It took dry heat to burst the seed open, he realised, but it was winter, winter with its cold, clear nights, that told the seed to be prepared for the spring.
His eyes popped open. He had to tell Anne.
‘The seed must pass through winter.’
Anne turned. Her husband bounded back into the nursery, brown oak leaves peeling from his clothes. Félix gripped her arms, begging her to be excited.
‘Must we wait an entire winter?’ Anne asked, dismayed it would take so long. His face showed she had disappointed him.
‘We must convince the seed that it has passed through winter.’ Félix began to pace. ‘We need to put the seed somewhere cool.’
Anne immediately thought of the ham. ‘The cellar,’ Anne said.
‘It might not be cold enough.’
Anne frowned, thinking of the boys and the cave they had found in the garden. ‘There is a grotto. It is always cold there. The boys come home with fingers like icicles.’
‘You have it!’ he cried, cradling her face in his hands and kissing her lips, and Anne was too shocked to pull away.
Together they crossed the parklands towards the old grotto that the boys had found beside a stream. Anne carried the remaining seed in a small pouch as if it was a precious spice that she dared not spill. Félix carried a metal tray. The entrance of the grotto was overgrown with dripping ferns. Anne shuddered as she passed through a narrow slit in the rock and took the stairs down into the ground.
It was damp and dark and medieval, this grotto. She sniffed. It smelled of mould. Félix paused and lit a candle. Anne tried not to touch the slimy wet walls as they climbed down the steps. Someone had carved faces in the rock walls and Anne shivered away from the leering gargoyles. If the intent was to frighten then it had succeeded. The godless air sent a chill down the back of her neck. A drop of water landed on her head and she thought of the superstition, that it meant bad luck. She looked up. The ceiling was thick with moss and black mould.
‘What sort of person creates this kind of place?’
‘Best not to imagine,’ Félix answered.
They clambered down into a chamber of sorts. Not unlike a chapel, Anne thought. Small niches had been carved into the walls and Anne could imagine candles being placed there for prayers to some false gods. The Vikings had once camped here on this spot when they’d attacked Paris and she would not be surprised if they had made this place. Or more likely this was some pagan worship place of the Dark Ages—when the English were here, no doubt.
‘Well, it’s cold enough to be winter,’ Félix said, putting down the tray on a stone altar and rubbing his hands together. ‘Let’s try it.’
Anne opened the leather pouch and shook the seed onto the metal tray. Small and brown and oddly shaped. Each seed unlike the other. ‘Do you think they will be safe here?’ She looked about at the dripping walls, listening to the droplets fall onto the wet stone floor and trying not to think of blood sacrifice.
‘A month and we shall see.’
‘A month to prove ourselves worthy of a place here.’
Félix looked at her grimly.
‘A month,’ she murmured, forcing herself to smile.
Three weeks passed and Félix could stand the wait no longer. He returned to the grotto alone, unwilling to let Anne see the seeds if they had failed. He was terrified they would be devoured by spores of mould and turned to fungus before his eyes. How could he face her with this disappointment? He had thought her mood had lifted over the past weeks, and perhaps her words were less tinged with hopelessness. He could not bear to see the look of despair on her face if these seeds were rotted away to nothing.
Candlelight flickered in his lantern as he stepped down the winding stairway. It was damp and cool and smelled of mould. He tortured himself by thinking he had wasted their precious seeds on this experiment. As he descended, he noticed the walls of the staircase had been carved with haggard faces and runes. Did they mean anything, he wondered, or was it folly? Another game some rich master had once liked to play. But the faces with their open mouths could not scare him. He was too intent on his tray of seeds.
The tray was still there, that was the first relief. He had warned his boys away but any other child of the village could have come and disturbed them. Holding his breath, Félix carried his lantern to the middle of the chamber and dared himself to look. The seeds were clean. Brown and misshapen like tiny lumps of coal but they lay just as they had been left, shivering on the metal tray.
He laughed in disbelief. The thrill was immediate and he couldn’t stop grinning like one of the leering faces in the darkness. The seeds were safe from mould, but he would need to plant them to see if he had broken the dormancy. He carried the tray reverentially out into the light.
He made his way quickly to the greenhouse, anxious to share the news with Anne, hopeful this success would cheer her. He longed for the sound of her laugh. That earthy chuckle that had once so delighted him. He hurried across the lawns and into the moist, warm air of the nursery.
‘Anne!’
In her face he saw surprise.
‘I thought you were going to wait a month.’
He showed her the seed, hoping she saw each one as a tiny nugget of promise. He had nudged these seeds through dry summer, a cold wet winter, and now, he hoped, into the warmth of spring.
‘We’ll try the warmest part of the greenhouse,’ Félix said. ‘Give them the best chance to succeed.’ When he reached out for Anne, she let him twine his hand through hers.
Autumn became winter. Christmas passed. Then the New Year came and with it the return of January and all the names of the months. Anne was relieved that the Emperor had abolished the Republican calendar; far better to mark the passing of the year in the old ways. Soon, she realised, Candlemas would be upon them and the Empress still had not returned to Malmaison.
Anne could not look at the bare pots in the corner of the glasshouse, she no longer checked them every morning and made excuses to be outside in the gardens. She didn’t know if Félix had dug under the soil to check if the seeds were still sound beneath the loam and neither of them mentioned how much this germination meant to them.
Sitting in the dark, she watched her sons as they slept. It calmed her to be with them, knowing they were safe inside their room each night. She watched their chests rise and fall. She waited, ready to retrieve a blanket should it slip from their skinny shoulders, and heard their dreamtime whimpers. She sat in the dark sometimes for hours, reluctant to leave them.
‘Anne!’ Félix called up the stairs to her. She jumped and crept out of the boys’ room as guilty as a thief. She hurried down the stairs.
‘Come quick!’ he said, gesturing for her to follow. She read his face and it nudged the numbness of her heart. Seeing his excitement, she felt the first uncertain flickers of hope.
The evening was crisp and clear and sparked with starlight. They took the well-worn path out of the village towards the glasshouses. Anne had trekked this route so many times she could do it in total blackness. Tonight, a full moon frosted the entire lawn in silver. Across the lake, Anne caught sight of a figure coming out of the woods. She started, stopping still. The goddess Diana glowed in the moonlight. Diana the huntress. A foolish fancy but Anne thought she saw the figure moving. It could not be, it was only one of the Empress’s statues. A quiver of arrows was slung across her shoulder and a whippet ran at her heels. Anne hurried after Félix.
The glasshouses were blazing white, lit by lanterns and the stoves to keep them warm against the winter nights. Inside, the nurserymen and women had gone home for the evening and it was spookily hushed. She felt the warm, moist air on her skin and listened to the whoosh of her heartbeat in her ears. Félix had gone ahead. At the end of the nursery he turned to her. She kept her eyes on his face as she walked, passing between two benches like an aisle in a church. On either side, rows of pots lined the benches with bottlebrush, hakea and hibiscus—these foreign plants she now knew fro
m birth—filling the pews like guests at a wedding. It was a nervous kind of hope she felt and recognised from her own wedding day, remembering the posy of orange blossoms she had held crushed in her hands and Félix with his broad and delighted grin. Félix held out his hand to her and she took it. She had no need to be anxious. In the corner of the nursery, the brave little stems of the blue gums had pushed their way out to the light.
‘We’ve done it!’ Félix cried and the sound of his voice was loud to her ears.
His face was shining. He was bursting with the same pride she recognised in him after the birth of their sons. Here, he had achieved something no other gardener, not even the great men of the Jardin des Plantes, had done. She saw the awe in his eyes, the disbelief. He had proved himself, and their security here must be assured.
She tried to smile. She wanted to be happy.
He reached for her, embracing her, twirling her around and around on the dirt floor.
Dazed, she clung to him. She had been hoping for this moment as though it might cure her of her sickness. She should feel his joy. But staring at those first two leaves bursting above the soil, as innocent as a child stretching and yawning with the break of day, she realised she had put too much weight of expectation on their tender leaves.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
Spring 1806
The house Marthe and Jacques had taken on Boulevard Montmartre the year before was an extravagance. For the first time since her marriage they had three floors of rooms to call their own, including a large ground-floor kitchen. They could now afford a cook and a maid. Both she and Jacques had income from their family’s estates in Alençon after the passing of their parents. For Marthe, it was hard to reconcile that this sad event had left her both more alone and more free. With that income she now enjoyed a modicum of comfort.
A central stairwell wound through the middle of the house like a beanstalk. The second floor was high-ceilinged. To the left of the stairs was a grand salon and to the right a dining room of sufficient proportions that she was able to install her magnificent mahogany table. At last the long and shining table had a home fit for purpose. She brought even grander candelabras to put along the centre of the table. When Marthe and her husband sat at either end they could barely glimpse one another through the twisting silver candlesticks and flickering candlelight.
Their private bedrooms were on the third floor. Every evening Marthe would turn to the left and Jacques to the right. They each had a bedroom and a small study. Marthe would take her tea and a plate of mignardises to her salon while Jacques retreated to his book-lined cave to work late into the night.
Marthe told herself she was content with this new comfortable life. It was not the life that she had pictured for herself. The crocheted hats and booties were long since given to charity as there was no hope now of a child. She had to make her peace with that. In this past year she had let go of any expectations of her husband and it eased her sadness. She no longer cared to understand him. Some men were aberrations, perhaps, freaks of nature to whom the usual urges did not apply. He was a man unshackled from the desires of the flesh and unmoved by the spiritual. He could exist entirely in his mind.
Her own state of mind, however, had shocked and shamed her that day in Anne’s home. That image of Anne’s boys drowning beneath her hands had played over and over in her head. Innocent boys. She was a vile woman who did not deserve their friendship. She thought of returning to the dark-edged park, to seek out oblivion with the drunks beneath the trees. She knew she was lonely and this isolation had turned her thoughts to morbid fascinations. At night, her dreams were plagued with visitations from her dead mother and father. It wasn’t healthy to be so alone. She must tame her wild mind into docility and shield her heart from wanting or yearning for too much from her life. She needed friends or occupations to distract her, and she vowed not to return to the dark little park and its temptations.
So Marthe thought she might like to draw. There was a small hill behind them and she decided she should climb it one fine day, take her art supplies and sit and sketch the city scenes. It would do her good to find a creative pursuit rather than waste her days walking the streets and sitting alone in parks. She had bought herself a box of pastels and Conte crayons and a small pad of good-quality rag paper. They sat on the bureau, unopened.
Or perhaps she should devote herself to charitable endeavours. It did not do to dwell upon the deaths of her elderly parents when there were so many young men falling in the wars. Was she too old to help in the hospitals? she wondered. Or with the veterans who had injuries that meant they could not work? She saw the men dragging themselves around on wheeled platforms and begging outside the coach-houses and the boulangeries. She saw herself as a grey-cloaked saviour, bringing sustenance and warmth on cold days.
She found it was easy to pass her days thinking about what she ought to do while making no decision either way.
At least the house on Boulevard Montmartre had its own kitchen and cellar and rooms set aside for servants. Now they had a cook, though not much of one she had first thought; he had a drinking problem by the looks of the empty bottles lining the courtyard wall, and only one arm. God knew where Jacques had found him. And yet to watch him in the kitchen was like watching a waterfall, so fluid and natural were his movements. The paring knife, the cleaver all as quick in his hand as an able-bodied person. In fact, he was so quick that the change from one to the other gave the impression of a human arm turned into one of those ingenious switching knives used by the Swiss. To flip a pan, to stir a pot, all could be done as easily and efficiently as a man with two hands and almost without an observer noticing any imperfection.
Today Marthe watched him make her an omelette. As always, her curiosity was pricked but not her bravery, and though she longed to ask what had befallen the limb of their unfortunate cook, she did not. Blown off in one of Bonaparte’s senseless wars, she did not doubt. But then there were men who had cut off their own limbs to avoid this latest draft, or so it was said. There was to be war in Prussia. Five hundred thousand men would need to be found.
Marthe watched as their cook deftly cracked the eggs into a bowl with one hand. No—he was too confident in his movements, too assured to have lost his limb recently. Perhaps he was born with this deformity. At the very least he had been this way for some time to show such skill. He used a long-handled carving fork clamped between his teeth to steady the meat for his knife. He had graters fixed to a wall and a bowl pushed beneath to catch the shreds of vegetables or cheese. Now he reached for a strap to loop around the bowl and she saw he meant to tighten it around himself, like a belt, and hold the bowl against him while he whipped the egg.
‘Let me help.’ She shot to her feet. ‘Let me hold it for you.’
He turned his head, a look of suspicion on his face. ‘I need no help.’
‘Please. Please, Dominic.’
She watched his shoulders give the slightest shrug. Whatever the mistress of the house wants.
She placed her hands around the ceramic belly of the bowl as he whisked the eggs, making figure eights in the frothy mixture. She watched him crack another egg expertly in one hand and prise the shells apart. She saw each golden orb fall into the bowl and did not even wonder why he needed to crack and whisk so many eggs to make just one omelette.
Marthe soon took to spending every afternoon with the cook in their large and homey kitchen. She liked the warmth and the smells and the cave-like security of the space. There always seemed to be a soup bubbling above the fire.
‘I did not think we ate so much soup?’ she enquired once of the cook.
His back was to her, slicing onions on a mandoline and he did not turn. ‘It is stock for our sauces, Madame.’
Marthe nodded, breathing in the aroma. She liked to sit on a stool and feel like she was a child again, in cook’s kitchen, waiting for the tiny sausages he would make just for her.
Dominic seemed nervous in her presence. He did not appear to
enjoy her company as much as she enjoyed his. Occasionally the maid would pop down and sit at the other end of the table, glaring and scowling. Marthe supposed she made them nervous. The mistress sitting so casually in their domain.
‘Does the master know you come down here so often?’ the cook asked, a sideways glance thrown at her.
‘He does not know or care what entertains me,’ Marthe replied more harshly than she intended. The cook did not comment again on her presence in the kitchen.
She knew he had a drinking problem because of the empty bottles in the yard. The type the navy used for brandy. Perhaps Jacques had found Dominic from one of the ships. Perhaps that was where the cook got his taste for regular portions of liquor. She did not ask. As long as he continued to produce their meals for her, she was content.
But she did wonder where he hid his supply. Was it cooking brandy? Did he keep bottles in the cellar with the root vegetables? She supposed there was a cellar to keep things cool. There had been one in the kitchen of her home in Alençon.
She climbed off the stool and felt the creak in her joints. A drop of brandy might be just the thing to ease the aches and pains she had been feeling of late. A drop of brandy from the cook’s supply would not be commented on. Jacques had already made a rather pointed comment when he noticed the level of the decanter in the salon had been declining rapidly of late. She had looked up, an expression of vague interest on her face.
‘Has it? I had not noticed.’
‘And there are bottles of claret missing.’
She didn’t know whether he suspected her or the maid. Perhaps it was both of them. She snorted and the cook looked at her sharply.
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