‘He’s doing right, Henri. A country needs a King and a Queen, otherwise who are we to look up to?’
‘You can look up to Bonaparte. King or not.’
But she couldn’t. He knew she couldn’t. It was not simple vanity that was putting this man on the throne.
When my mother talked about her parents, she harboured the same hopes as the traveller who returns home. She thought of them unchanged, described the furniture as though nothing would have been moved or broken in more than twenty years. Her father’s beard was still the same colour. I understood her hopes. We all had something to pin on Bonaparte.
Time is a great deadener. People forget, grow old, get bored. The mother and father she’d risked her life to escape from she now spoke of with affection. Had she forgotten? Had time worn away her anger?
She looked at me. ‘I’m not so greedy as I get older, Henri. I take what there is and I’ve stopped asking questions about where it comes from. It gives me pleasure to think of them. It gives me pleasure to love them. That’s all.’
My face burned. What right had I to challenge her? To take the light out of her eyes and make her think of herself as foolish and sentimental? I knelt in front of her, my back to the fire, my chest resting against her knees. She kept hold of her darning. ‘You’re like I was,’ she said. ‘No patience with a weak heart.’
It rained for days. Thin rain that soaked you in half an hour without the thrill of a real torrent. I went from home to home gossiping and seeing friends, helping with whatever had to be mended or gathered. My friend the priest was on a pilgrimage, so I left him long letters of the kind I would most like to receive.
I like the early dark. It’s not night. It’s still companionable. No one feels afraid to walk by themselves without a lantern. The girls sing on their way back from the last milking and if I jump out on them they’ll shout and chase me but there’ll be no pounding hearts. I don’t know why it is that one kind of dark can be so different from another. Real dark is thicker and quieter, it fills up the space between your jacket and your heart. It gets in your eyes. When I have to be out late at night, it’s not knives and kicks I’m afraid of, though there are plenty of those behind walls and hedges. I’m afraid of the Dark. You, who walk so cheerfully, whistling your way, stand still for five minutes. Stand still in the Dark in a field or down a track. It’s then you know you’re there on sufferance. The Dark only lets you take one step at a time. Step and the Dark closes round your back. In front, there is no space for you until you take it. Darkness is absolute. Walking in the Dark is like swimming underwater except you can’t come up for air.
Lie still at night and Dark is soft to the touch, it’s made of moleskin and is such a sweet smotherer. In the country we rely on the moon, and when the moon is out no light can penetrate the window. The window is walled over and cast in a perfect black surface. Does it feel the same to be blind? I used to think so, but I’ve been told not. A blind pedlar who visited us regularly laughed at my stories of the Dark and said the Dark was his wife. We bought our pails from him and fed him in the kitchen. He never spilt his stew or missed his mouth the way I did. ‘can see,’ he said, ‘but I don’t use my eyes.’
He died last winter, my mother said.
It’s early dark now and this is the last night of my leave. We won’t do anything unusual. We don’t want to think that I’m going again.
I have promised my mother that she will come to Paris soon after the Coronation. I’ve never been myself and it’s the thought of that that makes it easier for me to say goodbye. Domino will be there grooming his preposterous horse, teaching the mad beast to walk in a quiet line with Court animals. Why Bonaparte has insisted on having that horse present at such an important time is not clear. It’s a soldier’s mount, not a creature for parades. But he’s always reminding us that he’s a soldier too.
When Claude had finally gone to bed and we were alone, we didn’t talk. We held hands until the wick burnt out and then we were in the dark.
Paris had never seen so much money.
The Bonapartes were ordering everything from cream to David. David, who had flattered Napoleon by calling his head perfectly Roman, was given the commission to paint the Coronation, and he was to be found each day at Notre-Dame making cartoons and arguing with the workmen who were trying to do away with the ravages of revolution and bankruptcy. Joséphine, given charge of the flowers, had not contented herself with vases and arrangements. She had drawn up a plan of the route to the cathedral from the palace and was engaged as intently as David on her own ephemeral masterpiece. I first encountered her over the billiard table, where she was playing Monsieur Talleyrand, a gentleman not gifted with balls. In spite of her dress, which spread out would easily have made a carpet all the way to the cathedral, she bent and moved as though she wore nothing at all, making beautiful parallel lines with her cue. Bonaparte had dressed me up as a footman and ordered me to take her Highness an afternoon snack. She was fond of melon at four o’clock. Monsieur Talleyrand was to have port.
This holiday mood of Napoleon’s was almost a madness. He had appeared at dinner two nights ago dressed as the Pontiff and lewdly asked Joséphine how intimate she would like to be with God. I stared into the chicken.
Now, he had me out of my soldier’s uniform and in Court dress. Impossibly tight. It made him laugh. He liked to laugh. It was his only relaxation apart from those hotter and hotter baths he took at any time of the day or night. In the palace the bathroom staff lived in the same state of unrest as the kitchen staff. He might cry out for hot water at any moment, and woe betide the man on duty if the tub were not just full, just so. I’d only seen the bathroom once. A great big room with a tub the size of a line-ship and a huge furnace in one corner, where the water was heated and drawn and poured back and reheated over and over again until the moment came and he wanted it. The attendants were specially chosen from amongst the best oxwrestlers in France. Fellows who could handle the copper kettles like tea-cups worked alone, stripped to the waist, wearing only sailor’s breeches that caught the sweat and held it in dark stripes down each leg. Like sailors they had their liquor ration, but I don’t know what it was made of. The biggest, André, offered me a swig from his flask the time I poked my head round the door, gasping at the steam and this huge man who looked like a genie. I accepted out of politeness, but spat the brown stuff over the tiles, frantic at the heat. He pinched my arm the way the cook pinched spaghetti strings and told me that the hotter it is the hotter the liquid you drink.
‘Why do you think they drink all that rum in Martinique?’ and he winked broadly, imitating her Highness’s walk. Now, here she was before me and I was too shy to announce the melon.
Talleyrand coughed.
‘I won’t miss because you grunt,’ she said.
He coughed again and she looked up, and seeing me standing there put down her cue and moved to take away my tray.
‘I know all the servants, but I don’t know you.’
‘I’m from Boulogne, Majesty. I’ve come to serve the chicken.’
She laughed and her eyes travelled up and down my person.
‘You don’t dress like a soldier.’
‘No, Majesty. My orders were to dress as Court now that I’m at Court.’
She nodded. ‘I think you might dress any way you like. I’ll ask him for you. Wouldn’t you prefer to wait on me? Melon is so much sweeter than chicken.’
I was horrified. Had I come all this way just to lose him?
‘No, Majesty. I couldn’t do melon. I can only do chicken. I’ve been trained.’
(I sound like a street urchin.)
Her hand rested on my arm for a second, and her eyes were keen.
‘I can see how zealous you are. Go now.’
Thankfully I bowed out backwards and ran down to the servants’ hall, where I had a little room of my own; the privilege of being a special attendant. I kept my few books there, a flute I was hoping to learn and my journal. I wrote about her or tried to.
She eluded me the way the tarts in Boulogne had eluded me. I decided to write about Napoleon instead.
After that, I was kept busy with banquet after banquet as all our conquered territories came to congratulate the Emperor to be. While the guests filled themselves on rare fish and veal in newly invented sauces, he kept to his chicken, eating a whole one every night, usually forgetting about the vegetables. No one ever mentioned it. He only needed to cough and the table fell silent. Now and again I caught her Majesty watching me, but if our eyes met, she smiled in that half way of hers and I dropped my eyes. Even to look at her was to wrong him. She belonged to him. I envied her that.
In the weeks that followed he grew morbidly afraid of being poisoned or assassinated, not for himself, but because the future of France was at stake. He had me taste all his food before he would touch it and he doubled his guard. Rumour had it that he even checked his bed before he slept. Not that he slept much. He was like a dog, he could close his eyes and snore in a moment, but when his mind was full he was able to stay awake for days while his Generals and friends dropped around him.
Abruptly, at the end of November and only two weeks from his Coronation, he ordered me back to Boulogne. He said I lacked a real soldier’s training, that I would serve him better when I could handle a musket as well as a carving knife. Perhaps he saw how I blushed, perhaps he knew my feelings, he knew those of most people. He tweaked my ear in his maddening way and promised there was a special job for me in the New Year.
So I left the city of dreams just as it was about to flower and heard second-hand reports of that gaudy morning when Napoleon had taken the crown from the Pope and placed it on his own head before crowning Joséphine. They say that he bought Madame Clicquot’s entire stock for the whole year. With her husband lately dead and the whole weight of the business on her shoulders, she can only have blessed the return of a King. She was not alone. Paris threw open every door and lit every chandelier for three days. Only the old and ill bothered to go to bed, for the rest it was drunkenness and madness and joy. (I exclude the aristocrats, but they are not relevant.)
In Boulogne, in the terrible weather, I trained for ten hours a day and collapsed at night in a damp bivouac with a couple of inadequate blankets. Our supplies and conditions had always been good, but in my absence thousands more men had joined up, believing through the offices of Napoleon’s fervent clergy that the road to Heaven was first the road to Boulogne. No one was exempt from conscription. It was up to the recruiting officers to decide who should stay and who must go. By Christmas, the camp had swelled to over 100,000 men and more were expected. We ran with packs that weighed around 40 lbs, waded in and out of the sea, fought one another hand to hand and used all the available farming land to feed ourselves. Even so, it was not enough and, in spite of Napoleon’s dislike of supply contractors, we got most of our meat from nameless regions and I suspect from animals that Adam would not recognise. Two pounds of bread, 4 oz of meat and 4 oz of vegetables were rationed to us daily. We stole what we could, spent our wages, when we had them, on tavern food and wreaked havoc on the communities who lived quietly round about. Napoleon himself ordered vi-vandières to be sent to special camps. Vivandière is an optimistic army word. He sent tarts who had no reason to be vivant about anything. Their food was often worse than ours, they had us as many hours of the day as we could stand and the pay was poor. The well-padded town tarts took pity on them and were often to be seen visiting the camps with blankets and loaves of bread. The vivandières were runaways, strays, younger daughters of too-large families, servant girls who’d got tired of giving it away to drunken masters, and fat old dames who couldn’t ply their trade anywhere else. On arrival they were each given a set of underclothes and a dress that chilled their bosoms in the icy sea-salt days. Shawls were distributed too, but any woman found covering herself on duty could be reported and fined. Fined meant no money that week instead of hardly any money. Unlike the town tarts, who protected themselves and charged what they liked and certainly charged individually, the vivants were expected to service as many men as asked them day or night. One woman I met crawling home after an officer’s party said she’d lost count at thirty-nine.
Christ lost consciousness at thirty-nine.
Most of us that winter got great sores where the salt and wind had rubbed down our skin. Sores between our toes and on our top lips were the most common. A moustache didn’t help, the hairs aggravated the rawness.
At Christmas, though the vivandières had no time off, we did, and we sat around our fires with extra logs toasting the Emperor with our extra brandy. Patrick and I feasted on a goose I stole, cooking and eating it in guilty joy on top of his pillar. We should have shared it, but as it was we were still hungry. He told me stories about Ireland, about the peat fires and the goblins that live under every hill.
‘Sure and I’ve had my own boots made the size of a thumbnail by the little people.’
He said he’d been out poaching, that it was a fine night in July, just dark, with the moon up and a great stretch of stars. As he came through the wood he saw a ring of green fire burning as tall as a man. In the middle of the ring were three goblins. He knew they were goblins and not elves by their shovels and beards. ‘So I kept as quiet as the church bell on a Saturday night and crept up to them as you would a pheasant.’
He had heard them discussing their treasure, stolen from the fairies and buried under the ground within the ring of fire. Suddenly one of the goblins had put his nose to the air and sniffed suspiciously.
‘I smell a man,’ he said. ‘dirty man with mud on his boots.’ Another laughed. ‘What does it matter? No one with mud on his boots can enter our secret chamber.’
‘Take no chances, let’s be off,’ said the first and in a wink they were gone, ring of fire with them. For a few moments Patrick lay still among the leaves turning over what he had heard. Then, checking he was alone, he took off his boots and crept to where the ring of fire had been. On the ground there was no sign of burning but the soles of his feet tingled.
‘So I knew I was in a magic place.’
He had dug all night and in the morning found nothing but a couple of moles and a pile of worms. Exhausted, he had gone back for his boots and there they were.
‘No bigger than a thumbnail.’
He searched his pockets and handed me a tiny pair of boots, perfectly made, the heels worn down and the laces frayed.
‘An’ I swear they fitted me once.’
I didn’t know whether to believe him or not and he saw my eyebrows working up and down. He held out his hand for the boots. ‘I walked all the way home in my bare feet and when I came to take Mass that morning I could hardly hobble up to the altar. I was so tired that I gave the congregation the day off.’ He smiled his crooked smile and hit me on the shoulder.
‘Trust me, I’m telling you stories.’
He told me other stories too. Stories about the Blessed Virgin and how she couldn’t be relied upon.
‘The women, they’re always the clever ones,’ he said.
‘They always sense our lying ways. The Blessed Virgin’s a woman too, for all that she’s Holy, and there’s no man I know can get his own way with her. You can pray all day and all night and she won’t hear you. If you’re a man, you’d much better stick with Jesus himself.’
I said something about how the Blessed Virgin was our mediator.
‘Sure she is, but she mediates for the women. Why, we’ve a statue at home, so lifelike you’d think it was the Holy Mother herself. Now the women come in with their tears and flowers and I’ve hidden behind a pillar and I’ll swear on all the saints that the statue moves. Now when the men come in, cap in hand, asking for this and that and saying their prayers, that statue’s like the rock it’s made of. I’ve given them the truth over and over again. Go straight to Jesus, I say (he’s got a statue near by), but they don’t heed because every man likes to think he’s got a woman listening to him.’
‘Don’t you p
ray to her?’
‘Sure an’ I do not. We have an arrangement you might say. I see to her, give her proper respect and we leave each other alone. She’d be different if God hadn’t violated her.’
What was he talking about?
‘See, women like you to treat them with respect. To ask before you touch. Now I’ve never thought it was right and proper of God to send his angel with no by your leave and then have his way before she’d even had time to comb her hair. I don’t think she ever forgave him for that. He was too hasty. So I don’t blame her that she’s so haughty now.’
I had never thought of the Queen of Heaven in this way.
Patrick liked the girls and was not above sneaking a look uninvited.
‘But when it comes to it, I’d never take a woman without giving her time to comb her hair.’
We spent the rest of our Christmas leave on top of the pillar sheltering behind the apple barrels and playing cards. But on New Year’s Eve Patrick swung out his ladder and said we were to go to Communion.
‘I’m not a believer.’
‘Then you’ll come as my friend.’
He cajoled me with a bottle of brandy for afterwards and so we set off through the frozen streets to the seaman’s church that Patrick preferred to army prayers.
It was filling slowly with men and women from the town, muffled against the cold but in the best clothes they could find. We were the only ones from the camp. Probably the only ones still sober in this desperate weather. The church was plain except for the coloured windows and the statue of the Queen of Heaven decked in red robes. Despite myself I made her a little bow and Patrick, catching me, smiled his crooked smile.
We sang with our strongest voices and the warmth and nearness of other people thawed my unbeliever’s heart and I too saw God through the frost. The plain windows were trellised with frost and the stone floor that received our knees had the coldness of the grave. The oldest were dignified with smiling faces and the children, some of whom were so poor that they kept their hands warm in bandages, grew angel hair.