It was the Jack of hearts that caught me out.
When I lost, I thought he would force me home and that would be an end to it, but instead he kept me waiting three days and then sent a message for me to meet him.
He was with his friend when I arrived and an officer of high rank, a Frenchman whom I discovered to be General Murat.
This officer looked me up and down in my woman’s clothes then asked me to change into my easy disguise. He was all admiration and, turning from me, withdrew a large bag from within his effects and placed it on the table between himself and my husband.
‘This is the price we agreed then,’ he said.
And my husband, his fingers trembling, counted it out.
He had sold me.
I was to join the army, to join the Generals for their pleasure.
It was, Murat assured me, quite an honour.
They didn’t give me enough time to collect my heart, only my luggage, but I’m grateful to them for that; this is no place for a heart.
She was silent. Patrick and I, who had not uttered a word nor moved at all save to shield our scorching feet, felt unable to speak. It was she who broke the silence again.
‘Pass me that evil spirit, a story deserves a reward.’
She seemed carefree and the shadows that had crossed her face throughout her story had lifted, but I felt my own just beginning.
She would never love me.
I had found her too late.
I wanted to ask her more about her watery city that is never the same, to see her eyes light up for love of something if not for love of me, but she was already spreading her furs and settling to sleep. Cautiously, I put my hand to her face and she smiled, reading my thoughts.
‘When we get through this snow, I’ll take you to the city of disguises and you’ll find one that suits you.’
Another one. I’m already in disguise in these soldiers’ clothes.
I want to go home.
During the night, while we slept, the snows began again. We couldn’t push open the door in the morning, not Patrick nor I nor the three of us together. We had to break down the wood where it had splintered and because I am still skinny, I was the one bundled face first into a snowdrift banked taller than a man.
With my hands I began scooping away that deadly heady stuff that tempts me to plunge in and never bother to come out. Snow doesn’t look cold, it doesn’t look as though it has any temperature at all. And when it falls and you catch those pieces of nothing in your hands, it seems so unlikely that they could hurt anyone. Seems so unlikely that simple multiplication can make such a difference.
Perhaps not. Even Bonaparte was beginning to learn that numbers count. In this vast country there are miles and men and snowflakes beyond our resources.
I took off my gloves to keep them dry and watched my hands alter from red to white to beautiful sea blue where the veins rear up almost purple, almost the colour of anemones. I could feel my lungs beginning to freeze.
At home, on the farm, the frost at midnight brightens the ground and hardens the stars. The cold there slashes you like a whip, but it is never so cold that you feel yourself freezing from the inside. That the air you breathe is seizing the fluids and mists and turning them into lakes of ice. When I drew breath I felt as though I were being embalmed.
It took me most of the morning to clear away the snow enough to open the door. We left with gunpowder and very little food and tried to go on tracing our way towards Poland, or the Duchy of Warsaw as Napoleon had designated it. Our plan was to skirt along the borders, then down through Austria, across the Danube, heading for Venice or Trieste if the ports were blocked. A journey of some 1,300 miles.
Villanelle was skilful with the compass and map; she said it was one of the advantages of sleeping with Generals.
Progress was slower than usual for us thanks to the snowdrifts, and we might have died less than two weeks after we’d set out if it hadn’t been for a detour we were forced to make that led us to a cluster of houses away from the spread of our armies. When we saw the smoke rising in the distance we thought it was another desolate sacrifice, but Patrick swore he could see rooftops, not shells, and we had to trust that it was not the evil spirit guiding us. If it was a burning village, troops would be close at hand.
On Villanelle’s advice, we pretended to be Poles. She spoke the language as well as Russian, and explained to the suspicious villagers that we had been captured by the French for service but had murdered our guards and escaped. Hence the uniforms, stolen to avoid detection. When the Russian peasants heard we had murdered some Frenchmen, their faces were alive with joy, and they hurried us indoors with promises of food and shelter. From them, through Villanelle’s interpretation, we learned how little of the country had been spared, how comprehensive had been the burnings. Their own homes had escaped because they were sufficiently remote and mainly because a Russian high ranker was in love with the daughter of the goatherd. An odd story of a chance seduction that had excited his heart as well as his imagination. This Russian had promised to spare the village and re-routed his troops accordingly, so that when we French followed we too had gone another way.
Love it seems can survive even a war and a zero winter. Like the snow-raspberries, our host explained, love is like that, and he told us how these flimsy delicacies appear always in February, whatever the weather, whatever the prospects. No one knows why, when pines are withered at the roots and rough sheep have to be kept indoors, these impossible hot-house things still grow.
The goatherd’s daughter was something of a celebrity.
Villanelle had pretended she and I were married and we were put to sleep in the same bed, while poor Patrick had to share with their son, who was an amiable idiot. On the second morning we heard cries coming from Patrick’s loft and found him pinned on his back by the son, who was the size of an ox. This boy had a wooden flute and was playing tunes of a kind while Patrick groaned beneath. We couldn’t move him and it was only our host’s wife who, giving him a flick with her cloth, sent the boy roaring and weeping out into the snow. A little later, he crept in and lay at his mother’s feet, his eyes wide open, staring.
‘He’s a good boy,’ she told Villanelle.
It seemed he had been visited by a spirit at birth and this spirit had offered him brains or strength. Our host’s wife shrugged. What good were brains in this place with the sheep and goats to care for and the trees to fell? They had thanked the spirit and asked for strength, and now their son, who was only fourteen, could carry five men or lift a cow across his shoulders like a lamb. He ate from a bucket because there was no dish large enough to comfort his appetite. And so at meals the three of us sat with our bowls and the peasant and his wife with their hard bread and, at the end of the table, their son with his shoulders blocking the window and his ladle dipping in and out of his bucket.
‘Will he marry?’ Villanelle asked.
‘Yes indeed,’ said our host, looking surprised. ‘Any woman would want such a fine strong man for her husband. We will find someone for him in time.’
At night I lay awake next to Villanelle and listened to her breathing. She slept curled up with her back towards me and never made any sign that she wanted to be touched. I touched her when I was sure she was asleep. Ran my hand up her spine and wondered if all women felt so soft and so firm. One night she turned over suddenly and told me to make love to her.
‘I don’t know how.’
‘Then I’ll make love to you.’
When I think of that night, here in this place where I will always be, my hands tremble and my muscles ache. I lose all sense of day or night, I lose all sense of my work, writing this story, trying to convey to you what really happened. Trying not to make up too much. I can think of it by mistake, my eyes blurring the words in front of me, my pen lifting and staying lifted, I can think of it for hours and yet it is always the same moment I think of. Her hair as she bent over me, red with streaks of gold, her hair on my face
and chest and looking up at her through her hair. She let it fall over me and I felt I was lying in the long grass, safe.
When we left the village we left with a series of short cuts drawn for us on our map and more food than they should have spared. I felt guilty because apart from Villanelle, they should have killed us.
Wherever we went we found men and women who hated the French. Men and women whose futures had been decided for them. They were not articulate thinking people, they were people of the land who were content with little and zealous in their worship of custom and God. Although their lives were not much changed, they felt slighted because their leaders had been slighted, they felt out of control and resented the armies and the puppet Kings Bonaparte left behind. Bonaparte always claimed he knew what was good for a people, knew how to improve, how to educate. He did; he improved wherever he went, but he always forgot that even simple people want the freedom to make their own mistakes.
Bonaparte wanted no mistakes.
In Poland we pretended we were all Italian and received the sympathy due to one occupied race from another. When Villanelle revealed her Venetian origins, hands flew across mouths and saintly women crossed themselves. Venice, the city of Satan. Was it really like that? and even the most disapproving crept up to her and asked whether or not there were truly 11,000 prostitutes all richer than Kings?
Villanelle, who loved to tell stories, wove for their wildest dreams. She even said that the boatmen had webbed feet, and while Patrick and I could hardly swallow our laughter, the Poles grew wide-eyed and one even risked excommunication by suggesting that perhaps Christ had been able to walk on the water thanks to the same accident of birth.
As we travelled, we heard about the Grande Armée, how many thousands had died and I was sick to hear of so much waste and for no purpose. Bonaparte said that a night in Paris with the whores would replenish every one. Maybe, but it would take seventeen years for them to grow up.
Even the French were beginning to get tired. Even the women without ambition wanted something more than to produce boys to be killed and girls to grow up to produce more boys. We were getting weary. Talleyrand wrote to the Czar and said, The French people are civilised, their leader is not . . .
We are not especially civilised, we wanted what he wanted for a long time. We wanted glory and conquest and slaves and praise. His desire burned for longer than ours because it was never likely that he would pay for it with his life. He kept his valuable, fabulous thing behind the secret panel until the last moment, but we, who had so little except our lives, were gambling with all we had from the start.
He saw what we felt.
He reflected on our losses.
He had tents and food when we were dying.
He was trying to found a dynasty. We were fighting for our lives.
There’s no such thing as a limited victory. One conquest only leads on, ineluctably, to another, to protect what has been won. We found no friends of France on our journey, only crushed enemies. Enemies like you and me with the same hopes and fears, neither good nor bad. I had been taught to look for monsters and devils and I found ordinary people.
But the ordinary people were looking for devils too. The Austrians in particular believed the French to be brutal and beneath contempt. Still believing us to be Italian, they were generous to a fault and compared us favourably in every way with the French. And if I had thrown off my disguise? What then, would I have turned into a devil before their eyes? I worried that they would smell me, that their noses, so disdainful and attuned to hate anything that had a whiff of Bonaparte, would detect me straight away. But it seems we are as we appear. What a nonsense we make of our hatreds when we can only recognise them in the most obvious circumstances.
We were close to the Danube when Patrick began to behave oddly. We had been travelling for more than two months and we found ourselves in a valley surrounded by pine forests. We were at the bottom like ants in a great green cage. We were making good time now that we were out of the snow and the worst of the cold. Our spirits were high; another two weeks perhaps and we might reach Italy. Patrick had been singing songs since we left Moscow. Unintelligible, tuneless songs but sounds we had grown accustomed to, that we marched to. For the last day or so he had been silent, hardly eating and not wanting to talk. As we sat around our fire in the valley that night, he started to talk about Ireland and how much he wanted to be home. He was wondering whether or not he could persuade the Bishop to give him a parish again. He had liked being a priest, ‘And not just for the girls, though there was that, I know.’
He said it made sense, whether you believed or not, it made sense to go to church and think about someone who wasn’t your family or your enemy.
I said it was hypocritical and he said Domino was right about me; that I was a puritan at heart, didn’t understand weakness and mess and simple humanness.
I was very much hurt by this, but I think what he said was true and it is a fault in me.
Villanelle told us about the churches in Venice with their paintings of angels and devils and thieving men and adulterous women and animals everywhere. Patrick brightened and thought he might try his luck in Venice first.
He woke me in the middle of the night. He was raving. I tried to hold him down, but he’s strong and neither I nor Villanelle dared risk his flailing fists and feet. He was sweating despite the cold night and there was blood on his lips. We piled our blankets over him and I set off into the dark that still terrified me to find more dry wood and build up the fire. We built him a fiery furnace but he couldn’t get warm. He sweated and shook and shouted that he was freezing to death, that the Devil had got into his lungs and was breathing damnation at him.
He died at about dawn.
We had no shovels, no way of penetrating the black earth, so we carried him between us to the beginning of the pine forests and covered him with bracken and branches and leaves. Buried him like a hedgehog waiting for summer.
Then we were afraid. What had he died of and could we have caught it? Despite the weather and our need to move on, we went to the river and washed ourselves and our clothes and shivered in the weak afternoon sun by the fire. Villanelle was talking gloomily about catarrh, but I knew nothing then of that Venetian disease that now attacks me every November.
When we left Patrick behind we left our optimism with him.
We had begun to believe that we would finish our journey and now that seemed less possible. If one can go why not three? We tried to joke, remembering his face when the ox-boy had sat on him, remembering his wild sightings; he once claimed to have spotted the Blessed Virgin herself touring the heavens on a gilded donkey. He was always seeing things and it didn’t matter how or what, it mattered that he saw and that he told us stories. Stories were all we had.
He had told us the story of his miraculous eye and when he had first discovered it. It was on a hot morning in County Cork and the church doors were wide open to let out the heat and the smell of sweat that even a good wash can’t get rid of after six days in the fields. Patrick was preaching a fine sermon about Hell and the perils of the flesh and his eyes roamed the congregation; at least his right eye did, he found that his left eye was focused three fields away on a pair of his parishioners who were committing adultery under God’s Heaven while their spouses knelt in his church.
After the sermon, Patrick was deeply perplexed. Had he seen them or was he like St Jerome and subject to lustful visions? He walked round to visit them that afternoon and, after a few chance remarks, judged from their guilty faces that they had indeed been doing what he thought they’d been doing.
There was a woman of the parish, very devout with a bosom that preceded her, and Patrick found by standing in his little manse he could see straight into her bedroom without any vulgar telescope. He did look occasionally, just to check that she wasn’t in sin. He reckoned, after all, that the Lord must have granted him this eye for some righteous purpose.
Hadn’t he granted Samson strength
?
‘And Samson was a one for the women too.’
Could he see us now? Could he look down from his place next to the Blessed Virgin and see us walking away thinking of him? Perhaps both his eyes were now far-sighted. I wanted him to be in Heaven even though I didn’t believe there could be such a place.
I wanted him to see us home.
Many of my friends were dead. There was only one boy left of those five of us who had laughed at the red barn and the cows we had birthed. Others I had come to know over the years and grown used to had been fatally wounded or recorded missing on one battlefield or another. A fighting man is careful not to make too many ties. I saw a cannonball blow a stonemason in two, a man I liked and I tried to drag his two halves off the field, but when I came back for his legs they were indistinguishable from the other legs. There was a carpenter they had shot for carving a rabbit out of his musket-butt.
Death in battle seemed glorious when we were not in battle. But for the men who were bloodied and maimed and made to run through smoke that choked them into enemy lines where bayonets were waiting, death in battle seemed only what it was. Death. The curious thing is that we always went back. The Grande Armée had more recruits than it could train and very few desertions, at least until recently. Bonaparte said war was in our blood.
Could that be true?
And if it is true there will be no end to these wars. Not now, not ever. Whenever we shout Peace! and run home to our sweethearts and till the land we will be not in peace but in a respite from the war to come. War will always be in the future. The future crossed out.
It can’t be in our blood.
Why would a people who love the grape and the sun die in the zero winter for one man?
Why did I? Because I loved him. He was my passion and when we go to war we feel we are not a lukewarm people any more.
What did Villanelle think?
Men are violent. That’s all there is to it.
Being with her was like pressing your eye to a particularly vivid kaleidoscope. She was all primary colour and although she understood better than I the ambiguities of the heart she was not equivocal in her thinking.
The Passion Page 10