‘At Malmaison?’
‘Of course. Where else?’
‘Will the Emperor and Empress be there?’
‘I have no idea.’
Marthe beamed at her husband from behind the tangled candelabras.
CHAPTER FORTY-TWO
Spring 1806
Anne watched as Félix made the Empress cover her eyes.
‘Don’t look,’ he warned and led her through the nursery to stand directly in front of the eucalyptus seedlings. The Empress had her fingers pressed over her eyes and a faint smile on her lips.
‘Are you peeking?’ Félix asked the Empress.
‘No!’
‘Good. You can look now.’
‘Oh! Heavens!’ The Empress reached up to touch the silver, heart-shaped leaves, to rub them between her fingers. ‘They are magnificent.’
The eucalyptus seedlings had shot away, growing tall and straight with a profusion of waxy young leaves. Anne had re-potted them twice in the last few months and staked them all with bamboo. They had already been pruned to strengthen the main stem and develop the roots in readiness for planting outside of the greenhouses.
‘I swear they grow more than a foot in length a month,’ Félix said.
‘How did you manage it?’ the Empress asked.
Félix looked puffed with pride. ‘A matter of convincing the seeds to take their coats off, so to speak. We had to make them think they had passed through winter to break their dormancy, to trick them into thinking it was spring.’
‘Ingenious!’
The Empress looked so delighted, Anne began to feel a little of her happiness rub onto her. Empress Josephine had that effect on everyone. Her moods were as catching as a yawn.
‘It is miraculous. Like entering another world, is it not?’ She brushed her hands through the leaves, releasing a waft of scent.
‘It is, Madame,’ Anne agreed.
‘We have beaten them! We have bested the Jardin des Plantes! We have the first eucalyptus in France.’ She clasped each of their arms, shaking them.
Anne glanced at Félix. His eyes were shining.
A fresh idea delighted the Empress. ‘Let’s send them some of these saplings!’ She grinned wickedly. ‘Oh, how I would love to see their faces!’
She squeezed their arms and Anne almost decided she would not tell the Empress what she had seen. She would wait. Why ruin this perfect moment?
But a promise had been made.
It made it worse to see the Empress in such high spirits. How could she deliver this news to her when she was so full of joy and happiness? But Anne had promised the Empress she would share any news of Eléonore Denuelle.
Anne had seen the girl herself and there could be no denying it. Uncaged, Eléonore walked freely in the village now, belly first and secret out.
This news would be a shocking blow. It would devastate her. All Anne could smell was the overpowering scent of eucalyptus oil.
But if she did not tell the Empress, then someone else would. No doubt the Princess Caroline Murat would delight in the opportunity. Likely she was already on her way here to share the news that Bonaparte’s mistress had fallen pregnant. Would she say those words? Fallen—as if by accident. This was no accident. It seemed this wicked experiment had proved the Emperor was capable of fathering a child and the Empress must now be barren.
‘You look distracted, Anne,’ the Empress said. ‘Is anything the matter?’
The Empress’s dark eyes were pools of worry for her. Anne blinked, unable to speak. Josephine looped her arm through Anne’s and drew her out of the hothouse. ‘I find it is always easier to speak of one’s worries while walking.’
They stepped out together, leaving Félix fussing with the staking of the blue gum saplings. Anne breathed the sweet fresh air. In the distance she could see the spire of the village clock tower above the soft green trees, bright with spring growth. Almost a year had passed since their arrival here and her feelings about the village and the garden had warmed with each passing day. They could lose all this if the Empress lost her marriage. They could lose their home.
Out of loyalty, Anne knew she should tell her before any other.
‘There is gossip in the village,’ Anne began.
The Empress instantly stopped walking. ‘About her?’
Anne darted a glance at the Empress, unsure if she should go on, but knowing she had gone too far to go back. How to say the words? As those in the village would—a chicken in the oven, a puppet in the drawer—or as they spoke of animals: she is full.
‘Is she?’ the Empress’s voice broke.
Enceinte. Anne nodded.
The Empress wheeled away, breaking the link with Anne. Anne watched her totter towards the lake, fearful for her state of mind. She followed the Empress, not wanting to leave her like this. But the Empress suddenly stopped. She turned to Anne, struggling to compose herself.
‘Thank you for your honesty, Anne.’ The Empress pulled at the fingers of her gloves, slipping them off her hands. She rubbed at a diamond ring, swivelling it from the little finger of her right hand. She pressed it into Anne’s palm. It felt hot.
‘I remember my friends.’
The Empress’s tears were falling and Anne couldn’t stop her own. She watched the Empress walk, head down, towards the house. She had ruined this special day. She should have waited till tomorrow and given her this one night of triumph.
Anne trudged towards the village, her skirts dragging in the grass. The diamond ring in her palm was as sharp as a thorn. But she would keep it.
They would need to think of a future for themselves after Malmaison.
The next morning, Anne knocked boldly at the scullery door. She came as early as she dared, running across the lawns and sending the wallabies bounding out in front of her in all directions. It was out of character for her to call upon the château. In fact, she had not been inside since that first day when they had arrived at the estate. Out front, she had noticed a fine carriage waiting in the driveway.
‘The Empress is with the Princess Caroline,’ a servant informed Anne with an obvious look of scorn that travelled from the cheapness of her bonnet to the scruffiness of her shoes. ‘She has no time for gardening today.’ He began to pull the scullery door closed.
‘Please, I have to see her! It is a matter of urgency.’
‘They are taking breakfast in the music room. I could not possibly interrupt on your behalf.’
Anne was almost bursting with the news. Last night she had left the Empress in a state of melancholy from the village gossip. But what she had seen on her journey home would change everything. She wanted to scream and laugh and cry. It felt good to be the bearer of welcome news, to come to the Empress’s aid.
But the door was closed on her. In irritation she swung away, determined she would not give up so easily. Slipping around the side of the château, she crept along through the flowerbeds.
A harpist was playing in the music room. Anne could hear the plucked notes thrumming out across the garden. The downstairs doors were flung wide open, the sheer curtains billowing slightly in the breeze. Anne hovered by the pink china roses, weaving from side to side, trying to catch a glimpse of the Empress. She could see the hateful Princess Caroline sitting primly on the chaise longue, chin lifted and self-satisfaction in her pouting lips.
The Empress walked into view, carrying a teacup and saucer. Anne marvelled at her self-command. If it were her, she’d drop the hot tisane down the back of the princess’s dress. Anne went to raise her hand but felt the thorns jag on her sleeve. She pulled and found herself more deeply caught by the tangle of thorned branches. If she were not careful she would rip her dress.
Inside, the Empress walked like a caged animal around the salon.
Anne pulled herself from the snatches of the thorns and came as close as she dared to the terrace doors. She almost called out, but the frantic waving of her arm was enough to attract the Empress’s eye.
The Empr
ess stopped in surprise to see Anne in her garden. She turned her head back into the salon and said a few words, perhaps to excuse herself. Then she stepped out onto the terrace with the curtains billowing around her.
Behind her the Princess Caroline frowned and strained her neck.
Anne beckoned the Empress to her.
‘Is something wrong, Anne?’ the Empress asked, coming over to the rose beds.
Anne struggled to find the words to explain, thinking back to the night before. After leaving the Empress, Anne had returned to the village in dull spirits, passing the chalet that housed Eléonore Denuelle. She had looked up, as had become her habit, and expected to see the drapes firmly closed. But Eléonore had appeared at the window standing before the little balcony. She pulled one side of the drapes closed and then the other, like a naked woman wrapping herself in a robe. But not before Anne had seen a man slip his arms around the pregnant girl’s belly and kiss the back of her neck.
‘I have seen Eléonore with another lover!’ she blurted.
Anne could see comprehension dawning on the Empress’s face. The experiment had failed; her pregnancy proved nothing.
‘Last night,’ Anne gasped. ‘It was Joachim Murat. Princess Caroline’s husband!’
The Empress opened her eyes wide, startled, and then threw back her head and let the laughter burst out of her like golden bubbles of champagne.
The feeling of joy at Malmaison lasted for weeks, taking them from spring into summer. Anne found something of her old self in these warming months. All seemed brighter, the days more pleasant, the fruit sweeter after the Empress won her victory over Princess Caroline. It was soon revealed that her husband had been seen on many occasions, sneaking into the village in the dead of night. It was rumoured even the Emperor knew of her love affair with the lusty, handsome soldier and thought the whole thing comical. How cruel to laugh, Anne thought. How cruel to go along with his sister’s experiment at all.
Anne felt sorry for the girl, Eléonore. What was to become of her now? She walked the village growing larger day by day, no longer kept like Rapunzel in her boudoir, but trapped here with an uncertain future nonetheless.
The Emperor was preoccupied again with war in Prussia that summer, and Anne was relieved that he seldom visited. The mood when he was in residence changed, he put everyone on guard, even here in the village. She noticed people turn an eye to the château in the same way they would watch the clouds when a storm was brewing.
Empress Josephine was overjoyed when Hortense came to stay and Anne and her family were invited to an entertainment on the lawn. Anne was nervous. It was one thing to be with the Empress working in the nurseries, but another altogether to be sitting in her finest dress on Turkish rugs on a summer’s afternoon and expected to know how to be. She sat stiffly and could not get comfortable. Hortense sang sweetly but Anne did not understand the foreign words. She felt out of place, until she began to watch the children play. Hortense’s son, a giggling sturdy-legged boy of four, chased after her boys, and soon all three were throwing themselves to the ground and rolling down the grass slopes, laughing and flinging their arms and legs with wild abandon. She grinned to see it. Children made friends so easily, she thought, with no fear of doing and saying the wrong thing.
Anne leaned back against Félix’s chest and heard his breath catch. She stilled, feeling the thudding of his heart through her backbone. He slowly closed his arms around her. It had been so long since she had been held like this. How had she let this feeling slip away? Hortense’s son ran after her older boys with all his might, arms pumping at his sides, small legs trying their hardest to catch up. She couldn’t help but smile. It reminded her what pleasure young children could be and of the dreams she and Félix once had of a large family. Anne could feel him watching the children too.
Anne heard the Empress clapping for her daughter and urging Hortense to sing again. The Empress looked so happy in that moment, the garden thriving behind her, the scent of flowers light on the air. Anne would remember this moment later, remember that she thought the Empress had reached such heights of happiness that it surely must be dangerous.
As night fell, the celebrations continued. They ate food from platters on the lawn, kicked their shoes away and danced around a bonfire as the musicians played. Her husband’s face was warmed by the light of the flames. She had forgotten how much she loved his smile. They were foolish, laughing, and slightly drunk on honeyed liquors. She admired the curve of his muscled arms beneath his shirt and imagined her fingers stroking his bare body. They fell back on the grass as fireworks exploded overhead. It was the first time Anne had seen such a spectacle, the crackle and burst of light, like so many stars exploding in the night sky, the booming cannons, the smell of magnesium, the spent rockets falling to the earth.
That night she found she could not deny him the intimacy. Her body responded as it had of old, relishing the touch of his skin to hers. Félix was always a tender lover and she could feel the gratefulness in his touch. She forgot her fears and thought only of the sensations of her body. All that mattered was the hunger for pleasure, for bliss. She gave her body permission to be free.
Anne should have known that such happiness could not last.
Afterwards, she woke cold and curled in a ball and could not get warm. Her whirling mind took over. What if one time was all it took?
In the following days, Félix was sweet and attentive and it irritated her. I am a terrible wife, she abused herself.
‘Our boys are growing up so fast,’ he said to Anne, cradling her. ‘Think how nice it will be to have a little brother or sister for them.’ She tried not to flinch at his words. She screwed her eyes tightly closed when he placed his hand against her naked stomach. She tried not to see the blood or remember the smell of it. The thick liver clots of it. She tried not to think of the risk, and to get angry at her husband for his disregard of it. Was a mother to his boys of so little consequence? Did he care that she had nearly died? Was her own life worth so little?
Her moods were skittish. Tears were quick to come. It angered her when a card arrived from Marthe.
‘She enquires after the children and expresses how very much she and Jacques should like to visit us,’ Félix read aloud. ‘What do you think?’
‘I think this is Jacques. He wants to see the blue gum for himself,’ Anne said bluntly. Why would Marthe wish to visit them? Marthe did not care for her children. Anne had always felt her coolness towards them and the thought of their visit gave her no pleasure.
Anne stared out across the village square from her kitchen window. Her boys were with the other village children, playing at being soldiers and riding broomsticks like steeds. The sticks dragged across the cobbles, making a noise that grated. She wanted to call them inside. Her youngest was crying; the older boys always made him be the enemy: the cowardly Prussian or the feeble Brit. He threw down his stick and refused to play, storming away with his arms crossed and his little face like thunder. It frightened her to see this play.
Anne took them down to the lake to see the swans. The orphaned cygnets were now full grown but they flocked to greet her boys at the lake’s edge. Across the water, she glimpsed the Empress and her daughter. The two women rested their foreheads against one another, forearms clasped, unmoving. Their pain was visible even from that distance. Anne felt she was intruding but could not look away. She wondered what sad news had brought mother and daughter together like this.
Later she learned the Emperor had made his brother Louis the new King of Holland and Hortense and her son were being sent to a foreign court. The Empress was losing her daughter. Anne thought of her farewell with her own mother and how she had promised to return. A promise she had not kept.
Anne counted the days waiting for her menses, convinced that a life was growing inside her and terrified of it. Her fear was shameful. Félix was a good father. Why couldn’t she give him the family he longed for? Her nightmares of that fatal birth returned to shock her
even in the middle of the day. She sought out the attic space that she had not needed for almost a year and crawled into its dark familiar confines, wrapping a blanket tight around herself. And she rocked and rocked and rocked.
CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
Summer 1806
Marthe and Jacques Labillardière arrived mid-week. As soon as they entered her parlour, Anne began to feel uneasy. They were both so tall and upright in their manner, they made her feel fat and frumpy and every bit the farming stock she had come from.
Jacques presented Félix with a copy of his Plantarum, the second volume of the plants of New Holland. ‘The most thorough categorisation of the plants of New Holland in all the world is now complete,’ he stated without humility.
It was a tall, leather-bound volume and Félix laid it on the table as if it were a Bible. Anne could see her husband was thrilled with the gift, and he exclaimed at the handsomeness of the bindings. Félix gently peeled open the cover and delicately turned each page. The illustrations were fine and graceful and not what she expected. The grasses were tall and sweeping and each part of their flowers drawn with great care. When Félix turned upon the page of Eucalyptus globulus Anne stalled his hand. So this was what the juvenile leaves of her gums would grow into. Their soft, heart-shaped leaves would darken and grow hard like sickle blades.
‘This is too much,’ said Félix, his voice thick. Anne guessed this volume with its hand-painted lithographs and fine papers would cost the eyes from your head.
‘The Empress would also like a copy for her collection,’ Félix said, recovering himself.
‘Yes, no doubt she would,’ Labillardière said, unmoved.
With reverence, Félix lifted his copy of the Plantarum to a high shelf safe from the children.
‘You are in luck,’ Félix said with a smile. ‘The Emperor has ridden to war in Prussia and the Empress has gone with him to Mainz.’
‘In luck?’ Marthe said, her voice sharp. ‘Luck that we are at war again?’
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