She was doing it for Jules, of course. It had always been for Jules and his career, for the family, and yes, even for France. They would each do their part, he in the field, she at home, and together they would attain the ultimate mantle she sought, the baton of a marshal of the French army.
She had been sleeping with the general since the Italian campaign, when Jules had received his promotion from lieutenant colonel to colonel. Jules had been assigned to the Italian garrison, and had found himself involved in a skirmish at Mentana. He led a force of nearly brigade strength and had stumbled across a much smaller and poorly equipped company of men who had been separated from their leader, Garibaldi, during a storm. The incident was one of those turnabouts in war that results not from planning or deliberation, but rather from complete happenstance that becomes blind luck. The result said little of Jules’s leadership or lack of it, for there was nothing more involved than utter surprise on both sides. Without firing a shot, raising a sword, or giving an order, Jules had simply been swept along at the front of an impressive tide of Frenchmen and horses that swarmed over a grossly inferior Italian force. It was over almost before it had begun.
Yet in a campaign that had been boring, brief, and seriously deficient in action, the skirmish had matured with each retelling. The details took on more luster, with the outcome of the “battle” appearing ever more uncertain, until by the time they arrived at headquarters the word was everywhere that Jules deVries was a cunning hero and his troops valorous indeed. It was a triumph of illusion. Jules, who had remained with the main force, had no idea why such a stir had developed over a trivial incident; but the general who later presented him with his promotion didn’t press him for details, and Jules knew better than to protest.
Elisabeth had not known which had been the truly important act: her sleeping with the general, which she had resolved to do before Jules had even left for Italy, or Jules’s own good fortune in the field. It didn’t matter, really, for the result was what counted. General Delacroix had been quick to claim credit for the promotion – and in fact had endorsed it enthusiastically – and had since made it clear to her that he had taken to looking after the colonel, to keeping him out of trouble and making certain that opportunity met him square on. The promotion had brought with it assignment to more sedentary duty at Imperial Guard headquarters in Paris, which meant Jules would travel less than before. Elisabeth liked that. It meant he could spend more time with her and Paul.
Not for an instant did Elisabeth consider her trysts with Delacroix an act of infidelity. She was not unfaithful, just practical. When they slept together the first time, in the Hôtel de Ville, in a suite the general had arranged with silk curtains and thick Persian rugs and a stunning Louis XIV four-poster bed, she had begun with some trepidation, for while she knew what she was doing, this was an unknown road full of danger. Her butterflies had flown quickly before his advances. And as she took him inside her that first time, and closed her eyes and realized with whom she was sleeping – that this powerful man sat at the emperor’s side and commanded the legions of France – she grew hot and frenzied and made love like a madwoman. Her long fingernails left deep gashes down the back of the astonished general, who had never known such turbulence and lust in bed.
She had not stopped loving Jules; nor did she love him any less. In fact she felt the opposite had occurred. She felt closer to him than ever, knowing that she had played a pivotal role in their mutual quest to advance his career. She knew Jules quite well, suspecting that his military skills were uninspired and that his past promotions had had more to do with his ability to follow orders without hesitation than with his qualities as a strategist or leader of men. There was nothing wrong with that, for the military depended upon obedience. It was simply that his career could use every possible advantage in its progression. It did not matter to her that in the councils of power, from the Tuileries to the parliament, from the emperor on down, flesh was the currency of the moment, that other women, many of them, were doing the same thing she was to curry favor here or there. She drew no comfort from having so much company, nor did she need it to ratify her own actions. What others did was of no consequence to her.
Elisabeth stood there in the foyer with the general and savored the danger and the thrill and the arousal she felt in a room full of generals and diplomats and nobles. She glanced again over the general’s shoulder. Her pulse quickened. She made her decision.
“Follow me,” she whispered, touching his hand lightly. Briskly she turned and walked to the far side of the entry hall, around the corner toward the kitchen. There was a door to a little-used pantry. As she approached it she hoped she appeared composed. She dreaded the thought of seeing Madame LeHavre, the cook she despised, but the object of her fear was loudly occupied at the far end of the kitchen directing the efforts of the help. Elisabeth opened the pantry door and slipped quickly inside. The general appeared a moment later, closing the door softly behind. There was no latch on the door, but there was a small wooden ladder used to reach the highest shelves. He slid it in front of the door, wedging its cross-brace beneath the handle so the door couldn’t open.
Elisabeth threw her arms around him. The sounds of the house dimmed. Dishes and glasses clinked in the kitchen. There were muffled voices and an occasional shriek of laughter. They kissed long and passionately. Elisabeth fumbled at the general’s clothing while he worked at the catches of her dress. He pulled it off her shoulders and partway down.
They froze as someone jiggled the doorknob to the room. The person gave up, and they heard footsteps disappearing down the hall.
“Ce n’est rien,” she whispered. “Someone’s got the wrong room. But we must hurry!” The general surveyed the room. Two walls were covered from floor to ceiling with brown wooden shelves which held hundreds of cans, bottles, and jars. A canning table stood along the wall at one end of the room. With powerful arms he lifted her off her feet and carried her to it, pulling some aprons from a stack on a shelf as he went and throwing them on the table for a cushion. Frantically he unbuckled his trousers and dropped them, struggling to get them past his erection. He was panting. He lifted her skirts and petticoats and she lay back on the table, arms outstretched.
“Come to me quickly, Bernard,” she said in a low voice, and an instant later he was in her, his hand on one breast, his mouth on the other as he half-stood, half-lay upon her and their bodies began to move together in the steady unison of passion.
* * *
Moussa and Paul sat in the semidarkness of the secret passageway, comparing notes on the evening’s espionage and sharing the last of the champagne. They were not drunk, for the spilled bottle had left them little, but they felt content, fuzzy and warm.
“Une soirée magnifique!” announced Paul. He had never seen a party at the château, or anywhere else, but his pronouncement was delivered with the authority of a true connoisseur.
“Merveilleux,” agreed Moussa. “Especially the goose.”
They’d had a wonderful party. They’d spent most of the time in their second-story haunts enjoying their private view, looking down upon bald heads and feathered hats and baroness parts. But they’d also hidden underneath the buffet table, staring out at shoes and pants and petticoats. Paul had started to tie a banker’s shoelaces together, but the man had moved away before he was done. They’d poured vinegar into several open bottles of champagne, and put horseradish in the cake. They’d stuffed their pockets with hors d’oeuvres and gone out behind the house where they sat in the woods, their backs to a tree, and watched the comings and goings of the guests. The shoelaces inspired Moussa to try something similar with the horses. They’d sneaked behind a group of liveried footmen standing near the carriages. Crouching low, they’d tied the tails of some of the horses to the carriages behind them, and then tied harnesses to other harnesses, and managed to create a massive tangle without getting caught.
And then there had been the goose. The boys had been downstairs in the ki
tchen when it happened. A mongrel dog had slipped through a forest of guests’ legs, underneath the buffet table and through a door to the kitchen, where it had boldly seized an entire cooked goose ready to be carved by Madame LeHavre. She was a stout woman who always wore a plain black dress and a starched white apron, and she could get deadly serious when the mood took her. Her eyes caught fire at the sight of the thief. She grabbed a butcher knife and gave chase to the scrawny dog, which weighed barely as much as the goose flopping around in its mouth. They disappeared through the back door, which had been propped open to keep the kitchen cool, and across the lawn. Madame LeHavre was not a young woman. She moved more quickly than the boys thought possible, but not as quickly as the dog. She took the theft personally and would have carved up the beast if she could have caught it, but the dog was lucky and got away clean. For the boys, if not for Madame LeHavre, it was the high point of the evening. They howled at the memory.
“Thinking of the goose makes me hungry again,” Paul said. “I’m going to the kitchen. I’ll bring something back.”
“Your face is a mess. You’d better let me go, or wash up first.” Even in dim light Paul’s face was covered with dirt and streaked with champagne. It was the kind of attic grime that wouldn’t wipe off, but smeared instead. It wouldn’t do to appear downstairs looking as if he’d been dragged through the dirt, and washing wasn’t something that appealed to Paul just then.
Moussa wasn’t much better. His upper body was covered with dirt, which highlighted a long scar that ran underneath his rib cage where the boar had gored him four years earlier. His shirt, the one he’d used to mop up the champagne, lay in a heap somewhere down the passageway. But his face was still relatively clean. “D’accord,” Paul nodded. “You go. Here. You can wear my shirt. While you’re gone I’ll go back and get yours.” He slipped it off and gave it to Moussa, who pulled it over his head and crawled through the trapdoor into their bedroom.
Paul started back down the passageway. He crawled next to a wall that ran around the back stairwell and continued down the passageway. Along the way he stopped to look through each of the spy holes. He peered into the count’s study. The room was dark. He watched the help in the kitchen, and saw Moussa talking to Madame LeHavre. He noticed a notch in a board that he didn’t remember ever lifting to look through. He lifted the board and knelt down and put his eye to the hole. He saw part of a table and two hands, a man’s and a woman’s. He guessed he was looking into the pantry. He shifted his position to get a better view. Then he saw it clearly, at first not comprehending what he was seeing. But then his brain caught up with what his eyes were seeing and his eyes went wide.
He saw his mother lying on her back on a table, and a man in a uniform – it was a general’s uniform, Paul could see the sash of the Imperial Guard – a general bending over her, his pants down around his ankles. They both were moving back and forth and making grunting noises. And then everything came to him in a blur. He saw her breasts, breasts he’d never seen before, at least not that he could remember, breasts like those on the baroness, but these were his mother’s breasts, breasts uncovered, and her dress was pulled down off her shoulders and the man was holding her and rubbing them and kissing them – he was kissing them – and his mother’s eyes were closed; Paul knew the man wasn’t hurting her, but he couldn’t tell what he was doing, couldn’t tell what that expression on her face meant, and he didn’t know what was happening, except that his mother was with another man in a strange way. And then she kissed him. Paul knew what that was; he’d seen his father kissing his mother one time when they didn’t know he was looking, but this was a different kind of kiss, a lot different than when she kissed Paul. Then he saw his mother’s eyes fly open wide. She groaned and bucked and said, “Oui! Mon Dieu! Oui!” and looked straight up at the ceiling, right to where he was looking back. He panicked and thought she must be looking at him, but then he remembered she couldn’t see him, not through those little holes, of course not, but he jerked back anyway and sat up.
He was breathing hard and his face felt hot and his heart was pounding, pounding so much he could feel it in his ears. It was like the time he’d fallen out of the tree house and had the wind knocked out of him. That time his breath had finally come back to him in great gasps. Now he felt the same way, but there wasn’t a tree house, or a fall. Just his mother and that man. He was terrified too, all tingly and scared. He had no idea what he had seen, only that it seemed to be something private, something his mother shouldn’t be doing with a strange man.
He closed his eyes, which stung with grime, and rubbed them as he tried to make sense of things. He felt ashamed for spying like that, and knew that somehow he’d done something wrong, something terribly wrong, that he shouldn’t have done it, shouldn’t have been looking, but now it was too late, he couldn’t take it back, and he wished he and Moussa had never come here at all, wished he didn’t know about the stupid peepholes and the passageways, wished he were back in the tree house, right now.
Down through the darkness he heard Moussa calling for him in a low voice. “Paul!” There was a pause, and silence. “Paul, where are you? I brought the food! And I got another bottle! Paul!”
Paul didn’t answer. He sat in silence, staring straight ahead. He drew his knees up to his chest and buried his dirty face in his hands, and tried his hardest not to cry.
* * *
Four days later Napoléon declared war.
Jules prepared to leave for the front. His days were a blur of activity. He left for the Tuileries early in the morning and didn’t return home until late at night, barely taking time to eat. Even at home, when everyone was asleep except Jules and the boys, officers and soldiers came to see him. The boys watched from their window overlooking the front drive. Everyone was in a hurry. Couriers rode up fast on their horses, right to the front door, and carried messages inside. Their boots clomped in the front hall. There was silence in the house as they waited, and then boots clomped again as they carried messages back out.
Sometimes at night the boys heard Henri and Jules arguing. They didn’t understand what was being said, except that it was something to do with the war. Moussa wanted to go into the passageways to listen, but Paul wasn’t interested. He was finished crawling around in there, he said.
Paul stood in awe of his father, and with the coming of the war supposed he was probably the most important man in Paris just then, excepting maybe the emperor. Jules was the biggest, bravest, most powerful man the boy had ever seen. Paul swelled with pride when he saw other soldiers salute him, or stiffen in his presence, or run to carry out an order. He loved to watch him put on his uniform. His father was meticulous about it, every movement precise and well ordered, every centimeter of cloth pressed, every button shiny, everything just so. When the colonel was out Paul would touch his dress uniform, the sword and pistols and crimson sash, and wonder what it must be like to be a soldier. He dreamed of the uniform he would wear one day.
When Paul had turned eight two years earlier, Jules had begun letting him polish the sword. Paul handled it with reverence. It was over a meter in length and had an ivory handle with an eagle’s head carved in it. It had belonged to his great-great-grandfather, who had used it in the Revolution. He ran his finger down the long blade, lightly so that the razor-sharp steel wouldn’t cut. He used polish and a soft cloth to make it shine until he could see his reflection. After he was finished and was sure he had it perfect, his father would inspect it with a critical eye. The colonel always found a blemish, and lectured him like a recruit.
“Your sword is your companion, your friend. It is an extension of your honor. Show your pride, son. Make it look so.”
Sometimes, no matter how hard he tried, Paul couldn’t see the defect, but he would start over just the same, often having to repolish it three times before the colonel would accept it.
Now, as Jules stood in his bedroom and packed his bags with uniforms and toiletries and papers, Paul polished the sword ag
ain. Moussa was with him. The boys shared everything, but not sword duty. Paul let Moussa assist by getting the cloth or holding the polish, but he wouldn’t let him touch the sword.
“Where are they going to have the war?” Moussa asked as Paul worked.
Paul shrugged. “I don’t know. Somewhere they can find Prussians to kill. Prussia, I guess.”
“I bet your father kills a lot of them.”
“About a thousand, probably.”
Moussa whistled. It sounded like a lot, even for Uncle Jules. “How can he get so many?”
“I don’t know. He’ll stab them first. Like this.” Paul lifted the sword with two hands and ran a Prussian through. “I suppose he’ll shoot them, too. Just to be sure.”
“What if they shoot back?”
Paul frowned. “Everybody knows Prussians can’t aim. Prussians are sissies.”
“Didn’t they beat the Austrians?”
“Austrians are sissies too.”
Moussa knew that was true. Everybody said so.
At last Paul finished the sword. He was certain it had never looked so fine. He had Moussa check it first, and even though Moussa didn’t touch it, Paul buffed it again. With great trepidation he took it to Jules, who held it up for inspection. Paul held his breath, expecting the inevitable order to do it over. Jules turned the sword to see both sides. He held it up to the light of the window. The blade gleamed. Paul had done well. It was perfect. But he was not a warm or demonstrative man. He could not permit himself a smile of acknowledgment. He addressed Paul as he would a private.
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