Read Chapter 34: A Thread in the Loom

The chandelier’s fall had left scars in the marble of the Queen’s antechamber, but the real wounds were invisible—the tremor in Marie Antoinette’s hand as she signed her next order, the hollow look in her eyes when she dismissed her remaining ladies. Two days had passed since the poisoned gloves, since Bertin’s arrest, since Étienne had taken the blow meant for a queen.

Camille sat in the corner of the Queen’s private sitting room, a half-finished bodice in her lap, her fingers moving through the motions of a stitch she had taught herself at nineteen. But her mind was elsewhere entirely: in a hospital room in Paris, in a body that might not exist anymore, in a future she had seen in a fever dream.

The Queen entered, flanked by two ladies Camille did not trust. She looked thinner in the jawline, the softness of her cheeks hollowed by sleepless nights. She waved the ladies away and collapsed into the chair beside Camille, not regal at all—just terrified.

“They say the people of Paris are singing songs about the gloves,” Marie said quietly. “They say I deserved the arsenic. That it was God’s justice.”

“They say,” Camille said carefully, “that you are a tyrant fattened on their bread. You know what they say, Majesty. What matters is what you do next.”

Marie’s eyes found the bodice in Camille’s lap. It was not for her, not for the Queen—it was a simple thing, linen and cotton, cut square like a peasant smock. The Queen reached out and touched the fabric with her fingertip, as if it were a relic.

“What is this?”

“The seed of a garden,” Camille said.

She had been thinking about it for nineteen hours straight, through the doctor’s visits and the incense and the endless murmurs of the court. Étienne had begged her to go home, to use the needle and her knowledge to stop the Revolution before it began. But she had already refused the full moon. She had already chosen him, chosen this world, chosen to remove the portal from her future.

Yet the vision he had described—the crowds, the guillotine, the heads that fell like apples from a tree—would not leave her alone.

You have the knowledge, Claire. Use it.

She set the smock over her knee and met the Queen’s eyes.

“Your household spends a million livres a year on lace and powdered wigs. The people see it as a tax on their starvation. You will never change that by wearing simpler gowns, Majesty—they will simply say you mock them with false humility.” She held up the smock. “But if you, the Queen of France, were to ask your ladies to wear *this*—unbleached cotton, cut by seamstresses of Paris, sold at cost to benefit the poor—and if you yourself wore it once a week to the public masses…”

Marie blinked. “Wear *peasant* cloth?”

“Wear *French* cloth. The markets of Lyon will not weave silk if no one buys it. But cotton? Cotton is America. Cotton is the future. France is starving for bread, not for fashion—but fashion is the only language they will hear from you.”

The Queen stared at the smock. Her fingers stopped trembling.

“I have been trying to save my throne with charity galas and concerts,” she said slowly. “Bertin told me the people wanted spectacle. That I must outshine them, dazzle them into love.”

“Bertin was starving them,” Camille said. “With her gloves, and with her advice.”

“So what do you propose instead?”

Camille laid the smock flat and pressed her palm to the seam. This was the part she had not told anyone yet. The part that made her stomach roll and her hands sweat, the part that flouted every law of a physics she no longer believed in.

“You announce a reform: the royal household will reduce its spending by a third. You sell the crown’s jewels in Bouillon to feed the starving cities first, and you commission a single, simple white gown—trimmed in the lace of a dozen seamstresses of Paris, to show that France made this, that France is the maker of its own fate.” She paused. “And you let the seamstresses put their names on it. In the hem. Where the light catches when you walk.”

Marie’s eyebrows arched. “A billboard.”

“An honor. A thread that binds the Queen to her people, embroidered by hand, worn public.” Camille’s voice dropped. “It will not save your throne, Majesty. But it will make certain that when historians write of you, they will write of a woman who tried… and who listened, in the end, to the hands that clothed her.”

The Queen’s eyes glistened. She gripped Camille’s hands.

“Then I shall wear the white gown,” she said. “And I shall name you my First Seamstress of the Public Works.”

Camille bowed her head, but her heart was pounding so loudly she could hear it.

*Now the other part. The dangerous part.*

Later that night, alone in the small garret she now shared with Elise above the Queen’s workshops, Camille pulled the needle and locket from their hiding place inside the doll’s breast—the doll Drouet had failed to find. The locket still glowed faintly at the touch of her pointer finger, the way it had that first night in the cold field.

She pressed the point of the needle to her own palm, not enough to bleed, but enough to feel the tug—that strange, warm pull toward something older than her.

“I’m not coming home,” she whispered to the air. “But I need you to *be better*. To grow up without my mistakes, and be braver than I was.”

She pressed the needle into the seam of the white gown she herself had cut for the Queen’s commission—no, into the smock, the peasant smock she had made first. The one she would send to a little girl in Lyon via charitable house.

A little girl with her grandmother’s eyes. Claire Martin, age six, in a village outside Lyon, who would one day grow up to be a fashion designer—but who, this time, would trace the embroidery in the seam of the smock her mother bought at the market, and read the tiny letters sewn in white thread:

DON’T BE AFRAID. MAKE THINGS THAT MATTER. YOU ARE NOT ALONE.

The needle pulsed once, then went cold.

Camille gasped and dropped it on the table. The smock looked no different. The thread was white on white cotton, invisible to any eye but a child’s—and only when the light caught it a certain way.

For a long moment, she stared at her own hands.

She had just changed her own past. She had sent a message to a girl who did not exist yet, a version of herself who would never remember the fire, the drowning, the loneliness—because Camille had just made sure she would be kind to herself instead of cruel.

The paradox hit her like a cold wave: if that girl becomes kinder, she changes. If she changes, the woman who disappeared into Versailles might never have become her at all—and yet the portal had still brought her here, so the strands were holding, for now, in a knot she had just tied herself.

She felt the world tilt—not physically, but deeply, as if the loom of time had been threaded in a new direction, and the shuttles were still adjusting.

Somewhere above her, in the palace of echoes and intrigue, a queen was choosing a white gown.

And somewhere in the future, a little girl was about to read a message from a ghost she had not yet died.

Camille picked up the smock and folded it, precisely, the way her mother had taught her—though now, she could no longer remember which mother she meant.

She tucked it under her arm and walked to the door, feeling her heartbeat steady. Whatever happened next—portal, Revolution, sword or needle—she was no longer just a stranger in this time.

She was a thread in the loom. And she had just pulled the whole tapestry tight.