she approached the gate, she noticed something stuck in its iron bars. Reaching down, she wiggled it loose. It was a scrap of paper, printed in a cramped style, as if the writer had tried to put the most words possible onto the page. Some letters were incomplete, ghosts of what they should have been. Papa would have dismissed it as a sorry piece of work. Leave room for the reader to think, she could hear him say. Give the words some air. She was about to crumple it up when a sentence caught her eye.
soon the MAGICIANS will flee Versailles and their rotting estates and come to Paris where they will insult us with their tricks and snatch the food from between our lips for this is the way that they are, a race apart, sinners and EVILDOERS that must be eradicated like the rats they are—do not the ends justify the means when otherwise we will be killed in our beds?
There was no author’s name at the bottom, only a stamp resembling a bird. She traced it with her thumb, as if that would tell her something. What was it her friend, the Marquis de Chandon, had said to her in a dusty hallway at Versailles?
They are frightened of us magicians, because of what we are willing to do.
She felt a shadow creep over her, as though a storm cloud had covered the sun. But when she looked up, the street was still bright, busy with people going home. Paris was full of people printing things, herself included. Everyone wanted to be heard. Everyone wanted to shift the tide their way. This was nothing more than rubbish, blown against the gate and tangled there by accident. She wanted to let the breeze take it far away, but instead she tightened her grip on it.
It was too dangerous to let go.
Timbault, the wizened gatekeeper, nodded at her as she went inside. On the other side of the gravel court in whose center four pointed yew trees stood like sentinels, a low flight of shallow marble steps led to the front door. Behind it would be servants … and possibly Sophie. So she kept to the right, heading toward a battered servants’ entrance that faced the stables.
She didn’t relish going in that way, but the narrow back hallway led directly to the blue salon, which was, in the peculiar way of the house, always ice-cold. On a steaming day like today, it was her best chance. There was bound to be a fire in the hearth, and she was determined to see the pamphlet burn.
She found the door unlocked—a relief, since she never knew what the house would do—and went inside. The cramped passage was long and dim, and as she hurried along it, it began to change. Tendrils of mold bloomed on the plaster. The floorboards creaked in a chorus of complaint. And the walls themselves leaned ominously close, as if they wanted to touch her. “Get back,” she whispered, but they did not listen. She walked faster. Doors on either side led to a network of servants’ halls and stairs that tunneled through the house like secrets. In the few short weeks she’d lived there, she hadn’t wanted to explore them. Trying to uncover what was in the rest of the house had been more than enough.
For the Hôtel Séguin was webbed with an insistent, uncomfortable magic.
She hadn’t realized it, not in the first week or two. It had come on slowly, step by step, a wary animal edging closer.
The house was always changing, a corridor appearing where there hadn’t been one before, a door that should have opened onto a bedroom revealing a bricked-up staircase instead. Objects Séguin had enchanted when he was alive had begun to fade, taking on their former shapes: an ornamental sword hanging over a fireplace became overnight the thigh bone of a horse. A vase of what appeared to be Sèvres porcelain turned out to be a rusted urn.
All of it made Camille uncertain, as if everything around her might turn out to be different than it seemed. Sometimes she woke with the taste of ash in her mouth or caught herself holding her breath as she went from room to room, as if someone were listening. She stayed away from the dim attic where in a great wardrobe her once-enchanted dress hung silent and sleeping. She avoided the library that murmured at night. But it was harder to dodge the wind