low and strode off into the crowds, his coattails flapping in his wake.
* * *
She did not dare study the card he’d given her until she’d returned to the Hôtel Séguin. In the red salon, she closed the door quietly behind her. The tapestry knight’s lance dripped crimson; the windows rattled a kind of ghostly welcome. When she was certain that no one was coming, she opened her fist. What she’d believed to be a card was only a piece of white paper. It was folded in a complicated way, though when she pulled at one of the corners it undid itself. From it rose the faintest hint of smoke.
A Meeting
8 o’clock, tomorrow night
The cemetery of Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre
She frowned at the paper. Perhaps there was a kind of double meaning with the address, because as surprising as some of the parties she’d attended at Versailles had been, a meeting in a graveyard on an autumn night would top them all. Somehow, she thought as she ran her thumb over the ink-black words, it did not seem like that kind of invitation.
Camille flipped it over to see if there was an explanation, but the back was completely blank. Disappointed, she was about to set it down when a single line of text appeared where there had been nothing before.
Tell no one.
The back of her neck prickled.
Magic.
She sensed it thread into her, insistent as hunger. Irresistible as the warm tang of bread when she was hungry, the cool relief of water when she was thirsty. In themselves, the words that had appeared on the paper were not persuasive. Or even ominous. They could mean the dinner was a secret. But something about the gleaming blackness of the letters unnerved her. She decided then, almost without realizing it, that she would in fact tell no one. Not Sophie, nor Lazare. It would be her secret.
As she stared at the invitation, the paper began to gray around the corners. Then cracks appeared in it, and before she could even think to let go, the note was nothing more than a pile of ash cupped in the palm of her hand.
18
The graveyard behind Saint-Julien-le-Pauvre was shabby with overgrown grass. Parishioners still used the weathered church, but its burying ground had long been abandoned. A grove of cypress trees made gloomy shapes under the evening sky and in a few places, roses grew among the graves. With no one to tend to them, they’d run wild, their bare, thorny canes covering the graves like shrouds.
As she walked hesitantly between the tilting stones, searching for anything that resembled a door, a figure stepped into the light cast by a lamppost at the cemetery’s edge. He wore a heavy monk’s habit that dragged the ground, a hood shadowing his face.
Camille stiffened. “Who are you?” she said with more bravery than she felt.
He inclined his head. “A servant of the Marquis de Chandon, who awaits you inside. Come, you must not linger here where eyes may see you.”
She followed him through damp grass and past funerary urns to where an ancient chapel stood. Beside it crouched a marble sarcophagus. On its lid perched an angel, its wings veined with lichen. The man grasped hold of the statue, and pushed.
The enormous lid pivoted away to reveal stairs descending into nothing. From the opening came a cold wind heavy with the scent of rot. It made Camille gag.
“Après-vous,” he said.
There was nothing she wished less to do than to follow this unknown person down through a tomb into a—a crypt? “Chandon is down there?”
“He gave me this token to show you.” In his palm lay a tiny jeweled box, decorated with a silvery pearl. It was the snuffbox Chandon had won from her when they first met at Versailles.
Camille squared her shoulders. “You first.”
He went down a few steps and held the lantern high so that she might find her way. Carefully she placed her feet on the moss-slicked stones, one after another, as they descended into the ground. Chandon would never go to these lengths for a lark. His dream of happiness was strolling the apple orchards with his beloved Foudriard in Normandie. For him to be in Paris, asking her to come in secret—here—meant something was terribly wrong.
The tunnel she found herself in filled her with foreboding. It was no wider than her outstretched arms, and only a hand’s width higher than the top of her head. Its sides curved slightly, and in the wavering light of the servant’s lantern