Camille unfolded it and pressed it flat. Inside was written:
Mes Amis!
Please join me for the launch of a marvelous adventure!
Wednesday, 2 o’clock sharp-ish
At the workshop
Just below, scrawled so boldly that the final “r” ran right off the page:
Charles Rosier
And at the bottom, a final note:
P.S. Lazare has promised to attend!
Camille laughed out loud. Of course she would go.
Knowing Lazare had returned to Paris, she could never stay away.
5
From her dressing room Camille heard Sophie’s light step in the hall. “You’re home already? Come quickly—we’re to meet Lazare and Rosier in an hour and I need help!”
“I closed the shop early.” Sophie was smartly dressed in a gray-and-blue flowered cotton dress and a straw hat festooned with silk periwinkles. In one arm, she was carrying her black cat, Fantôme, who was purring loudly.
Camille lifted the lids of several enormous hat boxes. “Tired from your adventures with d’Auvernay?”
“Cake and boys are never tiring. It’s my customers’ choices that are exhausting,” she said, giving Fantôme a kiss. “Why does no one want a hat trimmed in sky blue? Or a rich green, like you’re wearing?” She sighed. “Revolutionary ribbons are not why I opened Le Sucre.”
At least, Camille thought with a twinge of envy, Sophie made hats and ornaments people wanted. But the sad set of her shoulders made Camille instantly regret it. “I wish you could sell only your fantastical hats, ma chèrie. I hate that your original ideas are going to waste.”
Mollified somewhat, she asked, “What hat will you wear?”
Camille looked despairingly around her chaotic dressing room. “I don’t know!”
“I do believe you’re nervous,” Sophie observed.
“I’m not!”
Her gaze went to the tiny balloon-shaped music box Lazare had given her. It was a souvenir of the two times she’d gone up with him in the balloon—and that gossamer night he’d taken her in his arms at the top of Notre-Dame, the city’s rooftops far below.
But last week he’d left Paris abruptly to visit his parents at their estate of Sablebois. And though he’d been away only a handful of days, his sudden absence had left her feeling unmoored. Unsure. For so long she had tried to hold on to the things she loved only to have them slip like water through her fingers. What was to say it could not happen again?
Lazare was true, she knew. He did not willingly keep secrets. Still, it rubbed at her, like a seam sewn wrong.
“Ne t’inquiète pas! I’ll find the perfect hat,” Sophie said, setting the cat on the floor. He disappeared immediately under the bed. “It’s got to be here somewhere.”
Casting a critical eye at the mirror, Camille examined her emerald-green dress, embroidered with ribbon roses in various shades of pink. Over it she would wear a pistachio cloak with a wide ruffle and shoes that matched. As she smoothed her skirts flat, she thought for a moment of the other dress, the enchanted one that always made her look beautiful and compelling, hanging quiet and alone in a wardrobe in the attic—
“You should wear this.” Sophie handed her a hat she’d unearthed from a pile of Kashmiri shawls. “The dotted ribbon will go nicely with your cloak.”
Just as Camille was settling it over her hair, Adèle appeared in the hall, her cheeks very pink. “Monsieur Mellais has arrived in his carriage! He wishes to offer you a ride to the workshop.”
Lazare, here? “I thought we would walk! I’m not at all ready—”
“Apparently he couldn’t wait,” Sophie remarked. “I wonder why.”
Camille’s fingers fumbled with the hat’s ribbons, but even she could see how prettily her gray eyes sparkled, how becomingly her skin flushed. She bit her lip and smiled.
“You look absolutely delicious. He will devour you like a pastry.”
“Hush!” Camille swatted at Sophie with a fan. “Adèle, would you let him know I’ll be there in a moment?”
* * *
When she came downstairs, the doors to the courtyard stood open. Lazare was leaning against the door of his carriage. His beautiful face was turned away, but Camille could never mistake his tall shape nor his elegant, lanky ease, the gloss of his long black hair. Lazare being in the country at Sablebois hadn’t agreed with Camille, but it’d certainly agreed with him—his skin had deepened to a bronzy brown across his cheekbones, as if the sun now lived inside him. His tricorne hat tucked negligently under his arm and head tipped back, Lazare seemed to be absorbed by a flock of swallows swooping across the cloudy sky. The way he looked at things made her want to see what he saw, or, she thought, be seen by him.
Etiquette said to be coy, but she didn’t care. Instead she ran across the cobbled court. Five steps away, then three. Two. One—and he turned and pulled her to him.
Her heart was pounding ridiculously fast. “You’ve returned,” she said—and instantly felt foolish for saying this most obvious thing. With him in front of her, she was suddenly shy.
“Seeing you, I understand why each moment in the country felt like an eternity.” Slowly, he kissed the back of each of her hands, one by one, before releasing them. It would have been chaste, not violating any of etiquette’s rules, except for the way he looked at her. Hot, as if his gaze could kindle flames. The brush of his lips thrilled—a hand kiss from Lazare was much, much more than such a small thing had a right to be.
“Oh,” breathed Camille. Why go anywhere else, when he was here? Absently, she straightened a fold of his cravat, her fingers grazing his skin. “Do you think … would Rosier really miss us? Could we not perhaps sneak away?”
“There is nothing I would rather do,” he said in a way that made her feel like she was flying, “though he would certainly be disappointed. But now that I’m returned to Paris, nothing will induce me to be parted from you.”
Her fingers curled against the warm skin of his neck, she imagined a different autumn in Paris. Not the one that she’d been living, disturbed by the house’s magic and dissatisfied by her destiny.
Instead, it could be this.
She pulled herself back to the moment. “And your parents? Are they well?”
She remembered them from the opera—his bejeweled stepmother’s disdain; his distant father, a pale inverse of Lazare. Lazare’s warm coloring and inky hair came from his father’s first wife, an Indian from Pondichéry, whom he’d met while visiting his family’s spice plantations. When she’d died of malaria, he and a very young Lazare had returned to France. Whatever India had been to his father, it was no more. That door was firmly closed, even to Lazare. His father insisted, Lazare had told her, that he be more French and less Indian. It hurt and bewildered him.
At the mention of his parents, a muscle in Lazare’s jaw tightened. “Well enough. Some angry peasants had threatened to burn down a neighbor’s château. They’d managed to work themselves into a fright by the time I arrived. Anywhere, they said, would be better than Sablebois.”