Is it true that your friend Christophe Duroc was injured at the same time as you? How awful! If only we knew more.
I won my third Rose of Virtue, which I now display in a porcelain vase with my name embossed on it in gold. I also won a prize for piano. I was surprised. Shortly before, I’d played my teacher the composition I’d written for you, and he appeared not to like it. Now I don’t know what to think.
I feel silly writing these letters to you, knowing that I will never send them. Perhaps, somehow, thoughts travel the world. In that case, you know how much I love you.
Your Chouchoute
Note—Do you remember the annual tradition Mouse, Ém and I started, of wearing a black ribbon on our sleeve at this time of year? Mouse’s is to honor the memory of her mother, and Ém wears hers in memory of her missing father. Mine, of course, is to honor Father’s.
Strangely, there is little I remember of the day Father died. All I can recall is that there was a violent thunderstorm that morning. For some reason, I was alone—and terrified. Where were you?
ILLUSIONS
“So this is the latest in fashion?” Caroline said, sneering at the black ribbon on my sleeve.
It was the last day of school before the summer break. “I wear this every year at this time,” I said—coolly, for I didn’t trust her. I stepped aside for a group of Purples. “Ém, Mouse and I all wear one.” I guess that made it sound like we were a club or something, a club she would never be part of. “It’s in honor of our family members who died during the Terror.” And for Ém’s father too, although that was hard to explain.
“Ohhhhh, the dreaded Terror.”
“You don’t understand.”
“You’re right,” she said with a smug expression. “I don’t. Why would Mouse want to honor her mother’s suicide?”
What a horrible thing to say! “What?”
“You heard me.” Jutting out her chin.
“You are mistaken,” I said evenly. “Mouse’s mother died of a fever, after helping a family of sick unfortunates.”
“So the story goes,” she said. “The fact is, she threw herself out a window for fear of—” She made a slicing motion across her neck.
“That’s not true!”
“Are you calling me a liar?”
“I’m calling you a lying bully!”
“Don’t believe me? Ask the little American, why don’t you?” she said, spraying spittle.
Eliza?
“She knows everything. She ferrets out the most hidden secrets.”
Why would Eliza know anything about Mouse’s mother?
“But what I really can’t understand,” Caroline went on, gloating, “is why you honor a man who wasn’t your father.”
“Excuse me!” I glanced around. Our “conversation” was attracting notice.
“Has nobody told you?” She leaned in as if to tell me a secret, but I stepped back. “Your so-called father didn’t think he was your father,” she said. “In fact, he publicly denied it.”
“That’s a lie!”
She grabbed hold of my arm, hard. “Turd in your teeth. Ask your whore of a mother,” she said with a mocking grin.
And that’s when I hit her.
* * *
—
Of course Caroline screamed bloody murder.
“Angel, you, more than anyone, know that there is never a reason for violence,” Maîtresse said, lecturing me as if I were a child.
I hung my head. “I know, Maîtresse Campan.” Yet I wasn’t repentant. I was angry. “But she—”
Maîtresse held up her index finger. “No excuse. You’re to stay in your room for the rest of the day.”
A humiliation!
On the way up, I encountered Eliza. “Did you say anything to Caroline?”
“Around?” she asked, twirling Henry by his tail.
“About Mouse’s mother.”
“Yes, about her slaying herself through leaping from a high window.”
“Hush!” I said, standing back to let four girls in Red pass. “That’s not true. Who told you that?”
“Everyone knows it, my mother said.”
“Your mother?”
She nodded, biting her cheek, realizing the gravity of what she was claiming.
So —Eliza had told Caroline that Mouse’s mother killed herself. How awful! And then I remembered what Caroline had said about my father.
“Did you say anything to Caroline about my father?”
“The illustrious General Bonaparte?”
No. “General Beauharnais, my natural father.”
She scrunched up her nose. “Was he your father?”
“Of course!”
“But my mother said—”
* * *
—
I went to my room and collapsed onto my bed, trying not to cry. I took Father’s miniature portrait out from under my pillow and stared at it. Was he my father? If not him, who? For a lunatic moment I even wondered about Citoyen Charles. (Of course that made no sense; he wouldn’t have been ten years old.)
I heard the door creak open. I pushed the miniature under my pillow and sat up, wiping my cheeks.
Mouse sat down beside me on my bed, handing me an apple. “Are you hungry?”
“No, thanks,” I said glumly. “I’m being punished.”
“I heard,” she said, placing the apple on the table beside my bed.
“I have to stay here until school lets out.” Of all days, the day when everyone exchanged friendly notes before parting for the summer. I was missing all that.
“What happened?”
She didn’t know? “I hit Caroline.”
Mouse covered her mouth with her hands. “You must have had reason,” she said, ever loyal.
Her sweet expression only made me feel worse. “I don’t want sympathy.”
She made a puzzled frown. “Are you angry at me?”
“No! I’m—I don’t know. I just found out that my father probably wasn’t my father.”
“But that can’t be true.” She pushed her spectacles up onto the bridge of her nose.
“Things are not what we think, Mouse. It’s all an illusion.” My father wasn’t really my father. My mother was a faithless sinner. “We think one thing, and it turns out to be another.”
“Like what?” she asked, in all innocence.
I took a shaky breath. “Like that your mother didn’t die of a fever.”
She looked at me with an expression of naïve bewilderment, her eyes huge through her thick lenses. “What does my mother have to do with this?”
“Because how she died is an illusion. It’s a story, a made-up tale. You’re always saying that you want the truth.” I gulped. “Well, the truth is she didn’t die of a fever.”
Mouse fingered her black armband. “Then how did she die?” She seemed to sincerely want to know.
In the moment that followed, I could have held back, but I didn’t. I felt reckless, angry and confused. “She threw herself out a high window.” Five years ago today.
“She would never have done that!” Mouse said, her voice a squeak.
“But it’s the truth.”
Abruptly, she stood, staring at me with a look of pity. And then she ran out the door, slamming it shut behind her.
—
In the silence that followed, I packed my trunk. Maman would soon be arriving to pick up Ém and me, take us to Malmaison. I put the miniature of my father away in the secret drawer in my trunk, along with all the letters I’d written my brother. I stood motionless for a moment, pressing my hand over the black band on my arm, as if soothing an injury. My heart ached thinking of what I had told Mouse, remembering the pain in her eyes. It made me ill to look at my vase with the silk rose in it, my award for being a good person.
A good person I certainly was not.
CONFESSION
Maîtresse glanced up from her long table, covered with books and papers. “Aren’t you supposed to be in your room?”
“I have to talk to you,” I said, my breath still shuddering.
“You understand, of course, that I had to punish you.”
“Which is why I can’t accept this.” I placed my vase with the Rose of Virtue in it on top of a stacked six-volume set of Plutarch’s Lives.
“Hortense, everyone voted—the staff, all the students. You misbehaved once. You deserve the Rose, and certainly the vase.”
“No, I don’t,” I said, my lower lip quivering.
She led me over to the divan. “You’ve been through quite a lot of late, what with worry about your brother and all. It’s understandable that you’re not your usual self.”
“It’s not because of what happened with Caroline.”
She regarded me with a question in her eyes.
And so I told her the awful thing I had done to her niece, Mouse, my dearest friend.
Maîtresse covered her heart with her hands, her eyes filling.
“Is it true?” Part of me prayed that it was a fabrication, a cruel rumor.
“I’m afraid so.”
“How awful!”
“I’ve kept it a secret because I didn’t think Mouse could bear it.” She frowned. “But how did you find out?”
“Caroline told me.”
Maîtresse sat back. “How could she . . . ?”
“Eliza told her.” I twirled my fingers. “Her mother knew. She goes to all the salons, and, I guess, there is, you know, talk.”
Maîtresse smoothed the ribbons of her linen cap, her fingers trembling. “It was inevitable that people would find out one way or another. Where is Mouse now?”
“I don’t know.”
Maîtresse reached for a service bell. “Find my niece,” she instructed Claire, the maid who appeared. “Tell her she’s to come see me immediately. And Émilie, as well.”
Ém too? I cringed.
“Don’t worry, angel,” she said. “I’ve learned that it is best for everyone to speak openly. Our health, our energy, our essential vitality is oppressed when we carry a burden. Keeping a secret, even with the best of intentions, is only that: a burden.”
Was she forgiving me for revealing to Mouse how her mother died? I’d crushed the soul of my dearest friend. How could that ever be right?
* * *
—
I heard footsteps on the stairs, the raised wooden heels of boots, a tap on the door.
“I could only find one of the girls,” Claire reported.
Indeed, only Ém followed her in. “We looked everywhere,” Ém said, pulling up her black armband, which had fallen down to her elbow. “Even in the infirmary.”
A thought—more like a flash of an image—came to me. With a jolt of fear I jumped to my feet. “I’ll be right back.”
* * *
—
I took the steps two, three at a time. Gasping, I emerged onto the narrow terrace that rimmed the peaked roofs. It was a cloudless day—I could see Paris in the distance.
And then I saw her, standing near the edge. “Mouse!”
She turned to look at me—quizzically, as if I were a creature from another world.
“Mouse.” Don’t jump. “I’m so sorry.” I moved closer and linked my arm through hers. “Maîtresse wants to see us. She’s waiting in her study.”
“Oh,” was all she said, but I could feel her trembling.
I pulled her back, toward the door.
Safe now.
* * *
—
Maîtresse had set out coffee and chocolate madeleines, as if for a social occasion. Ém looked up to see us, but did not smile. It seemed we’d all aged.
“Good afternoon, little one,” Maîtresse said, standing to embrace her niece, kissing each cheek. She took Mouse in with her eyes, assessing. “You had me worried.”
Mouse nodded, staring at the floor.
Maîtresse looked over at me with a question in her eyes.
“She was up on the roof,” I said, tearful now.
“I see.”
Something in the way Maîtresse said that made me think that she did see.
She took Mouse’s hand. “We need to talk.” Her sad eyes addressed Ém and me. “All of us.”
There followed moments of activity and fuss: china clattering, serviettes being passed.
Would you care for . . . ?
Sugar?
How many?
The social rituals put me on edge with their meaninglessness, knowing what was coming.
“Hortense,” Maîtresse announced, stirring her coffee with a tiny wooden spoon, “perhaps you could begin.”
The portrait of Mouse’s mother hung on the wall in front of me, wreathed with flowers. How awful to be having this conversation on the anniversary of her tragic death.
“Explain what you told me,” Maîtresse prodded.
I cleared my throat. I didn’t want to have to do this. “May I first explain what happened before?”
“If it is relevant,” Maîtresse said.
My cup shook in my hand. I set it down carefully. “Caroline told me something disturbing this morning, something to do with my father. My real father,” I said to clarify, but then bit my lip. Was he my father? “It helped explain why he had no love for me.” My voice trembled saying that. I’d always made excuses for him, I realized, telling myself that he was too busy to make time for me.
Ém put her hand on my shoulder. “Hortense—”
“Whether or not it was true is beside the point,” I persisted, glancing over at Mouse. She had pulled off her armband and was clutching it, twisting it. “I felt it to be true, and that’s when Mouse had the misfortune to try to comfort me.” I touched my serviette to my eyes.
“Go on, angel,” Maîtresse said.
My heart was pounding. “I told Mouse something else Caroline had told me, about how her mother died.”
“Mouse’s mother?” Ém asked.
“Is it true?” Mouse asked her aunt.
“Little one,” Maîtresse said, putting her arm around Mouse’s shoulders, pulling her close, “I wanted to protect you. You feel things so intensely. I intended to tell you when I felt you were strong enough.”
“But is it true?” Mouse was insistent.
“I’m afraid so,” Maîtresse said with tears in her voice.
Mouse looked at Ém and me accusingly, over her spectacles. “Did you know all along?”
“I learned it this morning,” I said.
“I don’t know what this is all about,” Ém said.
“My mother didn’t die of a fever,” Mouse told her angrily. “She threw herself out a window. Right?” Mouse glared at her aunt. “She killed herself.”
Maîtresse nodded, blinking back tears.
Outside, I heard girls laughing. But not in here. We were none of us laughing, none of us joyous.
“What else have I not been told?” The tip of Mouse’s nose was bright red.
“I’m not sure,” Maîtresse said, glancing over at me. “Angel, did you tell her why her mother . . . ?”
“I don’t know why.” How could Mouse’s mother—any mother—have done that? Mouse was so young, only ten.
“Little one,” Maîtresse began, “your mother, my much beloved sister, learned she was to be arrested. She knew she would be tried, convicted and . . .”
Beheaded.
Maîtresse held up her hands. “But that wasn’t the reason. Your mother didn’t fear death. Of all the Queen’s attendants, she was the bravest. The Queen”—Maîtresse crossed herself—“the Queen called her a lioness.”
We knew the sto
ry well. Mouse’s mother, the Queen’s lioness. Her beautiful, brave, lioness mother.
“What your wonderful and very loving mother knew was that if she was convicted, as she surely would have been, the officials would confiscate all your family property.”
That was the law then, I knew. My father had lost his life, and all his property was taken.
“Château Grignon, everything.” Maîtresse put out her hands, as if a supplicant. “She couldn’t bear to leave you impoverished, and so . . .”
I stared down at my hands, clenched in my lap. Was it all about property, then? That didn’t seem right.
“But for what?” Mouse lashed out, her face white. I feared she might have one of her faints. “Robespierre was arrested the very next day.” She threw her black band on the carpet. “My mother died in vain. She would have been . . .”
Safe.
“I know, my pet, I know,” Maîtresse said, weeping now too. “She had no way of knowing.”
How capricious it all seemed. Mouse’s mother had given up one day too soon.
“Truth hurts, but secrets can be damaging as well,” Maîtresse said, addressing us all. She put one hand over her heart. “Let’s vow to be open with one another.”
“I so vow,” we repeated listlessly, hands over our hearts.
The pendulum clock chimed.
“Maîtresse Campan, my mother will be here soon.” I hated to leave at such a moment.
Maîtresse stood and opened her arms. We formed one big embrace as we had so many times before. I felt Mouse pressed beside me, her slender form, her thin, bony shoulders. Would she ever forgive me? (Would I ever forgive myself?)
“Safe now,” Maîtresse whispered, and we repeated it after her.
I squeezed Mouse’s shoulder, but she didn’t squeeze back.
IV
TRANSFORMATION
9 Thermidor, An 7 – 24 Vendémiaire, An 8
(27 July – 16 October, 1799)
THE COFFIN CARD: TRANSFORMATION