Chapter Twenty-One - Oh.

They were everywhere. Clocks fashioned from intricately molded gilt-bronze were lined up along the room’s many shelves. Clocks decorated with pastel figures of birds and mythological creatures were arranged on the desks. And what looked like an entire clock graveyard was scattered across the floor, cogs and springs and other bits I didn’t know the name for spilling from the wooden bases like metallic entrails.

Everywhere I stepped, I was in danger of knocking into unpainted chunks of porcelain, buckets of glittering powders, or decorative bronze pieces in the shapes of crowns, vines, and flowers. The air was warm and thick with dust and wood shavings, coating my throat whenever I dared to take a breath.

The room wasn’t merely meant to display clocks—it was an entire workshop.

“This is awful,” I said at the same time Jacqueline gasped out, “This is wonderful.”

I gave her a disbelieving look, but she was turned away from me, making her way to a row of jewel-colored mantle clocks on the wall.

“They’re all so lovely,” she said as she ran her hand across a silver clock adorned by a lacquered sun and moon. Then she stopped. “This is my design. All the clocks on this wall are my design.”

“Your design?”

Jacqueline waved me over to where she stood in front of a clock with a swooping gilt base, golden leaves and vines jutting out from the bottom and ending in porcelain rose buds, each painted a different shade of pastel pink.

“I designed these clocks and gave the designs to Monsieur Duvaux,” she said. “They all must have been stolen from his workshop earlier.”

“You designed them?” The details were so complex and delicate, I couldn’t imagine anyone spending the time to design them, especially not someone who I’d seen wield a dagger while spitting out insults like they were shells on a pumpkin seed. “I thought you were an apprentice.”

“I’m not—I mean, I am, but my actual job is to design the clocks for Duvaux’s shop. I only pretend to be an apprentice because no one will accept a design done by a dark-skinned woman. It’s Monsieur Duvaux’s and my little secret.” She bit down on her lip. “Well, it was our little secret before I ruined everything.”

For the second time that afternoon, my mind flashed back to Jacqueline sitting on the street, chest heaving with ragged breaths. For years, I had felt completely alone in my struggle. Mother never cared enough to help. Father was always busy gambling away the family fortune. Étienne and Renée tried, but it was clear they couldn’t truly understand. It was always just me—by myself—wondering if there was something wrong with me, if people would consider me a huge joke for the rest of my life.

But then I met Jacqueline, and for once, I didn’t feel so broken.

“Jacqueline—” I started, but she plucked her clock off the shelf and walked over to a worktable covered in wood shavings and golden powder. She flipped the clock over, picked up the turnscrew next to her elbow, and began prying the back open.

“Wait!” I said. “Don’t break it.”

She continued working at the screws on the back of the clock, not bothering to glance up as she said, “I’m not going to break it. I need to see something.”

“We came here to find the journals, not to tear apart clocks.”

“Then you look for the journals.” She let out a heaving sigh. “There are two of us here, you know.”

I hadn’t thought of that.

“I don’t know what they look like.”

“They look like journals, Olivier.”

“Yes, but are they big or small? What color are they? Are there a lot of pages or—”

Jacqueline slammed the turnscrew down on the table, displacing a cloud of wood dust, and glared at me. A bit of gold powder was stuck to her cheek, and it glittered against her skin. “We came all the way here, broke into someone else’s home, and now you don’t have enough sense to look for the journals by yourself? Do you need me to hold your hand on the way back to your house, too, so you won’t get lost?”

I flinched. I may have understood her better, but she was still an enormous pain. “God, all right, I’ll look for them. You don’t have to be so mean.”

I stomped over to a marquetry sideboard cabinet and yanked open its drawers. “They look like journals, Olivier,” I said in a high-pitched tone. “Do you need me to hold your hand on the way back to your house, too, so you won’t get lost?”

“I can hear you,” Jacqueline said from the worktable.

“Good!” I ripped open a drawer with so much force, it came free and crashed to the ground.

Silver picks and files and tweezers spilled onto the floor, their wooden handles worn with use. I kicked them away impatiently. My foot slipped against a metal pin, and the sharp tip of a nearby tweezer caught on my ankle, tearing a hole in my white stocking.

Ugh, ugh, ugh.

I brought my foot up to kick them again when Jacqueline called out, “I knew it.”

Every part of my body was screaming for me to ignore her, but my curiosity got the better of me. “Knew what?”

Jacqueline rushed over to the shelf and selected a second clock, this one decorated almost entirely of gilt bronze cherubs and angels, save for the clock face, painted a bright cerulean.

“That’s fine,” I said. “You needn’t answer me. You’re able to be here now because of my frightfully cunning and clever plans, but no matter. It’s fine.”

“These clocks have the same markings on the minute and hour wheel as the clock I looked at in Cardinal de Fleury’s apartments. This must be where the comte is making his clocks.”

“Wonderful. We’ve discovered where the comte makes his odd—” I wiggled my fingers around in the air “—magic clocks.”

“It isn’t magic; it’s science.”

“Same thing. Neither of them makes any sense.”

“Well, perhaps if you weren’t such an imbecile—” Jacqueline stopped, head whipping around to the door. “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“That voice. Someone is coming.”

I inclined my ear at the door. A second later, the sound of two people speaking leaked through the ornately carved wood. And they were getting closer.

“Merde.” I glanced around, from the two demolished clocks strewn across the table, to the mess I’d made with all the loose tools on the floor. “What do we do? The comte will have us arrested if he catches us here.”

Jacqueline's eyes leapt about the room, no doubt looking for a place to hide. But there was nothing we could have taken cover behind. “Did you remember to lock the door?”

“Yes but—but what if whoever is coming has a key?”

Jacqueline shoved her hand into her pocket to produce her dagger, its polished black hilt glinting in the candlelight.

I gaped at her in horror. “Stabbing people cannot be your solution to everything.”

“I’m not going to stab anyone; it’s only a precaution. I—” Her gaze flitted back and forth, hand gripping the dagger. “Kiss me.”

I nearly choked. “What?”

“We’re dressed like servants, are we not? We can pretend we came in here for privacy, not to search the place.” Her eyes were unwavering, but her voice shook. “If someone comes in and sees us together, they will be flustered, and we can take advantage of their surprise by threatening them with weapons and then running away.” She grabbed the turnscrew from the table and shoved it into my hands. “Take this.”

I stared down at the turnscrew. “I can’t. . . I don’t. . . What?”

“Olivier, please. There isn’t much time.”

As if to emphasize her point, the two approaching voices paused right outside the door. “I’ll meet you in a few moments,” one of them said. “There is something I must retrieve from the workshop first.”

I looked back to Jacqueline. My heart thundered in my eardrums. “Yes, fine.” I took a shaking step, then another, until our bodies were so close, I could feel her panicked breaths against my skin. “Are you sure it’s all right for me to do this?”

She nodded. “I’m sure.”

“But—”

I couldn’t finish my sentence, for two things happened at once.

First, whoever was on the other side of the door tried to open it, found it was closed, and proceeded to jam a key into the lock. And second, Jacqueline lifted herself up on her toes, put her hand on my neck, and kissed me.

I stumbled back in surprise, and Jacqueline shot out her free hand to wrap around my waistcoat, the hilt of her dagger digging into my side. I tried to focus on what was happening, but I had no goddamn idea what to do. I’d read plenty of erotic novels over the years, but none of them ever said a word about what one was meant to do in this sort of situation. Where were my hands supposed to go? How much vehemence was I supposed to put into returning the kiss? And, God, was I supposed to make noises?

I squeezed my eyes shut, reaching out to tilt her chin up as I opened my mouth to the kiss. A moment later, Jacqueline let out a tiny, almost inaudible gasp against my lips.

And suddenly, the kiss didn’t feel so fake anymore.

I crushed myself into her, my hands moving from her chin down to her neck and satin-covered waist. But it wasn’t enough. I had to be closer to her. To feel more of her. I dropped the turnscrew, threading my fingers through the waves of her hair. The strands were like silk on my skin.

She slipped her tongue into my mouth, and I swear to God my heart nearly gave out altogether. I tripped over a damned rogue screw while trying to deepen the kiss, and we both fell back onto the worktable, loose wheels and cogs tumbling onto the ground with a ting, ting, ting. But neither of us stopped.

My hands were everywhere and Jacqueline’s hands were everywhere and our hearts were slamming together as one and I was forcing myself to remember she doesn’t mean it, she doesn’t mean it, she doesn’t mean it.

This isn’t real.

Then a male voice sputtered, “Goodness!”

I dropped my hands at the same time Jacqueline pushed herself away from me, both of us jumping back like we were leaping away from a blazing fire. Before us stood a shocked older man, pale skin growing paler still at the sight of us. His hair was dark and streaked with gray, pulled into a loose ribbon at the nape of his neck. The thick spectacles he wore slipped down his nose, and he pushed them up as he gaped at us, looking like he had never seen two people perform a romantic act in his entire life.

At least, I thought his surprise was a result of what we had been doing moments before, until he gasped out, “Jacqueline? My God, is that you?”

I shot a look at Jacqueline, hoping she would have an explanation for all this, but she stared at the man with as much silent surprise as he stared at her.

“The knife,” I whispered. “Use the knife.”

Jacqueline took a step forward, her dagger clattering to the ground.

“All right. That’s not what we planned to do with the knife.”

“It can’t be,” Jacqueline said. Her breath sounded like it was catching in her lungs. “Father?”