‘Is it?’
‘Camille—’
‘Because when I take a break, it’s not just me I’m putting at risk. Back when I started the battalion, I took risks because nothing mattered. Only, it turns out I built myself a new family out of the wreckage of my old life and now it does matter. I care and, oh god, I keep saying we’re doing good, I tell myself I do the right thing, but I don’t.I can’t sleep because all I can think of is how I hate myself – people are dead – but all I care about really is Guil, which makes me a goddamn bad person who clearly does not do the right thing. Am I a bad person? James, tell me. Am I a bad person?’
Carefully, gently, he folded her into his arms just as he had so many times in the past. She forced herself to stay still for a moment, unwilling to admit she wanted to be held by him. Then lost the battle and let herself lean into his warmth. His fingers carded through her hair, smoothing it back from her forehead. Her breathing fell in time with his, the rhythmic rise and fall tethering her when she felt she might fall apart.
‘You’re not a bad person. I know you, Camille, and I know who you are. You’re good and kind and brave and honest and I’ve loved you all my life.’
Closing her eyes she wrapped her arms around his waist, feeling the hard planes of muscle and breathing in his familiar smell of leather and wood smoke.
‘No. I’m not.’
5
The Crypt
Ada watched Olympe sleep. She was buried under a heap of jackets, dead to the world. Al had disappeared some time during the night. She didn’t know where. For a brief, unexpected moment, she was alone.
From the pocket tied under her skirts, she pulled out the letter from her father that Bisset the bookseller had passed to her. The money that had come with it had been half-spent already. Part of her wished the letter had burned in the fire. But it hadn’t, and the game continued. To read or not to read.
She turned it over in her hand. It was a small square of paper, folded over on itself and sealed shut with a hastily applied blob of wax. The ink showed through from the inside in an illegible backwards scrawl. She eased a nail along a fold, sliding her finger under the paper and like that, the seal cracked open.
Well, then. The choice was out of her hands.
To read, it was.
My dear Adalaide,
I am sorry you were so upset by our last meeting. Please believe me when I say that all I’ve ever done is care for you. Perhaps it’s impossible to understand the choices our parents make, but whatever else you think of me, never doubt that I want the best for you.
Come back again in a few days and I’ll do what I can to leave some more money with Bisset. You know you can ask me for anything you need.
She crumpled it without reading further and stuffed it back in her pocket.
Sick of being cooped up, she fished out a shawl from their stashed supplies and went to get some air.
Then stopped dead at the top of the stairs.
James and Camille were together. Their arms wrapped around each other. Then James was pressing a kiss to Camille’s mouth as she tilted her chin to meet him. He slid his fingers into her hair and held her close.
They looked so familiar with each other – Ada remembered that, of course, they were.
Camille was crying, Ada realised. Camille never let anyone see her cry.
For a moment she wanted to go back downstairs and pretend this had never happened.
But Camille had spotted her over James’s shoulder and was disentangling herself.
‘Ada, it’s not what it looks like—’
Ada didn’t give her time to finish the sentence.
Pulling her shawl bitingly tight around her, she marched past them and let herself out into the alley behind the charnel house. Sheer, caustic jealousy flooded through her.
It was not far to the market that was already in full swing. A tailor with a rare display of riotous fabrics, frothing Belgian lace and coils of ribbon from Saxony, jostled against stands of swedes and carrots and rhubarb, bunches of dried rosemary, sage and thyme. The curled wig of a noblewoman fluttered in the wind as she hung out of her carriage window to berate her driver for stopping behind a delivery wagon. Wheels and hooves splashed up sewer-smelling water. Ada walked blindly along the Rue St Honoré, stumbling into carts and street sellers, mud splashing her muslin skirts as she went faster and faster until her lungs burned and her heart raced. Anything to obliterate the image of Cam in James’s arms.
She stopped abruptly in front of the Conciergerie. Somehow her feet had led her across the river onto the Îsle de la Cité, back to where it had all started. Coming to her senses, she slid out of the thoroughfare and into the shadowed overhang of a building. It was a slim chance that any of the guards outside the gate would recognise the girl who’d fallen from the hot air balloon a few days before, but one she wasn’t willing to take.
