Jo Graham - [Numinous World 05]

by The Emperor's Agent (epub)

  “No, Michel.” The tears choked me and I could say no more.

  “Would I be the man you think I am if I used her the way your husband used you?”

  “No, Michel.” I couldn’t see. I reached for him, and his naked arms went around me, pulling me against his shoulder.

  He was crying too. “I almost hope she refuses. But if she doesn’t, I can’t do this, don’t you see, Elza? I have to honestly try to make her happy. I have to try to keep my promises.”

  “You don’t love her,” I sobbed. “You don’t love her the same way.”

  “No. And I never will. But perhaps in time I can come to care about her. I can respect her and be her husband, even if I’m never going to love her this way.” He bent his face against mine, and I felt his tears on my forehead.

  “I hate you,” I said. “God, Michel, how I hate you!”

  “You should,” he said, holding me tighter.

  “All your pious cant about honor and fidelity. How can that be more important than me?”

  He touched my face with his fingertips. “Elza, aren’t some things more important? Shouldn’t we at least try to do what’s right?”

  “You fucking bourgeois from fucking Saar Louis.” I buried my face in his shoulder. “I will hate you every day of my life. With your stupid Paladin of Charlemagne….” I couldn’t talk any more. I just held onto him and cried.

  “Elza, I can’t do it,” he whispered. “I can’t take vows and make a mockery of them. I just can’t do it.”

  “I know you can’t,” I said. “I know.” He would not do to someone else what Jan had done to me. He would not marry her and be nothing but a stern taskmaster, an absentee owner she would try to please in vain. He knew the damage it did. He knew my scars.

  “I’m not asking you to forgive me,” he said.

  “I won’t forgive you. I never will,” I said. “Never, as long as I live.”

  “I’ll miss you every day of my life,” he said, and he was crying as hard as I was.

  “You have no right,” I said. “You have no right to miss me when it’s your fault. You have no right to say you love me or ever do anything for me again. I hate you. I hate you more than I hated Moreau. Can’t you see that this is worse?”

  “Worse than throwing you out in the street? Elza, I would never do that. I would never hit you or….”

  I clenched my fist against his chest. “You have no idea what hurt really is. You have no idea. I would rather you beat me till I shitted than this. If you beat me I would forgive you.”

  “I wouldn’t beat you,” he said. “Elza. God. I don’t know.”

  “I wish you would,” I said. “I wish you would do something so awful you would feel damned for the rest of your life and then you would give up on doing the right thing and just be as evil as you can be, just rip and tear and take what you want out of life and not care about anything else.”

  “If you wanted a man like that there are plenty of them,” he said, his voice low and shaking. “Elza, I thought you wanted more. Something finer. I thought you believed.”

  “You made me believe,” I whispered. “All the grace I have ever known is you.”

  He raised my chin, desperately, urgently, looking into my eyes. “Elza, I don’t deserve that kind of love. I’m just a man. I’m not redemption. I don’t make you worthy. Your worth is in you. You are fine and brave and honorable and good. You’re as strong as a man and twice as brave as most young soldiers, clever and sharp and quick on your feet, doing whatever needs to be done. You’re a survivor and a scrounger and the best I’ve ever known.”

  “And a woman,” I snarled. “If I were your eromenos, if I were your lover, I would have a future when you’re done with me. But I’m stuck in this female body and there is nothing I can do. I can’t swear my sword to Bonaparte and win some oak leaves of my own. If I could, don’t you think I would? I would be better than Corbineau, better than Auguste Thibault. I would be damn good.”

  “And God help me, I would love you anyway,” he said, ducking his head.

  “You would. And it would be your problem, not mine,” I said. I put my face against his shoulder. “I would do it anyway, and you would go on about God and law.”

  “Probably,” he said with a wry smile. “I would fuck it up like I’ve fucked up this.”

  I ran my hand up his stubbled face. “Michel, you are the biggest ass in the world.”

  “I know,” he said, lifting his head and blinking. “I don’t know what else to do. Jilt Aglae?”

  “And end your career?” I said. “Michel, this has gone too far. If you had ignored her in the first place, you might have gotten by with that. But now you’re in too deep and if you do that you’ll go back to Saar Louis on half pay. It will be the end of all your ambitions. And what would you do then? Take me with you so I could be a farm wife in the Saar for the rest of my life? I would hate that as much as you would. And we would hate each other and blame each other for the ruin of our ambitions.”

  “It would be honest and right.”

  “Michel, we would hate each other!” I pushed him back on the bed, put my head down on his shoulder. I felt shaken and tired.

  “What do you want?” he asked, his arm stealing around me.

  “To go with you wherever you go,” I said. “To be your squire as I was in Bavaria. To fight for my friends and my lord and my liberty.” I closed my eyes, but the tears still squeezed out. “To be as much as I can, as long as I can, and die well at the end.”

  I knew it would make him cry, and it did. “Elza,” he said, and pulled me close. “You don’t belong in this age of the world.”

  I took a deep breath. “I will say goodbye,” I said. “I will say goodbye to you. And I will miss you, and I will go on living and I will think of you sometimes, and eventually I will love someone else.” My heart felt curiously empty, as though all the fear had run out of me. I would lose him, and I would go on. I had done it before, and I would do it again.

  He pressed his lips to my collarbone. “Goodbye,” he whispered. “Oh my love, goodbye.”

  “But not tonight,” I said. “Michel, it’s not time yet.” I drew him tighter against me. “Not yet.”

  “Not yet,” he said.

  After that, we were very gentle with one another. Our days had a sweetness as they had in the beginning, the fragile, tentative peace that comes from knowing that something is ending. With Moreau, I had not seen the season turning, had not savored the days. This time I knew. I knew exactly how many days we had left.

  Mademoiselle Auguié said yes. The wedding was planned for 17 Thermidor, the height of the summer, with the signing of the marriage contract seven days earlier. The wedding would be at the Chateau of Grignon, where her father lived retired. Michel would leave Paris to go out to Grignon the day before the contract was signed.

  I saw the contract. He did not hide any of his business from me. He left it on the table so I could read it if I wished, the contract and another document. The contract stipulated Aglae’s dowry, and said that Michel brought to the marriage the estate of La Petite Malgrange, where his father and sister lived, and 12,000 francs in cash. I raised my eyebrows. Even given that we had spent part of the 10,000 francs from Moreau, he had been on full pay this year. There ought to be more in the bank than that. In fact, I was sure there was more. 12,000 francs was a pitiful amount for the bridegroom to bring to this marriage, given the income he should have.

  I opened the other document. It was a draft for 12,000 francs made to me.

  I put it down on the table and closed my eyes. Half of what he had. More than a fair settlement on a mistress. More than the dowry of a girl of good family. More than Moreau thought his price. Enough to live on for five years if I were careful.

  I had never taken money from him like that.

  I heard his step before I decided what to say. He knew that I had seen.

  “Elza?”

  I turned around. “I’ll take it of course,” I sa
id, and my voice was brisker than I felt. “I’d be a fool not to. It’s more than Moreau thought you were worth.”

  “I don’t want you to need anything,” he said. He did not look at me. “I don’t want you to have to do anything you don’t want to. I can give you your independence, at least.”

  “Yes,” I said. I would not start crying again. I would not.

  “We always shared everything,” he said. “Everything we had.” He walked over to the window, pulling back the heavy blue velvet drapes. I hoped he wouldn’t start crying again.

  “Even when it was just a couple of blankets,” I said, thinking back to the nights before Hohenlinden.

  “Even when it was a bowl of soup.” He bent his head. I couldn’t see his face. “It’s not your price, Elza. It’s half of what I have.”

  “I know,” I said.

  He had packed his things. The apartment was mine. I would not need to move. Nothing would be thrown in the street. After the wedding he would stay with the bride’s family until they could buy a suitable house in Paris. I had no doubt that the dowry would buy an excellent house.

  His wedding gift to her was a parure of cameos, very fine, the necklace strung on a thin chain in the newest and most fashionable style. The note was gallant enough.

  These tokens from me to you are not worth very much. I cannot offer you pearls and diamonds because according to my beliefs the sword should be used to win glory, not wealth. May these adorn your beauty and may you take joy in them.

  “Very pretty,” I said. They were nice but not lavish. And how should they be, with an outlay of 12,000 francs to his mistress, some wicked part of my mind whispered. Perhaps she would like them all the better for their classical simplicity and style. Perhaps she would prefer them to diamonds. I had no idea what her tastes were. Nor, I suspected, did he.

  Our last night together we dined at home, for fear that we would both start weeping in a restaurant. We had the best of everything, our favorite foods, our favorite wines.

  I lifted my glass to him. “As though you were being shot in the morning,” I said, trying to find my wit.

  “If I were being shot in the morning I should want nothing more than you with me the night before,” Michel said. He touched his glass to mine. “Farewell, my dear one whom I have met too late.”

  “Don’t,” I said. “Let’s not start crying again.” I could tell that I would if he said one more word. “Not until after we’ve made love. I want it to be perfect. I want it to be something we’ll remember.”

  “Of course,” he said.

  In the end, this too was sweet, as though we were drowning in the melancholy, warm and enveloping without an edge to it. It suited our mood. Afterwards, we lay together in the darkness, whispering and caressing, saying farewell a thousand times. If there were recriminations, they were for later. I could hate him another day. I told myself that I would. I would hate him when it didn’t matter.

  In the morning I dressed early. I would not say goodbye in a dressing gown, like some tragic heroine in a novel. He sent his bags down to the carriage, a bridegroom with dark circles under his eyes on his way to his father in law’s house. It would take some little time to get out to Versailles. Perhaps he would be himself by then.

  When the last bag had gone down he came back.

  I stood facing him, trying to memorize everything so that I would remember. His hair was already damp with sweat, even this early in the day. He had a way of standing just so, legs slightly apart, as though he feared the floor would move.

  He handed me his watch, the one his mother had given him when he was made an officer. “We may never see each other again. I don’t know. But I will never cease to think of you as my dearest friend, whatever may come.” He looked away, and then we both started crying again.

  “I keep trying not to do this,” I said, taking the watch and chain and holding them against me. “You’ve worn it, and it has your name engraved on it. I wish it weren’t pointing to an hour of eternal farewell. I’m sorry, Michel. I can’t stop.”

  “I can’t either,” he said. His mouth twitched. “You’d think we would have played the whole scene by now.”

  I started laughing through my tears. “We’re doing it again, aren’t we?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Being awful.”

  He put his arms around me and I leaned up into his embrace. “We could be awful one more time.”

  “We could,” I said, and kissed him.

  We did not say goodbye. He raised his hand to me, and took his hat under his arm and went off down the stairs. Michel did not look back, and I did not call after him. I went inside and closed the door. I did not go to the window to watch the carriage leave. I was worn out with tears.

  I went and sat in the chair beside the fireplace. The apartment was quiet.

  “Well,” I said aloud. “What’s next?”

  The Lodge

  I woke at noon, thirsty, hung over, and embarrassed to death. I shook the cobwebs from my brain, drank some water from the pitcher, and resolved to get back to Boulogne before anything else happened. I looked about for something with which to write a note.

  Michel's desk was in the room next door, his old leather map case spread on a table. And right beside it, in plain sight beside the inkwell, a cipher key.

  I took a deep breath. Anyone who walked in would not even have to look for it.

  I thought about taking it, but instead tore off a piece of paper and wrote a note to leave on his bed: Thank you. E.

  It was brief and to the point, but I could not think what else to say. I dressed and slipped out without anyone noticing at all.

  As I hurried back along the cliffs it was beginning to get really warm. I loosened my cravat, and turned my face up to the sun. A glorious day, really, the tenth of Messidor in the Year 13. Or June 29, 1805, if one preferred. I did not see Lion offshore. Presumably even she must back off sometime, if for no other reason than to take on water from a tender. Or perhaps a ship had been sighted that I could not see from the cliffs. Our fleet was out, free on the high seas, trying to clear the channel of the likes of Lion while their Admiral Nelson tried to come to grips with us first. I should know nothing of that, except when at last weeks belated a bulletin came. The semaphores that brought the news so quickly on land, flashing signals over hundreds of kilometers in a few hours, did not exist on the sea. We should have to wait for a ship to bring the news, whether of victory or defeat.

  By the time I reached Boulogne I was quite thirsty and decidedly hungry, so I found lunch in a café not far from the fortress before braving my landlady. I could see the main gates from where I was, the constant stream of couriers and soldiers coming in and out, mixed with townspeople, farmers coming to and from the markets, fishermen, and the unmistakable soldiers' families, women in cotton and straw bonnets, children running back and forth shouting. It was high summer, and I assumed a school holiday. Since we now had the ecoles populaires, most young children would be in school unless they were the children of farmers, who of course would be working at this time of year.

  It startled me to hear the church bells ring. I had not realized it was Sunday. It had been a few years since the Concordat between Emperor and Pope had allowed the Church back into France, but I was still unused to it. A horde of little girls in white dresses, driven by their mothers like so many goslings, ran giggling and laughing up the street toward the church.

  I had never had a daughter. I wondered what it would be, to have a child who loved me, a little girl who would put her arms around my neck and her face against my cheek. My sons had not, but then they were boys, and had been left to their nurses too often. Francis would be nearly eleven now, I thought, and his brother fourteen. They would not be running in a gaggle, but turning into young men, those years behind them forever. If there was sweetness in that life, it was lost to me.

  From the looks of some of the officers arriving now, I thought that perhaps the Battle of Cunaxa had be
en brief. Some of them looked still caught in intense technical discussion. Perhaps it hadn't taken latter day Xenophon too long to be overwhelmed.

  I got up and paid my tab, then walked the few short blocks to my lodging.

  I had barely opened the front door when the landlady descended in a whirl. "You! What are you doing here?"

  "I'm here to see Madame St. Elme," I said, altogether too conscious of my stale clothes. "I'm her brother, Charles van Aylde."

  "I don't care if you're King Solomon!" the landlady shrieked. "You're that drunkard pounding on the door last night. And you are not going up unless your purported sister comes down to meet you."

  "She can't do that," I began.

  "Then you are not going anywhere. Out of this house!" She hustled me toward the door. "I do not want to call for Jerome to put you out, but I shall if you set foot in here again!"

  Out in the street I paused, for once completely flummoxed. Madame St. Elme could hardly come out if I couldn't go in! It was beyond irritating. Surely male spies didn't have this sort of trouble.

  Well, I supposed they did. Were I really a gentleman I would not be getting in either.

  Cautiously, I went around the side of the house. There was my bedroom window on the second floor, the window open in the warm summer air. If I could get up there, I could get in the window, change clothes, and reappear as Madame St. Elme. But I would need a tall person to help me….

  Providence provides, I thought. Coming along the street from the gate, a book open in one hand, was the young brigadier Corbineau had introduced me to, Reille, the one who hated Fouché. And he was quite tall. Also, this would give me an excuse to make his acquaintance.

  I rushed out and accosted him. "General Reille, have you a moment?"

  He did not recognize me, it was clear, as he had met me in women's clothes. "I'm sorry, sir. You have the advantage of me," he said, stuffing the book into an inner pocket.