I crane my neck to see if there is any bread anywhere, but there is only cake. Perhaps la Reine des Gâteaux was right, and there is nothing else here to eat. But looking on the piles of delicacies, I find my stomach turning.

“What’s that one?” Ettie points to a tiny mountain of macarons sandwiched together with fondant. My breath catches; they are so small and simple, so beautifully colored: soft pink for rosewater, red for strawberry, dark brown for chocolate, sienna for café. The burned-gold ones are salted caramel, and the white, delicate vanilla.

“That one please.” I point at a pale green one. The servant picks it up with silver tongs and places it on a saucer. I look at the macaron, the smallest smudge of green against so much pink-and-gold porcelain.

“That’s all?” Ettie asks, surprised. Her plate is piled high with cakes. She’s definitely making up for the weeks of hunger.

I can’t explain; there’s a lump in my throat. How can I be surrounded by such riches when hundreds of my brothers and sisters are dying of starvation? I signal to another servant. He brings a serviette of pink embroidered cloth. I take it and thank him. The prince looks at me, bemused.

“You don’t need to thank them,” he says in an undertone.

He’s right. Gentleman George would smack me for an error that blatant. I turn my mind to a way of bringing the conversation around to the kitchens, and where the larders or bakery might be.

“I’ve waited years to see you again. I thought I never would,” the prince mumbles to me, looking as if he is making bored, polite chatter. “You took the pendant of Charlemagne from me. I was in so much trouble!”

“Did … did they beat you?” I ask, curious as to how a dauphin qualifies “trouble.”

He turns to me, astonished.

“Beat me? Of course not. Nobody would ever dare beat me.”

I splutter into my teacup. “But you said you were in trouble.”

“Yes, well, Mother was very disappointed in me, and she does know how to make life extremely uncomfortable when she chooses.” He pauses to reflect. “I had a whipping boy when I was younger … What was his name? They would beat him if ever I did anything bad.”

A whipping boy. He’s worse than ridiculous; he’s horrible. I change the subject abruptly. “Do you want it back? The necklace?”

“What? Oh, well, it might be a tad difficult to explain how it’s turned up now, after so long,” he says dismissively, as if we were discussing a lost glove.

“It is one of the crown jewels of France,” I say, deeply reproachful, even while envisioning it around Tomasis’s neck, remembering the appreciation it earned me.

“Hmmm, yes …,” the dauphin says distractedly.

“Come here, child,” the queen says suddenly, beckoning Ettie.

Ettie looks at me nervously.

“There’s no need to fear,” says the queen. “I just want to see your lovely face.”