Belle made a face at him as he disappeared again. Lio squeezed the hand he hadn’t relinquished yet.
“Honestly, Lio. I’ll be fine. Look.” She pulled a book from the deep pocket of her dress. “If I find a garden and a patch of shade, my day will be made.”
Lio kissed her forehead. “Wish me luck with Louis.”
She opened her mouth to tell him he didn’t need it, but paused. The truth was, Lio would need a great deal of luck to make it through Versailles.
“Good luck,” she whispered, truly meaning it.
Lio grinned, but she could see the worry that hid behind his smile. He stepped into Bastien’s carriage, and the footman closed the door behind him. The horses started up, and soon the carriage was winding down Bastien’s laneway.
Belle’s heart hammered in her chest as she watched them go. Breaking the curse had tethered her to Lio in ways she didn’t yet understand. When she watched him die as the Beast, defeated by Gaston’s dagger and hatred for something he didn’t understand, a part of her died with him. And when she wept over his body, she whispered in his ear the truth she had been denying. He came back to her as Lio, his body whole and his mind sound, and that part of herself that she lost was similarly restored. They pieced each other back together, and now they were bound as one.
She felt sick when she thought of him facing the trials of Versailles alone. Not alone, she thought. He has his cousin with him.
But Belle still didn’t know what to think of the duc de Vincennes. She wasn’t sure if he would be an ally to Lio or if he had ulterior motives. She supposed it was best to assume that everyone in Louis’s court did. She certainly didn’t plan to make friends with any nobles now that she had married one.
The carriage disappeared from sight, and Belle tried to smother the worry that roiled in her gut. She was in Paris, a city that had lived on inside her heart since she left it, the place she had dreamed of when she felt the constraints of her provincial life most acutely.
It wasn’t as if there was anything she could do for Lio now.
• • •
A weight lifted from Belle’s shoulders as soon as she walked through Bastien’s gate. It was like stepping into another world. His courtyard was so insulated that the noises of Paris didn’t reach it, lending it a false sense of tranquility amid the chaos of the city. She hoped Lumière was enjoying his time to himself. She had a feeling he had more than a few past paramours to visit.
Despite the filth of the streets ruining her boots and hem, Belle felt more like herself than she had in weeks. Back home, she had become something larger than Belle. Whether they knew she broke the curse or not, the people of Aveyon viewed Belle as their savior. Some thought she had rescued them from an inattentive, reclusive prince; far fewer knew she had broken the curse that had been drowning the kingdom for a decade. Everyone wanted her to be their princess, to embrace her new role to the fullest extent.
But she couldn’t bring herself to do that, not yet at least.
This trip was to be a reprieve. Here she was anonymous, just someone going about their day. Her plain dress made her invisible. She could enjoy Paris the way she’d always imagined, before returning to her new life and hoping it fit her better after some time away from it.
She turned onto rue de l’Université and spotted the Seine in between buildings. She was heading to the Palais-Royal, armed with the piecemeal knowledge she had collected from travelers through Aveyon who told her Philippe, the duc d’Orléans, had opened the gardens to the public some years before. Belle had heard tell of the exchange of ideas that occurred there, and of the bookshops and cafés tucked into the covered arcades that surrounded the gardens. She had spent long nights imagining herself there, attending salons and taking part in lively debates with a more open-minded crowd than she could find in Aveyon. Each step she took was like walking through both a memory and a dream.
“Madame.” A woman stepped in her path, reaching a hand out in front of her. “Could you spare a sou? My children are hungry.” Her skin was a sickly pallor, and the dark circles of exhaustion under her eyes were deep. Two children hid among her skirts, hunger shrinking their forms. Belle couldn’t prevent the memories of her childhood from flooding into her mind. She had once known the ceaseless gnawing of an empty belly. When her mother was sick, Maurice had used every bit of money they had paying for physicians and tonics to no avail, since her illness took her anyway. Belle and her father went through a season of lean nights—sometimes sharing only a heel of bread and some watered-down broth—both feeling the pain of losing Belle’s mother more acutely than their hunger pangs. Spring came, and at last Maurice was able to bring one of his inventions to a nearby fair and sell it for half of what it was worth in order to fill their bellies.
She reached for her coin purse without hesitation and handed the woman a twelve-livre coin, enough for her to feed herself and her children for the days to come.
The woman’s eyes widened in disbelief, but she accepted the coin quickly. “Mon Dieu, thank you, madame, thank you.”
Belle wanted to say something, but the woman and her children vanished into the crowd like wisps of smoke, and she stood still for the first time since leaving Bastien’s home. The chaos of Paris continued to swirl around her, but beneath it, on the edges, she saw poverty unlike any she had seen before. Exhausted mothers and wailing babies, emaciated men, orphaned children, all collected on the seams and in the alleys of the city. Each of them wore their starvation plainly—in the number of ribs poking through thin tunics, in the shadowed clefts of skin pulled too tightly across collarbones, in the cheeks sunk deep into their skulls.
Without thinking, Belle wandered into the closest alley and began passing out the coins from her purse. She tried to talk to each person she met, but she was soon swarmed by children with outstretched hands. She was happy to press a coin into them, but she wished she could do more. Money was a temporary solution; these people needed long-term aid, work, shelter—things she couldn’t readily give to them. Guilt ate away at her. She was married to a prince and yet she had no power to end their suffering.
A shout echoed down the alley, scattering the children. Belle turned to see a group of soldiers armed with muskets nearly as long as they were tall. Their blue coats and red collars and cuffs with embroidered white braids marked them as Gardes françaises.
One of them stepped closer to her. “Madame, are you all right?”
She scoffed. “Why wouldn’t I be?”
He gave her a pitying look. “One can never be too careful with needy peasants.”
And then she realized that he thought her separate from them. She lived her whole life as a commoner, but since she’d married Lio, something about her marked her as different. She didn’t know if it was the shine of her hair, or the fullness of her cheeks, but just as Bastien knew she wasn’t noble, others now knew she wasn’t common. It left her torn between two worlds, neither of which she truly belonged to.
A sudden swell of loud voices snapped the soldiers’ attention back to the road behind them. Belle craned her neck to see what was causing the commotion. A large group of men were marching through the street toward the Palais-Royal, armed with nothing but their voices. She couldn’t make out what they were shouting, but what they lacked in intelligibility they made up for in passion.