The Queen's Fortune

by Allison Pataki

  Several days later, my sister was back, she and Joseph installed with the rest of the Bonaparte family in the Tuileries Palace. She sent word for me to come to her.

  “Will you go?” Elise asked, brushing my hair before the mirror in my dressing room. Errant strands of silver now laced the dark waves, but my eyes shone with the excitement of the recent days. Perhaps I still retained some of my girlish charms. “Of course I will go,” I said.

  “Would he…wish you to?”

  I eyed her reflection in the mirror; to whom was she referring? Bonaparte or Bernadotte? “Your husband,” Elise clarified.

  I evaded the question, simply stating matter-of-factly: “She is my sister.”

  * * *

  It was a chilly March morning, but the Tuileries courtyard was abuzz with activity, soldiers marching in tight formation, citizens gathered in ongoing celebrations of the Emperor’s return. If I paused and looked around, I could almost imagine that nothing had changed, that it was simply another feast day and I had never heard anything but “Vive l’Empereur!” shouted across these grounds.

  I entered the palace, stepping gingerly past the guards who were dressed once more in Napoleon’s imperial livery. I found my sister on the ground floor, bending over to examine a roll of bound carpet. “Desiree!” She immediately paused her task and ran to me, taking fists of her skirt in her hands so she could cross the massive room quicker. I fell into her arms. I didn’t know whether I’d ever enjoyed a happier reunion with a loved one.

  “I’m so happy to see you,” she said, her breath warming my neck.

  “As am I.”

  “We have so much to discuss. You can help me. Come.” Julie took my hand and we walked briskly down the long portrait gallery, entering the music salon. Louis had redecorated—I noted how he had reupholstered much of the furniture with his favored icy blue and white hues, but the room still hit me with a haunting familiarity. How many nights had we spent here, watching Josephine at her beloved harp, or listening to songs, playing cards, and trading gossip?

  Julie did not have time for nostalgia as she said, “There’s so much to do. He’s asked me to lift the carpets, because the servants have told him that the Bonaparte bees are still underneath. Will you help me?”

  We hoisted the nearby carpet and, as expected, the imperial carpet was still there. Josephine’s carpets—the ones she’d had custom-ordered at such great expense. We knelt beside each other, looking them over in thoughtful silence. “It’s his son’s birthday, you know. He turns four,” Julie said, her voice suddenly quiet. “Napoleon has declared it a state holiday.”

  I noted the date, March 20, in my head. “That’s right,” I said.

  “He longs for her to come,” Julie said, and I knew to whom she referred. Marie Louise. Titular Empress of France once more, but still a Habsburg princess in her heart; she had not been back to Paris since his defeat.

  “Where is she now?” I asked.

  “In Vienna. With her family. Word is that she has taken up with another lover, a one-eyed Austrian officer who fought Napoleon for years.”

  I gasped. “Does he hear these rumors?”

  “Of course he hears the rumors. He hears everything. But he won’t believe them. He can’t.”

  “She would have come,” I said, my tone heavy. “She would have flown to his arms. In fact, she would have been on Elba with him and probably would have sailed the ship back for him.”

  Julie and I both slowed our work for a moment, reflecting on the lady whose ghost still filled so many of these rooms, for Josephine was dead. It had been shocking to us when it had happened: she’d died within days of Napoleon’s exile to Elba. One evening she was hosting the Tsar at Malmaison, the next morning she was gone. There were whispers that she had been poisoned by our new Bourbon king, that her popularity with the people had made her a threat to the new regime, but I knew better. She’d died of grief; she’d always said she did not wish to live without Napoleon, and she’d held to that vow, even if he’d put his aside.

  “You know the first thing he did when he got back to Paris?” Julie said. “After greeting the soldiers and declaring the restoration of his reign?”

  I thought, venturing a guess: “Checked on his military supplies?”

  Julie shook her head. “He went out to Malmaison. He visited her grave. Joseph said he wept the entire time. He said: ‘Only death could have broken the union we shared.’ ”

  “So he still worships at the altar of Josephine,” I said, staring at the other carpets around the salon that we had still to lift and replace. “I pray she is at peace, even if I know that he will never be.”

  * * *

  We knew it would be war. It was inevitable. The rulers of Europe could not allow their order to be so unceremoniously disrupted. Paris was abuzz with activity, and our depots and recruiting stations swelled with enthusiastic volunteers from across the nation.

  Marie Louise finally responded from Vienna, but it was not the message for which her husband had hoped; she petitioned for a formal divorce. She would not leave Vienna, nor would she allow her son to return to Paris and his father. He was without an heir after all. I could only guess how Napoleon, holed up in his private rooms, received this most grievous of news.

  There was a parade that afternoon in front of the Tuileries, and thousands of Parisians turned out for it, for the chance to see the Emperor atop his horse once more. I stood beside Julie and Joseph as Napoleon passed by, reviewing his troops and nodding down at the cheering crowds. He wore his general’s uniform once more: bicorn hat, dark jacket over a white waistcoat and breeches, his fleshy neck squeezed by his high black collar. His alert eyes darted about as intently as ever, and he kept a look of intense focus as he surveyed his men and the throngs crowded together. Joseph waved the tricolor while all around us people shouted the “Marseillaise” national anthem.

  Julie looped her arm through mine, leaning close to speak over the deafening crowds. “It’s as though he never left, isn’t it?”

  I blinked, staring at the back of the receding figure as Napoleon’s horse carried him past us and into the ceaseless mass of bodies lining the route. All of Paris was celebrating. But for how long?

  * * *

  —

  As spring ripened, glorious and inevitable across Paris, a frontier darkened by war loomed before us. Napoleon dismissed all the changes to the constitution and legislature since the Bourbon restoration, but he vowed not to punish those who had held positions in that government. He wished for a unified empire once more.

  But so, too, were our enemies united, and by late spring, they had declared war against France. Suddenly, all Frenchmen of the fighting age were called into military service. From Vienna, Marie Louise declared herself officially aligned with the allies fighting against her husband. And my husband, ruling from Stockholm, was once again at war with his—and my—homeland.

  The French army left a few weeks later to face the enemy assembling across our border, and the forces met at a crossroads near a rural village in Belgium. “It’s an odd name for a place,” I said to Julie, scanning the journal before me. “Waterloo.” The writer for Le Moniteur predicted that any upcoming battle could be decisive.

  It was early summer, and Julie and Joseph were staying with me on the Rue d’Anjou, for fear that the Tuileries could be unsafe if the French forces were not victorious. I was grateful to have them, not only because it meant that my sister and I were together, but also because I was with Joseph when the updates came in from his brother.

  The day after the Waterloo battle, Joseph received the letter. Julie and I sat silent but impatient as he read. “We lost,” he said, his face going white as he quickly scanned Napoleon’s note. “A decisive loss. A crushing one.”

  Julie looked as though she might faint. My mind flew to my husband, who I knew wasn’t fighting at Waterloo
but was in support of the allied forces from Stockholm.

  “But he tells me that all is not hopeless,” Joseph said, reading on. “He believes that he might be able to reassemble his forces. He will come back to Paris immediately. Rally the support of the government, rouse the patriotism of the people.”

  “And what are we to do?” Julie asked, staring at her husband with the same fear and uncertainty that I myself felt.

  “What can we do, ma chère?” Joseph asked. “We wait for Napoleon.”

  Napoleon was back in Paris within a week, but the rallying cry he had hoped for did not greet him. In fact, following the blow at Waterloo, his parliament turned on him, with our one-time national hero the Marquis de Lafayette leading the ministers in a vote to oust our returned Emperor. Meanwhile, the British navy was blockading French ports as, once again, Prussian and Austrian forces were marching into France and toward Paris.

  Seeing the inevitability encircling from all sides, Napoleon abdicated just days after his return to Paris, declaring his intention to move to America. “Will they really allow that?” I asked Joseph. We sat in a modest, nondescript coach, traveling incognito from the Rue d’Anjou to the Tuileries, invited there by Napoleon.

  Joseph shrugged. A meaningful look passed between him and my sister, and my sister looked away. I could read the tension on her face, the tightening of her pale features, but I did not know what it meant. I would have to ask her later.

  We rolled into the forecourt, where soldiers and footmen and other imperial staff were in a frenzy of activity. The allies would arrive any day, and the French forces that had not already fled were now preparing for surrender. We entered the palace with our heads tilted down, our eyes avoiding any contact.

  “My dear, I need you for a moment.” Joseph put his hand on Julie’s back, guiding her toward the grand stairway. “We are packing up the bedrooms, and we must sort through some final items.”

  Julie looked from her husband toward me. “Will you be all right? On your own?”

  “It will only be a few minutes,” Joseph said. “We don’t really have more time than that.”

  “I will be fine,” I said. “Go.”

  They left me, and I made my way through the ground floor, hardly alone amid the hordes of household staff, but slipping silently into my own thoughts. Servants were hurrying to pull down all the artwork, which they no doubt wished to move to a safe place in case the allies burned the palace. I stared at the endless rows of priceless art—Italian, Dutch, Spanish, and German masterpieces. He had amassed it all—and now where would it go? The splendors befitting a glorious empire. The grandest kingdom on the globe. And such an empire would still have been his, but for his insatiable stretching and reaching and grasping.

  I was so mesmerized in these musings, in studying the chaotic scene before me, that I did not notice anyone behind me until I heard my name spoken aloud. “Desiree?”

  Napoleon’s voice. I turned, startling as I met his face. “Oh, hello. I didn’t see you.”

  “And I was beginning to think I had lost my knack for stealth,” he said, his tone wry.

  I offered a sad laugh, staring into his eyes, studying the man I had once loved. I had not seen him this close, in private, in years—since before his exile. The years had not been kind to him; his hair had thinned around the ears, and he was now completely bald on top. His skin, once a golden shade, was ashy pale, and his green eyes, usually so alert and all-knowing, now darted about the gallery with a listless, agitated quality. The servants continued their work around us as he leaned close and asked me: “How do you do?”

  I shrugged. There was no way to answer such a question. “You?”

  He ignored my question, his restless hands clasping and unclasping before the round paunch of his stomach as he said: “Your sister will be safe, always. I want you to know that.”

  I lowered my eyes. “That is a relief to hear. Thank you.”

  “She will have to leave France, of course. But she will not be harmed. And Joseph is a good man.”

  I nodded. “He is.”

  Napoleon watched me closely. “And he makes your sister happy?”

  “He does,” I said. “Theirs has always been a happy union. I am…glad for them.”

  “To think, you could have had him.”

  I looked away, down the long hall of the gallery. Such ancient history was better to remain buried in the past.

  Napoleon spoke again: “Your sister is a lucky woman, to be married to my brother.”

  “Indeed,” was all I said in reply.

  He followed my gaze, staring out over the hundreds of pieces of art, the priceless collection that he would now have to decide how to handle. “You know…Joseph has offered to change places with me.”

  I turned toward Napoleon, my eyes widening in shock. Joseph, change places? Bear the punishment so that his brother might slip away, free? Ah, so that was the cause of the tension I had sensed between Julie and Joseph in the coach. Her husband had made this offer, and my sister was furious over it.

  “I’ve refused him,” Napoleon said, sensing the distress I felt on behalf of Julie. “He has already given so much of his life to me; I cannot expect him to forfeit it entirely.”

  I swallowed, nodding slowly, feeling the relief wash over my entire body. After a long pause, Napoleon leaned close, whispering: “What about you?” He cocked his head to the side, holding me in his green-eyed gaze for what I knew would be the final time in our lives. I blinked, seeing, for just a moment, those same green eyes holding me from within a young, narrow, golden face. Wavy dark hair, thick and uncombed. The backdrop a fragrant garden where the warm breeze carried on it the sound of birds, the distant horn blast of a ship pulling into the seaside harbor. I blinked, and it was gone. Napoleon stood before me once more with his pale, tired, bloated face. And he was awaiting my answer.

  “What about me?” I asked, not sure of the meaning of his question.

  He fidgeted his hands, as if unsure of where to put them, but his eyes he kept focused on me. “Are you lucky, Desiree? In your choice of spouse?”

  I shifted my weight, avoided his appraising gaze. Before I could say anything, he added: “We know that you are better off…that you did better with Bernadotte than you would have done with me. But does he make you happy?”

  I straightened my back, my voice quiet as I answered, “Yes. He does.”

  Napoleon nodded, his eyes still affixed to me as he said, “Good. Yes. I am glad then.” And then he forced a smile—a worn, joyless expression as he sighed, saying: “I was luckiest of all. Josephine was the wife who would have come with me to St. Helena. But I threw it all away.”

  Chapter 41

  Stockholm

  January 1818

  “A TOAST TO HIS ROYAL Highness, the Prince Royal.” Queen Hedwig raised her champagne flute, tilting it in my husband’s direction as cordial murmurs of assent rose up throughout the large banquet hall. Outside the palace the night was frigid, with a steady curtain of snow falling over the city, but inside the hall, where hundreds of candles shimmered off the elaborate jewels and clothing of our guests, the space shone bright and warm. We were not yet in the somber period of Lent, and the court had gathered at a ball in order to celebrate my husband’s fifty-fifth birthday.

  “May you live in good health, sir,” Hedwig added, as her husband the king nodded feebly beside her, giving his blessing to her toast, though of course we all knew that it was not necessary.

  Now Hedwig turned her eyes on me, her taut smile no longer reaching her eyes as she said: “And to Her Royal Highness as well, who has finally returned to us, joining her husband and son, and her court, once more.”

  I offered a subdued nod of appreciation, lifting the cold champagne to my lips as I guessed that Hedwig intended an insult rather than a compliment.

  I did not owe Hedw
ig an explanation; it had been my doctors, after all, who had urged me against returning to this northern climate, cold and unpleasant as it was to me in so many ways. They’d written my husband on numerous occasions to tell him that the sea journey alone would worsen my cough and put my fragile health in peril. I’d been more than willing to follow their orders, remaining in my mansion on the Rue d’Anjou and taking up an inconspicuous but somewhat regular place at the Parisian court of Louis XVIII, the Bourbons having been restored once more to the French throne.

  And yet my husband’s impatience had won out in the end. My prolonged absence was creating problems for him at the Swedish court: gossipers falsely accused me of having taken a French lover, and advisers openly urged my husband to petition me for divorce and remarry a fertile young Swedish noblewoman who would give him a brood of Stockholm-born princes.

  Several women were openly vying for such a position. I would not have that; I would not have Oscar’s birthright and future put in peril. Not after everything my husband and I had endured and survived in the madness of our world.

  So I returned to Sweden, leaving France and the hope of an eventual reunion with Julie in exchange for the reunion with my husband and son. And here I was once more, in the throes of a northern winter, with the cold nights and even colder looks from Hedwig, the most powerful figure at court.

  We expected that Bernadotte’s ascendancy to the throne might come soon; King Charles hardly left his private rooms these days, and when he did, as on court occasions such as this, he appeared ever paler and weaker. And yet here was Hedwig, ensuring that he carry out his duties in public this evening of my husband’s birthday banquet. “Well, then, shall we dance?” Hedwig posed it as a question, but she turned to her husband with an expectant look, urging him to rise. King Charles obeyed, and several attendants hovered as he slowly pushed himself up from his chair, his breath rattling in and out through ragged wheezes. He had to dance at least one, and then he would quit the hall to return to his bed.