the everyday letters and bills, though the way they behaved was anything but ordinary. Some notes disintegrated to ash. Others lifted into the air, as if carried by an undetectable wind, and dissolved when they brushed against the ceiling. And there were those that melted in her hands like a marzipan flower held too long.
Despite the sheer number of notes, the news wasn’t good. Blaise reported he hadn’t yet found a book that revealed the secrets of making the blur, and now that he and Chandon had scoured most of Paris’s bookstores and personal libraries, they would come to the Hôtel Séguin. Let us know when it is safe, he wrote. As the ink faded from the paper and she thought of what she’d witnessed at the Palais-Royal, she wondered: What did he mean by safe?
Late at night she’d wander the hallways of the old mansion, and as she passed the printing room, hear the pamphlets sighing beyond the double doors. It was obvious even to those who knew little about magic that they were … unusual. Arrestingly beautiful and, as reviewers never forgot to mention, exceptionally persuasive. They had brought fame and money to the girls, and that had saved Flotsam House.
They themselves had told Camille the story of how it happened.
Only a couple of days ago, a police officer had arrived at the cottage with a letter. Henriette the forger had read it aloud. By order of the mayor, the letter announced, the house would not be destroyed and the girls would have the right to remain in it as long as it remained standing. When she finished reading, the girls whooped with joy, Héloïse embracing the shocked (but not entirely reluctant) officer.
Camille tried to convince them to speak in public, to show people with influence in Paris that more help was needed, but they weren’t interested. “They will want to change us, and we are happy as we are,” Henriette said. A copy of the first pamphlet, The Flower Seller, was preserved in a curlicued frame that hung from a nail in Flotsam House. “It is,” Giselle observed, “the piece of paper that changed our lives.” Odette and Margot had grumbled that Giselle put too much weight such a small thing when so much had changed for them—all of Paris was improving because of the revolution—but Giselle, her enormous eyes fixed on Camille, had squeezed her hand and whispered: “Merci mille fois, mon amie.”
And if magic, however unwilling she was to have it, had made that happen, how could she stop? Wasn’t it worth it, even if the fevered printing felt wrong but also … uneasily right? What she needed, she told herself, was to control her uncontrollable magic. There had to be a way. More than ever, it could not seep out and be discovered.
Magic must stay hidden.
For after what she’d seen at the Palais-Royal, the Comité had crept into her dreams. In cloaks dyed red they followed her, their snarling mouths packed with yellow teeth. Once they sniffed out her magic, they tore off her fingers, one by one, and swallowed them whole. Outside her dreams the Comité was everywhere—even the seamstresses at Le Sucre complained to Sophie that red fabric was hard to come by, now that the long capes of the Comité guards required so many lengths of it. And, they said in a hush, the reason they wore red was so that they when they caught evil magicians in the act of whatever … abomination they practiced … any blood spilled wouldn’t show. Sophie had laughed it off, telling them they were being silly, but she told Camille it made her nervous.
“Don’t worry, it cannot touch us,” she said to Sophie.
But her nightmares said the opposite. She needed a way forward, and soon.
Meanwhile, at the Hôtel Séguin, invitations to parties and salons and events celebrating the revolution and Camille’s part in the change arrived like a blizzard of early snow. Unlike the vanishing magical notes, these accumulated in drifts on salvers, on the mantelpiece, and on the escritoire, where they threatened to overwhelm it. Sophie teased Camille that she needed to hire a private secretary to manage her correspondence.
At first she accepted them all. It was intoxicating to listen to speeches by the wild-eyed Jean-Paul Marat, scientist and writer, who’d started his own newspaper, L’Ami du Peuple, and burned with an almost religious fire. His belief that the poorest of the French deserved the most resonated with her own. There was also