‘Aren’t these the most gorgeous children?’ She turned then to her ladies-in-waiting, who had pressed themselves back against the Italian marble columns. Félix noticed them watching the ape warily.
‘Indeed, glowing complexions,’ said the younger of the two women. ‘It will be a joy to have children running about the place at last.’
Félix thought he saw the Empress’s smile waver.
‘You must be a man who knows how to grow healthy things,’ Josephine said, extending her hand. ‘I look forward to our partnership.’
Félix took her gloved hand and pressed his lips to her fingers.
‘Now, I can’t wait to show you the grounds,’ the Empress said, clapping her hands. ‘We must go at once.’
She had an infectious happiness that Félix found endearing. But he hesitated. He glanced at Anne.
‘All of you.’ She smiled encouragingly. ‘The jasmine from my beloved Martinique is in flower. The smell is glorious. I sowed the seeds and tended them myself. I long to show you my treasures.’
Félix found himself smiling back and wondered if any man had been able to deny her whatever she might desire.
She bent down to address his youngest son. ‘And my swans have cygnets! Would you like to see the baby swans?’
Philippe nodded his head.
She straightened. ‘I have a black swan,’ she said to Félix, ‘from New Holland. And an emu and wallabies.’ She was breathless. ‘Baudin sent them back for me. I understand you have seen them in their native land?’
He nodded and she beamed back. ‘Some day you must tell me all your adventures.’ She squeezed his arm, then turned to her staff. ‘We will take the barouche.’
While the attendants leaped into action, Anne pulled Félix close and whispered, ‘She is not at all what I expected.’
Félix raised his eyebrows in agreement.
The Empress linked her arm through Félix’s as they walked out to the courtyard. ‘Tell me, M. Lahaie, do you think we shall be the first to germinate the New Holland eucalyptus? I do so hope we can do it. Not least to surprise those savants of the Jardin des Plantes!’
Félix smiled. He could just imagine the look on Labillardière’s face. Perhaps even Thouin was a little jealous that the Empress had asked for him.
‘I have great plans for my nurseries and hothouses. We shall be the finest garden in all of Europe.’
‘I have no doubt, Empress, no doubt at all.’ He felt her excitement pulse through him. It was exquisite to have the most celebrated, most beautiful woman in France champion him. She had chosen him, and all of a sudden he felt certain they would succeed.
His moment of joy on the Empress’s arm was short-lived, however. At the sound of carriages, she drew away. Her brows pulled into a frown. Félix instantly felt concern. How quickly her mood could sway his, he thought.
Carriages pulled by teams of four horses raced into the yard. The pebbles sprayed out beneath the horses’ hooves as they clattered to a halt. Men in uniform burst from carriages. They brandished swords. Some staggered into one another.
Instinctively, Félix moved back, taking Anne and his boys with him.
The Emperor was the last to step out of the carriage. Anne gasped. All the attendants fell into deep bows.
‘No need for formality, not here! I have come to escape all that.’
The Emperor’s voice was loud, his cheeks rosy. As he embraced his wife he pinched her arm, taking the soft skin between his fingers and twisting. Félix looked away.
‘Claire de Rémusat. We have seen that dress before, Madame, and the colour does not become you.’ The lady-in-waiting took the insult in her stride. Félix saw the barest flicker of contempt in her lip after the Emperor turned away.
‘Why don’t you dress like this fresh flower?’ he said, cupping a hand to the chin of the younger companion. ‘Adèle is like a summer breeze.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
‘Is that English muslin?’ he asked. Félix noticed the Emperor stroke his hand along the curve of her bottom.
‘Of course not,’ she said quickly. Félix thought he saw her eyes widen, her pupils darken, but the girl did not flinch.
‘Let me introduce you to our new chief gardener,’ said the Empress smoothly.
Napoleon Bonaparte swung around. ‘Ah! At last. A pleasure to have you with us.’
Félix swallowed; his throat was dry.
‘And you have brought your children. Two fine sons!’ The Emperor ruffled the hair on their heads. ‘You must be so proud.’
Félix opened his mouth to introduce his wife, but the Emperor had already turned away.
‘I have brought my generals here to shoot,’ he declared.
Félix heard one of them vomiting into the boxed orange plants.
‘We will go to the lake.’
Empress Josephine gasped. ‘You cannot. Not my swans. Not in nesting season! I implore you!’ Then she clapped a hand to her mouth. Félix felt her horror. All were silent, waiting.
‘So soft-hearted, my Josephine.’
He rallied his generals to be ready for the hunt.
Tears were rolling down the Empress’s cheeks. Félix was stunned. No one moved. No one spoke. Only Rose the orangutan, who had followed them out into the bright sun, ambled across and gently took the Empress’s hand in hers.
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
Summer 1805
Anne put her hands on her hips, surveying the box of orphaned cygnets as they piled over one another in the straw. Her boys were beside her, peering over the rim.
‘Don’t look them in the eye. They’ll forget how to be a swan and follow you about from dawn to dusk.’
She knew this to be true of orphaned geese at least. The box had arrived that morning, delivered to the dining table. The soft explosion of fluff was almost enough to bring her undone. She felt like picking each one up and rubbing them against her cheek. Their perfectly formed black beaks, all in miniature, pecked at the hard straw and discarded it in confusion.
‘They’ll need to be fed. And kept warm.’
All downy grey, it was impossible to tell the young black swans from the white. It would be a surprise when they grew, to learn the truth of themselves. They jabbed with stunted wings, kicked with oversized webbed feet and curled their necks around one another for comfort.
Anne had listened to the shots, flinching at each one, and gripped her children’s hands as they were taken past the lake and introduced to their new home. They were to live in a hamlet within the grounds of Malmaison. Just like Marie-Antoinette at the Trianon, the Empress had constructed a Swiss-style farmlet with cows to be milked and a dairy to produce ice cream, but Anne learned she had gone further and made an entire model village. A tiny town, with a baker for their baguettes, a butcher for their lamb cutlets, a printing press for their gossip, a market square, a water fountain, a cobbler, a potter and even a midwife.
The Emperor terrified her and she’d be happy if she saw nothing more of him, but the Empress had surprised her. She had a manner that drew you into her confidence, though Anne remained wary. It was too soon to pass judgement on her, for all her winning ways. Now it could be months before she had a chance to meet her again, as the Empress had left Malmaison immediately after the slaughter of her swans to take the waters at Plombières.
‘S’posed to bring on conception,’ sniffed the cook, Bernice, to whom Anne had just been introduced. ‘Crock of bollocks if you ask me. Everyone knows its birthwort boiled in beer she needs.’
Nonsense, Anne thought. A tea of red clover flowers and motherwort was better. But she said nothing.
The house that was to become their home was newly built but plastered to look like a centuries-old Swiss chalet. The walls were painted a gaudy yellow and the window planter boxes were bare. To Anne, it all felt false. A house pretending to be something it was not. It did not feel like a good omen. The residences at the Petit Trianon had been well-built with real stone, had aged and softened with
the growth of ivy on the walls. Here the houses looked out of place, roughly planted, and like they were not built to last. She was filled with the fear that they had made a terrible mistake.
Without realising it was happening, Anne began to weep. The boys didn’t notice. Her tears fell silently. She knocked them away with the back of her hand. It was often like that now. The sound of a crying child, a poem of unrequited love, a box of orphaned baby birds. Anything and everything could set her off.
‘What should we feed them?’ Philippe asked, breaking into her thoughts.
She looked into his earnest face waiting for her to solve the problem and felt herself soften and want to bend and kiss his glowing cheeks.
‘We need a mortar and pestle,’ she said with determination. ‘We will grind them up some grain.’
‘I’ll get it!’ Abraham scrambled for the kitchen.
‘Me too,’ Philippe sprinted after him, not wanting to be left behind by his older brother.
She watched them go, crying softly again.
The room she stood in had that medieval gloom of small blown-glass windows, dark wood and limed walls. She had grown up in rooms like this. Even the squeals of the cygnets reminded her of quarrelling brothers and sisters. She had a sense of having run so far away, only to return to a place where she no longer belonged.
Abraham came back carrying the heavy mortar. Philippe walked slowly behind his brother, cupping the pestle in his hands as if he held a precious sceptre.
They stared up at her.
‘Next, we need grain and corn and some flour and water. Ask Bernice.’
The boys ran off again.
The cygnets were calling loudly, their mouths open. Needy, insistent. Her tears fell.
Anne had lost her baby. What an expression, so full of blame and accusation, she hated it, yet there was the bald truth of it. One day she had the son that she had practised naming and imagined herself holding and the next she did not.
Anne clutched her stomach. A phantom pain to remind her, as subtle as a kick. She closed her eyes, waiting for it to pass.
Her first two births had gone so well. Everyone had predicted they would. She had oxen hips from her mother’s side. Her older sisters were similarly blessed and they all had large families. She had been surrounded by birth and babies all her life, but even that had not prepared her. The thought that she might lose her child had never crossed her mind. It should have, but it didn’t. Lord knew she had seen enough ewes stuck with backward lambs.
She had lost her baby. The beautiful life she had grown inside her was gone. When he left her, she had not even known of it, having laboured many hours only to pass out from the pain. She woke days later stuck fast by the dried blood to her sheets and pressing her fingers into a pulpy softness in her belly to find her baby gone.
Where was her child? The panic swelled. When they told her he had arrived still-born she would not believe it. Other women lost their babies, that was true, but no one in her family had ever lost a child. It couldn’t happen to her, not to a Serreaux woman. The midwife told her she had nearly died, that she was lucky; not many women survived once the fever overcame them. Lucky, she heard, while grieving her lost boy. While biting the pillow to muffle her cries and wrapping her arms around her empty belly. It terrified her that she had no recollection of the moment he was taken, that someone had wrenched her child from her body without her knowing.
Later, she tried to be stoic. She had her boys to care for, and Félix. But worries followed her into the night and woke her from her sleep. Voices hounded her, accusing her, reminding her that she had so nearly left her boys motherless. Many women lost their lives in childbirth, or in the fever after, but she had never believed it could happen to her. When the shaking started it felt like a demonic possession. Anne was no longer in charge of herself. She hid herself away in closets of empty rooms and bundled blankets around herself while sitting crouched on the floor. She sweated and cried. She didn’t know what was happening to her. She had told no one.
The boys rushed back in bringing her handfuls of ingredients and a reprieve from her memories. She pounded the oats into the stone. She leaned over the mortar, putting all her strength into it, grinding the grain and corn into mash. The boys drew back. She felt better for the work of it, relieved to put her arms back to use.
She smiled at her boys. ‘Do you want to feed the babies?’
They nodded. Their eyes were round.
‘They are relying on us now.’ She handed a spoon to each of her sons. ‘We are all they have and we must keep them alive.’
As the days passed and turned to weeks, Anne began to settle in her new home. Each and every one of the cygnets survived their ordeal and she was proud of her boys for staying dedicated to their care. It would soon be time to release them back to the water. For now they blundered around her scullery and made Bernice scream in frustration. They followed her boys like playmates, nipping at their heels, and taking any chance to escape throughout the house. The stairs were stained with bird mess. Anne took it upon herself to clean the mess before her new maid could grow to hate them.
Most days Anne felt normal again.
She began to work with Félix in the nurseries. Félix made no complaint at her coming to work with the nurserymen and women. He felt guilty. She liked that he felt guilty. Her husband had been away in Paris the night she went into labour. It was unfair, she knew, to blame him, yet sometimes she couldn’t help but feel he’d abandoned her. Some small grain of hurt had lodged in her heart and stayed there.
Félix had proudly shown her the Empress’s Grand Serre—the first of its kind, he’d enthused—walking her through the cavernous space with its tiled floor and monstrous wall of hard, clear glass. She had been intimidated by the emptiness. When she tilted her head back to see more glass suspended above her she imagined it shattering into a million pieces, falling in shards like ice spears on top of them. She had run from it.
Anne preferred the old greenhouse nursery, with its low ceiling and milky glass walls. It was like being in a cocoon with layers of silk thread shielding her from the outside world. Here there was the smell of earth in pots and a dirt floor beneath her feet. She chose to come each day to work with the seedlings while her children were with their tutor. At age six and seven her boys were now growing beyond her own level of teaching. Besides, she could never bear to be idle. At Versailles, they had grown many of the plants from New Holland; she was familiar with wattles, and bottlebrushes, and the papery-barked melaleuca. Her favourites were the Platylobium shrubs with bright, golden flowers in the shape of pea-flowers. Even the Latin names were becoming more familiar to her tongue. Here in this humble nursery they grew all the rare plants that would one day fill the Grand Serre with life.
Félix tried to interest her in the boxes of seeds he had received from Baudin’s shipment. The case was open on the bench, and she could smell eucalyptus oil above the musty scent of the greenhouse. He held out a handful of the famed Eucalyptus globulus like an offering. She was reluctant, feeling an unfair twinge of hatred for this plant that had taken her husband away from her on a night when she needed him most. When their unborn child needed him. Félix had been called away when the Baudin shipment arrived in Paris.
Anne twirled one of the gumnuts on the wooden bench like a spinning top. They were not much to look at, brown and warty and the size of a coat button. She tapped one of the hard little nuts, then shook it beside her ear. ‘Are you sure the seeds are inside?’
Félix frowned. ‘I hope so.’
Anger flared in her. He hopes so?
‘Give me a hammer,’ she said.
‘No, no! I think they must open of their own accord.’
He thinks? We have uprooted our lives for this plant.
She simmered in growing rage. It was not like her to feel such bitterness. She took her thumbnail to the nut, gouging into it, but it was closed more tightly than a clam.
‘We must mimic nature,’ Félix con
tinued, gaining confidence. ‘Give this nut the right conditions to release her seed. Convince her this is a safe home for her young. Like raising a family.’
Anne shifted away. As if producing a child was that simple. As if there was no risk. Something inside of her grew brittle and made her snap.
‘You think we are safe here? We have not been here more than a few weeks!’ She found a heat rising inside her. She felt her chest grow tight. ‘These people are not like us. They tire of a thing in an instant and think no more of it. They raise a man up, and might drop him as easily as a handkerchief.’ She spoke harshly, unable to stop herself, her voice quickening in panic.
Félix cast an uneasy glance at the workers in the nursery. ‘Shh, my love, have a care who might hear you.’
Anne breathed too quickly. Her heart was racing in her chest. Her fears were rushing for her. ‘What do you think will become of us if we cannot get these seeds to grow? We have no home of our own! We are at the whim of these royal pretenders.’
Félix looked shocked. ‘Quiet!’ he snapped. ‘Do you mean to ruin us?’
It was a tone she had not heard from her husband. Anne bit her lip, knowing she had gone too far. But she could not stop her thoughts racing, her heart pounding. She pushed past him. The scent of blood was invading her nostrils. She could not stay here. She ran out of the nursery and across the paddocks to their village. At their home, Anne ran for the stairs and found her place of safety in the dark, dry warmth of the attic.
Félix held the gumnuts cradled in his hands, stricken. He worried about his wife. It was the black moods of hers that scared him more than the bursts of anger. Sometimes, he could see the blood drain from her face, her cheeks grow long and lined, her eyes sinking like wells. He did not know where she went when she went inside of herself like that. Not even the children could bring her out. Before, he had no cause to wonder at her thoughts, she would tell him everything. But since that awful night—that night when he wasn’t able to come to her aid—everything had changed.
The baby had come too soon. He would never have left her if he had known. By the time he returned his beloved Anne was already in a coma and his baby gone. Neither one of them had seen their own baby’s face. This thought haunted him now, but then there had been no time to grieve the passing of his son. Anne was in danger, suffering some kind of sepsis, and the doctor could offer nothing more than bloodletting and prayer.
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