desolate, lost. Roughly their hands tugged at one another’s clothes, clutching at collars and lacings as if those were the barriers that kept them apart.
With a groan, he pulled away. His chest was heaving, and he ran a shaking hand over his face. “How can we be together if there is this thing between us?”
Something broke inside her then. A shivering crack, as of splintering glass. It was all wrong. Maybe once she’d thought she could stop working magic. But not now. She would not be that moth, insubstantial and too easily torn.
“If you can’t love me without wanting me to be something other than I am,” she said, “then yes—this thing will keep us apart.”
Before he could see her hot tears spill, she strode to the farthest window and put her back to him. Though there was only the space of a room between them, it was vast as a chasm. This is who she was: a magician. Cursed, or gifted, she did not know. He could leave her—but she would not let herself feel small.
“Camille!”
She would not go to him. She could not say how long they stood there, the house clattering and shifting unhappily around them, but finally he left. Nauseated, she listened to the rapid click of his shoes as he descended the stairs, his polite murmured exchange with Daumier, the doors closing behind him. In the hall, Adèle and Odette were calling her name.
From the window, she watched him cross diagonally across the street, heedless of the carriages, his hair flying about his shoulders. His beautiful hands, the ones that had just held her, were clenched in fists at his sides.
She might never see him again.
Someone might be trailing the Cazalès family. He might be caught before he left France. If not, the balloon could crash anywhere between Paris and Calais. It could tumble into the ice-cold sea. And then—nothing.
He had reached the park.
Every movement, every gesture he made as he crossed the faded grass of the Place des Vosges she wished to commit to memory. Like an important date, a name, a spell she could use to conjure him again.
She could not let him go like this.
Grabbing her skirts, she raced from the room. Past the startled servants, down the stairs, across the street, she ran, her breath ragged, until she reached the Place des Vosges, where she startled a cloud of pigeons into flight.
But Lazare was gone. All that was left were the trees in the square with their bare black branches, the fallen leaves tarnished like brass.
32
In the Place des Vosges, she waited for Lazare until her hands were stiff with cold, hoping he’d turn around and come back. Maybe then there would have been a way to erase what they’d said—what they’d done—and begin anew, the way embroidery could be unpicked from a sleeve.
But what had happened between them couldn’t be undone. There was no way to unpick it and make it as if it had never happened. It had. She hated how small and powerless she had felt, and she did not wish to feel that way ever again. If it meant being without him, then she would have to find a way.
She was running lightly up the grand marble stairs of the Hôtel Séguin when she heard, eerily clear, the sound of someone crying.
It couldn’t be Sophie, could it? Camille searched the house until she found her in her dressing room, holding a gown under her chin. She startled when she saw Camille.
“Dieu, what’s happened to you? You look terrible!”
“Lazare has left Paris. But I can’t talk about it now.”
The fabric slid from Sophie’s grasp. “Why ever not?”
“Can’t you hear the crying?”
Bewildered, Sophie said, “Hear what?”
What was it Blaise had said? That she needed to find a way to listen to the house?
The heart-wrenching sobs continued. It seemed as if they were coming from the mansion’s older wing. She hoped they weren’t coming from the library, for she didn’t want to go back inside with the rustling books and the enchanted portrait. She followed the sobbing down the long and gloomy hall until she came to a particularly ornate door. The weeping emanated from Séguin’s bedroom.
Gritting her teeth, she went in.
It had been emptied of anything personal and might have been anyone’s room but for a gold-and-black lacquered Chinese cabinet that seemed vaguely familiar. She opened a set of drawers and listened, feeling like a fool. Rien. She peered inside a towering armoire: nothing. And then she looked more