He glanced helplessly around the noisy, crowded ballroom. “Do you ever wish that there was a place where it wasn’t like this? Where things were different? Where we might simply be?”
Her throat tightened. “All the time.”
“Remind me of it when I return,” he said sorrowfully, “for now I must take my leave.”
“But I’ll see you at the Champ de Mars—did Lafayette say what time the launch will be?”
“He says it’s military only.” He took her hand and pressed his mouth to her knuckles. It was suddenly unbearable that she would not be allowed to see him off.
“Why would he care if I were there? Wasn’t I once an aeronaut?” she added.
Faintly, he smiled. “I would rather have you with me than anyone. But you will help me most by following his orders.”
“I can at least walk you out.”
He shook his head. “Please stay. I can’t be responsible for you not finishing your cake. À bientôt, mon âme.”
He made his way out of the room, avoiding questions as best as he could, making for the doors. This was his occupation now, she told herself. This is what he did. She too did what she must. Still, fury crackled through her when she thought of the men who refused to see him as their leader because of the color of his skin. So far the revolution had not delivered equality.
The room fading around her, she saw in her mind the best version of the launch, as if she could work magic to turn a tarnished event into gold. No military band, no fluttering flags, no proudly worn badges. Instead there would be a serene sky, a flurry of efficient activity as the balloons were prepared for the journey. Various members of the corps running back and forth, carts arriving with more straw and cut wood. No suspicion or disrespect on their part. She and Lazare would kiss before he ran to his balloon and vaulted inside. The ropes would be untied as the brazier fires flared, and slowly, majestically, the balloons would rise. The crew on the ground would cheer. And she, the only bystander, would applaud as the balloons rose into the morning sky.
Watching a balloon rise always filled her with hope. A thing of the earth—a silk sack, a wicker gondola—transformed into a thing of the air. It was one of the most beautiful things she knew.
At the ornate double doors, Lazare paused to survey the crowded room. When he spotted her, he smiled that crooked, one-sided smile she adored, full of promise and determination.
It would be a flight of great uncertainty.
It was nothing new, but it still was hard. She waved adieu and, though he was too far away to hear, she softly entreated, “Please come back to me.”
23
It was past ten when she left the revolutionary party. At the door, guests eager to be seen with the pamphleteer offered her a ride in their carriages, but she told them she needed fresh air. Lazare’s words tinted her thoughts, so that in each of their smiles she saw only the glint of want: she was a means to an end for them, nothing more.
Outside, Camille inhaled: the air was brisk, sharp with wood smoke. Far above the stars were faint as pinpricks. Passing through pools of darkness and pools of yellow lamplight on her short walk home, she was deep in her thoughts about Lazare and his disdain of pretending as she crossed the Place des Vosges. But when she turned onto her own street, she was jolted out of her reveries.
At the iron gate to the Hôtel Séguin stood five guards of the Comité.
They were like fragments of gloom: long cloaks, muttered words like curses rising into the night. And straining on the end of a lead, a giant dog built like a bull. It shoved its massive head against the gate as it sniffed the air.
She pressed her back to the Hôtel Séguin’s stone wall, flattening herself away from the street lamp. In her ears, the blood pounded so hard she strained to hear what they were saying. Keeping to the shadows, she crept closer.
Accidently she kicked a pebble and the dog raised his head, ears swiveling. The man who held the lead spun in her direction. Under the brim of his hat, the grim line of his mouth was an angry slash.
“What is it?” one of them said.
The dog gave a low, harsh growl. “Puissant heard something.”