I will have to start slipping coin to the ones that matter, cultivating my own relationships with them.
“Marie, yes. As you know, my dear, you are part of my image now. A reflection of my own reputation.” Her car-mined lips tighten into an implacable line, and she lowers her voice. “And I cannot have you tarnishing the both of us by traipsing to the cité to mingle with riffraff at your every whim. What if you were seen there by someone not in my employ, hmm? What if it became known that the maîtresse-entitre’s famed sorceress still wallowed in that sorry muck?”
“But she is my friend, Marquise,” I protest. “My oldest friend. She is … important to me. I can be more discreet in the future, if that is the trouble. I can—”
She draws me closer, her hand tightening around my arm so abruptly that it cuts me off, her lips hovering near my ear.
“And is our agreement not likewise important to you, Catherine?” she half whispers, her voice like a coiled whip. “Because if it is, I suggest you find another way to tend to your friendship. Send your mademoiselle Marie heartfelt missives, perhaps—but I had better not hear of you visiting her again. Do we understand each other?”
I hesitate for a moment, fuming with a quiet, blistering fury. How can she make such a demand of me, as if I am no more than one of the clipped-wing birds that line this room?
But I clamp down quickly on the rising anger before I have cause to regret myself. As my royal patroness, the marquise reserves the right to shape my conduct. And besides, just because she has my household staff still in her pocket does not mean I cannot find another way, one unbeknownst to her. I could even slip out disguised if I must, make my way to the cité concealed.
“We do, of course,” I confirm, taking care to keep my tone blithe and compliant even as I simmer with revolt. “It will be as you wish, Marquise.”
“Will it, though?” the marquise purrs into my ear, as though she can sense the deceit brewing beneath my surface. Her voice feels like a scalpel now, one pressed directly below my chin, where my pulse beats close beneath my skin. “Let me be abundantly clear, Catherine. Should I discover any defiance in this matter—and you can be sure that I would, sooner or later—I would consider our agreement null and void. Which would necessitate an immediate return of the sum advanced to you, of course. Now, I ask again, are we understood?”
I nod slowly, though my heart is a pocked pebble in my chest. The notion that I am forced to abide by this restriction makes me feel like my skin has shrunk a size too small, but what choice do I have but to agree? The independent life that I am slowly building for myself, and the very roof above Antoine’s head, depend on the marquise’s continuing patronage. I cannot leave Antoine not only without a home but at the mercy of the moneylender’s violent reprisal.
I will abide by the marquise’s command, I decide, at least for now. Until I manage to devise some safer stratagem to see Marie.
“Lovely.” The marquise draws back from me, shooting me a glittering smile. “Now, look, the show is about to begin! Do enjoy the rest of your evening, won’t you, Madame La Voisin?”
She squeezes my arm as though nothing is amiss between us and drifts elegantly away from me on a cloud of that cloying perfume.
As I turn to face the center of the room, all my former pleasure melting away like snow in early spring, a fresh swell of loneliness rises up within me at the thought of braving this unforgiving new life without the bulwark of my best friend.
Then a familiar figure clad in black steps onto the podium, jostling me from my thoughts.
The magician from La Pomme Noir, I think, catching a startled breath.
A velvet cape, sewn with silver constellations, billows behind him even in the windless room. In light of my conversation with the marquise, there is something unsettling and achingly nostalgic about his presence in this glittering place, so distant from the crumbling courtyard where I last saw him, with my fingers threaded through Marie’s. As if a shadow from my old life has snipped itself loose from its owner’s heels to haunt me here.
Just as silently as the last time, he transforms handfuls of feathers into a swarm of lace-winged moths that flutter above the crowd, teeming toward the chandeliers. He whisks black rabbits from his cloak before vanishing them away, twists handkerchiefs into orchid bouquets, summons a tittering lady from the crowd to bind his hands with shackles before effortlessly shedding them.
At the very end he lifts his hands to his face with a perplexed frown, running his fingers over his hairline and around his ears as if searching for some hidden seam. Then, with an anguished grimace, he seems to peel his features off to reveal a grotesque scarlet visage lurking beneath.
“Étonnant,” the lady beside me breathes to her companion, fanning herself. “Gerard, have you ever witnessed such feats of la magie?”
“No, indeed,” Gerard replies, sounding both captivated and a touch afraid. “If this Lesage is not truly a devil, he is at least some small god.”
As wild laughter echoes from the crowd, the demon’s face is peeled back to reveal Lesage’s once again—followed by another, even more diabolic visage. He strips back one after the next in gruesome and gripping succession, a seemingly endless metamorphosis. Letting a litter of used faces fall to his feet like husks.
Until none of us is certain what is real, the demon or the man.
Overcome by a tingling
