jacket brushed the wrong way.
“Gathering information,” he corrected. “Which reminds me.” He smiled then and it was as if the sun had come out. “He’s promised every team will take measurements when they go up.”
That sounded more promising. “What kind?”
“Barometric, atmospheric … it’s the clouds that interest me. Do you remember them in the distance when we went up together the first