Garden of Venus (27 page)

Truthfulness, she thought, was in order. This steady basis of self-control she prided in herself now demanded an account of her feelings. His temporary absence always registered, always measured. Moments she would think insignificant otherwise filled up with meaning just because they touched on him. She collected them, like a magpie or a thief. The sight of his reddened hands, with their curling black hairs, so coarsely male against the waxen skin of the countess. The frown on his forehead when she asked him about America. The sight of his boots being polished, disfigured from wear, the shape of his feet melted into the brown leather. The curious moment, in the shadowy darkness of the hall, when she saw, or seemed to see, a flash of surprised delight in his face.

The countess was breathing hard but did not groan, so the pain must have subsided. The room was filled by the sounds of the flute.

With her chin pointing at the burgundy curtain, the countess said:

‘Tell them to play something joyful, Rosalia. Tell them I’m not dead yet.’

In her Parisian apartment sleep refuses to console her. At first she amuses herself by guessing what kind of a carriage passes in the street below. In the evening, cabriolets are always most numerous, swift and light, drawn by one horse. By midnight heavier equipages prevail, when the best of society return from the theatre and the opera. It is still before dawn when the heavy workhorses of the tradesmen begin their day.

Joseph insists she decline the latest invitations. ‘They will miss you even more,’ he says. She can hardly walk now. In her dreams sometimes the baby is born already and its pale lips search for her. When she bends over the cradle, she can smell sweetened milk and lavender and then something else, something she doesn’t know how to describe yet, but something she will never forget.

The first pangs of pain seize her at dawn.

If only Mana could be here, with her. Mana who has sent a red string to be tied over the baby’s wrist as soon as it opens its eyes. Mana who promised to pray for her daughter’s safe delivery, to pray every day to the Holy Virgin, who knows well the woes of women, until the good news reaches her.

May this sweet child bring you as much happiness as you have brought me
.

The midwife has gentle hands. She cannot count the babies she has brought forth to this world. ‘Madame Sue is clean,’ Princess de Lamballe assured her, squeezing her fingers as if to warm them. She also praised the wisdom
of smallpox inoculation – an old custom of the Circassians, known for their beautiful daughters. The commercial people, she said, are always more alert to their interests. She too had it done, by a Parisian doctor, when just three years old.

Madame Sue demands a vat of boiling water to be placed in the room and orders everyone out. She places a sachet with dried hyacinth petals under Sophie’s pillow for easy childbirth. ‘No spectacle for the idle eyes,’ she announces, limping across the room to close the door on Joseph and the maids who try to steal one more glance inside. ‘We need peace.’

Madame Sue herself is not peaceful though. She moves about the room talking incessantly, her voice rising and falling. She does not require conversation. She does not expect to be answered or even listened to. But she does not stop.

Sophie listens. Time has slowed down, her pangs come and go at long intervals. What else is there to do.

‘The Queen is due any day now. There must be a boy this time. France is in need of a dauphin, in need of the prosperity and tranquillity such a birth guarantees.

‘When
Madame Royale
was born, so many of them came to watch that they sucked all air from the room and if it wasn’t for the King, the Queen would have departed this world. His Majesty, May He be blessed, broke the window open and let in fresh air. So many people around her, and no one with the presence of mind to make sure there was a vat of hot water ready. Good for nothing, the whole lot, gossiping and scheming all day long. None ready for an honest day’s work.

‘When the Princess was born, all Paris rejoiced: the illuminations and
feux de joie
! Fountains spewing real wine, and bread and sausages were given out in the streets. And the theatres of Paris were free to everyone who walked
in. One had to take the seat by noon, to assure oneself a place: the charcoal vendors were given the King’s box, the market-women the Queen’s.’

The Queen’s fecundity pleases Madame Sue to no end. So many barren years had not been good for France or for the Queen. A childless woman can easily lose herself. It had been heartbreaking to see how she looked at the children of all her friends, how she longed to be a mother.

Madame Sue makes Sophie lie down. She wishes to check the progress of her labour. ‘It won’t be that long,’ she declares. ‘You are a lucky one.’

When Sophie resumes her walk, she is leaning on Madame Sue’s arm. She is to keep walking. It is good for the baby. It is good to keep her mind away from the bad thoughts that hover over a woman in times like that. Let the earth pull at the child, Madame Sue says. Let the earth call. Outside, in the streets, the day is in full glory. A sunny October day, the 12th of October 1781. A Friday. This in itself is a blessing. She can take her time. She won’t have to fear that her firstborn will see the world on a Tuesday.

She is twenty-one, not that young any more for her first baby, but she is strong and the baby is fast. By the afternoon Madame Sue tells her to sit in her bed, propped against the pillows. She has opened enough to push. ‘This baby,’ Madame Sue says, ‘is no sluggard. This baby wants to be born.’

When she was coming into this world, Mana was in pain for two days and she almost died.

Push. Push. Harder.

Come, angel of the air. Have no fear of the evening cold. My arms are ready for you, my room is adorned with flowers. I’m waiting for you.

She pushes. She pushes hard. Blood floods her face, her eyes. There is nothing else in her but that force. She has no place for pain or fear.

Push.

Push.

Harder. Harder.

The baby slips out of her, so quickly that Madame Sue smacks her lips with delight. ‘The first ones are hardly ever so good to their mamans.’

Come, nameless one, come into my arms. You speak no language, but I understand you. Come quickly, my treasure. Come to console me and fill my heart with joy.

Madame Sue stops talking. The baby has all her attention now. Sophie tries to lean forward, but the strong pain inside forces her to fall back. She can only hear the baby cry, with a scream she has been waiting for, a scream she will never forget.

‘A boy. Little chevalier de Witt,’ Madame Sue says, placing the baby in her arms. ‘Ten fingers, ten toes, and lungs of iron. We can let the father come in now.’

Sophie is shivering. Her legs trembling as if she had walked through the Alps and reached a valley and her legs have carried her all this way. This is not from cold, but release.

The baby’s eyes are closed. He is no longer crying. When she touches his tiny lips he begins sucking on her finger. This is a moment when time stops, when there is nothing but joy. This is the essence of love, pure, simple, unalterable. Love that will never wane, never betray.

‘You are mine,’ she whispers in his tiny ear, touches the tiny fingers. ‘Nobody’s but mine.’

Five days later, Marie Antoinette is delivered of a baby boy. The artificers and tradesmen of Paris go to Versailles with their insignia and music. Chimneysweeps carry an ornamented chimney, at the top of which a small boy perches. The chairmen carry a gilded sedan in which a handsome nurse and a little dauphin sit. The butchers bring slabs of good beef. The shoemakers make a little pair of boots and the tailors a little suit in the uniform of his future regiment.

In the great room of the opera house, at Versailles, the bodyguards – having obtained the King’s permission – give the Queen a dress ball to which Madame Comtesse de Witt is cordially invited. Her Majesty opens the ball dancing a minuet with a private selected by the corps, to whom the King grants the baton of an exempt. Madame Comtesse de Witt gives her first dance to Comte d’Artois.

A memory he had thought forgotten. The Parisian mob bursting into La Petite Force and breaking down every door until they found Princess de Lamballe. Dragging her screaming from her cell into the yard where she would be raped, tortured, and hacked to death.

Thomas could speak about it, in a way. He could say that the Princess’s severed head and breasts were put on pikes and taken through Paris. ‘Come and see,’ the crowd yelled until the Queen came to the window and saw her
friend’s head. The mob, bloodthirsty, blinded by hatred and released from all restraints.

What he couldn’t say was that he had been there, in the yard of La Petite Force. Pushed against the wall, seeing her white hand clutching at the bricks, desperately trying to stop time. His mouth opening and closing, his throat raw, his nostrils twitching at the smell of blood. ‘What are you hiding from, Princess? From us? From your faithful servants?’

He was skinny and tall, but still just eleven years old. After his father had died, the Marquis de Londe had allowed Thomas to stay in his house. But Thomas did not have his father’s patience to become a valet and soon his quick temper and irreverent tongue landed him in the stables. Then when the first stirrings of the Parisian streets came, the cries for freedom and brotherhood, he couldn’t stay away. A stray amidst the revolutionary throngs, he lived from hand to mouth, stealing if no one wanted to give.

He couldn’t speak of the feeling in the pit of his stomach, of the blood pounding in his temples, in his limbs. Or of his hands trembling when someone pressed a bloodied rag into his hands. A rag upon which, with the tips of his fingers, he could still feel the shapes of embroidered flowers.

It was not enough to reason that he had never been close to her; that he had been too young and too weak to have pushed his way to where she lay in her blood and vomit; that he must have imagined the sights that came to him on so many many nights. Sights so vivid that he woke up paralysed, feeling as if he’d just stepped on something soft, on something breaking under his foot.

Later, fortified by experience, he pointed out to his students that violent death was often kinder to its victims than it seemed to onlookers. He recalled the eyes of a
little girl mauled by a dog. Parts of her throat were missing, blood was coming out of her in streams. And yet she felt no pain, of that he was sure. Her eyes gazed at him with bewilderment, not suffering. She was even smiling, telling him that her wounds were not important, that she was leaving and had no use for the body he held in his hands.

How he got back to the place where he slept, for he couldn’t call it home, he never knew. He came down with a high fever as soon as he threw himself on the damp bed. He was smeared with blood that he hoped was his own. Now he felt that the high fever and heavy sweats were cleansing him. He remembered the martyrs in the paintings he had stared at in churches: stoned, clubbed, decapitated, shot with arrows. I feel like St Sebastian, he thought, but then the voice in his head whispered, ‘Their bodies were mutilated because they resisted sin. You are not worthy to wipe their feet.’

He was sure he would die then, like a rat in his hole, alone, but he didn’t. And he was not alone, either. When he attempted, on the fifth day, to stand up, he fell right down, only then noticing that someone must have been taking care of him after all for there was a jug of water by his bed, and a plate with small pieces of bread.

It took another day before he could dip the bread in water and put the morsels, one by one, into his mouth; before he could open his eyes and see the smiling girl with reddish hair, telling him how he had screamed and cried and how everyone had thought he would die.

‘But you won’t die now,’ she said, brushing a drop of fragrant oil on his forehead with a small slender hand.

‘Leave me alone,’ he said. ‘I
want
to die.’

She told him to please himself, but not before she went out of the room for she didn’t fancy seeing yet another soul departing from a body. And then she left, hesitating a moment in the doorway, half turning around, as if
knowing that the light would play with her hair and make it beautiful.

Dr Ignacy Bolecki’s Berlin house didn’t resemble his old Parisian abode on Rue St Jacques. The carpets and the furniture had been replaced by far cheaper and less ostentatious ones, despite Ignacy’s obvious prosperity. (‘There are more important things in life, Thomas. Causes greater than another ottoman.’) No clavicord in the corner of the parlour. Only the collection of sabres on the wall of Ignacy’s study was unchanged.

Ignacy embraced him heartily and led him to his salon. His arms flailed like giant wings. Gone was the reddish moustache of the Parisian days and the goatee. Ignacy’s face was clean-shaven now, and he had put on quite a bit of weight. It suited him, gave him presence.

‘Thomas, Thomas, my friend, come in,’ Ignacy urged, ringing the bell. When a maid appeared, petite, in a dress that revealed neat ankles and black flat-soled slippers, he ordered coffee and sweets.

A small miniature of Ignacy’s daughter, Constance, was standing on a side table. Her hair was carefully coiffured, the locks gathered over her ears turned her into a woman of fashion. In his zeal the painter had woven a string of pearls in between them, which she would surely have refused to wear. But her grey, almond shaped eyes, he thought, were true to how he remembered them, and this was not an easy feat.

‘Mademoiselle Rosalia,’ he could hear Ignacy say, punctuating his words with gasps and heaves. ‘We went for a walk together and she told me that the countess has expressed a great liking for you. Did I tell you I knew Mademoiselle Rosalia’s father? Captain Romanowicz of the Polish Legion. He died in Santo Domingo, like so many.’

‘You did.’

‘I must say I’m surprised at the way it all turned out, Thomas. Mademoiselle Rosalia said the countess was grateful to you for telling her the truth.’