Read Chapter 23: A Ghost from the Past

The rain had finally stopped, leaving the air heavy with the smell of wet stone and boxwood. Camille and Marguerite stood shoulder to shoulder in the candlelit dressing room, the locket resting in Camille's palm like a captured star. Its gold surface was warm from her skin, the enamel work exquisite—a tiny garden painted on the lid, roses and a fountain that shimmered with an impossible depth.

Étienne hovered near the door, one ear cocked toward the corridor. “We should not linger here. The opera house will stir soon.”

“Then let us be quick.” Camille’s fingers found the catch, a hair-thin seam along the locket’s edge. She pressed, and the lid sprang open with a soft, resentful click.

Inside lay a miniature portrait: a woman with dark hair piled high, a gentle smile that did not quite reach her eyes. Marguerite inhaled sharply. “My mother.”

Camille studied the painted face, searching for any resemblance to the woman beside her. Marguerite had the same sharp chin, the same defiant set to her jaw. But it was the back of the portrait that seized her attention. Tiny, cramped script covered the reverse, ink so faded it seemed to have been written in dust.

She tilted it toward the candle. “There’s a message.”

“Read it,” Marguerite urged.

Camille squinted. The writing was in French, but the hand was hurried, as if the author had feared interruption. *When the needle finds the locket, the door will open. She who comes from tomorrow must stand where Apollo drinks the sky. A needle’s eye at midnight. Do not trust the watchers. They took my husband. They will take her too if they can. Burn the seam, or be burned by it.*

The words died in her throat. Marguerite’s fingers closed around the locket, pulling it closer to the light. “Apollo drinks the sky,” she repeated slowly. “What does that mean?”

Étienne turned from the door, his brow furrowed. “There is no fountain of Apollo at the palace. The main fountain is Latona’s, near the grand avenue. The Apollo fountain is at the far end of the cross-green, beyond the colonnade. But I have never heard it described as drinking the sky.”

Camille’s mind raced. She had visited Versailles as a tourist in her own time, haunted the gardens for inspiration. The Apollo fountain, the centerpiece of the cross-green, lay at the heart of the Grand Axis. Apollo rising from the water in his chariot, the sun god bursting from the deep. Drinking the sky.

“The new moon is in three days,” Camille said. “The message says nothing of the moon. It says midnight, at the fountain.”

Marguerite shook her head. “My mother’s other notes spoke of the moon’s phases. The door opens only when the night is at its deepest and the sky is empty of light.” She paused, her lips pressing together. “The new moon is the only night when the sky drinks the sun.”

Camille felt the pieces click into place like a lock turning. The new moon—the sky drinking the light—Apollo drinking the sky. “The door opens at the new moon, at midnight, at the Apollo fountain.” She clutched the needle through the fabric of her bodice. “But what is the needle for? The message says it finds the locket.”

“The needle is the key,” Marguerite said. “My mother always said the needle is the key. She claimed it could pierce the veil between now and then—that it was not a sewing needle at all, but something older. Something that had passed through a dozen hands before hers.”

Camille slid the portrait from its niche in the locket, turning it over in search of more writing. There was none. Only the warning echoed in her thoughts: *They took my husband. They will take her too if they can.*

She looked at Marguerite. “Your father—my predecessor’s husband—the watchers took him?”

Marguerite’s face went tight. “She told me he vanished on a summer night, two years before I was born. She never spoke of it again except to warn me. She said there are men who police the seams of time. They watch for those who slip between worlds. She believed they found him because he knew too much about her past.”

“The Vienna office,” Camille murmured.

Marguerite blinked. “You know of them?”

“I know of a man who works for them.” Drouet’s weasel face surfaced in her memory, his eyes alight with accusation. “He has been hunting me since the first day I arrived. I thought it was coincidence. Chance. But he knew things he should not have known about who I was—who I truly was.”

Étienne stepped closer, his voice low. “If the watchers are searching for you, and they are connected to the Vienna office, then every hour we spend in the palace is an hour they may close around us. The escape must happen at the new moon. We have three days.”

“Three days,” Camille echoed. She had been at Versailles for what felt like an eternity and a heartbeat at once. The silk gowns, the poisoned tongues, the endless intrigue—they had become a second skin. But beneath it all, like the needle pressed against her chest, ran the thread of her real life. Her studio in Paris. The sketches pinned to her wall. The coffee she had never fully appreciated until she was forced to drink boiled chalk-tinged substitutes.

Three days. She could survive three days.

A knock at the door made all three of them freeze. Étienne’s hand went to his sword. Marguerite’s eyes darted to the window, gauging the drop.

“It is I,” came a woman’s voice, low and familiar. The baronne.

Camille exhaled. “What does she want?”

“Let her in,” Marguerite said, with a surprising edge of urgency. “She knows more than she tells. If she is here, it is because the watchers have moved.”

Étienne hesitated, then unlatched the door. The baronne slipped through, her gown the color of midnight, her face pale beneath the candlelight. She glanced at the locket in Camille’s hand, then at the portrait, and something flickered in her eyes—recognition, or memory.

“You found it,” she said. “Good. Then you have three days to prepare.”

“How do you know about the three days?” Camille demanded. “How do you know about any of this?”

The baronne’s lips curved into a smile that did not reach her eyes. “Because I was once like you, Mademoiselle Martin. A visitor from tomorrow. I came through the door at the grotto forty years ago. I chose to stay.”

The words landed like a blow to the chest. Camille stared at the baronne, at the perfectly powdered face, the diamonds at her throat, the composed elegance of a woman who had mastered a world that was not her own. “You—you were—?”

“I was a scholar of architecture,” the baronne said softly. “I studied the fountains of Rome. And I found a door I should not have found. The needle chose me, as it chose your predecessor, as it has chosen you.” Her gaze dropped to Camille’s bodice. “It has a will of its own, that needle. It does not merely open doors. It decides who may pass through them.”

Marguerite’s face had gone pale. “My mother never told me.”

“Your mother never knew,” the baronne replied. “She believed the needle was a gift. But it is not a gift. It is a constant. A threshold. And it has waited a century for a hand that could bear its purpose.”

Camille felt the needle’s cold presence against her skin. It seemed to pulse, as if alive. “What purpose?”

The baronne’s smile deepened. “Why, to thread the seam, of course. To mend what has been torn. Or to rend it utterly.” She stepped back toward the door. “The Vienna office believes the needle is a weapon. The man who paid Marguerite to deliver the locket believes it is a key to treasure beyond imagining. They are both wrong. It is a choice. And when you stand at the grotto at midnight, you will have to make it.”

She paused at the threshold, her hand on the latch. “Choose well, Mademoiselle. The seam between worlds is fragile enough without another wound.”

Then she was gone, leaving only the whisper of silk and the scent of bergamot.

Marguerite rounded on Camille, her eyes blazing. “That woman knows my mother. She knows what happened. She could have told us—” She broke off, her fists clenched.

Camille pressed the portrait to her lips, feeling the weight of its promise and its warning. Three days. The new moon. Apollo drinking the sky.

And a choice she did not yet understand.