She entered his room one night (barefoot, her toes like ice) and closed the door carefully behind her. There was a brief metallic clack of the lock as she turned the key, and then she heard Kasimir sit up in bed. Elisabeth went over quickly, heart beating, breathless and yet relieved. She’d reached the peak of her courage and would now relinquish the event to the artist. He’d know what to do next.
In the dark, the bed creaked, the mattress bounced, blankets ruffled. She slipped in and lay down, the soft pillows billowing up around her ears (she felt his warmth in them, smelled his hair). Her excitement was intense, her skin alive. She closed her eyes and waited for the touch of his elegant hands.
But instead there was the sound of limbs sliding between the sheets, and again the intense creaking and bouncing of the bed. Breathing. Whispering? Then nothing.
Elisabeth said, ‘Kasimir?’
In a weak, croaky voice, the artist, who must have been standing beside the bed now, said, ‘Please go away.’
Elisabeth’s eyes adapted to the dark. There was a silhouette standing beside the bed, framed by the curtained window. Kasimir, obviously: but no. There were two silhouettes.
Again, the artist, in a whisper now, but firmly: ‘Please. you must go.’
The other silhouette cleared its throat.
Elisabeth went back to her room. The next day, the artist Kasimir Wieczorkowski ignored her completely. As did the family lawyer, Seidlitz.
THE INTERPRETATION OF DREAMS
In late December, Grande Armée in tow, Bonaparte sped from Berlin in his carriage, first to Posen, then to Warsaw, en route to Russia. Along the way, he met an eighteen-year-old Polish countess named Marie Walewska.
It was a coincidental first meeting, on a snowy New year’s Eve. Bonaparte’s carriage was welcomed on the outskirts of Warsaw by a crowd of Polish nationalists, among whom was the fetching young countess in her red-amber fox fur hat. Fair and beautiful (and married to an old count), she was granted permission to approach the carriage, where she handed the Emperor a bouquet of flowers and so caught his wandering eye. Some historians argue this story was a romantic fabrication and that it was in fact Talleyrand who’d plucked her from his ‘pockets full of girls’ (Bonaparte’s own words) and delivered the young countess to Napoleon’s attentions, but no matter; the result remains the same.
The Emperor slept warmly during his brief Polish sojourn.
Countess Walewska moved into the Schloss Finckenstein (Bonaparte’s temporary headquarters) and nobody there could quite work the demure little countess out. She didn’t play cards, she didn’t drink or giggle or raise her voice, and she hid her voluptuous, pale Polish curves beneath unflattering clothes. Marie Walewska was not typical of Bonaparte’s lovers, and yet … and yet.
Her devotion and love for the Emperor grew fierce as his own fresh passion fired and burned during those winter weeks. But what would happen, what would eventuate … well, this was in hands other than her own.
True love relinquished all control.
The Empress Josephine, meanwhile, had been begging to join Bonaparte, sending numerous insisting letters. I am so miserable without you, she wrote, and always in tears. The balance of their love had shifted since the coronation and the change in Napoleon worried her deeply. She couldn’t give him a son. She would be abandoned, discarded, just like one of his many lovers. Her hand trembled over the pages, new letters begun as soon as the previous ones were sealed and sent.
I cannot breathe with you so far away. You must send for me.
From Warsaw, Bonaparte wrote: This is no time of year to travel. It is cold and the roads are bad and unsafe. So I cannot allow you to undertake so many trials and dangers.
Josephine was no fool but she suffered the rejection with less than her usual grace. One terrible night she even dreamed of the bouquet, of which she knew (as she knew of the young Countess Walewska and most everything else that involved her husband on campaign). In her dream she saw the bouquet on the carriage seat beside Napoleon who, as the horses began to pull away, tossed the flowers through the window and left them fallen on the snow, forgotten. In the dream, Josephine couldn’t tell what kind of flowers they were and was desperate to see, to know, as though this might dispel her distress, but the distance grew and the snow became silvered, then dark, and everything became strange and distorted, as so often happens in dreams. She woke and threw the covers off in a panic, felt she was suffocating beneath them. Later, after she left Mainz and returned to France, not even her magnificent gardens at Malmaison were able to ease her sense of dread.
The Countess Walewska might have feared worse, had she endured such a dream, for it was in fact her own bouquet that was tossed from the carriage window. And, indeed, the dream would have proven prophetic; months later and pregnant with the Emperor’s illegitimate son, she waited in vain for Bonaparte to send for her in Warsaw, while instead he set about in earnest search of a worthy wife among the royal families of Europe. But neither the Countess Walewska nor the Empress Josephine could really claim the dream. In truth, the dream was Napoleon’s. It was he who’d conquered their sleep.
HIGHWAY ROBBERY
There was the carriage driver and Mr Hendrik, Wesley Lewis Jr and the Prussian, Krüger, who’d come along at the last.
They got to Oschersleben easily enough, but a few miles short of Wolfenbüttel (it was dusk, foggy) they were held up by bandits.
Four men with pistols rode out of the trees and surrounded the carriage. The chestnut gelding and the mottled grey mare reared and sent everyone inside lunging suddenly forwards and then backwards. They were summoned from the carriage and directed to kneel on the ground.
‘Move swiftly,’ one of the bandits said, pointing his pistol. A red kerchief hid his face (the others wore kerchiefs in different colours). He remained on his horse while his colleagues dismounted and patted down the prisoners for wallets, weapons and blades. They found nothing but the driver’s apple knife and his sad little pigskin of small silver and coppers (they completely missed Mr Hendrik’s knife, the sheath tucked up in his armpit). Then they climbed up onto the carriage and threw the luggage down from the roof, opened the trunks and tore through the bags and spilled everything over the ground. They unhitched the two horses as well and led them away.
Wesley Lewis Jr watched as one of the bandits used the hilt of his sword to break the lid of the smallest chest. It had been under the seat in the carriage with them. The bandit tore the splintered wood away and tipped everything upside down. It was the chest with the false bottom, where Mr Hendrik had hidden their travel money for the way over and now the money for the electrical eels, all of Claus von Rolt’s beautiful shiny gold coins. Captain van der Velde had given it to them at the start of the journey, showed them how it worked. The false bottom came away as the bandit cracked the chest against the ground, but he didn’t notice; and, anyway, there were no gold coins in there. He threw the shattered timbers away, went to work on another of the trunks.
Where was the goddamn money? Wesley Lewis Jr turned to Mr Hendrik. ‘you black son of a bitch.’
The man on the horse said, ‘Shut it!’
Afterwards, when the thieves had ridden away, a light rain began to fall. Krüger stood up and helped Mr Hendrik to his feet. The driver brushed the grass and dirt from his knees and swore. They were still miles from the next waylaying inn, and now they were horseless and stuck.
Wesley Lewis Jr watched Mr Hendrik. He waited for him to say something, but the Negro wouldn’t even look at him.
Finally, Wesley Lewis Jr said, ‘So where is it?’
Mr Hendrik began to pick up some of their things from the ground. He had to stick his lame leg out a little to the side, stiffly, each time he bent down.
‘you’ll not tell me?’
‘It’s safe,’ Mr Hendrik said.
The rain was still only a faint drizzle, but the clouds had darkened. The cool mist was sweet with the smell of trees, and rich, luxuriant soil.
‘you son of
a bitch,’ Wesley Lewis Jr said again. ‘What if something happens to your black carcass? What then? I’m out with the beggars?’
Mr Hendrik ignored him.
‘We’ll have to spend the night,’ the driver said, draping a coat over his shoulders. ‘Unless somebody comes along and finds us.’
Wesley Lewis Jr stood there, didn’t move, didn’t speak, anger swelling in his chest and squeezing his throat.
‘I’ll try for the next village in the morning,’ the driver said.
Wesley Lewis Jr booted one of the empty trunks across the grass.
When the rain started properly, they sat in the carriage and listened to it pummel the roof. The floor inside was wet and muddy, and there were places where the carriage leaked and the water trickled down onto the seats and everybody had to sit slightly forward. Krüger balanced a few books on his lap, wiping them clean with a rag. One of the bandit’s horses had trampled them into the ground.
There was Kritik der reinen Vernunft and Maria Stuart and Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre. There was Hilde’s copy of Hyperion; oder, Der Eremit in Griechenland, too, and he also had Mr Hendrik’s Bible in his lap, a leather-bound copy in Dutch that Captain Willem van der Velde had given him for the journey (‘So they won’t think you’re a dirty black heathen,’ he’d said).
The rain drummed the carriage and it was cold now and getting darker and each man had a blanket over his shoulders.
Wesley Lewis Jr pointed at the books in Krüger’s lap. ‘If we had a candle, you could read us all a fucking bedtime story.’
LOVE IS UNPREDICTABLE
Général Fourés thought about Elisabeth von Hoffmann all the time. He thought about her in the morning and throughout the afternoon, and of course he thought about her at night, too. He played out in his mind any number of fantastic scenes between them, erotic and banal, though mainly erotic. He was exasperated, living under the same roof, and yet thrilled at the same time, because he could see her so often and without contriving to. The tensions of propriety (there had been none in his seduction of Letizia) were providing an unexpected satisfaction.
Elisabeth was short-tempered with him, especially if Günther was around. But, as the days passed, their brief interactions grew longer. She’d ask him a question or two now, just simple things, yet their conversations gradually took up a little extra time and so the moments between them lingered, acquired space. She still frequently bruised his brightness with her youthful, contemptuous dismissals of him (that look!), but soon it was done with a solicitous smile, brief, casual, intimate because it was almost unnoticeable, though the général noticed. He noticed everything to do with Elisabeth von Hoffmann, the smallest detail and slightest change in the air.
Except of course the night she came into his room and slipped into the bed and grabbed his hand and put it to her breast. All day, all week, he hadn’t noticed a thing that might have predicted the occasion.
She’d squirmed up against him, gathered his feet in hers. She’d said, ‘you know what to do, Général, don’t you?’
OBJETS D’HISTOIRE
Claus von Rolt held the square of bloodstained cloth in the palm of his hand. There was a vague swirl to the pattern, yellowish where it thinned out to the edges of the fraying material, and a rich red brown everywhere else. It looked like nothing, like a patch that had been used to dress a wound maybe, and Rolt was mildly repulsed by it, thinking of pain and blood, the stink of bandages. He held it up closer to his nose, expecting something pungent, but detected only a vague mustiness, and the slightly sweated odour of cold bedsheets. He touched a corner of the cloth with the tip of his little finger and couldn’t help but marvel at how close he was to history.
It was exactly things like this that thrilled him.
‘What do you think?’ Christophe Bergerard asked.
‘There’s the question of authenticity,’ Rolt said.
Général Fourés’s aide-de-camp carefully took the piece of cloth from Rolt’s palm and placed it back inside a small, velvet-lined box. ‘I assure you, sir,’ he said, ‘the article is genuine.’
Rolt smiled. ‘yes, well, you may say it …’
Christophe Bergerard had been given Rolt’s name by his father, who’d heard it from a London taxidermist and dealer in rare species. Now, in Berlin with Général Fourés, Bergerard had sought the Prussian out. He was a young man with a tendency to live beyond his means, a tendency often requiring redress.
‘I do not part with it lightly,’ he said, frowning at Claus von Rolt. ‘And even now question myself.’
The cloth in its special box had been a gift from his father, a good luck charm. The blood of the guillotined queen, Marie Antoinette, soaked up in a fishmonger’s apron, right off the cobblestones of the place de la Révolution, moments after her head had rolled into the basket and the blood had surged from her severed neck. Not having enjoyed much luck since it had come into his possession, Christophe Bergerard thought it was about time for Queen Marie to deliver.
‘My father was there,’ Bergerard said. ‘He saw the sun glint off the poised blade, he saw the Queen’s elegant neck placed in the choke, and then the blade’s sudden, swift descent. Pffft! He heard the roar of the crowd as her head fell into the basket and saw the blood flow in torrents, down off the boards and over the ground. And then the filthy peasants all ran up with their aprons and dresses and shirts and sheets, fought each other and wrestled in the blood, kneeled and sopped it all up in a frenzy, like animals.’
Rolt wondered how many times the boy had told his father’s story.
‘The filthy rabble,’ Christophe Bergerard said. He opened the box again, allowed Rolt a second look at the cloth. It was all true, every detail. His father had been among the crowd and then followed one of the women who’d brought her linen bundles with her for the soaking up. They’d been at it all week with the lesser aristocrats, but the Queen’s blood was the prize that day and the rush to the foot of the guillotine was as intense as any charge of dragoons.
‘Her name was Madame Sulzer and she was a fishmonger’s wife,’ Bergerard said. ‘She refused to sell my father the whole apron. Only this one portion.’
‘A shrewd businesswoman,’ Rolt said.
‘you need not doubt its authenticity.’
What I don’t doubt, Claus von Rolt thought to himself, is the power of the idea. He might even keep the piece for himself.
He made a generous offer and the happy young French aide-de-camp accepted.
DRUM
Training.
Johannes Meyer fired the musket and again completely missed the target. He’d also tamped too much powder down the barrel and almost blown his own head off. His cheek was hot and blackened from the exploding flintlock and his ears were ringing painfully. He dropped the musket to the ground. For the moment, the whole world was a giant tuning fork.
The sergeant instructor was yelling at him, but Johannes had his back turned and couldn’t hear a thing. Furious, the man began to stride over, whacking a long cane against his boots as he walked. The two soldiers on either side of Johannes backed away. Wolfie, further along the line and seeing what was happening, stepped out and stood to attention as the sergeant approached, hoping to distract him with a question, but the sergeant just pushed him roughly aside. Johannes, his hands clasped to his ears, turned to see the sergeant instructor suddenly right there in front of him. In the next instant, the sergeant’s cane went up and Johannes went to his knees, ears still ringing and now fresh pain exploding through his shoulder.
‘Get up!’ the sergeant instructor said. He’d hit Johannes so hard the cane had snapped in two and fractured the boy’s collarbone. ‘On your feet!’
Just then three horses galloped down the line of men: a French officer, flanked by two aides-de-camp. When they were level with the sergeant, the officer reined his horse hard and the animal whinnied and spun around, a huge chestnut stallion with black legs and a white blaze. The aides-de-camp pulled their animals up too, churning up the
ground, and now all the men with their muskets could see the officer was a colonel-en-second, his plumed shako with a gold-braided chinstrap, his blue pelisse intensely buttoned, a dolman cape over his shoulder. Large silver spurs shone immaculately on his black hussar boots.
‘What’s going on here?’ he said. ‘What has this man done?’
The sergeant instructor stood to attention. ‘He is incapable of firing a musket, Colonel.’
‘Since when has it been taught with a cane, Sergeant?’ The colonel-en-second’s name was Josse-Fridolin-Jacques-Antoine-Félix-Séraphin-Stanislas de Freuler. He despised the barbaric Prussian disciplinary methods and had opposed the practice being maintained in the Grande Armée, but the Emperor had been convinced to allow his foreign regiments to keep their traditions.
‘I believe he is purposely refusing to obey simple instructions, Colonel,’ the sergeant said. He was a brute (that much was obvious), short and gnarled, with phlegmy grey eyes.
The colonel-en-second looked down at Johannes, crumpled and holding his shoulder, unable to stand up. For a moment he thought to spur his horse on, leave the matter alone. There was so much else to do today, tomorrow, and all the days following. But he turned to one of the aides-de-camp on his left. He’d had an idea and, when they came unbidden like that, he always regarded them as gifts. They had never denied him pleasure and reward, as he’d never failed to act upon them.
‘Have this man attended to,’ he said, pointing at Johannes. ‘And bring him to me in the morning.’
‘yes, Colonel.’
‘He’s to be our new regiment drummer. Understood?’
‘yes, Colonel.’
Colonel-en-second Freuler swung his horse around and galloped away, pleased with himself and his magnanimity.
RESOLUTIONS
In the morning, the oak trees were dark with rain and shrouded in mist. The birdcalls were soft, tentative, the world still and contained, like a church.
One by one, they stepped out of the carriage, weary and silent, only the creak of springs to disturb the quiet, as the carriage leaned in and out of the shifting weight.
Fortune Page 5