far off, or had given up its hunt, for she could no longer hear its frenzied screams. For now at least, the island returned to its everyday noises. Her fury receded like a tide, laying bare the helpless fear underneath that never seemed to go away. The wild beat of her pulse that buzzed: if not for magic, that might have been you.
Things were better now, but each morning she willed herself to believe it would last. For wasn’t that one of magic’s lessons—that nothing stayed? She had lost so much before, why not the fine house, the friends, the raven-haired boy she dreamed of?
She pushed the thought away.
Shouldering the strap of the flower seller’s tray, and tucking her bundle of pamphlets and the roses under her arm, Camille struck out toward the old oak at the island’s tip.
Her way took her past the old palace wall, built by French kings long before the Louvre, the Tuileries, or Versailles. On it, two boys were hanging posters. The taller one balanced on a ladder, a bucket of paste swinging from his arm, in his hand a wide brush. The other handed him posters, one by one. As they went up, a woman read them aloud to a ragtag group gathering around her. Plenty of people in Paris could read. Others got their news this way, from the mouths of hawkers and newsboys, troublemakers and rabble-rousers. Each of the papers and broadsheets and pamphlets that had mushroomed since the fall of the Bastille had a tale to tell. Some of them real, some fake. Camille could hear Papa now, how angry he’d have been if he’d been able to see the lies people printed: A pamphleteer must tell the truth!
But what if no one listened?
Two small boys, their clothes worn to rags, split off from the group and ran to her on their bare feet. Their bellies were swollen—rumor said the poor had nothing but grass to eat—their eyes too large in their faces.
“Mademoiselle!” they begged. She kneeled beside them and emptied her purse into their hands. “Buy something for yourself first,” she told them. In a moment, they had vanished, as if they’d never been. As Camille stood, she heard the woman shouting out the poster’s words: Bread. Aristocrats. Death.
On the Quai des Morfondus, she passed a weary farmer in his wagon, heading home. Unlike last year, there was grain to be had this summer, but drought had dried up the rivers and there was no way to mill it into flour. In the countryside, hungry people were leaving their villages to search for food and work, and it made others suspicious.
All of Paris was a mass of kindling, piled perilously high.
It would only take a spark to leap into flame.
Having traversed the narrow island, she had come to the river Seine, flowing dark beneath her. Across the river lay the Right Bank, where she lived, and the infamous Place de Grève. It was in that great square, Papa had told her, that King Louis IX had burned twelve thousand copies of a religious book in an act of censorship and hate. Worse were the executions. Legend said the Place de Grève was haunted by those who’d been tortured there, their malevolent ghosts waiting to drown passersby in the river.
Despite the heat, Camille shivered.
Ahead of her lay the island’s tip and the ancient oak, its limbs spreading wide. It was only August, but the dry heat had tinged its leaves with bronze. Under its shady canopy, people stood talking with their neighbors.
But the flower seller was nowhere to be seen.
Camille could only wait a few minutes. As she rested the tray against the old oak, she remembered the pamphlets tucked under her arm. Across the top of them was sedately written: On the Education of Girls by Jean-Nicolas Durbonne. The sight of those words made her want to scream. If only she could toss them into one of the bonfires that burned at night on the Seine and incinerate them into ash.
Her visit to the bookshop of one Henri Lasalle had not gone well.
She’d passed the store several times, working up the courage to enter. In its window hung posters announcing the latest actions of the General Assembly, which was meeting in Versailles to create a constitution and rights for the citizens of France. Through the bookstore’s open door came the buzz of enthusiastic arguments. Promising, but also intimidating. Standing on the threshold, she suddenly longed for Lazare—his hand at her