“Then yesterday, as I was going to oversee repairs on one of the balloons, the family appeared again. The older woman stopped me and asked, ‘Are you not the Marquis de Sablebois?’ She told me she was the Duchesse de Cazalès and that she needed my help.”
Already Camille dreaded the answer to her question. “For what?”
He swallowed. “Her son had been wrongfully imprisoned at La Force prison but through some scheme had escaped before his execution. It was clear she feared nothing for her own life, only for her son’s wife and child. Already they’d been warned not to leave Paris before the police could question them about the son’s disappearance. She’d heard there was a nobleman in the balloon corps. It was not difficult to discover my name or where I lived.”
“And?”
“She asked me to fly them to England.”
Surprise—and sudden fear—startled in her chest. “How could she ask that of a stranger?”
“She believed in our common bond as aristocrats, I suppose.” Carefully, he turned the key a little more. “I met her grandson and his mother. She’d let out her stays—she’s having another child.”
“Does she know how dangerous it is to fly over the sea?”
“They are desperate. They tried to give me a diamond necklace as payment! What do you think the boy said?”
Numbly, she shook her head.
“‘It’s the least we can do, Sablebois. We will not take charity.’ With his father gone, he’s been forced to grow up too soon. I replied that we had a very serious problem, since I’d take nothing for the journey.”
The journey? “Lazare, this is madness—”
He held up his hand. To Camille it felt like a slap. “The Cazalès could be us in a week. A month. Tomorrow.” Carefully, he laid the key back in the case. “After what happened at Versailles, I see what the revolution has become. A poison poured in the wells of all of Paris.”
It was hard to argue with that. “Why must you go?”
“Because of you,” he said solemnly. “You are my inspiration.”
Bewildered, she said, “For this flight across the Channel? I would never do it—it is too dangerous!”
“I saw what you did for the girls. You saved their lives. And what was I doing? Giving my hard-won experience and knowledge to Lafayette so he might make balloons into war machines.”
“Surely they are only watching the border—”
“They are not.” He closed the clock’s case so hard the glass trembled. “Lille, the revolutionary dinner, Versailles: each one was a hole in the defensive wall I’d built to protect me from the reality of what I was doing. What you’d done so selflessly for the girls showed me where I’d gone wrong. You showed me what revolution could be. True rebellion. I can’t live with myself if I don’t take the Cazalès.”
On a pedestal beside her stood a bust of a long-dead magician. Gripping the corner of its cold marble base, she tried to steady herself. She had done this? Wishing so hard to be admirable, she had set his feet upon this path that would take him away from her? She felt untethered, the room tilting around her. There had to be another way.
“Can they not go by boat?” she asked.
“They’re already wanted by the police. Someone, somewhere has their names on a list of possible traitors. They wouldn’t get past the Paris gates.”
The rumors Sophie had heard were true after all. There were people in Paris keeping score, keeping the tally card of rights and wrongs, and the list would only keep growing. It was frightening, but the terror of him taking this journey was worse.
What could she say to convince him? “But the balloon corps, they need you—”
“Lafayette wishes to add guns to the balloons. That’s what I learned when I was called to ‘oversee repairs’ on the balloons.” He raked his hand through his hair. “And I gave them this weapon. I showed them how to build it, how to fly it. And for what?”
Clouds, she thought wildly. “Science. Progress—the things you believe in.”
“That’s what I told myself, too. Convenient lies. You know another lie? I never told you that it was my father who invited Lafayette to Sablebois. My parents had lured me to the country just for that purpose, though I didn’t know it. My father was so pleased Lafayette could provide me with a way to use the balloons that made sense to him, in the way my experiments never had. You know what he said?”