“Can I ask you a question?”
“No.”
“What’s wrong with your parents?”
“Look, Jules? You’re nice and everything, but you need to mind your own business.”
The Mercedes rumbles through some road construction. Bright cones flicker past like little lighthouses, gone in an instant. My chest feels tight. I don’t look, but Jules’s expression is probably bordering on disgust.
“Well, you certainly look like you’ve had a rough life,” he says. “Malnourishment. Constant threat of war. No clothes but what you could scrounge out of the charity dump. How did you ever make it this far. . .”
“What?”
“Nothing. D’you think it’s strange they’re letting teenagers into a find like this? I mean, they could have gotten some veterans. Famous art historians or something. Doesn’t it strike you as odd?”
I squint at him. “No. There are going to be famous art historians and veterans. Dorf’s here. And anyway, we worked for this. We have qualifications. I’m sorry you have such a low opinion of your skills, but I feel like I’ve earned this.”
I don’t. I don’t feel like I’ve earned anything.
“You’re not even out of college,” Jules says. “You’re saying you’re right up there with the greats and they couldn’t have gotten anyone better if they tried?”
“I’m saying, no one’s been down there yet,” I snap. “I’m saying there haven’t been many tests or age verifications, and no one knows anything until we get in there and start combing the place. So until then, yeah, teenagers are a great option. Good night.”
I curl myself into the corner, and I feel empty, straight-up miserable. Wave at your chances of friendship as they pass, Ooky. You’re being diligent as ever. There’s this special talent humans have that they can be unhappy no matter where they are. No matter who they’re with and what they have. Or maybe that’s just my talent.
I pretend to fall asleep. Jules isn’t talking to me anymore anyway.
Chateau du Bessancourt, October 6, 1789
The market women marched on Versailles yesterday. They killed two guards, relieved them of their heads, and mounted their grisly trophies on pikes. “Like apples on a spit,” Guillaume told the servants gathered around him in the front hall, and a gasp went up, a frantic chorus of rustling aprons and whispered oaths.
We were not supposed to hear, my sisters and I, but we stood at the crack in the music room’s doors and listened.
Guillaume had been at Versailles, waiting to deliver a message from Father, when news came of the market women’s approach. He claimed to have seen the queen herself running for the hall of mirrors with the young dauphin. He said that the royal family fled to Paris, that Louis XVI was as good as headless already.
My sleeves stick uncomfortably to my wrists. My mouth is dry. I hurry my sisters out the other side of the music room, and I try to distract them with fumbled card tricks, but I cannot focus and I drop the deck. Father has already left the chateau, gone down to the Palais du Papillon. Again a casket was sent to Mama, an invitation asking her to come with him into his palace. Again I intercepted it:
My darling, it said, the writing splattered and uneven, ink beads on an ink thread, as if Father paused many times during the forming of each letter to consider the next.
It is no longer safe to remain in the chateau. I have heard whispers, received letters. A storm brews in Paris that will rain blood and ruin on France as it has not seen in a hundred years. Soon there will be looting and death and chaos. The king will be beheaded and his wife as well. A wave of human filth will flow across the land. But you, my chérie, you have nothing to fear. For such a catastrophe as this I built the Palais du Papillon: so that no matter what terrors befall the world, our way of life shall go on, the beauty and tranquility of our grand culture preserved forever. I promise you, you shall have every comfort in the palace. You will be safe, my treasure. You will be cared for.
Your husband,
Frédéric du Bessancourt
But Mama would not go. I heard her pleading with Father, heard her anguished sobs, so desperate and grating, I could hardly imagine them coming from one so small.
“Why?” I asked her again this morning when I caught her alone in the upstairs gallery. “Mama, why will we not go to the palace? We will only be there a short while, surely. What has frightened you?”
She answered me this time, taking my hands and squeezing them until I thought my fingers might snap. “The servants,” she said. “They have such horrid faces.”
She might as well have held her tongue for all that helped me.