by Jo Graham
“Oh no,” I said.
“I pinned him up against the wardrobe doors and threatened to rip his head off. It was a little awkward.”
I burst out laughing. “Oh, Michel! I imagine it was!”
I heard him smile despite himself. “Half the household came rushing in when he started shrieking, and I wasn’t wearing a nightshirt, and Madame Bonaparte was there, and . . .”
Still laughing, I asked, “And what did she say?”
“She didn’t say much, but she seemed to be enjoying the view.” He was laughing now. “I grabbed a towel off the washstand, but that didn’t really cover very much. I begged the poor fellow’s pardon and tipped him, but Barras never asked me back again. It wasn’t the best first impression I’ve ever made.”
“I imagine it made a good impression on Joséphine,” I said. There was something ironic about Joséphine appreciating Michel in the nude, considering how I knew her husband.
“It seemed to have done,” he said.
I propped up on one elbow, snuggling closer. “You are beautiful, you know.”
“I know,” he said. “That’s why I wear those tight white breeches.” His hand strayed across my stomach caressingly. His fingers were damp. “A good soldier should always make the most of his assets. If ladies of fashion like to look . . .”
“Just a provincial lad, knowing nothing of the ways of the big city,” I said airily. “Perhaps someone should show him around. I’m surprised you haven’t been shown around thoroughly.” It pleased me obscurely, to think of him showing off that way, made him a bit like Charles.
“I’ve been around the gardens a time or two,” he said. “But I never—”
I pressed my hand against his lips firmly. “Don’t say it.”
“Say what?”
“Say you love me.” How many times had he said it, and to whom? I had never felt jealous before. It had not really mattered to me whom Moreau slept with, and it had never occurred to me at the time that Jan might even be capable of infidelity.
He took my hand from his lips and kissed it, even the tips of my fingers. “Why not?”
I closed my eyes. “Because I’ll believe you.” He could hurt me. He could hurt me more than anyone ever had.
“Oh.”
I couldn’t look at him. “Don’t do that to me. Don’t make me believe in you. Just let this be what it is.”
“And what is it?” he asked quietly.
“An interlude,” I said. “A wonderful, glorious, passionate interlude. We both know it can’t last. It’s as fragile as this peace treaty. In a few months you’ll be gone back to war, and I’ll be working again, being with whomever. And the time will come when you marry someone else and send back all my letters.” I gulped. “I want this to be good while it lasts. I don’t want any lies.”
“You don’t believe I could really love you?” His hands never stopped moving, caressing and slow, gentle almost.
“No,” I said. “You have no idea who I am. You have no idea the things I’ve done. What I’m capable of doing.” And yet some traitorous part of me wanted him to know, wanted him to know everything, to have every power.
“You don’t know what I am either,” he said. “I might be a rapist or a torturer. I might beat you or cut you for fun.”
“I don’t believe that.”
“Isn’t it likely? Knowing what you know of me?”
“No,” I said, “it isn’t. Tell me the worst thing you’ve ever done. I can hear whatever it is.”
Michel was silent for a long moment. His hands finally stilled. “No,” he said quietly, “I can’t. Not yet.”
“Then don’t tell me you love me.” I put my face against his shoulder. It was too good. I must not believe too much, be drawn too deeply into this spell of passion, this illusion of friendship and mutual desire. “Live for half an hour in the world as it is.”
“A world without magic and love? With nothing more than flesh and bones and old blood?” There was a sadness in his voice I hadn’t heard before. “I don’t think I could survive half an hour in that world. If this is madness, then so be it.” His hands started again, slow and gentle. “If we compromise with sanity to create the worlds we love, the places where we thrive, then we do.”
“I want to be sane,” I said. “I don’t want to believe in visions and portents, in angels and demons and ancient gods and old oaths dragging me into stories I don’t understand. I just want to survive.”
“Maybe you’d survive better if you stopped fighting the current,” he said. “Like a swimmer pulled out to sea. Stop trying so hard and let go.”
I held him tight. Tomorrow, I thought. It will be different tomorrow. We will wake and these illusions will fade. But it’s not tomorrow yet.
And he said nothing, just rocked me against him until we both fell asleep.
In the morning, Michel woke me with a kiss. “I have to go back to my rooms,” he said. “I need to get a clean shirt, and I need to check on Eleazar. Livery stables sometimes don’t bother to exercise a horse if the owner isn’t checking in. I should take the poor boy out myself.”
I unfurled from the covers, stretching. “I could come with you,” I said. “Nestor could use a run too.”
“And clean up a bit,” he said. “Do you want me to tell the landlady to fetch you up a bath?”
I shook my head. “She’ll charge two sous to have her boys bring the tub up and fill it.”
“I don’t care,” he said. “If you want it, I’ll dress and pay her. They can put the tub in the other room, so you don’t even have to come out until it’s ready.”
I did want it. And I wanted to think about this, now, not some other things. My eyes went back to him, wondering if I had managed to completely disgust him with the female process.
Instead, he was getting hard. The expression on his face warred between arousal and embarrassment.
I slid over to the side of the bed and ran one stained hand up his thigh, watching the muscles twitch at my touch. His bloody phallus was half-erect beside my fingers. I understood something about him suddenly. “You like that, don’t you?” He moved his head, but didn’t answer me. “The idea that you’ve used that kind of force.”
“Elza, no. I would never—I have never—” He looked away. “I’m not like that. It’s not that I’ve never had the opportunity. God knows I have, more than I would like. But I swear to you, I’ve never done it. I’ve never forced anyone unwilling. I’ve never done it.” His voice shook.
“But you wanted to.” He had. I knew that. He wanted to rape.
He closed his eyes, and his voice was ragged. “God help me, yes.”
A weight lifted from me that I hadn’t known was there. Michel sat down next to me, and I put my arm around his shoulders. “If you wanted to and didn’t, it doesn’t count. A sin you only think about isn’t the same as something you’ve done. Something you’ve wanted isn’t the same as something you’ve really done to another person.” That was the fear I had never named—what would a man do to me if he could get away with it, if there were no servants, no people who would talk? With him, I knew. And I knew he wouldn’t really do it. “What is it you want?”
He shrugged, and his shoulders moved under my arm. His face was turned away. “I don’t know. To tear into someone. To listen to them scream and beg. To throw her down and take her like an animal.” He put his head in his hands. “I wouldn’t do it, Elza. I really wouldn’t. I haven’t, when I had the chance and other people were.”
“What did you do?” I asked, my mouth dry, wanting to know and not at the same time. “When other people were.”
“Started shouting and laid into them with the flat of my sword,” he said. “Kicked some noncoms in the ass who really deserved it. They knew better. You can’t have that kind of thing. I wound up killing one of them. I didn’t mean to, because I just struck him in the arm to get him off her—but the wound putrefied. I swear to God, if I were the corps commander, rape would be a hanging
offense.”
“And then?” My voice was very quiet and calm, like a priest in a confessional. But a priest would not understand this. A whore would.
“I got the town doctor out. He was hiding in the cellar of his house, and I scared him half to death. I put the girls in his care. He knew who they were, who their families were. He could get them home. I put everyone on report, and brought the ones who were the leaders, the ones who’d actually done it, not the ones who were watching, up on charges. Six months’ pay and two weeks in chains. Not enough, but it was the maximum in the corps.”
“Moreau’s corps,” I said, remembering the cantinière in camp with a rush of shame. I had not done half what he had. I had gone to bed, telling myself I needed a thicker skin. “Yes, I know about that.”
He nodded. “It’s not what I did that bothers me. It’s what I felt.” He took a racking breath. “I was helping one of the girls to the doctor’s house. The street was rutted and she was shaking, and I . . .” Michel turned his head away, his face drawn. “This Franconian girl my sister’s age, with long brown hair, and what had just happened . . . What kind of monster am I to think that?”
“What did you do?”
“I took her arm and helped her to the doctor’s house, and said some things about how I would arrest the men and that I hoped she would be all right and that the doctor would get her home.” His shoulders shook. “Surely God will judge me by what I did, not by what I thought.”
“I will,” I said. I put my arms around him and held him close, his head against my shoulder, searching for the words. “And if you believe in a forgiving God, then surely that grace is easier to reach than a whore’s absolution.” I stroked his brow. “Michel, you can’t help your nature.”
He made some sound against me that wasn’t a word.
I ran my hands down his back. Last night had not even been the pretense of violence. It had been love and tenderness. “Michel,” I said, “you didn’t hurt me. Remember? It’s just the thought. Just the idea. There’s nothing wrong with that.”
He lifted his face to mine, looking for something there. If it was fear, he didn’t see it, because I felt none. Perhaps I should have been afraid of him, but I knew in that moment that I never would be.
I kissed his cheek softly. “Really, my dear. I promise I would tell you if you hurt me. But it doesn’t bother me at all for the idea of hurting me to excite you. If you want to take me right now, I’ll even scream and struggle a bit.”
He laid his cheek against mine, two days’ beard prickling. He hadn’t bothered to shave yesterday. “Don’t tempt me that way.”
I took his hand and closed it around my wrist, letting him feel the shape of the bones, letting him see what it did to me to test myself just a little against his strength. “Why not?” I said. “If it’s a game between lovers, and no one is hurt? It’s just a quirk.”
He felt me shiver as he tightened his fingers, solid but not quite bruising, just on the very edge of pain. “And what are yours?” He smiled against my face, and his voice was almost normal, leading him back out of the dark places.
“I like dominating men twice my size,” I said almost playfully, leaving it so he could take it as a joke if he wanted, leaving me a way out, “and I like being made to come in public, and the pretense of seduction. And I like dressing in men’s clothes and sleeping with women.”
“That’s quite a list,” he said.
“Do you think you’re up to it?” A glance showed he clearly was. I didn’t frighten him or disgust him any more than he did me.
“I love a challenge.” He smiled again, and this time it touched his eyes. “But I don’t think I can manage the being a woman part. This is the body I have right now.”
“We can work around it,” I said, and kissed him.
Autumn
The weeks that followed were the happiest I had ever known. Michel moved his things over and let go the rooms he had taken to save on rent. There was no sense in his paying for rooms he was never in. We were together every moment, as lovers are when no sense of fatigue has set in, and when neither has any more pressing responsibility than to be together night and day.
On clear days we rode in the Bois de Boulogne, cantering through the parks and scattering the squawking ducks and geese, taking the bridle trails at breakneck speed. Nestor didn’t have Eleazar’s wind or his stride, but he did his best to keep up.
Michel leaned out of the saddle, laughing, waiting for me to come thundering up beside him. Nestor and I were both sweated. My hair had escaped from its binding, and Charles’s shirt stuck to my body beneath a waistcoat. We walked the horses under the trees. Michel’s boots were scuffed, and the fallen leaves crunched under his feet.
“I look terrible,” I said, taking my hair down and trying to tie it back more neatly.
“You worry too much,” he said. “You look beautiful no matter what you wear. It’s disturbing.” He looked at me sideways.
I paused, hands raised to tie my hair back. My coat was stuffed in my saddlebag, and I wore dove-gray breeches and a black waistcoat, cut a shade higher than the current fashion so that it came just above the line of my breasts. With the fullness of the shirt and cravat above, there was no curve at all, just long slim legs and golden hair in a tail. I looked like a young man of seventeen or so. “Disturbing?”
“You carry it off well,” Michel said. Nestor stepped between us, so I couldn’t see his face.
“What, being a young man?” I almost said being Charles, but stopped myself in time.
“It’s the way you walk. The way you move. When you dress like that, you don’t move like a woman at all.”
I took Nestor’s reins and held him by the head, so I could see around him to Michel. One golden leaf had fallen and caught in his red hair. “It’s safer on the road to travel as a man. And my father taught me to fence, which I suppose accounts for the way I move.”
“Really?” He looked at me around Nestor’s head.
I nodded. “And I’ve taken lessons this way. People see what they want to see.”
“Are you any good?” That gleam he’d had in his eye galloping across the park was back.
“I’m not bad,” I said. “But I’m not about to cross swords with you. You’ve got a head of height on me, and six inches of reach. Not to mention a much heavier sword.”
He wore it even in Paris, and glanced down at the belt now, a worn general-issue saber weighing a good ten pounds. “No,” Michel said. “You’d need something lighter. But it’s not all weight and reach. I wish it were.”
“I’m left-handed,” I said. Perhaps a gentle introduction to Charles was best.
“I have to see this,” Michel said, grinning with delight.
Nothing would do then but that we had to go to the fencing salle he favored right away. It wasn’t one of the fashionable ones, but I was coming to expect that. The owner was a wicked Sicilian with muscular thighs and an old-fashioned curled wig. His rooms were popular with young army officers who wanted to fight dirty, and with green boys who needed a quick turn or two before an affair of honor.
He greeted Michel like a brother. Michel hung about his neck, pounding him on the back, while they cheerfully insulted one another, Michel in bad Italian and M. Vincenzio in worse German.
“My young friend,” Michel said, “is in need of a few lessons. Perhaps you could take him through a pass or two and tell us what is needed?”
M. Vincenzio looked me up and down with a somewhat skeptical expression on his face. His ornate brocade coat looked as though it were ten years old, and smelled like it too. “The boy has to fight a duel?”
“He often travels,” Michel said smoothly. “And it would be well if he could defend himself.”
Vincenzio raised one eyebrow and addressed me. “How fortunate you are to have such a friend who has concern for your well-being. Have you ever crossed swords in earnest?”
“No,” I said. “But I killed two men with a pistol on the ro
ad from Milan this summer.” I was not about to be cowed. And Charles would never be, arrogant as he was. I put one foot forward, standing negligently, as the young bucks did. I flicked my cuff back as though to take snuff.
The other eyebrow went up. “You are a fair shot?”
“I am a fine shot,” I said. Which was true. Not that it took much of a marksman to hit someone with a horse pistol at point-blank range.
“And where have you learned to fence?”
“My father taught me, having been a swordsman in the service of the Czar. And then I had lessons in Italy when I was a youth.”
“With your pretty face, you’ll need all the lessoning you can get,” he said. “We’ll try a pass or two as a favor to the general here. It seems it would disturb him if you were to be scarred.” He walked over to a group of foils hung on the wall and selected one for each of us.
Michel gave me an encouraging smile, apparently entirely oblivious to the implications flying over his head. Sometimes, I thought, it’s like he just crawled out of a cabbage patch.
I took the foil Vincenzio offered and tried the balance. A bit battered, but a serviceable practice weapon, tipped with a nub of India rubber. It would bruise if it connected, but not really do much damage unless wielded with exceptional force. I stepped back, saluted, and sank into guard.
He pressed me almost at once. My footwork consisted mostly of retreat and endless riposte. He touched on my off shoulder in seconds. I went back to work, circling grimly. I knew I was outmatched, but I wouldn’t make this easy.
The next touch was a glancing one on the sword wrist, a disarm that didn’t quite work. Vincenzio nodded approvingly. “Better, my boy! That would be a pinking, but it wouldn’t stop you, not in a real fight. This would.”
He lunged. The third touch was an absolutely stinging blow to the back of my left hand. Even tipped, it broke the skin a little, a star-shaped red mark spreading.