The Josephine B. Trilogy

  “You see him?”

  “Oh, he’s dark as an Arab!” she hissed, spinning, her hands on her cheeks in mock horror.

  The door swung open. “At last—you’re back.” Mimi rolled her eyes as if to say, You would not believe what’s been going on here. “It’s your mother and sister,” she said over her shoulder.

  Eugène was standing in front of the dining room fireplace with a wool blanket draped around his shoulders. He put down the candle, held his arms open wide, the blanket falling.

  Hortense threw herself into her brother’s arms, bursting into sobs. He held her shyly, blinking. He looked like a young man—thin, tall…and so dark.

  “Maman,” he said, his voice breaking. His voice told me so much—that he loved me, that I was in serious trouble, that he had tried.

  He stooped to embrace me. He smelled of cigar smoke, the smell of a man, not a boy. The smell of a soldier, I thought, not without regret. I put my hand on his cheek, surprised by the stubble of beard. He was smiling, yet there was something amiss, a tremor around his eyes, a slight convulsive twitch.

  “I can’t tell you—” I took a sharp breath. “I love you so much! We…” But I could not speak for a choking feeling welled up in me.

  “We thought you had died!” Hortense sobbed, all the nights of coldsweat dreams breaking loose in her. She took a shuddering breath and laughed at herself, and then at the three of us, for we were all weeping.

  Sniffing, my breath coming in little gasps, I pulled away. There was so much I wanted to ask him—about Egypt, his injury, how they’d managed to return*—but now was not the time. “Bonaparte—is he…?”

  “He’ in the study,” Eugène said.

  “Upstairs?” In the room I had had made over for him. I took up a candle.

  “Maman, you know…?”

  “I know.”

  As I turned the narrow stairs onto the half-storey landing, a cry escaped me. In the dark at the top of the stairs, a black man had leapt to his feet in front of the door to the study. The light of my candle caught the curved edge of a scimitar, the whites of his eyes, his teeth. “You gave me a fright,” I said, catching my breath. He was young, more than a boy, but not quite a man.

  He said something to me in a foreign tongue. “I don’t understand,” I said, stuttering a little. “I am Madame Bonaparte. I must speak to my husband. Is the General in there?” I spoke slowly and simply, so that he might understand. But I kept my distance.

  “Bonaparte!” He clasped the pommel of his scimitar.

  The name Bonaparte he understood. “Me,” I said, pointing at my chest, “me wife of Bonaparte.” I paused, for effect, then said, “Go!” with a sweep of my free hand.

  With relief I saw that he understood and, sweetly obedient, slipped past me down the stairs. I went to the study door, knocked. There was no answer, although I heard movement within. “Bonaparte?” I turned the handle, pushed. “It’s me, Josephine!” The door was locked. “Please, open the door.” I knocked again, called out. I pressed my ear to the wood. I shook at the handle, turned it, rattled it. “Bonaparte!” Louder this time. “I know you’re in there. Please!”

  Silence.

  It was cold in the corridor. My thoughts were in disorder, slowed by exhaustion, anticipation. And now, I was stumped. I hit the door with my palm. “Bonaparte, let me in! I can explain. It’s not what you think.” I pressed my forehead against the door. “I love you,” I said, but too softly for him to hear. Then I banged on the door, violently, more violently than I’d intended. “I love you,” I cried out, weeping now. You bastard.

  After a long and terrible time, my children came to my aid. Hortense looked distraught. Eugène was standing behind her with a look of pained concern, his cheek twitching. I felt humiliated; how much did they know? I pulled my shawl around my shoulders. Why was it so cold? What season were we in?

  Hortense stooped down beside me, caressed a lock of hair out of my eyes, as if I were her child and she my mother. By the light of the single guttering candle she had an ethereal look. “Oh, Maman, please don’t cry,” she said, handing me a handkerchief.

  Her tenderness made me weep all the harder. “He won’t open the door.”

  “We know,” Eugène said.

  Of course. The house was small. “There must be a key somewhere,” I said. Or an axe.

  “Maman.” Eugène looked uncomfortable. “You can’t just—”

  “There is no key,” Mimi hissed up from the ground floor. “I looked. He must have it.”

  He—General Bonaparte. My husband. Hortense and Eugène’s stepfather. Barricaded on the other side of a small oak door. “This must be what a siege is like,” I said. A shadow of pain crossed my son’s face.

  “Eugène, maybe you could say something to the General,” Hortense said in a conspiratorial tone.

  “There is something you should know, Hortense.” I glanced at Eugène. “Bonaparte believes I have been—”

  “It’s all right, Maman.” Hortense gave me a knowing look, an expression curiously woman-to-woman.

  “Just keep trying, Maman,” Eugène whispered.

  Tears filled my eyes. What had I done to deserve such children? I felt I had somehow tarnished them.

  Eugène helped me to my feet. I pressed my forehead against the door. Bonaparte, please! Listen to me!

  How much can a man take? Now I know: a very great deal. Bonaparte, in any case.

  Yet when he finally lifted the latch, it was a shockingly frail man I saw before me. He’d wound grey flannel strips around his head in the manner of a turban. His skin, like Eugène’s, was bronzed by the sun. Although his face was in shadow, it was clear that he, too, had been weeping.

  We three, my children and I, froze in surprise. After hours of crying, pleading, praying—cursing—we’d come to accept the fact of that locked door.

  I don’t recall the children leaving, only the silence, the sudden awareness that Bonaparte and I were alone. I’d been talking to myself for days, imagining this moment, imagining what I would say. But now, words seemed foreign. “It’s cold out here in the corridor,” I said finally, starting to shiver.

  I followed him into the study and sat down in the leather chair by the fire. The room smelled of cinnamon and ginger. A snuffbox decorated with an Egyptian motif lay open on a side table. A single lantern burned on the desk, which was already covered with papers and reports, books and maps.

  Bonaparte pulled the door shut, not so much for privacy, but for warmth, I suspected. “Well? Are you not going to speak?” he said, holding his hands out over the fire. He’d put several waistcoats on over a linen shirt, and over that a heavy woollen smoking jacket. The layers of clothing made him look thin. He grabbed a chair and sat down, leaning on one arm with the air of an indulgent monarch. “You’ve been wailing to be let in, and now that I’ve opened the door to you, you have nothing to say.”

  I sat watching him, fighting the anger that was growing in me. “It is you who say nothing.”

  “I am speaking.”

  “Without truth, Bonaparte—without heart.”

  “You have the nerve to talk to me of heart?”

  My self-control gave way. “You claim to love me, yet you are prepared to divorce me based on the gossip of soldiers! It is you who should explain, Bonaparte.”

  “You dare to imply that you are innocent, that you have not—” He hit the arm of his chair with his fist, hard.

  I took a breath, held it, held it longer, held it as long as I could stand. “And what about your mistress, Bonaparte—your ‘Cleopatra,’ as the soldiers called her. You told her you would marry her if she were to bear your child.” Blinking, my eyes stinging, trying not to sniff.

  “How do you know this?”

  “Your brothers and sisters went out of their way to make sure I found out.”

  He sat back. It was not the answer he’d expected.

  “They’re so intent on destroying me, they don’t care what it might do to you
in the process.” Caution, I told myself. One wrong word, and forgiveness would be impossible. “They tell you I do not love you.”

  The light of the lantern shimmered in his eyes. I had found his vulnerable spot, I realized sadly. “I do love you,” I said, knowing the truth of those words. I do love this man, this intense, haunted, driven soul. Why, I cannot explain. “And I long for you,” I said—meeting his gaze, holding it. Bonaparte is not easily fooled.

  It was almost four in the morning when I blew out the candles. We’d crossed the desert and returned, wounded but walking. We had made our confessions (yes), both of sin and of pain. We’d confessed to weakness, to the power of grief. We’d confessed to the desperation of loneliness. I told him I’d not managed well, that weakened by constant attack, I’d fallen.

  “Were you unfaithful?” he asked bluntly.

  I paused. The time had come to be truthful—but what was the truth? “Not in the sense that you mean.” I touched his hand; it was so cold. “Not carnally.” Not quite. “But almost.” I took a breath. “And you?”

  “She got on my nerves.”

  It felt good to laugh…and cry. He told me of the despair he’d felt in that country, convinced that I’d betrayed him, convinced that the Angel of Luck was no longer with him. “Without you…”

  He made love to me, and then again. “I am with you now,” I said.

  V

  Conspirator

  We are sowing today in tears and blood.

  Liberty will be our harvest.

  —Napoleon, to Josephine

  In which Eugéne is healed

  October 20, 1799.

  I woke with a start. Fauvelet, Bonaparte’s secretary, was shaking him, trying to rouse him. I stuck my hand out from under the fur coverlet. An enormous fire was raging in the fireplace, yet even so, I could see my breath. “Greetings, Fauvelet.” Groggily. “What time is it?” A sliver of light showed through the drawn curtains. “Is something wrong?”

  “No, Madame, the General is always hard to wake—as you know,” he added. By the dim light Fauvelet’s face looked dark, like Eugène’s, like Bonaparte’s. “It is seven. I allowed the General to sleep in this morning, but now his brother Deputy Lucien is here to see him.” A shy smile. “We have been missing you, Madame,” he whispered.

  Lucien Bonaparte? I put my hand on my husband’s shoulder. He was like a man dead. Everything he did, he did with profound intensity, I thought—work, love, even sleep.

  He stirred, then rolled over and embraced me, his eyes closed shut. He smelled like a baby, sweaty and sweet. “Fauvelet, have I introduced you to my lovely wife?” Talking into my nightcap.

  Fauvelet pulled back the drapes and morning light filled the room. I was taken aback by how sallow Bonaparte’s skin was—his face, although darkened by the sun, had a sickly hue. “Your brother is here to see you,” I said, kissing my husband, stilling his roving hands. “Lucien.”

  Bonaparte rolled over onto his back. “I know, I sent for him,” he said, stretching and yawning and talking all at once.

  Sent for him—when? I started to get up, but Bonaparte put his hand on my shoulder. “Bonaparte!” I did not want to be in the room when Lucien was shown in.

  “Remember what I said last night—about the transition to the offensive?”

  I fell back against the pillows. The transition from the defensive to the offensive is a delicate operation, one of the most delicate in war. “This isn’t war.”

  “No?” Bonaparte smiled. I followed his gaze. Lucien was standing in the door looking rumpled and aged, stooped over like a man of eighty, not like the young man of twenty-four that he is.* His gangling arms hung down out of his coat sleeves. He is a talented young man, fiery and ambitious. I would admire him but for one glaring flaw: he wishes me dead.

  “Good morning, Lucien,” I said, pulling the comforter under my chin. I wanted to grin—gloat. “How nice to see you.” Overdoing it, I knew.

  He peered at me through his thick spectacles, disbelieving. Then he remembered to bow, lower than was called for, an exaggerated show of subservience—a degree of subservience that signified treachery, to my mind. “I’m leaving, Napoleone,” he announced, pronouncing Bonaparte’s name in the Italian way. He looked like a disgruntled spider, all long legs and arms. His brother, to whom he clearly felt himself superior, had had the gall to disregard his advice and forgive his wife.

  “No, you’re not.” Bonaparte swung his feet onto the floor. Then, with a mischievous smile, he turned and whacked my bottom. I buried myself under the comforter. If I looked at Lucien, I would burst out laughing, I feared.

  At the door, suddenly, carrying a clattering tray, appeared the black-skinned youth I’d encountered the night before. Dressed exotically in bright silks and fur, he looked like a vision out of a storybook. A jewelencrusted scimitar dangled from a thick silken cord at his waist.

  “Roustam!” my husband said, knotting the sash of his winter robe. The youth bowed, put the tray down on the table beside the bed. “This…is…my…wife,” Bonaparte said slowly, pointing at me. “He’s a Mameluke, but a good boy,” he told me. “A great favourite with the ladies, however. I have to keep an eye on him.”

  “Good morning, Roustam,” I said, reaching for a mug of steaming chocolate.

  “And…this…is…my…brother…but…he…is…furious,” Bonaparte said, tugging on Lucien’s ear.

  The black youth bowed and slipped backward through the door, his scarlet silk slippers making a sliding sound on the parquet floor.

  “It’s so cold in this country.” Bonaparte threw on one of my cashmere shawls, stomping his feet. He took a tiny cup of coffee, gulped it down. A roll disappeared as quickly, crumbs covering the front of his robe. He poked at the fire with the iron, chewing, then threw on two more logs. “There,” he said, standing back to watch the flames. He pulled one of the little drum stools over beside the fire and sat down.

  “The General fancies himself at camp,” I said to the glowering Lucien, attempting to leaven the mood.

  Lucien crossed his arms. “Noi dobbiamo parlare, Napoleone.” We must talk.

  “So talk.”

  “Privatamente.”

  “My wife is to be included in all discussions.”

  “You are a fool!” This with the voice of a man addressing an inferior. “Your wife has played you false. She defames our good name.”

  I was relieved to hear Bonaparte laugh. “Our good name, you say? And our charming sister Pauline with three lovers? And Elisa throwing herself at the feet of poets one month after the death of her child? And Joseph in a mercury treatment again? And you, Lucien, making a fool of yourself over Madame Recamier while your wife languishes in childbed?”

  I regarded Bonaparte with astonishment. He had only been back in Paris a short while and yet had managed to discover everything.

  “I did not come with the intention of debating family matters,” Lucien said, his eyes half-closed.

  “Correct. You came because I summoned you.”

  “Bonaparte, I can—” I put my cup down on the side table.

  Bonaparte glared at me as if to say, Don’t move. “And sit down, for God’s sake,” he barked at his brother.

  With haughty obedience, Lucien lowered himself onto one of the little stools, his ankles and wrists showing long and bony.

  “General? The journals have arrived.” I was relieved to see Fauvelet at the door. “But I could come back at another time.”

  “Now, Fauvelet.” Bonaparte motioned to his secretary to take the remaining stool. I sat back against the pillows, resigned. There would be no escape.

  Fauvelet ruffled through the stack of journals perched on his knees. “Ah, here’s one you should know about. Director Moulins claims you broke quarantine when you landed, that you’re bringing the plague to the Republic.” His voice was nervous, high.

  “Bah! We were forty-seven days at sea, for God’s sake, and not one man ill. Is that not sufficient proof???
? (I listened to this rebuttal with some relief, I confess.) “And?”

  “This one regards Citoyen Bernadotte.” Fauvelet cleared his throat.

  “Ah, yes, my charming new relative.”*

  “He sent a letter to the Directors suggesting that you be court-martialled.”

  “That sounds like something a relation would do.” Bonaparte smiled, but I couldn’t tell whether he was amused or not. “Like something a coward would do.”

  “He’s going around calling you ‘The Deserter,’” Lucien informed Bonaparte with unseemly relish. “For abandoning your post.”

  “Basta! I left this country at peace and I return to find it at war. I left it crowned with victories, and I return to find it defeated, impoverished and in great misery. And who, I would ask the good Bernadotte—our once-upon-a-very-short-time Minister of War—who is to blame? That’s my question to him.” Bonaparte hit the mantel with his fist. “Anything else?”

  Fauvelet and I exchanged glances. Bonaparte was back.

  October 22, early evening.

  Each day, more soldiers return, bronzed and bearing gifts. Paris is aglow with celebration, abuzz with stories. Wives and daughters parade scarves of exotic silks, fathers and sons proudly wear bejewelled scimitars. Our meals have suddenly become hot with spice. We’ve been invaded by the East—seduced.

  October 23.

  It’s only four in the afternoon and already my little house is bursting with soldiers. “My Egyptians,” Bonaparte calls them. Hortense, home from school, powders her nose and studies her reflection in the looking glass before descending the stairs.

  Loud and boisterous, the soldiers celebrate their return “to civilization,” consuming with great gusto, as if they had been starved. (They were.)

  Fearless Murat, swarthy, jewelled and plumed, struts from room to room displaying his battle scars to every servant, the wounds still fresh, barely healed, two holes, one in each cheek. “But not my tongue,” he says, sticking it out for examination. The pistol shot went in one cheek beside his ear and exited the other, “without even breaking a tooth,” he told me, pulling his thick lips with his fingers.