It blinked.
She raised up and took two steps backward, a hand to her pounding chest. Surely she had imagined it.
The figure spoke in a deep, familiar voice. “I’m sorry, I just can’t maintain this position any longer.”
Marguerite tamped down a shriek. “What is this? Who are you?” She peered down again. “Darden?”
“I’m afraid so.”
“I don’t understand. Why are you here? In Dublin? After closing time in the wax exhibition? Pretending to be a wax figure, for heaven’s sake?”
“Would you believe it was all Madame Tussaud’s idea?”
“It was Marie’s idea for you to pose as a statue in an empty wax salon?”
“Well, put like that, it’s not quite as romantic as she promised me it would be.”
How had she gone from a pleasant, idyllic nap to facing down Darden Hastings, all in the space of an hour?
“How could this possibly be romantic?”
Darden explained that he had written to Madame Tussaud, seeking her assistance in wooing Marguerite back. He knew Marguerite would refuse his letters and he had to come up with a more creative way of seeing her.
“But how could you know I would reject your letters? You’ve never sent me one.”
“Marguerite, you made your feelings about me and the British government quite clear that day at Westminster. You repudiated the whole lot of us.”
“Oh. Yes, I suppose I did do that. But how did you come to be in Dublin?”
“Lord Howick gave me leave. Madame Tussaud wrote to me with her conviction that you weren’t happy in Dublin. She developed a plan for having me surprise you privately, before you could think to turn me away. And I believe she sent you off on some wild-goose errand to Portugal so she could have time to put the tableau together.”
Marguerite shook her head in wonder. “Unbelievable.”
“Are you angry with her? With us? I simply had to find a way to get you alone to talk to you one last time. I ask that you hear me out, and if you still hate me, well then, I will leave and I promise to never purposely cross your path ever again.”
He pulled out the fourth empty chair with his booted foot and patted the seat with his scarred left hand. His hand, the tableau, and the movement of his foot brought all of her time on Victory flooding back over her once again. His warm embraces, his powerful protection of her, his ridiculous sense of duty. Her knees felt like they would not support her much longer.
I love him. God help me, I do.
She nodded her head and sat silently.
They were seated a mere foot away from each other. He had the scent of cloves about him again, on his breath and in his hair.
He must carry them about for chewing.
Darden leaned toward her. “I hardly know where to begin. I wasn’t quite sure you’d even talk to me inside this rather preposterous setting of Madame Tussaud’s.”
“Marie has always had a talent for the theatrical. I never imagined she’d use it on me.”
“I suppose we never really quite know people the way we think we do. And perhaps you haven’t really known me. Not in the way you should.” Darden took her hands in his, and she could see relief in his eyes when she didn’t pull away.
“Quite simply, Marguerite, I love you. I have ever since I met you. Since that soirée at Edinburgh Castle where I behaved like a complete horse’s ass. I tried to keep it from Brax, because he always had an easy, fascinating appeal for women, and I figured that if someone of his charm made up his mind to have you, I was lost. But I suppose my heart was completely exposed and he sensed it. Being also very competitive, he decided he wanted you and would have you at all costs.”
“I was never his. Not for a moment.”
“But how could I know that? His presence always brought a smile to your face that I couldn’t seem to conjure up no matter how I tried.” He stroked the back of one of her hands with his fingers.
“On Victory, I was beside myself, between worry for you and my shipboard obligations. Plus, I knew that I was seeking a responsible position inside Pitt’s government, and I didn’t know if my life could accommodate you. I didn’t want to be a neglectful husband.
“Then when I realized Brax was up to something vile while still courting you, it took all of my own self-discipline to keep from thrashing him personally and leaving him in a sewer somewhere.”
“Darden Hastings, I hardly think self-discipline has ever been a difficulty for you.”
“It never was. Until I met you.” He reached up to push a tendril of hair behind her ear, then resumed his light caressing of her hand. “So tell me, Marguerite, what you think.”
“Honestly, Darden, I think you should simply stop talking.”
Marguerite moved to his lap and wrapped her arms around his neck, a better position for nuzzling him and feeling his arms around her. He obliged by wrapping her tightly in those arms and lowering his head to hers for a kiss. One completely uninterrupted by the sounds of battle or the anguish of torn loyalties. It was deep and all-consuming, a release of desire that had been straining against its chains for nearly two years.
Marguerite felt robbed of breath, but if she died of asphyxiation now, she could have considered her life well spent. But things weren’t finished between them yet. She broke away, but held her face close to his.
“Tell me, Captain,” she said in a whisper, “aren’t there things you wish to know about me before we go any further?”
“You mean, beyond the fact that you’re a rash, stubborn little waxworker who will never give me a moment’s peace the rest of my days?”
“Hmm, I guess there isn’t much to know beyond that.”
She saw that his eyes were twinkling with pleasure as she closed her own for another kiss.
They stayed locked together until some of the candles began sputtering out and their resultant smoke left an acrid smell in the air.
“I believe we have a signal to depart,” Darden said as he broke away.
Marguerite was reluctant to leave the tableau and everything it meant but agreed. She stood and gestured to Nelson.
“Do you think the admiral would approve?”
“I believe he would want to be present at the ceremony himself if he were here today.”
Together they blew out the remaining candles and made their way out of the exhibition together. At the entrance, Marguerite stopped and turned to Darden, taking his disfigured hand in her own and kissing it gently. “There’s just one more thing that remains unsaid.”
“Yes?” Darden’s voice radiated desire.
“I’ve loved you for what feels like an eternity. I think I may have even fallen a bit in love with you at Edinburgh Castle, even though you were quite impossibly rude to me when I met you. But for certain I loved you after you escorted me to take Lord Nelson’s life mask. And I was deeply, madly in love by the time I left Victory. I think that if I’d gone the rest of my life without you, I’d have gone deeply, madly insane.”
33
Nathaniel sipped tea from his terrace, which ran the length of his palatial new residence in Bengal. Polly sat by his side with her own cup. Her eyes still hadn’t lost their look of utter wonder at her greatly improved circumstances.
Circumstances had changed for Nathaniel, too. He’d managed to obtain employment with the East India Company, as a representative of their interests in Bengal. In a masterful move that combined his desire for glory with his new leisure pursuit, he was now an agent ensuring that opium collected here was transferred to one of several foreign intermediaries for smuggling into China. The Chinese had declared the opium trade illegal in their country.
Such a harmless, enjoyable pastime, declared unlawful. He shook his head. Ah well, all the more profit for him. Finally, a simple, secure way to earn vast sums of money in a country where he could be treated like a king.
He reached over and squeezed Polly’s ample thigh. She simpered and leaned over to give him a generous view of
her cleavage. Life would be uncomplicated and blissful from now on.
34
Charles Fox had died at the age of fifty-seven, on September 13, 1806, not eight months after the much younger William Pitt. Although he, too, was interred at Westminster Abbey, he was given a private funeral. Yet the crowds who turned out to pay their respects were just as large as those who came to see Pitt.
A postscript noted that Charles Grey, Viscount Howick, would be succeeding Fox as foreign secretary and leader of the House of Commons.
And so the political intrigues will continue uninterrupted.
Marguerite put down the newspaper and ticked the numbers off on one hand. “Nicholas, murdered. Philipsthal, also dead. Brax, a tragic and foolish death. Pitt and Fox, departed less than a year from one another. All men in close association with me, all expired before their times.” She looked up at Darden. “Do you realize what this probably means for you?”
He gently pulled her up from her chair and put an arm around her, brushing the back of his scarred hand across her cheek. “Well, thus far it has meant a naval promotion, an opportunity to serve the Crown gloriously, and marriage to the most willful woman God did ever create. So it probably means”—he laid the same hand across her stomach—”that we’ll be having a stubborn, mulish child who will have a natural desire for adventures on the high seas, no matter whether a boy or girl.”
“That’s not what I meant,” Marguerite protested, laughing.
“But it’s what I mean, Mrs. Hastings. The past is done, and has no bearing on our future. I’m sure Lord Nelson would agree.”
He covered her lips with his own, to silence any further objections. But Marguerite had already forgotten her theory of unlucky fate inside the warm circle containing Darden, their quickening child, and herself.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
Marie Grosholtz Tussaud is one of the most interesting figures of the French Revolution. She likely knew more famous people than anyone else of her time. According to her own autobiography—which admittedly was a bit self-serving—she was personally acquainted with Marie Antoinette, King Louis XVI, the king’s sister Madame Elisabeth, Robespierre, Napoleon, Josephine, and the painter Jacques-Louis David.
After fleeing France to try her fortunes in England, she traveled about Great Britain with her exhibition for nearly thirty years, her only help being in the form of her son Joseph (with Francis joining them in 1822).
There is a vast amount of conflicting information regarding Tussaud’s life. Her autobiography of her life during the Revolution details a woman who witnessed more up-close carnage while narrowly avoiding the blade herself than anyone else of the time. Some modern biographers doubt many of her claims, finding them unsubstantiated. As a novelist, I chose to concentrate on her life in England, where the historical record is sketchier and I could more liberally fill in details.
I have also rearranged certain events in Tussaud’s life to better fit the pacing of this story. For example, the terrifying sea voyage I describe that she takes in 1804 from Glasgow to Dublin, during which she lost much of her collection, was actually a trip from Liverpool to Dublin in 1820 to arrive in time for George IV’s coronation visit.
There are also minute details that the astute reader will pick up on as having been changed. For example, the Duchess of York did indeed have Madame Tussaud do a model, and extended her patronage to her, but the model was of a young child (the duchess was childless), and Tussaud never went to Oatlands Park to visit the duchess.
The oldest surviving figure in Tussaud’s collection is called The Sleeping Beauty, believed to be that of Louis XV’s last mistress, Madame du Barry. A breathing mechanism was first introduced into it in 1837, and would not have been present when Marguerite first arrived on Tussaud’s doorstep in 1803.
Madame Tussaud was not the first waxworker of fame. Waxworks have been around in various use since the ancients. The most famous of her predecessors was a Mrs. Salmon, who modeled and exhibited in the early eighteenth century. However, it was Tussaud who took the genre to a completely new level of entertainment. Going to Madame Tussaud’s exhibition was much like opening up a gossip magazine today. It provided a personal look at both the popular and infamous people of the day.
Charles Dickens appears to have been referring to Madame Tussaud’s exhibition in his references to Mrs. Jarley in The Old Curiosity Shop, an indicator of Tussaud’s vast popularity at the time.
Madame Tussaud married relatively late in life, at age thirty-four, to François Tussaud, an engineer eight years her junior. After bearing him two children, Joseph and Francis, she elected to travel to England with Joseph under Philipsthal’s “protection” to make her fortune. It was her intent to return to France “with a well-filled purse,” but François’s terrible management of their financial affairs—including the sale of her waxwork salon in Paris in 1808—created a rift in their marriage that would never be healed. Marie refused to forgive her husband and instead had Francis sent to her. Although she remained married to François until he died in 1848, she never communicated with him again after he betrayed her by abandoning the Paris salon.
Marie lived to the grand old age of eighty-nine. She remained active with the exhibition until just a couple of years before her death. From her deathbed she admonished her sons never to argue over the exhibition, and they never did.
Philippe Curtius was a medical doctor with an aversion to blood and gore, a most inconvenient phobia for his profession. He began making anatomical figures as part of his practice, then discovered that people enjoyed looking at them and were even willing to pay to do so. He came under the patronage of the Prince de Conti, and did indeed invite Marie and her mother to come and live with him in Paris. Curtius had an uncanny sense of the rapidly changing powers in France, and always managed to stay on the right side of the shifting political winds during the Revolution. Marie always referred to him as her “uncle,” but rumors have abounded that Curtius was actually her father. It does seem strange that Curtius would send to Salzburg from Paris for a mere housekeeper, and even more strange that he would mentor the housekeeper’s daughter. Marie certainly inherited a love of wax sculpting from him, and eventually surpassed her mentor in talent.
Paul de Philipsthal was a French showman well acquainted with Marie Tussaud when she lived in Paris. In fact, Dr. Curtius intervened on his behalf with Robespierre when the showman was jailed during the revolutionary frenzy under one of the typical trumped-up charges used by those with axes to grind. Philipsthal viewed her show as a way to add notoriety to his own Phantasmagoria show, and invited her to join him in England under the most dreadful contract conditions, which were ludicrously favorable to him. Marie detested the man and complained bitterly of him in her letters. John Philpot Curran was a famous Irish judge who visited Madame Tussaud’s Wax Exhibition in Dublin, although I placed their meeting in Glasgow. Upon hearing about her troubles with Philipsthal, he offered to represent her for free. When Philipsthal heard that Curran was conducting her affairs, he quickly came to terms and departed her life forever. It appears that Philipsthal later married, had children, and then died around 1830.
It’s rather difficult to study the events leading up to the five furious hours at Trafalgar and not fall just a little bit in love with Lord Horatio Nelson. He was a complex man, as most heroes prove to be. He was clearly a naval genius, and inspired deep loyalty in his men not only because of his fairness and kindness, but because of his infirmities. Many sailors had amputated limbs or missing eyes, so Nelson’s own gave him a connection to the average man. To have so great an admiral as Nelson continue on doggedly, despite his great injuries, further served as inspiration to them. Yet the hero was flawed. Although he was zealous, patriotic, and dutiful, he could at times be vain, insecure, and overly anxious for recognition. Even though Nelson plays a fictitious role in this story, I did try to use much of his own dialogue at Trafalgar from the time he was sequestered in the orlop after his injury until the moment he
died.
Lord Nelson is still well-deservedly revered in England today for his efforts in assuring English naval supremacy for the remainder of the war with the French, and there is a glorious tribute to him at Madame Tussaud’s in London.
Although both were married to other people at the time, Nelson and Emma Hamilton fell violently in love with each other. Emma’s husband at the time, Sir William Hamilton, was the ambassador to the Kingdom of Naples and the two of them became involved in helping Nelson, who arrived after the Battle of the Nile to prevent a French invasion of Egypt. So respectful was Sir William of Nelson that he turned a blind eye to what he surely realized was a torrid affair between his wife and the naval hero. They formed an interesting threesome, practically living together at Merton Place until Sir William’s death in 1803. Both Emma and Nelson were at his side when he died. Nelson’s wife, Fanny, was not quite so tolerant, although she had the better of it upon Nelson’s death. She had half his income, whereas nothing was settled on Emma and her daughter with Nelson, Horatia. Emma went deeply into debt and died from amoebic dysentery at the age of fifty-four in 1815.
Sir Thomas Hardy was Nelson’s flag captain and one of the few people tolerant of Nelson’s relationship with Emma Hamilton. Nelson trusted Hardy implicitly, and relied on the man’s quiet, unemotional, and dependable reserve. Hardy personally delivered Nelson’s last letter to Emma Hamilton. After Trafalgar, Captain Hardy received the equivalent of $100,000 of today’s currency in prize money, and nearly $250,000 in compensation from the government. He was also created a baronet. Hardy went on to more crowning achievements, becoming first naval lord at the Admiralty and reaching the rank of vice admiral of the blue. He died in 1839, at age seventy.
Vice Admiral Cuthbert Collingwood also profited well from Trafalgar. He was made a baron, and granted a pension of £2000 a year, equivalent to approximately $200,000 in today’s money. However, he was not able to enjoy his reward. He was continuously on board ship for nearly five years as he commanded a fleet involved in a continuing blockade of French and Spanish ships sheltering in various ports. The hardship of being constantly at sea gradually wore down his spirits and his health, and he died at sea in March 1810 at the age of sixty-two, having not seen his wife and children since before Trafalgar. He did give Lieutenant John Richards Lapenotière the privilege of rushing back to England aboard HMS Pickle to deliver the news about Trafalgar as a debt of honor. Lapenotière was rewarded by the Admiralty Board with £500 and promotion to commander.
A Royal Likeness Page 46