Garden of Venus (28 page)

He likes to say her name, Thomas thought, aware that the thought annoyed him.

That turn of events was of immense importance. Countess Potocka, Ignacy continued, commanded exceptional influence in St Petersburg’s highest circles. Tsar Alexander was numbered among her close personal friends. Her gratitude could be priceless, her influence used to sound a few people out and keep an eye on others. Revolutionary ferment was in the air, and it was reaching as far as Russia. Some said that even among the officers of the Tsarist army.

‘I hope you don’t think too harshly of me, Thomas. I’m not thinking merely of myself …’

Thomas had known Ignacy long enough to know that. Never merely of himself.

Thomas stretched his legs, suddenly aware of the return of the dull pain in his right knee. An old fall from a horse, innocuous at the time, insisting on taking its toll. If he did not stop his friend now, he would be treated to speculations on the possible Polish uprising, the chances the Polish cause had for the support of the Enlightened Russians who, like the whole world, did not give a damn about anyone else but themselves. He would be asked what he thought about this or that speech at the Russian Duma, another proposal to end serfdom. The slightest increase of democracy in Russia, Ignacy would say, was a new chance for Poland. Speculations Thomas had heard so many times before. He had to stop him right away.

‘Do fashionable Berlin women still promenade at five o’clock in the morning along that great canal, bordered with poplars and plane trees?’

This was something he observed fifteen years ago. It seemed so odd to him then. In Paris, society ladies would have still been fast asleep. But here they took their walks, breakfasted at eight and then slept through the hottest hours of the day. Thomas had offered this observation to his students as an example of the adaptability of human habits (a sensible one for a change) contributing a great deal to the remarkable state of freshness and good health among German women.

‘Only in the summer months, Thomas,’ Ignacy said. ‘Only in the summer months.’

Vienna is on their way back to Kamieniec from where General de Witt is dispatching impatient letters, complaining that other people have to tell him what his grandson looks like. This journey of theirs, he writes, is taking too long. She reads these letters, carefully noting how veiled the complaints are, how cloaked in the loneliness of an old man, the longing of a grandfather eager to see his only son’s firstborn.
Sophie will agree with me
, he writes,
that a baby needs tranquillity and peace
.

My baby, she thinks, needs nothing but my presence. With her son’s birth, something has changed in her, hardened. The mere thought of Kamieniec makes her shiver. How can this gloomy fortress be a good place for her son? The society of uncouth officers and their boring wives? The Potockis are the only family of any importance for miles around.

‘My favourite sister writes that Paris misses you already,’ the Emperor of Austria says.
‘Misses Countess de Witt’s beautiful eyes
, she writes. You will stay in Vienna for a while, won’t you?’

Luckily Jan has taken to the new wetnurse, and she can leave him without worrying. ‘Such a good baby,’ the wetnurse flatters her shamelessly, knowing the shortest way to her heart.

Her menses are back. ‘A visit from
dame Thérèse
,’ she calls it now. In Paris one evening, Comte d’Artois had confessed his fondness for the ‘seductive effluvia, vapours transmitted by the essence of life’. She replied smiling, that if he ordered her to bleed to death for him, she would.

‘Vienna is already dear to my heart, Your Majesty.’

‘I can see you’ve not been enticed to rouge your lovely cheeks,’ Emperor Joseph of Austria says, putting his hand on her shoulder and leading her away from the curious ears of his courtiers. ‘Some ladies, even here in Vienna, have made great progress in the art of painting. They lavish more colour on one cheek than Rubens would have required for all the figures in his cartoons. I suppose I look like a death’s head upon a tombstone among them.

‘Don’t interrupt. I know what I am talking about. How lovely you look. It
is
true what they say that maternity brings out the loveliness of the female form. Would this husband of yours protest much if I kept you here? You hold him firmly in your little hand, do you?’

‘Your Majesty flatters me.’

‘When the King of Naples offends his queen, she keeps him on short commons and
soupe maigre
till he has expiated the offence by humbling himself. Only then does she permit him to return and share her bed.

‘You are laughing. But this is such a sad story, my dear countess. This sister of mine is a proficient queen in the art of man training. My other sister, the Duchess of Parma, is equally scientific in breaking in horses. She is constantly in the stables with her grooms while the simpleton, her husband, is ringing the bells with the Friars of Colorno to call his good subjects to mass.’

The art of conversation comes to her like breath, without thinking. Mostly it means letting the men talk and remembering what might become useful. She never rouged her cheeks, for her face had never been touched by the scars of smallpox. No, luck had nothing to do with it, she tells the Austrian Emperor. ‘It was my dear Aunt’s foresight. When I was three years old, she took me all the way to Paris for my inoculation. Your Majesty can judge the results.’

‘How cold you’ve become,’ Joseph tells her. Is it the thought of Kamieniec, closer with each passing day, that makes him bolder? The hope that at home he could be her master?

The irritation in his voice annoys her. Each morning, when she is hardly awake, craving her first cup of coffee, he begins his accusations. She never listens to him; he is always the last to know of their plans. His valet knows more of her whereabouts than he.

‘What precisely is it that you want to know?’ she asks. Her voice is ice cold, edgy. As he stumbles for an answer, she can see the fear in his face, no matter how hard he tries to hide it.

It’s not that he objects, she hears, but he is worried. He is her husband after all. She doesn’t get enough sleep, just a month after giving birth, when her body is still weak, still vulnerable. Her headaches in the morning should not to be ignored.

‘I’ve never felt better in my life,’ she says, but her voice has lost its coldness. She recalls the moments when they sit together in the nursery and watch their son; watch the miracle of his first smile at the sight of their faces; breathe the same air. ‘I’m the father of your child,’ he tells her. For now, he knows, it is still enough.

‘This is the fourth cherry you have picked from the plate, my dear Comtesse,’ the Emperor of Austria says. ‘Shall I
take it you are fond of cherries? I grow them in my orchards. Sheep manure is best, around the roots in the spring.’

He amuses her with the gallery of his relatives, reflections in the funhouse mirrors. A brother who is too fat to walk. A sister who eschews men for she is too ugly for any to look at. Another brother who sells corn to his enemies in the time of war, and to his friends in the time of peace.

She laughs with him, protests what she calls his exaggerations. Invented to amuse the ladies of the court. Amuse her.

Delight her.

‘And what do you make of Versailles, my dear Comtesse? Will you agree with me that the Queen’s staircase and antechamber resembles the Turkish bazaars of Constantinople more than a royal palace. My sister does not dare to protest this barbaric custom. She tells me that a Frenchman is more easily killed than subdued.’

Perhaps she should have stayed in Paris. Diane had begged her to forget Joseph, not to go. How will you live there, she asked, not even trying to conceal her tears. Who will you talk to? Returns, she said, were always impossible, like relighting an old passion.

‘I have little experience of the Turkish bazaars, Your Majesty,’ she says, fanning her cheeks. ‘However, I think your comparison is particularly apt.’

The countess did not need them for a while, Doctor Lafleur said.

After it was aired (Doctor Lafleur insisted on it), the grand salon smelled of the autumn garden, of wet leaves, smoke and freshly dug earth. The invalid would sleep at
least until early morning. ‘And so should the nurse,’ he added.

He opened the door for her and she walked past him. She would remember that moment, the momentary closeness of their bodies, the black stubble on his chin.

As they walked toward her room, Rosalia told him the recipe of St Genowefa’s balm that her mother had taught her: French olive oil, rose water, wax, red wine, and sandalwood. All boiled and mixed with Venetian turpentine and then, when it cooled, with powdered camphor. ‘In the end,’ she said, ‘one gets a balm that can heal old wounds, rashes and pustules. Excellent at restoring circulation in frozen limbs. Or on the belly, to relieve stomach pain.’

He repeated the ingredients after her. She watched him as he did it, his head nodding, hands moving with the rhythm of his words.

‘I have an excellent memory,’ he said, smiling. ‘I’ll remember.’

Later, in her room, she wondered about memory. She remembered a long summer day in Zierniki in 1803, when she had felt purely happy. Apples and pears were ripening in the orchard. She was nine years old, no longer a child, her mother kept reminding her every time she complained about her lessons or the hours spent in the kitchen learning what Aunt Antonia called ‘running a house’. The grass had been freshly mowed this morning and she loved the heady, sun-soaked smell of drying hay.

They were playing blind man’s buff. Her cousins, Andrzej, Krysia and Anusia, hovered around her. Three shadowy figures whose shapes she couldn’t distinguish through the mesh of the linen blindfold. The girls were wearing light summer dresses. Andrzej, back from his Warsaw school, almost a stranger but not quite, in
breeches and a loose white shirt, open around his neck. It was his presence that occupied her thoughts so fully then: the sight of his muscular arms; the curious glances he surprised her with; the awkwardness that overtook her in her cousin’s presence. The day before he had sought her out as she stole into the garden after supper. He talked to her of Warsaw, of his school. The teachers were tedious, he said, but his comrades were fine fellows. She liked the word ‘comrades’. A bat flew above them. The lights of the salon reached where they stood, but she was watching the moon rise above the linden tree. They were second cousins, he said, stressing the word
second
, and he squeezed her hand.

When they returned to the house, Aunt Antonia gave her a dark, long stare. ‘Andrzej has brilliant prospects,’ she said. ‘I won’t let him throw them away.’

In the long months since her father’s departure from the Livorno harbour, from where Napoleon’s orders summoned him into the unknown, this had been the only time Rosalia had permitted herself not to think of him. That day it was Andrzej’s laughter that rang in her ears, followed by Anusia’s ‘Not fair.’ He was cheating again, letting Rosalia catch him.

Then the dogs started barking, fiercely, announcing a stranger. Removing the blindfold from her eyes, she caught a glimpse of a man on a chestnut mare, dismounting, walking toward the house, asking to speak to Madame Romanowicz. ‘Concerning a very grave matter,’ he said with eyes cast down.

Her mother closed the door to the parlour. From behind these doors, Rosalia heard the messenger’s quiet voice, then her mother’s anxious gasp, her scream, and the thump of a body falling to the floor. Before the man had the time to call for salts, she ran upstairs to Aunt Antonia’s boudoir to fetch them. She held the blue bottle under her
mother’s nostrils until the stink of ammonia brought her back.

A dispatch was lying on the floor, the seal broken:

It was Aunt Antonia who picked it up and read it aloud. It was Aunt Antonia who threw her arms around Rosalia and let her hide her face in her bosom. The face of a daughter who could not yet cry for her father.

Later that day, still unable to cry, Rosalia pushed away Andrzej’s hand as if he were the guilty one. As if it were his fault that she had stopped thinking of her father. That day she blamed herself for everything. She should have felt the moment of her father’s death. She should have listened to her own heart. She should never have let her own thoughts betray him.

The messenger, fed and having drunk a shot of vodka with Uncle Klemens, left muttering condolences. He wasn’t able to tell them much. Two witnesses had confirmed that Captain Jakub Romanowicz had been taken to Les Pères Hospital, and that he had died there of yellow fever.

It seemed to Rosalia that the shapeless sack he had left behind was somebody’s skin, discarded in a hurry.

Her mother clasped the leather sack to her chest and begged to be left alone. Alone, she repeated, closing the door to her room with a thud. Every so often, Rosalia crept to the closed door. ‘Maman,’ she pleaded. ‘Maman, please.’ But all she heard were sobs, moans and what sounded like prayers.