Only the day before, 22 March 1812, at the Place du Carousel, Polish regiments fresh from Spain had marched in review for the mounted emperor. Napoléon’s new empress, Maria Louise of Austria, and other pretty noblewomen stood watching from a balcony. He had divorced Josephine in favor of a political marriage and hopes of a son. Gossip in Paris favored no other subject. His Polish mistress, Maria Walewska, remained in Paris—in seclusion. Paweł heard it whispered that she was none too happy about her current status.
The legions had stood at attention then for a long time. Paweł wondered how many soldiers held it against Napoléon that for the last two years he had left Spain to his subordinates, to desultory effects. He rode up and down now, asking a question here, tossing a compliment there—the sparkle in his gray eyes ultimately eliciting from the men a prideful enthusiasm few other leaders could inspire. “I applaud you all!” the emperor called out. “You are most fit to march. I can scarcely believe you have waged such a fine campaign against Spain! Bravo!”
“A fine campaign, indeed,” Paweł mumbled to himself. Nonetheless, the emperor went on, at no little length, working his magic on the troops. He was a wizard that way. Somehow—without any direct assertion from Napoléon—Polish soldiers had gotten it into their heads that a war with Aleksandr in the East presaged a complete resurrection of the Old Poland. And so, in mighty voices that came from deep within themselves, the regiments called out “Vive l’Empereur!” Napoléon seemed quite pleased, but in the end, few decorations were handed out for the risks and sacrifices of nearly four years.
Instead the men were pronounced fit for travel and the departure date was moved up, cutting short the troops’ well-deserved leave in Paris.
Anna opened her eyes. She could hear Jan across the room, probably searching in the dark for his boots. “Jan?”
“Did I wake you? I’m sorry.”
“Come here,” she said. She didn’t tell him that she lay awake most mornings before he went out.
He came over and stood by the bed. “Go back to sleep.”
Anna reached up, took his hand, and drew him closer. “Stay with me a few minutes.”
He smiled impetuously. “Ah, you’re wishing a morning tumble?”
“No, nothing like that!”
“Too bad. There are worse ways to start the day!” He spoke with a mock naughtiness.
“Come,” Anna said.
Jan lay down next to her atop the counterpane, bootless but fully clothed. His arm went around her neck, and he drew her to him. “There, is that good?”
“Yes.”
“You wish to talk?”
“Yes.”
A lull ensued.
“You wish me to start?” he asked.
“No, it’s just that, well, Jan, I don’t always feel a closeness between us.”
“I’m holding you, Anna. I’m here. And last night—”
“I know that. It’s not just that kind of closeness I mean. It seems like married people should talk about their feelings more. And fears. There should be more sharing. Oh, we have passion, but I long for more.” There! She had said it. Would he understand? Jan was quiet for what seemed a long time. Anna waited. She would say nothing that would make for a lighthearted comment.
“I have my fears,” he said at last. “I’m one who acts, though, Anna. You know that. And you must know my feelings.”
“I do, Jan, but often I can’t read you.”
“Read me—what, like a book?”
Anna smiled. “A good book—but sometimes—a mystery. Sometimes it is hard to understand you.”
“I love you. I tell you so, do I not?”
“You do.’
“Perhaps I’m a simpler soul than you think. Perhaps I’m not the type of husband you imagined when you were a girl.”
“You are more than I imagined, Jan. Much more.”
Jan turned on his side, propping his head up with one arm as he peered down at her. The room was slowly beginning to fill with light now. Anna studied her husband. His face had filled out again after his ordeal with the Cossacks. Despite a limp that was more pronounced in the cold weather, his health and handsomeness had come back to the extent that she could at least picture him so many years before, lying in the forest leaves, professing for the first time his love for her. The intervening years were not all happy years, but they were gone, the bad with the good. How very quickly!
“I love you, Ania,” he said, as if he had read her mind. As if he, too, had traveled back to that autumnal day in Halicz. “I’m sorry if it seems that I close you out.”
“You do.”
“You are my heart, Ania, my heart.—And our worries are the same, no? Day to day life. The boys and Basia—and what kind of a Poland is to be left them.”
“They are the future,” Anna conceded.
Jan kissed her now, lightly. “Don’t be too quick to make us the past,” he quipped.
“Always a joke,” she replied.
As if to refute her gentle accusation, he kissed now with a passion that caught flame in them both, his hand moving over her. Anna had wanted to speak of his lost property, of the new war on the horizon, of their sons’ roles in the military. But she felt her body responding to his, felt her mind blurring, becoming a world of colors, not thoughts. After a time, as they made love, his mouth on hers, she opened her eyes. She was startled to find that his cobalt blue eyes were open, too, speaking to her, loving her.
Later, after he had gone out, Anna lay wondering at her chances for another child. She was thirty-eight but not past bearing time. Her courses still came like clockwork. Their children were growing fast, and sometimes she thought she would relish having another little one in the house. Anusia Potocka had just had a little boy, and she envied her. Other times, however, she wondered if she could manage it, for she sometimes seemed to be the one in need of nurturing and protection.
Anna often felt at loose ends these days. Her little announcement four years earlier, when Jan came back from Gdańsk, that her family was returning to Sochaczew had come to fruition only in part. The boys had not come with them. The school commandant flatly refused to dismiss Tadeusz. The Brotherhood had invested too much in him. As unlikely as it was that a kingship lay in his future, she was told, they were keeping their options open. They would have allowed Jan Michał to come home, but Anna knew it would break his heart—he had come to love soldiering. And Anna wanted him near Tadeusz.
Jan, who had learned about the Brotherhood’s machinations for the first time, took the news calmly, placing no faith in its happening—and after visiting with the boys, voiced no objections to a soldier’s life for Tadek and Jan Michał. It was an honorable calling, he told Anna, one on which both boys had already set their hearts. Anna realized it was not so strange a reaction, coming as it did from a man with a soldier’s heart.
As for Barbara, she had come home to Sochaczew with Jan and Anna, but she was now in Warsaw, pursuing her education at the Convent of Our Lady of the Assumption. It was her second year there. On her shorter vacations, she often stayed with Izabel, who was in her third year at the convent school. Anna worried about Zofia’s parentage, but all evidence seemed to indicate that her cousin was proving a good influence, and that Izabel—with the help of the nuns—was developing into a true gentlewoman and a good friend to Barbara.
Before Anna and Jan left Warsaw for Sochaczew, they learned just how duplicitous and evil Lord Doliński had been. Paweł remembered him as the Prussian spy within the Brotherhood. And Anna watched as Jan’s pallid face became inflamed when she spoke of the threat he had been to her spirit—and person. But it was her turn to be surprised—and angry—when Jan detailed how, in order to hold at bay the Prussians’ interest in Anna’s estate, he had been blackmailing Jan for years, bleeding his inheritance.
When all of Doliński’s masks had been removed, Zofia’s dark eyes turned on Anna with concern, as if to say, Are you going to tell? Talk did turn to Doliński’s death then—and to th
e identity of his accomplice. For a moment, Anna wanted to say that it was she who had killed Doliński and Michał who killed the murderer of his grandfather. But Zofia, perhaps seeing her temptation, spoke out then about the comeuppance the two criminals had gotten. It was enough to give Anna pause—and she kept her silence.
Maybe she should have revealed everything at the time, she thought now, as a way of keeping the boys safe. If they had suffered a bit in the public revelation, they would at least have been removed from the school—no longer cadets, no longer fodder that could fuel still another of Napoléon’s campaigns coming this way. She would have confessed, too, had it not been for Zofia and the threats of the school commandant, who wanted no such scandal. Oh, she knew the talk would not have mattered much to the boys. But having to leave school, being forced to give up the thought of soldiering for Poland—that would have! They would never have forgiven her.
For years she regretted keeping the secret from Jan.
The thought that war was once again on the horizon made her tremble. Where was her old confidence? Her nerve? Anna remembered the extent she had gone to prior to the last—and final—Partition of Poland. With the capital occupied by Russians, she had hosted numberless meetings of patriots in the Grońska household, putting everyone at risk. She had even the gall to impersonate Zofia in order to warn the king himself of an insurrection within Warsaw. And when Catherine sent her most merciless general to avenge the rebellion, the army descending on Praga, slaying every citizen in their path, Anna had driven a carriage to Warsaw across the burning bridge from Praga.
Anna still wanted a free and independent Poland, as much as ever. But now with talk of yet another war, she felt fear rising up within her, taking a stranglehold. She could think only of her husband and her children. Not a day went by that she didn’t imagine the sounds of soldiers on the march, sometimes from the west, sometimes the east, everywhere the tramp of feet.
She recalled Zofia’s telling her that nations were merely boundaries that shifted with time, whimsy, and war. Perhaps there was truth in that. She remembered, too, something her Aunt Stella had told her once: “Anna, before there are countries, there are families.”
At mid-morning, Jan took a rest, sitting down on a fallen tree. He had taken to his old habit of chopping wood on the edge of the estate, where no one would witness the master of the estate at such a servile task. It was cold, made more so by a frigid March wind that whipped off the as yet unsown wheat field, but his activity had driven up his body heat so that the chill felt exhilarating. He looked to the east, watching the sun continue its ascendancy.
He knew he had given little satisfaction—other than the physical—to Anna. Instead of opening up more fully to her, he had played the love-making card. Why? What would he have told her? That he felt an overwhelming sense of unease in the life he was leading in Sochaczew. He would not say unhappiness. No, he loved Anna as much as ever—more!—but he felt as if he were going through the motions of another man’s life.
He had made his choices, after all. He had asked to be released from the legion. He would follow Napoléon no longer—no longer looking for promises between the lines of his speeches. Kościuszko had long ago given up on the little Corsican.
Not that Poland had been completely forgotten. With the peace Napoléon had made with Aleksandr in 1807 had come the Duchy of Warsaw. The national flag was unfurled once again, and Prince Poniatowski—who most Poles thought should have been named king—was made Commander of the Army. Napoléon named the King and Queen of Saxony Duke and Duchess of the new duchy. They were benign in their old age, but that they were non-Poles nevertheless stung. It was at least a small blessing that the duchy did not go to French Marshall Joaquim Murat, who had eyeglassed it, or one of the Bonaparte brothers, who were picking up pieces of Europe as if they were chips in a game of cards.
The duchy government consisted of a council of seven ministers and a president. Knowing his past support of Kościuszko and the Constitution, several ministers beseeched Jan to take a position in the government. Jan declined because it was evident to him early on that the council operated only with the authority of a kind of proconsul—a Frenchman, of course. And if a truly serious or controversial case arose, its resolution fell into the hands of no one other than Napoléon Bonaparte himself. The Duchy of Warsaw was a puppet government, not the independent nation Jan had dreamt of.
Still, his hopes had been raised less than two years after the duchy was formed. Assuming that Napoléon would be overextended with his troops in Spain and that the French people had lost the taste for perpetual war, Austria had declared a war of revenge on France. Called upon by Napoléon, Poniatowski and his army of sixty thousand did their part magnificently, counterattacking and reclaiming key elements of the old kingdom: the area of Kraków as well as Galicia. For a time it looked as if the Stelnicki town house in Kraków and the Stelnicki and Groński estates in Galicia would be returned—but when Austria sued for peace, Napoléon ceded most of it back.
Time and again, Napoléon broke Poland’s heart. And Jan’s. Undeterred, Prince Poniatowski continued on under the French aegis. Paweł, too, Jan’s greatest friend, fighting there in Spain for years at a time. Why? For what?
Jan’s thoughts came back to Anna. She had learned at last of Doliński’s bribes to keep her estate from falling into the hands of a Prussian owner. She had paled at the news, cursing the man anew. While she carried no guilt for the death of the man who would have murdered Tadeusz, she seemed nonetheless bolstered by his just end. Jan now knew that she could cope with such truths—and yet, he had kept from her an extortion more recent than Doliński’s: Once the duchy had been formed, France had demanded an exorbitant amount to keep claim to her own family property. Jan had quietly paid it, using much of own his family fortune.
So there was this secret and his worries and disappointments that he kept from her. He did it to protect her, to shield her—and his little family. He did it consciously. And he prayed for the day when he could be to her the kind of husband she longed for.
He looked up and saw coming into the clearing the peasant boy who made use of the wood Jan chopped. Hardly a boy any longer. Nearly a man, Jan thought, as he drew closer. Nearly a man, seeing to the needs of his family.
As the boy waved, the noon sun interfered, splashing spangles of light into Jan’s eyes. And for a moment Jan imagined him in the blue and crimson uniform of an infantryman. Was it a presentiment? Was this the future of every young Pole?
Paweł reached Poznań in early June. It was here that the majority of the troops awaited Napoléon. Paweł experienced the sharpest sense of déjà vu, for all the excitement, triumphal arches, fireworks that had welcomed Napoléon in 1806 welcomed him anew in 1812. The emperor arrived in the evening and could only have been pleased by a lighted crown of laurels displayed on the church clock tower, its inscription reading “Napoléoni Magno Caesar et Victori!” The citizens and new conscripts, it seemed, placed their faith afresh in the emperor. Of the soldiers, however, there were some of the Old Guard—those veterans that had been there in 1806—who cheered now with less enthusiasm. They were here because they were soldiers and knew no other life. If Jan were here, Paweł knew, he would find his own comfort among this dissembling minority.
As for himself, Paweł had always been an optimist, one who saw the best in people and discounted their flaws. He would be the first to admit he had worked up no lasting immunity to the emperor’s charismatic ways.
Both Jan Michał and Tadeusz were called up to service. As Young Guards in the cavalry, they were assigned to Prince Poniatowski’s Warsaw contingent, the Fifth Corps.
In the days prior to their departure, Anna could not bring herself to talk to Jan about their marching orders. They were to go to Poznań. Now, instead of worrying about her husband away at war, she would have two sons placed in imminent danger. War had become a certainty, and Napoléon’s appreciation for the prowess of the Polish soldier was such that he o
ften called on them first. Like other boys of their class, Michał and Tadek had been educated to appreciate—no, to love—honor, bravery, and the glory of the battlefield. They longed for it. All for the cause of a free and independent Poland.
It was no surprise to her, either, that Jan did not speak on the subject. He remained morosely silent. Anna knew that he—like Kościuszko—placed no trust in Napoléon. But who else could they trust? Not Russia. Nor Austria. Nor Prussia. And if the good Prince Pepe, as Prince Poniatowski was called, threw in with the Corsican—they told each other—perhaps some good would come of it. The Duchy of Warsaw, flawed as it was in so many ways, was something, anyway.
And so Anna and Jan stood, shoulder to shoulder and dry-eyed in the Warsaw Square, watching the presentation of the colors. This was a more abbreviated ceremony than that she had witnessed in 1806, and this time the attendees were not invited to the dais to hammer symbolic nails into the staffs. Prince Poniatowski and a few dignitaries carried out that tradition. Anna thought it just as well. She hadn’t the heart to do it.
Old soldiers spoke in full-throated tones of their valor and deeds well done in past battles won and lost. And it seemed that hovering over the square were the spirits of the many thousands who had died fighting in the Partition years and in the host of wars waged by Napoléon. Now a new generation of Poles had stepped up, mere children really, some with cheeks as soft and smooth as peaches. Children, Anna thought. Children fired with the ardor of war and killing. Her children.
In the midst of the prince’s speech, Anna glanced up at the figure atop Zygmunt’s column. Suddenly, she was five again, visiting Warsaw for the first time with her father. Craning her neck, she had been awed by the sight. The bronze figure of the long-dead king held a cross in one hand, a sword in the other—like a warrior saint. He had been the one, her father told her, who had moved the capital from Kraków to Warsaw. Even then she had precociously wondered at the strange juxtaposition of the symbolic cross and sword. But some years later, while Jan risked his life in the army and she worked behind the scenes for Kościuszko and the Patriotic Party, she would often quote the proverb: “Sometimes it takes a sword to bring the peace.”
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