There was no reply that night. Laura sat by the fire and read aloud to the children from Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont’s fairy tales. Jeannette rocked back and forth and pretended not to listen while Laura read and brooded, the old, familiar phrases rolling off her tongue with very little relation to her brain. As Beauty wandered into the Beast’s castle, Laura wondered whether the bookseller had missed her meaning. By the time the Beast’s favorite flower was dying, Laura was quite sure that Jean had resorted to a drop and a spit. Jean, she had learned, used spitting the way other, more evolved, creatures used speech: to convey a whole range of emotion. And wouldn’t it be just like him to hold on to the book just to thwart her?

Of course, he couldn’t realize just how much it would thwart her. If he did, she would really be in trouble.

“Read us another!” exclaimed Pierre-André.

“Tomorrow,” said Laura, and closed the book.

That might be it! She could send to the shop for more fairy tales. Or . . . she could wait and see what happened. Prudence over impatience, she counseled herself. Even a governess could only patronize a bookshop so much before people started getting suspicious. And by people, she meant the Ministry of Police. All she needed was to draw their attention to the bookshop on the Rue Serpente and bring the whole edifice crashing down upon all their heads.

On the second day, she taught lessons in the morning and set the children passages from Racine to memorize in the evening, Pierre-André’s significantly shorter than Gabrielle’s. Pierre-André lost his place and giggled. Gabrielle slunk off with her Romance of the Forest. Jeannette knit. When Jean appeared to deliver the evening’s load of coal, it was all Laura could do not to jump up and shake him.

But she didn’t.

By the third day, Laura was feeling distinctly twitchy. She had never imagined that it would be possible to feel marooned in the midst of one of the major cities of Europe—utterly cut off from everyone and everything but the play of light in the nursery grate, Pierre-André’s giggles, Gabrielle’s sulks, and the click, click, click of Jeannette’s needles as she carried on with her everlasting knitting. One more click, and Laura wasn’t going to be accountable for the consequences.

“Who wants to go exploring?” Laura asked impulsively, flinging down the slate she had been using to demonstrate the principles of long division.

“Papa said we weren’t to leave the house,” said Gabrielle primly.

Laura eyed Gabrielle appraisingly. They had come to what Laura could only consider an armed truce; Gabrielle was tolerating her until such time as someone had the sense to throw her out. There were no frogs in the bed (the youngest Marchmont child), no ink down her back while she marked up compositions (Harry Littleton), and no midnight apparitions by ghosts in bedsheets (Laura had particularly enjoyed that one, especially when the littlest ghost had taken a header into the fender). Gabrielle wielded good behavior like a weapon, performing her lessons punctiliously and with a minimum of personal communication. Infinitely preferable to the frogs.

“But have you been exploring within the house?” Laura demanded.

“A house is a house is a house,” contributed Jeannette, spinning her woolly web like a spider who had hijacked a sheep.

“Not this sort of house.” Laura lowered her voice thrillingly. “Who knows what might be in the other wings.”

“Toys?” asked Pierre-André brightly.

“Perhaps,” said Laura noncommittally, but she was watching Gabrielle. No reader of Mrs. Radcliffe’s could resist that sort of possibility. Skeletons in closets, secret passageways, moldering manuscripts . . . “The house is very large and very old. There’s no telling what we might find.”

Gabrielle grudgingly dragged herself out of her chair. “If we have to . . .”

Ha! Laura had her. She didn’t know if they would find secret passageways, or a large manuscript entitled How to Thwart Royalist Plots by André Jaouen, but goodness knew what else might be there. At least she would be doing something instead of waiting, waiting, waiting. If she was to be marooned on an island, at least she might make full use of all the resources it offered.

They passed through room after empty room until Laura was dizzy with it, although it was easy enough to navigate by keeping one eye on the courtyard through the window. There were three of them—the larger garden court in front, two smaller courtyards in back—all perfectly symmetrical. Any internal symmetry, though, had been marred by the improvements of successive generations. There were strange crannies where the shapes of rooms had been altered to create fashionable ovals or octagons, leaving odd, triangular spaces behind; there were doors into narrow, windowless hallways running along behind the formal rooms, the openings cunningly disguised within the paneling.

Pierre-André made tracks in the dust, shuffling to watch his footsteps blur. The children hunted for lost jewels in the depths of old armoires, and danced to watch their own reflections twirl in the tarnished mirrors of the ballroom.

When the Parisians looted, they looted well. The only furniture remaining were those pieces too large to be easily tossed out a window or chopped up into firewood. Even bits of the wood paneling had suffered the latter fate, leaving gashes in the walls and empty hinges where doors must once have hung. After corridor after corridor, room after room of dusty emptiness, they all came to an abrupt stop at finding a third-floor room crammed full with bundles and boxes. They had climbed and wandered so much that Laura wasn’t quite sure where they were, other than that it was somewhere towards the back of the house, overlooking the service courtyard.

The boxes were wooden crates, the lids sitting askew where the nails had been prised out. There were canvases and framed pictures propped facedown against the wall, rolled rugs piled in corners, even a large, padded chair sitting in state all by itself among the boxes, as though waiting for someone to sit in it.

“But these are ours,” said Gabrielle, hanging over the side of a box. “These are our things from home.”

“Grandfather’s globe!” exclaimed Pierre-André, spotting something sticking out of one of the other boxes, and went to go pull at it.

“Don’t!” said Gabrielle fiercely. “You’ll break it.”

There was a brief scuffling match, resolved only by Laura lifting the globe out of the box for them and setting it on its stand. It wasn’t a particularly grand specimen. The paint had begun to crack in places and some of the boundaries were out of date, but it was obviously well used and much loved. Pierre-André gave it a well-practiced spin, turning the hard-won products of war and dynastic alliance into little more than a multicolored blur.

The box next to Laura was filled with books—books of all shapes and sizes, with dog-eared pages and broken spines. She leaned over the box, turning them over in her hands, one after the other. Plato rubbed shoulders with Rousseau, Aristophanes with Molière, and Seneca with the The Sorrows of Young Werther. Weighty treatises on law lounged cover by cover with thin volumes of poetry: Petrarch, Scève, Ronsard, du Bellay. There was Greek and Latin, German and Italian, and even a very small smattering of English titles, although those seemed the least thumbed of the lot. Ah, well, who really wanted to read Blackstone’s commentaries on the laws of England?

Laura sorted busily through the box, setting aside those that might be useful in the schoolroom—yes to Racine, no to Blackstone, yes to Plato, no to Ronsard—when something made her pause. She stood with her hands clamped on either side of the box, staring down into it, at a small red book with faded gilt lettering on the cover. The sound of the children’s voices receded into the background, replaced by other, louder voices, dead now for so many years.

Reaching into the box, Laura let her fingers close around the book, lifting it with care. The red morocco cover was worn now, eaten away at the edges by time and use, the pages spotted with brown.

Venus’ Feast by Chiara di Veneti.

Then, under it, in smaller lettering, Chansons d’Amor.

Her mother had never believed in the subtle approach.

Laura could remember it fresh and new, just this same edition. She could picture the book in her mother’s hands, her fingers unnaturally white against the red cover, rings glittering in the candlelight, bracelets jangling on her wrists. Above it all shone the great mass of her golden hair, never powdered, always with long curls tumbling around her shoulders as though the bands of any headdress ever made could never hope to contain the vibrancy of it.

She would stand there, Laura’s mother, in all her shining wonder, the little volume of poetry small and insignificant. Then, just as the laughing, chattering crowd had begun to grow restless, to shift and whisper in their seats, she would let the covers fall open and begin to read.

Everything else would be forgotten—the jewels, the hair, the artful dishabille of her dress. Friends, lovers, former lovers, the lovers of former lovers, no matter how petty or vicious, how inebriated or exhausted, would all fall silent, enchanted into immobility by those words, those wonderful, rolling, searing words. It was better than music, better than dance, thought and form in perfect harmony, painting images in words, addressing all the old, visceral emotions in a powerful combination of lyric and rhyme.

There wasn’t a person who could resist Laura’s mother when she read. She was a force of nature, pure, elemental.