The Queen's Fortune

by Allison Pataki

  Hedwig’s gaze was still fixed on me. “You poor thing. I suppose you long for a bouillabaisse, coming from Marseille.”

  “There, there, my dear, you must be nicer to our new arrivals.” The dowager queen, the old woman named Queen Sophia Magdalena, tut-tutted beside her sister-in-law. “Why, I remember you yourself as a shy thing, if any of you can believe it.” Sophia Magdalena, the widow of the former king, still resided at court even though her late husband’s brother now ruled. I wondered whether that created an awkward tension between the two queens, one past and one present. I only knew that, as the queen of the future, I had no interest in joining any potential rivalry. I would happily keep to myself.

  Hedwig ignored her dowager sister-in-law now, chewing her herring before posing another question toward me: “Will you join our faith, Desideria, as your husband and son have agreed to do?”

  I glanced toward my husband—hoping to convey with my dark eyes that I had had quite enough of this woman’s conversation and that he had better join in. But he was busy, speaking with Count Mörner and two other noblemen, brothers with the name of Löwenhielm, on the far end of the table. Ah, and there was Elise! I would have to make sure that she was seated beside me at future meals. But for now, both my husband and my lady were out of my reach.

  And so, to save myself from further conversation, to avoid having to reply, No, in fact, I intend to retain my faith, thank you very much, instead, I lifted my napkin to my lips and began a horrid fit of chest-heaving coughs.

  Chapter 37

  Stockholm

  Winter 1811

  “I BELIEVE THAT HER ROYAL Highness intends to say: ‘I have a little boy.’ Is that correct?”

  “Yes,” I said, nodding toward Oscar, unsure of my error.

  Our royal tutor, a reserved Swede by the name of Herr Wallmark, eyed me with his earnest expression. “Well then, you might…that is, if it pleases Your Highness…instead say: Jag har en liten pojke.”

  “Jag har en liten pojke.” I repeated the words, finding them guttural and odd.

  “Very well done.” The tutor nodded his approval.

  “What had I said?” I asked.

  “Your Highness had unintentionally said: ‘I am a little boy.’ ”

  Oscar and Bernadotte burst into laughter beside me, and I offered an apologetic smile as I answered the tutor: “It will come as no shock when I say that Swedish does not come easily to me.”

  “Nor will it come as a shock when we confess that we have not done our homework, my good man.” Bernadotte pressed his palms together in a gesture of playful contrition. “We are terrible students. Only Oscar here has any hope.”

  “Your Highnesses simply need time,” our tutor said, undaunted. “And practice does help.”

  But in truth, we were terrible, and I had little interest in practicing. We grew bored easily at our lessons, and why would I practice when the only people with whom I wished to speak were my son, my husband, and my lady—all of them French? As for the rest of the court, they were all fluent in French, slipping naturally into our tongue. It was the language of Europe, after all; Napoleon had seen to that.

  Bernadotte, especially, relied on his French—particularly his Gascon flourishes—to tell the stories that entertained the whole court. It did shock me how at ease my Bernadotte was; it stood in sharp contrast to my own shyness—my slowness to make new friends or grow comfortable in the palace. At the dinners of state, he always ended up holding court, as if King Charles had already yielded the throne and the affection of his subjects. With his ministers, Bernadotte commanded a sort of casual respect and an easy camaraderie. He listened to everyone in silence, punctuating his observations with a well-placed joke or an appropriate question. He was absorbing the details of our new palace and learning the personalities of our new court much more easily, and willingly, than I was.

  * * *

  —

  As late winter clung to the city, with its gray clouds hovering over our sky and the chilly air maintaining its hold over our palace rooms, I settled into a sort of reluctant rhythm. After his morning audience, Bernadotte would join Oscar and me for Swedish lessons with Herr Wallmark. Really, only Oscar showed any promise, but Bernadotte insisted that we all participate.

  The tutor always turned to me first, knowing that my husband, or more probably my son, would need to sweep in to my rescue. “Your Royal Highness, would you be so kind as to describe the weather?”

  There was a question I could answer. “Snö!” I declared, my cheeks flushing in my triumph. “That I know!” It was the word I’d heard every day since my arrival to this frigid city.

  The tutor was delighted at my sudden enthusiasm, but Bernadotte frowned—he was growing tired of my complaining. I ignored my husband’s stare, turning to my son. “Did you know, Oscar, that I did not see snow until I was nearly nineteen years old? You shall grow up covered in the stuff. Why, I don’t believe I have seen sunshine in—”

  But we were interrupted by a quick, unexpected knock on the door. I looked to my husband. They knew we were occupied; I was shocked that anyone would dare to interrupt our private family time in this abrupt manner.

  “Come in,” Bernadotte answered. Count Mörner peeked his head around the doorway. Less surprising—the count had become my husband’s constant companion and favorite confidant; he saw far more of Bernadotte than I did, even though I shared the man’s bed. But the count’s face looked grave now as he treaded slowly into the room. “Your Royal Highnesses.” He was short of breath, as if he’d run the entire way here. He knelt. “It’s the king, sir. King Charles. He’s suffered a stroke. We are not sure whether he lives.”

  * * *

  The king survived, but only to lie in bed, slipping in and out of sleep, a fragile husk of his former self. Not even Hedwig claimed that he was able to perform his duties as sovereign. Within days, Bernadotte was made Regent of Sweden, and thus he would be expected to rule in all but name. It was far sooner than anyone had expected—most of all our family. We had been in our new homeland only a matter of months.

  As winter slowly thawed, the days began to stretch and the sun remained above the horizon for long enough to warm the earth. My husband spent long hours cloistered in his staterooms with Count Mörner, the Löwenhielm brothers, and his other ministers. He had petitions and reports flooding in from across his vast realm. In Stockholm, the various factions of the Swedish government were at odds, restless over the coming succession and shifts in power. But the hardest part of Bernadotte’s new position came not from within the Riksdag, the Swedish parliament, nor from restless Norway or even hostile Russia. Our main troubles that spring were coming from France—from Napoleon himself.

  The weather was warming across Europe, and thus Napoleon once more had war on his mind; he wanted my husband to join him in a renewed fight against England. The French Emperor wished, particularly, for my husband’s ships to thwart British trading vessels in the Baltic Sea along our coast.

  My husband’s council balked; we were weakened after the devastating war with Russia and the loss of Finland. “Sweden has no direct grievance with England,” my husband told me. What could we gain from beginning a conflict with the world’s great naval power?

  The news from Paris that I cared for was of quite a different nature. In March, I read with interest the reports that Napoleon had, at last, been given an heir. Marie Louise had safely delivered the boy, Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph Bonaparte, after just a year of marriage. All of France is in a state of rapture, Julie wrote. She described the parties across Paris—wine flowing from the fountains, fireworks, francs raining down over the ecstatic crowds who danced in the squares. Inside the Tuileries, there would be balls and champagne. I ached for Julie and yearned to stand beside her during those feasts and galas. It was horrible to be so torn; on the one hand, I knew that Napoleon and my husband were growing ever
cooler in their already frayed relationship, and yet, I could not think of Sweden as my home. I longed only for France.

  Chapter 38

  Plombières, France

  Summer 1811

  “IT’S NOT ONLY THE WATER,” I said, skimming my bare feet along the surface of the warm pool. “It’s the land. French land. That’s my cure, more than any of these healing waters.”

  Julie laughed, plunging her palm beneath the surface and splashing a handful of warm water in my direction. “What? You mean to tell me that you enjoy waters where there aren’t seals and polar bears swimming alongside you?”

  “Do not speak to me of Sweden.” I shivered, in spite of the summer air and the balmy water.

  “The Countess of Gotland does not wish to refer to her vassal Goths?” Julie teased, referring to the alias name under which I was traveling.

  “My cold will return just thinking about it. I’ve only just now thawed.”

  Julie and I were visiting the hot springs at Plombières, the spa resort nestled in the Vosges Mountains along the northeast of France. These waters had been considered curative since the Roman times, a popular destination for the ailing and weary. I remembered when both Julie and Josephine had come to these forested hills, desperate to become pregnant.

  “How is she?” I asked, my eyes focused on the rippling waters even as my mind traveled elsewhere.

  Julie sighed; she did not need to ask to whom I referred. “I haven’t seen her in months; he keeps his visits to her secret. He doesn’t want the newspapers to find out—or his court. Or, God forbid, his new Empress. But I hear that she weeps most days.”

  I nodded.

  “She still loves him, you know,” Julie said. “And he loves her, even if she isn’t the one to have given him his son.” Julie ran her damp fingers along her forehead, wetting her brow. The afternoon was a balmy one, but she would hear no complaint from me. “But she is…surviving.”

  “Of course she is surviving,” I said. That was what Josephine did—she survived. That was what each of us did, in our own ways. That was our lot in life as women.

  I had come to this spa town in the early summer on my doctor’s orders, after my prolonged cold refused to depart with the waning Swedish winter. I’d traveled from Stockholm with Elise, who had been just as happy to return to France as I was. Julie had met me in these mountains, leaving her country estate at Mortefontaine to take the waters with me. We enjoyed languid days together—sleeping late, eating breakfast on the veranda of our suite at the Grand Hotel. In the afternoons, we took the waters and walked along the wooded paths, or took naps on the porch while the fresh air rustled through the trees.

  My husband had been willing to grant me this trip, as it was prescribed for my health, but I had not been permitted to bring Oscar. Much as I lamented it, he was no longer my little boy, but was growing into a young man in line for the throne. He had turned twelve that summer and was now going through the paces of his formal Swedish education.

  The summer days grew gradually shorter. Autumn approached; I felt it in the longer nights, the tinge of crisp, dry air in the mornings. The changing quality of the colors across the mountains, the light shifting into a sideways, golden glow.

  “Stay here.” Julie was the first one to put the idea into my head. “Stay in France,” she said one evening at dinner. It was late August, and we both wore shawls around our shoulders, something we hadn’t needed to do until recently; it was yet another unwelcome portent that summer was waning.

  “I’m Queen of Spain, but you don’t see me ensconced in the palace at Madrid. Good lord, the thought of a Spanish summer!” Julie waved a dismissive hand. “If these men want to go around giving and taking crowns, let them. Why should we women have to suffer? Stay here. You still have your home on the Rue d’Anjou. Come to Paris with me for the winter. Oscar is content in Sweden. Bernadotte is busy with his duties. Why must you rush back, when it will compromise your health?”

  It was true that the thought of the sea voyage back to Sweden terrified me—the idea of another winter in Stockholm, holed up in that palace with Hedwig, eating from platters of limp pickled herring. Barely seeing sunlight through the windows and certainly never feeling it on my skin. I began to weep and tremble just thinking of it.

  The doctor, seeing my anxiety, hearing of the sleeplessness that my nerves brought on, forbade my return trip. “It would be counter to all of the progress Your Royal Highness has worked so hard all summer to make. What Your Highness needs is more rest, not an arduous journey along land and sea toward a frigid winter climate.”

  I wasn’t certain that hard work was an entirely apt description of the summer I’d just passed, but I did not argue with the doctor’s orders. It was true that Oscar was happy and Bernadotte was busy; what urgency was there for me to rush back to Sweden? I wrote my husband, telling him of the doctor’s recommendation—no, orders—and hoped that Bernadotte would take the news well.

  * * *

  Bernadotte might take a mistress; it was a possibility with which I had to contend. No man could stand such a long absence from his wife—especially not a king who had the most beautiful women of his court constantly dangled before him. He would be presented with any number of willing lovers, but that was a reality I was willing to accept. If it kept him happy, if it maintained harmony between us and allowed me the liberty to remain in my beloved France, near Julie, well, it was the price of my freedom, and it was a price I was disposed to pay.

  Julie and I greeted the New Year, 1812, with champagne and oysters in my home on the Rue d’Anjou. I was living in Paris as the Countess of Gotland, though of course members of the Bonaparte family knew my true identity. The Bonaparte sisters visited from time to time, probing for details of Sweden and my husband. I sensed the spy work in their questions; I knew they were reporting back to their brother, just as they suspected me of reporting back to my husband.

  I missed my men, Oscar and Bernadotte, but little else of Stockholm. Paris was a city in the midst of a grand transformation. Napoleon was slowly and gradually changing the names of the streets and squares from their revolutionary and Bourbon origins to reflect the glory of his new empire. He was building a massive temple modeled on the buildings of ancient Greece—it would be called La Madeleine, and he would dedicate it to the men of his Grand Armée.

  Aside from the ambitious building projects, the brilliant art collections, and the growing wealth of Napoleon’s subjects, the city of Paris was uneasy that winter, a latent ripple of tension traveling on the cold wind. A great comet rested over us, hanging low in the winter sky; a bad omen, according to so many in our capital. When will it move on? the priests and scholars wondered aloud.

  And where would it go—where would it take all of us?

  * * *

  Julie burst through my door. It was Bernadotte’s forty-ninth birthday, and I was finishing up a small charcoal sketch of our beloved Parisian home that I planned to send him as a gift. “Desiree!” My sister had not waited for the footman to announce her entry before she found me in my sitting room.

  “What is the matter?” I put my sketch down and turned toward her, my body stiffening.

  “I had to tell you as soon as I heard,” she said, panting. “Joseph does not wish me to say anything.”

  “Julie, please, sit.”

  She did, catching her breath a moment before explaining her frantic state. “Napoleon has invaded Swedish territory, the ports at Pomerania, and he’s seized Swedish ships in the Baltic. I can’t imagine that Bernadotte does not see this as an act of war.”

  It was Bernadotte’s birthday; that was all I could think of as my mind struggled to make sense of Julie’s news. Hadn’t Napoleon, with his peculiar genius for details and dates, known it was his birthday? And yet he’d chosen this day for his attack on Sweden?

  Julie went on: “You mustn’t write anything. Al
l your letters will now be read.”

  She leaned forward and took my hand in her own cold grip, looking down to see my palm smudged in black from my morning’s sketching. And then I looked at my drawing—the unfinished outline of our home’s façade. I had hoped to send this small piece of Paris, of our former life, to warm my husband’s winter days in Stockholm. Now, I didn’t know if that would even be allowed.

  My husband declared a Swedish alliance with Britain and Russia within a matter of weeks—a move that could only make us the enemies of France. Shortly after that, I read in the newspapers that Sweden and France had broken off diplomatic relations. I thought of Napoleon’s parting words to my husband, given on the same day as the Swedish crown: Very well then, Bernadotte. Go. And let our destinies be fulfilled. I had never imagined it would have come to this, and so quickly. But perhaps it hadn’t been quick at all.

  By spring, just as that feared comet moved on and out of France, so, too, did our Grand Armée. Napoleon had war on the mind once more, and he was marching east, toward the vast and untamed steppes of Russia.

  * * *

  —

  Outside, the carriage traffic rattled up the street just as it did on any other day. Suddenly, though, the world beyond my window seemed a frightening and unknowable place.

  As I was still living in Paris, I was in hostile territory. Correspondence with my husband would be considered letters into an enemy land, so I stopped writing. He did the same. All that reached me were Oscar’s innocent letters, written in French, filled with news of his language lessons and his military studies, the Stockholm weather and the names of the new horses in the royal stables.

  My life in Paris felt as if I might as well be on a separate continent, a place where uncertainty reigned and the threat of war lurked constantly, an immutable dark cloud hovering always on the horizon. I was protected because of Joseph’s power in the family and in the court, but I was held at a safe and cautious distance. The only person who visited was Julie; otherwise, my home was considered the place of one hostile to France. The Bonaparte sisters stopped coming—they knew that my letters from Sweden carried absolutely nothing of political importance, since it was their brother’s censors who read them, and so I was of no further use.