by Jo Graham
“You are lovely that way, my dear. I believe you’d do nearly anything.”
“Yes,” I whispered. To touch myself this way, to come naked on the bed while clothed he stood watching was . . .
And then there was a cool touch between my legs. The ivory phallus slid inside, oiled and hard. I shrieked and came between his hands and mine.
He laughed.
I sat up unsteadily. It shifted, pressing inside me. He was standing beside the bed. “Don’t take it out,” he said. “Leave it there.”
I could see the strain on his face, and with something like a purr I opened the buttons on his trousers and took him in my mouth, kneeling on my haunches. The phallus inside me slid slick and wet with my movements. It was like being penetrated twice, once there and once in my mouth, where I took him completely.
In the end he had to hold on to the bedpost to keep from falling. He clasped at my hair and called out something I didn’t quite understand. I did not let him fall.
Afterward we lay together lazily. Usually he would dress and leave before too late, but that night he showed no inclination to go, lounging next to me wearing his ruffled evening shirt and nothing else. Which was also unusual. Victor usually hated being en déshabillé, and he was never naked if he could help it.
“My dear,” he said, “be entirely truthful with me. You hate this house.”
“I do,” I said. “It is too old and sad. And too far from where you live. It takes you too long to get home at night, and you will not stay with me because you must leave so early. And there is no other suitable room if you wanted to stay in your own bed.”
“And you hate it,” he said.
“And I hate it,” I said. “If I were choosing a place, it would be closer to you and would be both simpler and more elegant. And more modern. Not larger. I don’t need more space. Just better arrangement.”
“Hmm,” he said. “Well, perhaps I can look for something different for you.”
I leaned back against his arm. “I will pay the rent out of the money you give me. I’m not asking for more money.”
He shrugged. “Which is as well. You know I am no spendthrift. Though”—he brushed the damp hair back from my forehead—“I think it’s time I gave an entertainment of my own.”
“A ball?” I asked.
“Nothing as grand as that. Perhaps a smaller, more intimate evening with friends.”
At the word intimate, the hairs on the back of my neck rose. “How intimate?”
Victor smiled down at me. “Are you imagining yourself the main dish, trussed and presented to the company? Nothing that intimate, my dear. Though I imagine you’d like it.”
“I would not,” I said, though I wondered if I would. It would depend on who was there. I could not help thinking of Thérèse Tallien and her secret smile.
“I was thinking,” he said, “of dinner and cards. If you can get your mind out of the gutter, I would like you to plan it. At my house, for the week after next.”
I wrenched my mind back out of the gutter with some difficulty. “To do that, I would have to see your house, Victor.”
“So you would,” he said. “Get dressed and we will go.”
“To see your house in the middle of the night?”
He pulled his arm out from under me, dropping my head on the pillows. “Why not? I am going anyway.”
“Victor, it’s freezing, and I wasn’t planning on going anywhere.”
“You are a little hothouse flower, aren’t you?” Victor said, smiling down at my naked form. “Get dressed. Surely with a warm cloak and boots, you can manage to get across town in a carriage without expiring.”
I grumbled, but went to dress. I confess that I was curious. I had never seen his house, though I had been in Paris four months. And in the more than a month he’d been in town, he had never asked me there before.
In the end, I did not see any of it in the dark. A carriage ride through Paris in the moonlight is romantic, regardless of the temperature. Indeed, freezing weather only makes it expedient to huddle more closely together. And then I thought it might warm my hands to put them in his trousers.
So in the end we rushed in rather precipitously. He slammed the door shut in a room of which my only impression was dark and shoved me against the door, his lips on mine urgently while both of us attempted to get winter clothes off without breaking apart.
There was a bed. I ascertained that when I lay back on it at his order while he found the box of English letters in the nightstand. I put my hand over his and drew the sheepskin letter tight over him, bending my head to kiss the indentation at the join of groin and thigh.
Afterward, I heard him removing it and dropping it into the chamber pot beneath the bed.
“I’m glad you remembered,” I said sleepily. “It is the wrong time to be without.”
“I remembered,” he said. “For all that you test my sanity. I want no bastards, my dear.”
“Of course not,” I said, and settled more closely against him. Surely he would not send me away tonight. It was nearly dawn, and the servants would remark on it if he ordered a guest room made up in the middle of the night. It would not suit his sense of the respectable.
If one could call breakfast at nearly noon respectable, this was. Dressed in an impeccable quilted sapphire-blue wrapper, I breakfasted with him in a small dining room looking out over a formal garden. The walls of the room were white trimmed with gold, and all was modern and airy. Only the lavishly plastered ceiling looped with Louis XV ornament showed the house’s age. The carpets were cream-colored and perfectly clean. The furniture was all in the best possible taste.
His own room, where I had spent the previous night, was a model of a gentleman’s room, with dark wooden furniture and subdued colors. The bed was not a four-poster, but the elaborate carving of the headboard offered plenty of places to attach ropes, if any were required. Perhaps they weren’t, here. Victor was more circumspect than that.
There were no other women here, and probably had never been. There was only one woman’s garment in the wardrobe, the quilted wrapper I wore, and it was exactly my size and sapphire blue.
At breakfast, Victor’s hair was still a little damp from the bath, and he was shaved and neat, wearing buff trousers and a cream shirt with a buff brocade waistcoat. For him, this constituted great unbending in dress. He helped himself to everything at the table and ate with none of his usual restraint.
I watched him butter a third piece of toast. “Are you quite well, Victor?”
“Absolutely, my dear,” he said. “Now, hurry and eat. We have things to do.”
“What are we going to do?” I asked.
“I thought you wanted to look at houses,” he said. “There is a charming place to rent quite close by.”
I shrugged. “That suits me very well.”
And indeed it did. It lacked a few days till Candlemas, but the day was sunny and bright, though still cold.
The house Victor wanted me to see was lovely. It was only a few blocks from his own, a beautiful house of weathered red brick, not very large but with a big English garden that swept down to a small stream. I wandered the garden happily, imagining the vistas that would be revealed when the trees greened and the flowers bloomed, pointing out the buds of things to Victor, who seemed bemused.
“Those are tulips there,” I said. “I think they are pink or red. I wonder which?”
“How can you possibly tell?” Victor asked, looking down at the pointed leaf spikes that rose two or three inches above the earth in a bare bed.
“The color,” I said. “See how dark they are compared to those buds of snowdrop there? The dark pinks and reds show like that. Whites and yellows are pale green. And it is hard to tell with the very pale pinks.”
“I had no idea you knew anything about gardening.”
I shrugged and took his arm again. “I do have some interests that are not sexual, Victor.”
Moreau looked out over the sleeping g
arden. “I forget that, my dear. And I should not. You are so sensual that it’s easy to become entirely beguiled by your face and body.”
“You do,” I said. “Beguiled, is it?” There was a teasing note in my voice. “Beguile the master himself?”
He raised one eyebrow, but did not smile. “Men are fools, my dear, fools for a pretty face and lovely arms. And when beauty comes with raw, submissive sensuality that would make Ovid blush, it’s a terrifying combination. I’d like to think that I am immune to those sorts of charms, but I am not.”
I took his arm. “I hardly think I’m a threat to you. It would take an extraordinary woman to beguile you, and I hardly think that I, young and gauche as I am, could do so even if I tried. Which I haven’t. I respect you too much to try to use you. After all, is not our friendship based on a certain degree of honesty?”
“Yes,” he said, and there was something unreadable in his dark eyes. “How do you like the house?”
“It’s beautiful,” I said. “I wonder how much the landlord wants for it? It must be quite expensive.”
Victor took my gloved hand and turned it up in his own. With his other hand, he dropped a set of keys into my palm. “I am the landlord, my dear. And it is yours.”
“Mine?” My incredulous joy must have showed in my face. “This wonderful house?”
“Yours,” he said with a smile, closing my fingers over the keys. “Yours to decorate as you wish. I have no doubt you will have many hours of pleasure arranging things in your own nest.”
I threw my arms around him and hugged him with delight, quite forgetting his reserve and dignity. “Victor, it’s amazing! You have made me so happy!”
“I’m glad that I have,” he said, returning my embrace. “You make me very happy too.”
I seized his hand and led him under a spreading bare tree. “See? In the summer I can put a table here and hang lanterns from the tree, and we could dine under the stars. It would be peaceful and beautiful beyond imagining.”
“In the summer, I will be in the field, my dear,” he said quietly.
During the long months when I’d awaited Victor in the fall, I had written to my mother. It was nothing really, just a quick note posted from Paris, saying that I lived and that I was well. There was no reply, but I had not expected one. I had not given her an address.
Now, settling into my own beautiful house in Passy, I wrote to my cousin Louisa. I knew Louisa’s discretion. I had relied on it for years when my mother was ill. I told her that I was in Paris, living with a generous and powerful protector, and that I had no intention of ever returning to Holland or to Jan.
Her response reached me on the day of Moreau’s fête. I knew better than to open it but I did anyway.
I expected remonstrances and anger, but instead she told me that my sons were well, and that Francis was safely recovered from a bout of coughing that had kept him ill through Christmas. Christmas, I thought. In places where there is not the Temple of Reason, where the church still exists, there is Christmas. We had had none. There’d been balls and pageants galore, theater productions and revels, but no Christmas. Suddenly I longed for snow and happy children, for midnight choirs and all the trimmings I had lacked.
Have always lacked, I said to myself sternly. It is not as though when you were a child in Italy, anyone took you to church. Or that Carnivale with its masks and licentiousness was not more to your parents’ taste than miracles and choirs. And you never saw a drift of snow until you were nine years old and crossed Grand-Saint-Bernard.
Jan says he will never divorce you. He and his family are adamant on that. He says that you will come crawling home when your money runs out. And that when you do, he will have you confined in the country for the rest of your life, with a strict nurse and a bottle of laudanum for company. He says you are mad. He has filed papers with the government of France to have you extradited to Holland.
That was no more or less than I had expected. But it was the next line that made tears start in my eyes.
He has told the children that you are dead.
Among the Marvelous
Moreau’s fête was the last week in February. I was a nervous wreck. While of course I had played hostess for Jan for years, I had never planned any sort of social occasion in Paris, and I was keenly aware of how my efforts would reflect on Victor. The wine, the food, the musicians, everything necessary for a simple party took weeks to prepare. In the end, I was beside myself over the flowers. The ones I had wanted were not available, and instead I had gray classical urns, meant to hold flowers outdoors on a terrace, filled with cherry branches forced to bloom early. The effect was both rustic and lovely, and the spare shapes seemed almost opulent in Victor’s understated rooms.
The fête went well enough. As I had expected, I did not enjoy myself much. It is far easier to be the guest than the hostess.
I did, however, at last meet Barras. He was of medium height, with brown hair and a handsome face of the sort that every young lawyer aspires to, open and inventive without any trace of cynicism or interest. He took my hand politely and bent over it, saying every conventional thing, making compliment to my clothing and décor. And five minutes later I found it completely impossible to remember a word he had said.
“You are right, Victor,” I said when I passed close to him later, “Barras is a cipher.”
Victor leaned forward against my arm. “He says everything that everyone wants to hear, and yet says nothing.”
I nodded. “But his lady . . .”
Madame Bonaparte had arrived with Barras as usual. She might be married to another, but it seemed in the capital that nothing whatsoever had changed. Whether or not it had changed in the bedchamber was anyone’s guess. Personally, I couldn’t imagine Barras bothering. But clearly he had loved her once, or at least lusted after her.
She came and joined me greeting arrivals near the door. “Anything interesting?” she asked.
I shook my head and extended my hand to a random officer who had turned up. “Yes, I too am enchanted. No, Joséphine, not a thing.”
She waited until the officer had turned away. Her perceptive brown eyes lingered on me. “Something is wrong,” she said. “I see it in your eyes.”
“It is just a letter I received earlier,” I said. “Nothing of consequence.” I feared that my voice betrayed me.
It did. She put her hand on my arm. “Do you want to go somewhere quiet and tell me of it?”
I shook my head. “I cannot leave the door. I should have known better than to open the letter before the party.”
“My husband sends me upsetting letters often,” she said, smiling and nodding to a gentleman who had just come in. “I can’t read them when I am to appear anywhere either.”
“Does he scold you?” I asked.
“No,” she said, her head turning slightly away as she followed the progress of a group with her eyes. “He tells me all of his unrequited passion.”
“I think I would prefer those letters,” I said.
Thérèse Tallien was coming up the steps on the arm of the banker reputed to be her current lover. Her gown was pure white and her stole was ermine, and a fortune in diamonds dazzled around her neck.
Joséphine leaned forward. “Good Lord, Thérèse! Where in the world did they come from?”
Thérèse gestured to the silent banker, who wore a small smirk. “From my dear friend. They once belonged to Diane de Poitiers, you know.”
“Really?”
“Not crown jewels, then,” I said rudely.
Thérèse looked at me, and her eyes were like diamonds themselves. “I should never aspire to a crown. It’s too easy to lose one’s head.” She spread her fan carelessly. “Unlike Joséphine, who had some Creole fortune-teller inform her that she was going to be a queen.”
Joséphine blushed. “Thérèse, I should never have told you that silly twaddle. You know those things are games and parlor tricks.”
“Not always,” I said. “I have a
deck of cards and they seem to work for me.”
Thérèse smiled. “Well, I shall have to get you to tell my fortune someday. And tell me if there is love in it.”
“There must be both love and generosity,” Joséphine said, graciously gesturing to the banker. “After all, you are the luckiest of women to have found such a friend.”
“Indeed,” Thérèse said, taking his arm and sweeping into the room.
Joséphine shrugged.
“I thought she was your dear friend,” I said.
“She is. But she must always conquer all. It’s her way.” Joséphine gestured to the footman to close the door. “It’s getting cold, and most of the guests are here.”
That night after the fête, I spread the cards on the table upstairs in the guest room I used. I put them in three piles, as Louisa had taught me.
Who. Joséphine. The Queen of Chalices sat in her garden surrounded by roses, a woman of sensibility and kindness. Clear enough.
How. The Six of Staves, six rods crossed on a white background. Conflict, war, swift changes.
Why. The Chariot.
I mussed the cards and scattered them as I heard the door open. Victor would laugh at me. “I’m coming, dearest,” I said.
There was a low, throaty laugh that was nothing like Victor’s. Thérèse stood in the doorway regarding me. “How nice of you to greet me that way!”
I stood up, folding the cards back together.
“So you are playing with your little cards?” Thérèse walked toward me, her fan swinging on its strings. “Do they tell you what waits for you?”
I didn’t answer. She lifted the fan. The sticks were heavy ivory. For all her manner, she was several inches shorter than I was. For a moment I thought she was going to strike me across the face with it, but she hesitated. “Victor will object if I mark you,” she said.
“So would I,” I said. “Moreau has never struck me, and that does not appeal to me in the slightest.”
Her eyes narrowed. “How do you know it doesn’t if you haven’t tried it? Victor may be very good, but I am better.”