Read Chapter 22: The Lost Locket

The dressing rooms at the Académie Royale de Musique smelled of powder, sweat, and stale wine. Camille had been inside the opera house only once before, in a box so far from the stage that the singers had looked like marionettes. Now she stood in the warren of corridors behind the stage, clutching a velvet pouch that contained a spool of silver thread and a needle—props for her invented errand.

"Her Majesty's gown," she said to the costume mistress, an exhausted woman with ink-stained fingers and a wig that sat askew on her head. "The queen requires an additional panel of lace for Thursday's performance. I was sent to match it against the existing trims."

The woman—Madame Roche, according to the embroidered badge on her bodice—looked Camille up and down with the practiced suspicion of someone who had survived thirty years at court. "The queen's dresser usually comes herself."

"The queen's dresser is attending to a fitter's crisis in the Trianon. I am the seamstress of the queen's new designs." Camille held up the spool of silver thread. "The silk is distinctive. I will know it when I see it."

Madame Roche hesitated. Then she shrugged, a gesture that said *the queen's whims are not my problem*, and waved Camille through. "The costume archives are at the end of the hall. Do not touch anything in the performing wardrobes, and mind the candles."

Camille curtsied and moved swiftly down the corridor, her heart hammering beneath her stays. The needle pressed warm against her skin, a constant thrum of attention, as if it could feel proximity to what she sought. The baronne had said the locket would be moved through unused costumes. The woman in emerald had worn it openly at the opera; after the baronne's warning, it would have been passed like a hot coal until it settled somewhere dark.

The costume archive was a vast, dim room lined with wooden racks of gowns in every imaginable color, their sleeves and trains hanging like the wings of sleeping birds. The air was thick with dust and the particular sourness of old wool. Camille moved between the racks, running her fingers along the fabrics—silk from Lyon, brocade from Genoa, velvet from Florence—searching for something that drew the needle.

The warmth at her chest pulsed as she passed a rack of dark costumes near the back wall. She stopped. The costumes were old, from some forgotten production, their hems frayed and their colors faded to sepia and rust. Opera singers were vain; no one would wear these again. The perfect place to hide a locket.

She began to search methodically, checking pockets and seams, feeling along the inner linings. Her hands worked quickly, practiced at finding hidden pockets and secret closures. The needle at her breast grew warmer with each costume she examined, until it was almost uncomfortable, a burning fingertip pressed against her sternum.

Then her fingers closed over something hard and cold in the lining of a tarnished gold bodice—a costume meant for a courtier, perhaps, with wide panniers and a bodice cut low. She worked the object free. The locket. It was smaller than she remembered, gold and oval, with a miniature painted on its face: a woman with dark hair and startlingly direct eyes.

Camille's breath caught. The woman looked familiar. She turned the locket over. The back was plain, with a small latch at the side.

"Looking for something?"

Camille spun. The woman in emerald stood in the doorway of the archive, silhouetted against the candlelight of the corridor. She was alone, and she did not look like a woman who had come to sing.

"You," Camille said, tucking the locket into her bodice with practiced speed. "You wear it to the opera, and now you follow me here."

"I don't follow," the woman said, stepping into the room. She moved with a dancer's grace, her gown of deep green silk rustling over the wooden floor. "I wait. And I watch. Drouet said you would come for it eventually."

"So you're his pawn."

The woman's mouth twisted. "I am not a pawn. I am a messenger. There is a difference, though I find men rarely appreciate it."

Camille's hand drifted toward the needle at her breast, not that she could use it as a weapon, but its warmth steadied her. "The baronne said the locket would be moved. You moved it into the costumes."

"I did as I was told." The woman's eyes flickered to Camille's bodice, where the locket lay hidden. "The man I delivered it to was not Drouet. Drouet is a servant, same as me, though he believes himself a master."

"A servant to whom?"

The woman’s smile was small and sad. "To an office in Vienna that collects accidents. And you, mademoiselle, are the most interesting accident they have seen in a very long time."

Camille's skin prickled. "The baronne mentioned the Vienna office. What do they want with me?"

"They want you contained. Catalogued. The previous one—the tailor who vanished—she slipped through their fingers. They will not make the same mistake twice." The woman took a step closer. "But I did not deliver the locket to Drouet's handlers. I delivered it to someone else who paid more and asked fewer questions."

"Who?"

"That is not my secret to sell. But I am telling you this much: I did not put the locket in the costume because I was told to. I put it where I knew you would find it, because I have seen what the Vienna office does to its accidents. They do not return home, mademoiselle. They disappear."

Camille's hand pressed against the locket through the fabric of her bodice. The needle hummed, a low vibration she could feel in her teeth. "Then why are you helping me?"

The woman looked away, and in the candlelight, her face seemed to age, the mask of courtly composure slipping. "Because the previous tailor was my mother. And I have been waiting twenty years for someone to hold that needle and find their way back."

The words hit Camille like a physical blow. The previous tailor. The midwife's note had mentioned a secret child, a mother who vanished. She had imagined an infant, a babe left behind. Not a grown woman with Drouet's eyes and a servant's position.

"Your mother was—"

"The woman who came before you. The one they hunted. The one who left this world and never returned." The woman’s voice cracked on the last word. "She left me this." She raised her hand, and in her palm lay a miniature portrait, identical in style to the one on the locket's face. "The locket has a hidden compartment. Open it."

Camille felt the weight of the gold oval against her chest. She hesitated, then reached into her bodice and drew it out. The woman in emerald watched, her expression unreadable, as Camille's fingers found the latch and pressed.

There was a soft click. The locket's face swung open, revealing a second interior cavity—not the usual miniature on the inside, but a small recess lined with silk. Inside lay a second portrait, a man this time, with sharp features and dark hair, a miniature so small it barely covered Camille's thumbnail. She lifted it carefully.

The portrait was unremarkable—a man in fine dress, perhaps a courtier, perhaps a lawyer. But when she turned it over, she found writing, faded brown ink on the back of the portrait, so small she had to squint to read it.

*For she who follows—the needle is the key. The grotto holds the door. Trust no one in Vienna. I am waiting on the other side.*

Camille looked up. The woman in emerald had not moved. Her eyes were wet, and she was staring at the portrait in Camille's hands with a grief so old and so deep that it seemed to fill the room.

"He was my father," the woman said. "He vanished a year after she did. They told me he died in a boating accident on the Seine. But I found this in his chamber, hidden in a hollow book. And the writing on the back is hers."

Camille's hands trembled. The locket and the portrait together formed a message, a guide. The needle was the key. The grotto held the door. But for whom was this left? A previous traveler, trying to help the next? Or a trap, laid by the Vienna office to catch her the moment she tried to leave?

The needle at her breast burned, unbearably hot, urgent. And Camille realized, with a cold clarity that cut through the fear and the confusion, that she had just become the third piece in a puzzle she did not yet understand. The woman in emerald was not the original owner of the locket, and not merely a pawn of Drouet. She was the daughter of a woman who had traveled before her—and she had been watching Camille for far longer than Camille had known.

"You asked who I delivered the locket to," the woman said. "I delivered it to you. I have been waiting weeks for you to find it. The needle chose you. It must return to the grotto before the new moon, or the door will close for another twenty years."

Camille's breath caught. "The new moon is in three days."

"I know." The woman in emerald smiled, and there was something desperate in it. "My name is Marguerite. And I am going to help you go home—if you will take me with you."