Revenant Eve (33 page)

Aurélie accepted this and turned around. “I’m so glad that you are still a secret, except for Hortense and Madame. I’ll be more careful when I talk to you. Let the
mouchards
spy on me! They will get a fine concert for their pains. I will be a very good lady-in-waiting until I hear back from my mother, and she tells me how to get home.”

Or I get you to Dobrenica,
I thought. Which at least had to be safer than Paris.

Then I remembered Xanpia’s warning about its destruction.

Alec!
I yelled, but not so Aurélie could hear. I was getting scared that nobody would hear me ever again.

T
HE REST OF THAT YEAR SPED BY FOR AURÉLIE,
as she bounc-ed between Malmaison, the Tuileries, and Saint-Cloud, so it sped for me, too, but with a relentless escalation of emotional tension. I had only to see Napoleon kiss Josephine or a romantic play by the
Comédie-Française, to hit me with the thought of
Alec still sitting at my bedside—which reminded me of Xanpia’s warning. And then I’d fret about how to act when I had no power to act. I couldn’t even pick up a feather, much less a sword!

Part of the pressure was my awareness of the inexorable unfolding of history. My knowledge of this period, incomplete as it was, could only be a powder keg. I didn’t intend to let anyone sit on it but me.

At first I was relieved when events unfolded as I remembered: in the summer Bonaparte was elected Consul for life; at the same time, he became infatuated with the fifteen-year-old actress Mademoiselle George, who I knew would go on to fame and fortune, a collector of crowned lovers. Then the birth of Hortense’s first child.

Because the number of newspapers went from over a dozen to basically just the
Moniteur
, which was all Bonaparte all the time, actual news was difficult to come by. All Aurélie heard among Josephine’s ladies was rumor and, of course, innuendo when Napoleon’s sisters were feeling extra mean toward the woman they considered an interloper.

I knew what was coming.

“Now we have this Madame Campan,” Aurélie told me early in March, after the caravan of coaches rattled back to Saint-Cloud. There never seemed to be any reason for the various shifts between the palaces; only Napoleon’s whim. When he was with us, everyone moved fast. When he sent Josephine, there was a more leisurely pace.

Aurélie was tired, not only from the all-nighters but also from lack of sleep due to worsening dreams, and the tediousness of the increasingly elaborate ritual. “I understand Madame Campan was once a lady-in-waiting to Marie Antoinette, but oh, it is so boring. She tells us where to stand, how deep to curtsey, how many steps forward and backward. Nobody can remember all the rules, and—” She slipped into English, “—the First Consul’s sisters squabble so about who is to go first, and who last.”

I thought,
That’s only going to get worse, especially after they start collecting crowns
.

“Imagine walking backward! But apparently the sky will fall if we turn our back on the first consul or Madame Jos—Bonaparte. We cannot presume to address her as Madame Josephine anymore, though that is what she asked us to call her. The sad thing is, I can see she doesn’t like any of these changes. The more like a royal court we become, the more afraid she is.”

“You didn’t sleep well last night. You kept tossing and muttering.”

“Another of those dreams.” She shook her head. “If only I recognized people or events, I would take some comfort. But these are always of strangers, in strange places. Last night,” another fierce yawn, “the people were brown, like me, but their eyes were round, their hair black but very straight. Many wore marks of red here.” She touched the middle of her forehead. “
Tilaka
. Their clothes were very beautiful, somewhat like the toga of the Roman and yet not. Bright colors, and oh, the palaces…” Her hands swooped, shaping the distinctive archways and domes of Akbari architecture early in the Mughal period.

“India?” I asked, wondering how she could dream about a place I knew she had never visited.

“I know not.” She yawned so hard her eyes watered. “Even the language is strange, yet I always know what the words mean.
Tilaka
.” She made as if scooping something with her forefinger, then touched her forehead. “
Bindi
, for a wedding. But there was fighting, ghosts and sky chariots and things with eyes like fire.”

“Mademoiselle! It is time,” came a call from the outer room, and Marie raced in to hurry Aurélie along.

As Aurélie carefully walked downstairs in her new gown (all the ladies were dressed in green and white velvet with gold trim for this fete) I thought about Nero’s bread and circuses, and wondered if he, too, had been trying to impose legitimacy, or at least order, from the top down.

Someday I was going to have to study Roman history, I thought uneasily, as we entered the long gallery, and there were the winged beings. They floated like vapor, only shadowy, I noted as I watched them cluster around Napoleon. The only other person who attracted so many was Fouché. When we showed up, however, they would widen their circle and float around us, the wings rising and falling with dreamy rhythm.

Once in a while a couple of them glided close. I recognized them—the androgynous creature from that night at the opera, with the long night-black hair; and a tall male with half-shut sleepy eyes of so light a gray they looked silver, his hair the color of pewter. His smile reminded me of Tony at his most mocking and untrustworthy. Yet it was not without humor, as if he was very well aware of my distrust, and he would be patient. There was no anger, no affront.

Why were there so many around Napoleon and Fouché? The two seemed completely oblivious.

Aurélie took her place in the grand
salle
. Today she was not playing music, she was there to dance with the zillions of military guys swarming around; to smile and add beauty to the backdrop.

The atmosphere was sharp with anticipation. Though arriving in state with her four chief ladies-in-waiting, it was Josephine who drew the eye. A slender, graceful figure in a deceptively simple gown of pure white, ornamented only by the thin band of lamé trim around the hem, the gold band binding the high waist, the black cameo ornaments holding together
the filmy cap sleeves. Around her neck she wore a serpent necklace, and her hair spilled out of a gold band that bound it up Greek-style. The effect so charmed Napoleon that he rushed forward impulsively and led her to the mirror. He admired her from all angles as he pressed kisses on her.

She flushed and made the courtly beckon that Madame Campan had taught her. Napoleon kissed her again as the officers raised their swords with a scraping and ring of metal. They shouted in approval, Napoleon beamed with equal approval, then he signaled imperiously.

The musicians, instruments poised for the past fifteen minutes, launched into the first piece. The wives of the officers and the titled ladies were led out first for the quadrille and gavotte, and then the waltz, which had been introduced in the Year Six—1798—at a ball Talleyrand had given for Josephine. It was already popular, though the visiting English would find it scandalous, and it would be nearly another ten years before it was introduced in London by ladies of rank sufficient enough to provide an excuse for adopting this dangerously enticing dance.

Aurélie had her usual swarm of partners, and as she twirled around the ballroom floor, I got a chance to look around the room. Not only were there more of those winged beings than I had ever seen, but the officers seemed rowdier, more intense.

I witnessed at least three incidences of
sabrage
. Opening a champagne bottle with a sabre may have been swashbuckling, but it was definitely not courtly behavior. Yet Napoleon did nothing to halt them, even when a bottle broke all over the newly laid parquet. His treasured officers in their sexy uniforms were not savages in his eyes. That opprobrium was reserved for the civilians who criticized him.

Raucous behavior was not limited to the wild Hussars, with their mustachios and
cadenettes.
One of the younger generals whipped out his sabre and expertly snapped the neck of a bottle of champagne, causing a roar of approval as he filled the champagne glasses held up to him. He poured with an air, sabre still gripped in the other hand.

As dance after dance formed its patterns then dissolved to form another, I caught snatches of speech—“Malta,” “England”—and nasty adjectives
coupled to “Whitworth.” The British ambassador had been feted to his face but sneered at behind his back. If history stayed true, he was shortly to get the sneers up close and personal, from Napoleon himself in one of his soon-to-be famous rants.

It was very late when a uniform different from all the others emerged from the relaxed, half-drunk crowd and approached Aurélie.

It was Jaska.

The room was filled with gaudy uniforms. But for those who knew lapels, facings, ribbons, and orders, there was an especial resonance in the challenge, the poignancy, of his wearing the dress of Poland’s National Cavalry: the crimson square-topped
czapka
, a tailored blue jacket with gold epaulettes and red lapels, and a white cross belt. His trousers were red to match the lapels, with six buttons pulling the pants legs tight to the ankle over his cavalry boots with their jutting spurs. At his left hung his curved sabre, and in his right hand he carried a tasseled walking stick, which he used to ease his limp.

The Polish National Cavalry had been disbanded after Poland was partitioned, but the reputation of the Polish soldiery was evidenced in the way the officers parted with respect as he walked to Aurélie. Then he made a short bow, epaulettes glittering in the light of a zillion candles.

“Mademoiselle, I have been entrusted with a letter to deliver into your hands. It was passed to the French fleet by the British in November.”

“November?” she asked, as she took the letter. Then she looked down, and said, “Oh.”

It had taken that long for the letter to make its way to Paris, and thence to Fouché’s
mouchards
to read before being resealed. She looked up again. “I have so many questions.”

“Those are perhaps better put to the foreign office,” he said kindly. Then, his faint smile vanishing, “We have almost four thousand families to apprise of the deaths of the Polish soldiers sent to the islands. I am one of those honored with this task.” He bowed again.

“Thank you,” she said, rising to curtsey deeply. “Farewell.”

He bowed again. She watched him until he vanished in the crowd, then she clutched the letter to her heart, her eyes closed.

The nearest ladies began whispering, “Open it!” “Read it!” “Oh, Mademoiselle Prude hath a secret lover!”

Joseph Bonaparte, not far off, was looking her way, his gaze speculative. But Joseph’s wife Julie, who alone of the Bonaparte family was never unkind to Josephine (or to anyone), sat down next to Aurélie in a rustle of silk. “You go read your letter in privacy, little one. If Madame Bonaparte looks for you, I will tell her I sent you away. I know she will understand. Then wash your face and come back and smile, for remember: You are alive even if your lover was snatched up to Heaven. There are many here who would rejoice in the chance to take his place.” She smiled and patted Aurélie’s hand.

Aurélie managed a curtsey and thanks, then fled down the halls, past the rigid Consular Guards, and upstairs, away from the brilliantly lit state rooms. She ducked into Josephine’s pretty anteroom, which had a fire roaring and lamps lit, sank down onto the hearth, ignoring her velvet gown, and tore the crumpled, water-stained letter open.

Anne’s handwriting was a headlong dash, complete to the old-fashioned
f
for
s
, even when she wrote in badly spelled, mostly phonetic French, interspersed with equally idiosyncratic English.