PUBLISHER’S NOTE: This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
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ISBN 978-1-4197-4592-8
eISBN 9781683359449
Text © 2021 Abrams
Cover illustration © 2021 Jen Wang
Book design by Hana Anouk Nakamura
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To Anne, for helping me bring some very bad and bloody ladies (sort of) back to life
PROLOGUE
PARIS, FRANCE
May 12, 1661
Sometimes when I fear I may expel my very soul into the cauldron’s fumes, I like to imagine that the fabrique is truly hell itself and I one of its lesser demons. A wraith, a capering imp, a nightshade wreathed in wisps of smoke. Some diabolical creature made entirely without mercy.
Anything but the prisoner I am in truth.
My ghoulish fancy requires only the barest stretch of imagination. Despite its soaring ceiling, the converted ballroom of the hôtel particulier that houses Maître Prudhomme’s candle factory feels as cloistered and scorching as any furnace. Cast-iron cauldrons of tallow and beeswax bubble all along the great room’s length, two dozen of them suspended by chains above roaring braziers. Each is tended by a barefoot girl clad only in a flimsy, sweat-soaked chemise, the linen slipping sideways to reveal jutting collarbones like blades, whetted by the ruthless wheel of hunger. In the room’s relentless heat, any more clothing would only be a punishment.
Though perhaps, I remind myself as I wipe searing spatter off my cheek, it could be worse. Perhaps we are all fortunate the maître has not yet decided we would work more ably in the nude.
I would not put it past him to strip us of the few scraps of dignity we have left.
As they bend over the kettles, shoulder blades flexing like little wings with the effort of churning each blistering mass, the stirring girls remind me of nothing so much as fallen angels. Discarded and cast into perdition, forced to tend to the instruments of their own torment in penance. Save that my fellow captives are innocents, I think bitterly as I stir. Guilty only of being girls, unwanted and poor enough to wind up in this enfer.
The ballroom’s curdled decadence only bolsters the illusion of hell. Above our heads swing ruined chandeliers, studded with blackened crystal shards like rotting teeth, dangling from rafters smeared with the tallow’s fatty smoke. While beeswax melts much more cleanly, releasing a warm, delicious smell, not even the royal candlemaker can afford to ply his craft in costly wax alone. Instead, only the maître’s favored girls are assigned to the five beeswax cauldrons, while the rest of us choke in the tallow’s charnel reek. The rendered sheep fat is bad enough, but the pig lard that yields the cheapest candles could roil even an iron stomach. Only the wildest girls, the banshees who court daily thrashings by the overseers, are consigned to that particular misery.
For all my quiet wickedness, the curses I whisper into the tallow, I make sure never to be a banshee girl.
But the new dipper who attends to my cauldron does not take such heed.
Instead, she mutters mutinously to herself as she works, uncaring of who might hear. “May the pox speckle his manhood until it rots like grapes left too long on the vine,” she hisses, dipping the lines of cotton wicks looped over her broach into the tallow. “May his own maman grow to loathe the sight of his vile face.”
Though she is plainly furious, the turmoil does not disrupt the deftness of her movements. She expertly dips, then lifts the broach, letting the tallow harden just enough before lowering it again. Never allowing it to linger in the molten heat too long.
At least this one will not bring a beating down on our heads by overdipping the candles or melting them with haste.
“May everything he touches fade and crumble,” she continues, “turning to the palest ash and sourest dust.”
The ferocity of the words, the eerie malevolence of their rhythm, plucks some deeply buried string inside me and sets it aquiver. Though she does not rhyme, it still sounds like some wicked song, a perverse sort of prayer not intended for the ears of notre Dieu but something altogether else. Though I doubt the devil attends to mortal pleadings any more than God himself, who is certainly all but deaf to our predicaments, the savage sound of her curses appeals to me nonetheless.
But for all that I like it, I am certain the foreman would not feel the same.
“Would you hush already,” I snap at her under my breath, flicking her a barbed arrow of a look. “Unless you yearn to feel a bullwhip on your back. Beelzebub may not be near, but those cabbage ears of his are keener than you’d think. If he thought you might be speaking of Maître Prudhomme, I wouldn’t wish to be in your shoes.”
She pauses in her labor, knuckling away a trailing drop of sweat. When she meets my eyes, hers are as dark as banked coals and unaccountably amused.
“Did you say ‘Beelzebub,’ p’tite?” Her chapped lips quirk, tugging to one side, and her eyes ignite with interest. “That is what you
