She halted and looked down in confusion. Bonaparte had approved of the silk from Lyon for her gown; he demanded she wear only French manufacturers’ fabrics to boost their sales. Her dress was high-waisted and clasped beneath the bosom with an enormous emerald, echoing the heavy strand she wore around her neck. It was a new creation of white silk with silver embroidery by the couture house Au Grand Turc, partly of her own design. She smoothed her shaking hands down the stiff fabric. Gone were her favourite muslins. Everything she wore now was chosen to suit her husband’s taste. What had she done wrong?
He bounded up the stairs and snatched her shawl away. ‘This is hideous! A Constantinople shawl? Have you lost your wits?’ Josephine felt the warmth of the cashmere shawl slide from her shoulders. ‘I told you. I warned you. You must be at your most beautiful. All of the Parisian snobs are watching us.’
She felt tears beginning to well.
‘Find something that suits, for heaven’s sake. My wife the celebrated leader of fashions.’ He spun around, appealing to the assembly with his wry sneer. Caroline laughed loudest. He turned back to Josephine. ‘I can’t even trust you to dress yourself.’
Josephine shared a stricken glance with her daughter.
‘The muslin shawl, embroidered by Picot.’ His orders given, Bonaparte turned away from her, expecting no dissension.
She fled up to her chamber.
Claire de Rémusat followed her, saying nothing as Josephine dabbed the tears from her eyes with the backs of her gloved hands.
Josephine sniffed. ‘He wants me to freeze in this.’ But she gathered the flimsy shawl around her shoulders.
‘It is beautiful,’ Claire said.
Poor Claire, what must she think of us? Josephine wondered.
By the time she descended the stairs once more Bonaparte had already left.
‘Where is Hortense?’
‘Gone ahead,’ said Caroline. ‘You’ll have to ride with me.’
Josephine hid her horror with a charmed smile. Claire de Rémusat gripped her elbow and helped her to the carriage.
‘Not with child yet?’ Caroline observed, heavy with her own pointed belly. Josephine ignored her. She climbed into the carriage, furious that she would have to share with Bonaparte’s witch sister, but determined not to show it. Outside her window, a row of flaming brands lit up the gold-tipped spears of the palace gates.
‘He has been back with you for an entire year,’ Caroline continued. She grimaced as she arranged herself on the narrow seat and crossed her hands over her belly. ‘Perhaps his attentions have been engaged elsewhere with a certain opera singer.’
Josephine tapped on the glass and waved to the driver. The carriage lurched forward. The horses’ hooves were satisfyingly sharp on the cobbles. There was once a time when she enjoyed the theatre. Every night was a ball, a performance. She closed her eyes, letting the jolt of the carriage rock her. She would have to find that carefree girl again, to paint her face in smiles. How she wished she had Thérésa with her in the carriage. To be a Merveilleuse again. To feel the excitement building as the horses rushed to the next entertainment. The thought of Thérésa cheered her. Perhaps she too would be at the performance that night. They had not seen each other since Bonaparte ousted the Directoire and became First Consul.
Thérésa, you must come and see the plans for my garden, for my new glasshouses, Josephine had written to her friend.
I am not welcome in your home, Thérésa wrote back.
Come anyway. You must see my ponds, my rambling walks. I have refused to have a straight path anywhere. You will love it.
But when Bonaparte heard her name announced, he flew into a rage. ‘That woman is not allowed in this house! She cannot be trusted. Tallien and Barras still plot against me. What were you thinking?’
‘I’m sorry.’ Josephine fell at his feet.
‘You must not be seen with her again. I thought I had made that clear.’
Josephine sobbed. He could not mean that. He could not take her oldest friend away from her.
Bonaparte had forbidden her to meet with Thérésa in private, but if they were to find each other in the intermission, to sneak a few moments alone, Bonaparte would never know and it would be enough. Enough just to be near her. Besides, her husband would no doubt be preoccupied calling on the dressing room of Mademoiselle Grassini.
She ground her jaw, annoyed she would have to endure another evening watching her husband drool over that fat Italian songbird. And Caroline’s smug gloating. Josephine flicked her foot against the side of the carriage. She should not let his affairs hurt her so. But how not to feel? Emotions could not be so easily commanded, at least not in her experience.
Outside the crowds were singing in the streets. It was Christmas Eve, and even though the old religious traditions had been outlawed by the Directoire, Bonaparte was relaxing the laws. Let the people have Christmas, she had told him, and they will love us for it. It seemed she was proved right. The crowds were cheering and waving scarves, holding candles in the cold and dark street.
There was no cry of alarm. Only the sudden boom and bucketing wave that threw her to the carriage floor. She registered the weight of Caroline landing on top of her before all went black.
When Josephine awoke she was dazed, with Caroline snapping her name in her face. She pushed her sister-in-law away and crawled over the broken glass of the carriage windows, looking for the door. Smoke filled the air. She didn’t understand what had happened. Where was Hortense? Why wasn’t she in the carriage with her?
Claire de Rémusat pulled Josephine to her feet. Somehow, she was standing in the street. Caroline was barking orders to the guards. Josephine looked down. Her new silk dress was splattered with blood, but she felt no pain. As she stumbled forward she found her feet were cut and her silk slippers missing. The horses. The horses were tangled and kicking. People were lying in the dark, there was blood, there were pieces of bodies. She covered her mouth with her hand. Her ears were ringing. There was screaming but she couldn’t hear it. She saw it. She saw the people with their stretched mouths and terrified faces.
‘Where is Hortense?’
Claire de Rémusat shook her head. Oh God, what did that mean? But when Claire began to speak, Josephine could hear nothing.
An explosion. A bomb. Fires were being stamped out from fallen lanterns. The streets were littered in broken glass from the burst windows of the buildings around them. The smoke swirled around the broken carriages.
Hortense had gone on ahead, Josephine remembered. ‘Hortense! Hortense!’ With each step she felt the glass pierce the soles of her feet.
A cart was blown apart and several carriages had been hit. A bolting horse leaped out of the smoke and over the remains of a carriage. Josephine screamed and covered her face, unable to move, waiting for it to strike her down. But at the last moment the horse shied away.
‘Maman!’ A cry, faint. Josephine uncovered her eyes.
Hortense stumbled out of the darkness, cradling her arm against her body. The wound dripped black blood onto her white dress.
‘You are alive, you are alive.’ Josephine clasped her daughter, holding her tight, terrified to let her go.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
Winter 1800
Marthe heard the blast and shot to her feet. It made her think of cannon fire. The windowpanes shook but did not break. Jacques came out of his room with a coat draped around his shoulders. ‘Stay here,’ he commanded needlessly. It was Christmas Eve and she watched from the window as the carol singers dropped their candles and fled the streets. She drew her shawl tighter around her. She waited for more shots to be fired, for the sounds of mobs, her thoughts imagining revolution.
Jacques returned some hours later with tales of carnage, of some sort of machine infernale, of smoke and horses trapped beneath the wreckage of their carriages, of bodies dismembered. She told him to stop. To say no more.
Days later, Marthe walked to Rue Saint-Nicaise, her breath puff
ing clouds, her hands deep inside her muff. She didn’t know why she was drawn to see the site of the explosion. Perhaps it was something to do with the fate of the girl. The girl and the old mare. The innocent.
It wasn’t far. A brisk walk along the Seine took her to the Tuileries Palace. As she walked beneath the palace windows, she wondered if the First Consul and his wife were inside. Both had survived the assassination plot and carried on to the opera as if nothing had happened. To listen to Haydn’s Die Schöpfung as if no one had lost their life.
Marthe paced out the route of the carriages from the Place du Carrousel. Her breathing grew quicker as she saw the splintered glass, the boarded windows, the piles of rubble. She imagined the screaming of horses and in her mind’s eye the misty morning fog became the smoke-filled night. But here, despite her imagination, life had resumed its usual pace. Carriages rolled past, carthorses lumbered with their loads, people hurried on their errands without a second glance at the bloodstains on the cobbled street.
When she reached the corner she kneeled and picked up a sliver of wood. Matchsticks of the blasted wood were trapped between the cobbles. She pricked the pointed end into her skin, watching the blood swell into a pearl.
An assassination.
Someone hated these people enough to try to remove them from life. She understood the nature of revenge. But what defect of character did it require, she wondered, to take innocent lives? To presume another’s hopes and dreams were nothing when compared with your own? To deem the pain of their loved ones’ loss as insignificant?
She was fourteen, the paper said, the girl the bombers paid to hold the horse. Twelve sous they gave her just to wait. Did she become afraid, waiting in the dark and cold for the man to return? The old mare might have nuzzled her fingers, breathing hot air onto them. Likely the girl had not yet been paid, Marthe thought, standing at the kerbside where she would have stood. Likely she wondered how long she would have to wait for her payment. And it was Christmas Eve. No doubt she was dreaming of the roasted chestnuts and the feast of Réveillon after midnight mass that night. Her mother would need help preparing the goose and it was getting late. Her mother would be worried. But this reward would make a fine Christmas present. Was that her last thought? Marthe wondered. Of a mother waiting? Of the joy her coins might bring?
She could not know that the barrel beneath the canvas on the cart was filled with gunpowder. And in the dark she would not have seen the long fuse that led away from it. Perhaps she was waving when the carriages from the palace passed by. Perhaps she was cheering with the crowds, hoping to see a glimpse of the great General Bonaparte and the fine ladies.
Yes, no doubt her thoughts were distracted by the smart carriages, the armed guards on their steeds, her mind taken away from anticipation of her Christmas meal and the twelve sous that she was owed when, lurking in the shadows, the assassin lit a fuse and ran to save his own life.
A cold tear dropped from Marthe’s chin and fell flat on the stone street.
Marthe touched her cheek, her nose, her mouth. What would it feel like to be blasted from existence? One moment whole in body and thought and the next split asunder, reduced to elements of blood and bone. She could not stop these morbid thoughts. She fancied she smelled the droplets of blood in the air mingled with gunpowder, fancied that she tasted the metallic tang, but perhaps that was the gorge rushing into her throat.
Her face was bone-white with cold but the blood was rising in her cheeks. She chewed her lip. Did men have such thoughts on the battlefield, she wondered, when cannon shot boomed around them? Did her young Michel leave his life in such an instant? Extinguished?
If she had been the one standing in this spot, holding the horse’s bridle when the bomb went off, would anyone now miss her? What was the purpose of her life? What was the point of it at all?
Her heart was racing towards its end, and she found she liked the pain of it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
Summer 1801
The bomb blast changed everything between them, Josephine was convinced. She traced it all back to that night—the arguments, the moods, the tempers. Every crack in their marriage became wider after the attempt on Bonaparte’s life.
Bonaparte escaped unscathed as his carriage had taken a different route to Josephine’s. News reached them that he was unharmed as they stood shivering amid the carnage in the street. All she wanted was to take Hortense home and keep her safe, but he ordered them to attend the opera as though nothing had happened. He would not give his enemies the satisfaction. With bloodied dress and cut feet she endured the performance, holding tight to Hortense’s hand. The people applauded her courage. Bonaparte had cheered and applauded the loudest, parading about heroic and undaunted. But privately he acted as though his time was coming to an end.
All their food was now tasted by others. She could not travel without guards. Bonaparte blamed Barras and the Jacobins, but Josephine could not believe that Barras was capable of murder. She thought it far more likely that the royalists would plot to kill them. Two common colonials who dared to sleep in the beds of royalty, who took over the Tuileries Palace as if it were their own? She was sure they felt threatened enough to kill.
‘We shouldn’t have stayed at the palace, we should’ve gone home to Malmaison.’ She’d murmured the thought, not realising that she spoke aloud.
‘I do not need your opinion!’ he had thundered.
Bonaparte expected attack at every turn, even here, at Malmaison. Sentry stations were being built at their gates. The peace of their summer home seemed violated.
Bonaparte stood at the salon window looking out over the garden, his fingers tapping against the pane. He was agitated, as usual, and Josephine anticipated an argument. She could not concentrate on her embroidery; her counting was off and the petals were becoming ragged.
‘You should take the waters at Plombières,’ Bonaparte announced.
Josephine continued to draw her thread tight, remaining silent.
‘Soak in the baths. Sip the healing waters. Breathe the mountain air. Isn’t that what you do at your sanatorium?’
Not this again. She knew where mention of Plombières was leading.
‘My brother Joseph’s wife has fallen pregnant, he tells me, after a visit to Plombières.’
Good brother Joseph. She stabbed her needle into the cloth. ‘Of course I will leave for Plombières, if that’s what you wish.’
She hated the journey. All those rutted roads and climbing passes. It made her stomach swirl just thinking of it. The dreadful inns serving curdled milk and spinach dressed in lamp oil. Here at Malmaison her roses were about to bloom and she was eager to see the results of their first cross between the cabbage and tea blossoms. She was hoping to create a bloom that held its pert shape for longer.
Bonaparte paced beside the salon window. ‘Fouché is worried. My enemies rally against me and if I were to fall the nation would be insecure. All my advisers are agreed.’ He spun on his heel. ‘I need an heir.’
An heir, she thought. He speaks as though he is king. He treats me as if I am a brood mare that needs to do her duty.
Bonaparte turned his back to her, gazing out at her Merino sheep grazing amiably on the slopes. She saw the gentleness of her fields and the sharpness of her husband’s shoulders. She didn’t know how to bring back those rare moments of loving intimacy they had found together last summer. They had walked together every afternoon in her garden, his arm draped around her waist. She had loved to hear him speak of his plans, his thoughts, his fancies. Her husband seemed to bubble with ideas, like a spring bursting out of damp earth. He intended to rearrange the streets, even address the houses with numbers odd on one side, even on the other, so that each house might be more easily found. Such a simple idea, but it had taken Napoleon Bonaparte to think of it. She was proud of her brilliant general.
And he had loved to hear her tell stories. She distracted him with her playful anecdotes about their friends and acquaintances.
The more wicked the gossip the better.
‘You understand people,’ he had once said to her, ‘in a way that I simply cannot. You rejoice in their foibles where I find only irritation. I wish I had your skill to love people for their flaws.’
‘It is not a skill, my love. I find I am simply interested in them.’ She shrugged and dismissed his praise but felt warmed by it nonetheless. ‘All it takes is curiosity.’
‘People bore me. So it is just as well that I have you.’ He swung her around and around, twirling until they were both dizzy.
That summer before, she felt as happy as she had ever been. But now all they seemed to do was argue.
It had started with her debts.
Bonaparte picked up her milliner’s account and tossed it at her. ‘Do you need thirty-eight new hats?’
‘You want a wife fit for a consul, do you not?’ she said, indignant. ‘You want me to win the admiration of the Parisian elites—how do you propose I do that in rags?’ She sat in front of her jewellery case, the ornate lid propped open against the mirror.
‘One hundred and eighty francs on feathers? Eight hundred francs on perfume? That is more than most men earn in a year!’
‘You like me to smell nice.’ Her voice was small, and her head dropped.
Bonaparte breathed heavily. He came to stand behind her and she felt his hands fall on her shoulders. He sighed and kissed the crown of her head. ‘I just wish you could be more moderate.’
‘I like new things,’ she said, tears slipping. ‘And when the merchants come, I find I cannot refuse them.’
‘You are too soft-hearted. They take advantage.’
She nodded her head, contrite. ‘I promise I will not let them in. When the dressmakers, jewellers and milliners come to call I will turn them all away.’ She turned around to him, her eyes pleading. ‘I will not buy another pretty new thing until I have my glasshouses. I promise you.’
She watched the muscles of his jaw work, considering her bargain. They had discussed this many times, the cost of her designers’ plans. When Thibault and Vignon had presented her their sketches she was overwhelmed with joy. She had never seen a structure as vast and magnificent as they proposed. One hundred and sixty-five feet long. A sloping wall of glass panes climbing more than fifteen feet high. Twelve stoves kept fired by night. She imagined standing in the warmth, never having to feel the chill of a Paris winter again.
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