Garden of Venus (33 page)

A Parisian tribunal would have made a great deal of his discovery. At the Marquis de Londe’s trial a metal chair was offered as evidence. ‘A rape chair,’ the prosecutor said. One of the men who had brought it in, tall and very thin, was asked to demonstrate how it worked. Sitting down on it, his body triggered a mechanism that clasped him in a grip, putting him in a horizontal position and spreading his legs.

Thomas took one last look at the secret chamber of the von Haefen palace, the whips, the red ottomans, the paintings covered with a thick layer of dust. He left the room, closing the padded door behind him, making sure he had secured the lever and covered it with books.

She has new bruises on her wrists where he has grasped her. In Russia she often hears of men who could wrestle bears: Prince Potemkin is one of them. His seeing eye takes on a strange brightness as if he has been drinking, but there is no wine or spirit on his breath. ‘He is mad,’ someone whispers behind her. ‘If you cross him, the Prince of Taurida will strangle you with his bare hands.’

Once he told her he would kill her, if she deceived him. That her cuckolded husband would not touch her, he was sure. ‘I’ve brought that miserable de Witt here,’ he told her, ‘I opened a chest filled with jewels, and I said, “Choose,
batushka
! You can have whatever you ask me for, or you can have Sophie.’”

He is my wife’s friend, Joseph insists to everyone – most generous, a benefactor. Her eyes he avoids, trying to make himself invisible. If he does not move, perhaps nothing will change.

She has lost her balance. Even with her eyes closed she can see her prince. With her whole body, she can sense the moment just before he enters the room or the moment before he decides to leave.

Once he took a knife and made a cut on her thigh, and then another, like notches on a musket for slain enemies. He smeared her blood on her thighs and then, with his bloodied fingers, he smeared his own lips.

‘Swear,’ he said. She swore on the Virgin Mary that she would never betray him. She knelt in front of the holy icon and prayed aloud, begging the Holy Virgin to bear witness to her love. Then the touch of his hands on her cheeks was gentle and soothing.

‘Look at them,’ he said and placed his hands in front of her eyes. She looked at his big red palms, veins crisscrossing under his skin.

‘What do you see?’

‘The hands of my lord and master,’ she replied.

Her meekness pleased him for a moment, but then he shook his head. This was not what he wanted to hear.

‘Kiss them,’ he ordered, and she pressed his hands to her lips, thinking he should be bled for his cheeks were too red.

‘You have just kissed the hands of the man who shall one day wear the crown of Poland,’ he said. ‘There are no limits to what my will can achieve. No one can stop me. The Empress has already given Poland to one of her lovers. Now she will give it to me. All I have to do is ask.’

He squeezed her hands until the joints cracked, piercing her with his eyes, but she did not flinch.

‘I’ll be your king,’ he said. ‘And you might be queen.’

It is his arrogance that weakens her, his absolute absorption in his own needs. His confidence that nothing will ever be withheld from him, that he could change the destiny of men and nations. He never cares if he pleases her or not, and she doesn’t know how to defend herself from him. One moment he is hurting her, another he is falling at her feet, begging her to forgive him for his harshness.

What is happening to her? Once she preferred sure bets in matters of survival. Once she vowed no man would deceive her again.

If only Mana were alive. Her mother, a shadow in her memory, a touch of her hands wiping the sweat off her brow, a gentle kiss on her forehead. But it’s too late now. She is dead and buried in Istanbul cemetery, next to her father.
I pray for your happiness everyday, thanking the Lord that He has kept you in His care
.

‘
Ma belle Phanariote
, were you really a Sultan’s odalisque?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘Is it true that the Sultan is the only man in the Porte who can see every woman unveiled?’

‘Yes.’

‘You are the most intriguing of women. A minx.’

‘You always say this.’

‘I sometimes say this.’

‘What is intriguing about me?’

‘A feeling that these beautiful eyes can see right into my heart.’

‘I’m a quick pupil, my Prince, and I have always had excellent teachers.’

She bends over him and caresses his hair, the nape of his neck. Laughing, he catches her in his arms and pulls her down onto the floor. He frees her breasts from the corset. The shiver of desire rushing through her body gives her strength to reach out and stroke him.

‘What is it that you see?’

A spoilt child who will never be happy with what he gets, she wishes to say. ‘A man who always gets what he wants,’ she says.

‘Liar.’

His arms tense as he rises over her. Anger is erupting again, a fit of passion carelessly triggered. Like an avalanche called into life by a scream.

She softens her body like a kitten before a fall. He has struck her before. He loosened a tooth in her jaw, drew blood.

‘Does it hurt?’ he asks with a fiendish smile, his hands diving inside her, tearing at her womb. She screams.

‘You like it, don’t you?’

She shakes her head.

‘Liar,’ he says. ‘This is what your secret is. You have never said a word of truth in your life.’

She nods her head. Nods it again and again.

‘And now?’ he asks. A dark threat in his voice makes her skin tingle. It sends her somewhere soft and dark, like a waterfall pulling her with it into its depths.

She screams again. But he is kissing her now, her Russian bear. Biting at her lips, her neck, squeezing her breasts.

This moment frozen in time rouses her out of complaisance. It brings her right to the edge of a precipice and forces her to look down into the darkness, the void. It makes her stare death in the face and not fear it.

In the Taurida palace, her prince falls asleep on the carpet. He is so big that Sergey has to come with three other footmen to carry him to bed. When the footmen leave, she takes a handful of jewels from the jar he keeps next to his bed and slips them into the pocket in the folds of her dress. Her petticoats are ruined, she thinks, and so are her silk stockings. Her lover is breathing hard, snoring and moaning in his sleep. The name he mutters is not hers. A bear skin has slipped off him, and she lifts it from the floor and covers him before she leaves.

In the end it is death that puts an end to her folly. Death that lays its claim on her lover’s body. In Jassy, where she has followed him, in the same headquarters where he celebrated the fall of the Turkish fortress of Ismail.

‘I’m going to die soon,’ the Prince of Taurida tells her. ‘I’m so tired.’

He is fifty-two years old. He has defeated the Turks and on good days he still makes grand plans for the future. They have just come back from St Petersburg where Catherine, his Empress, gave balls and festivities in his honour. Where, to please him, she presented Madame de Witt with a pair of diamond earrings and a bale of fabric for her new wardrobe.

‘You won’t die,’ she says. Only yesterday he refused to send for her. When she came anyway, Countess Branicka’s carriage was already there in the courtyard, so she did
not go in. She won’t mention it, though. Today is another day. Better. Brighter.

‘I’m so heavy,’ he complains. ‘The earth is calling me.’

He kisses her on the lips. ‘You’ll have to look for your king elsewhere,
ma belle Phanariote
.’

She looks at his bloated face, the livid shadows under his eyes. She kisses his hand, drenched in perfume. On her way in she has overheard the servants going over orders for the Prince’s meal: ham, salted goose and three chickens,
kvas
, wine, and vodka to drink and more perfume to drown the sweat.

1791 is the year of change. The kind of change she cannot ignore.

Catherine, the Prince tells her, is watching the Poles with growing annoyance. The partition of 1772 turned out to be a lesson lost. Revolt is brewing again. Revolt against Russian influence. There will be no more royal elections. In the new Polish constitution the throne has been made hereditary to eliminate the vying for power;
liberum veto
has also been abolished, no longer could one noble veto a bill. The King is stronger now, the Cities Act has enfranchised many townsmen. Peasants may have remained serfs, but are now under the state’s protection and complete freedom has been granted to all immigrants who return to Poland, which means that any peasant from the partitioned areas could, by escaping to Poland, become a free man. Catherine of Russia has written to him: ‘How dare they alter the form of government that I guaranteed?’

‘Listen,
ma belle Phanariote
,’ the Prince of Taurida whispers. ‘This is the beginning of the end. Soon your beautiful eyes will see the end of Poland.’

She doesn’t understand.

He tells her that the Polish
Sejm
has changed the basis of the voting system to limit the powers of the nobles, to
strengthen the cities. All to shake off the alliance with Russia. To encourage the French disease, the Jacobin revolutionary fever that will not stop until all monarchs are beheaded. Poland is sick, he tells her, and has to be quarantined. For the sake of the European future, the disease has to be stamped out. Eradicated. This is what he keeps telling his Empress to do, but she is tarrying.

Sophie has heard that triumphal arches have been raised in front of the Royal Castle in Warsaw; that public balls are given to celebrate the new constitution, a hope for a better future – for a stronger Poland able to defend its borders, a Poland free from Russian meddling; that the crowds in Warsaw cheer, ‘The Nation with the King, The King with the Nation.’

She has heard that the whole world is in awe of the Polish reforms.
Homme-roi
the poets call the King. Polish morning dress has become fashionable in New York.
Happy prince
, Edmund Burke has written,
Happy people, if they know how to proceed as they have begun
.

The whole world, Prince Potemkin says, is filled with deluded fools who will forget the word Poland as soon as it is wiped from the map of Europe. He shows her the dispatch from his Tsarina. Catherine of Russia orders her general to prepare for an invasion.

His face is flushed with blood.

He won’t die, she thinks. He cannot die. Not him. Nothing matters any more: Poland, Russia, revolts, wars. For him she would do anything. Her knuckles are white with pressure. She is biting her fingers until she draws blood. She prays and cries and makes wild offerings of penance and sacrifice. She will lay in front of the holy icon for the whole night, she will sell her jewels and give all the money to the poor.

‘You have to make your choice,
ma belle
,’ he says, squeezing her hand painfully tight. ‘Countries are like
men. You leave one to go with another. Will you side with us or them? Russians or Poles?’

She is scared of her own thoughts. She is not ready for her own conclusions.

It is Joseph who tells her the tragic news. Prince Potemkin, their dear generous friend did not want to trouble her with his pain. This is why he did not send for her on the last morning of his life. He was noble to the end.

The Prince woke up tired – Countess Branicka has told the story of this last morning – too dizzy to stand up unsupported. She was with him, when he asked to be driven to the country and when he ordered the carriage to stop. His Cossacks carried him from his carriage. He said that his bowels felt as if they were filled with liquid lead.

He didn’t want to be with me, Sophie thinks. He chose her, instead.

She wants to tell Joseph to stop, to go away and leave her alone, but she cannot
not
know.

Once out in the field, the Prince of Taurida asked for his bedding to be placed on the ground. Countess Branicka was holding his hand. She knew it was the end. No one had to tell her. Tears were streaming down her cheeks, tears the Prince tried not to notice. He tried to say something, but death was quicker.

‘Enough,’ Sophie screams.

‘I’m sorry, darling,’ Joseph says. This is why she has begun to hate him. For his frightened look, shifting gaze, the flutter of his eyelids. For the declarations that make him the butt of jokes.
The Prince is not my wife’s lover but just a friend because, if he was her lover, I would break any connection with him
. She hates him at this very moment for the obvious hope he still has that she will come back to him for consolation. For the hope that his
ruses have worked. That he has withstood her passion – he will never call it love – her folly. That he has weathered the storm and could now breathe out with relief.

How mistaken he is. How wrong. She has had enough of this marriage, this miserable comedy. She has had enough. Enough.

Countess Branicka is wearing black. She repeats the story of Prince Potemkin’s death over and over again. She has written up her account for the Empress, with a few embellishments, of course. It was Catherine’s name, the Prince tried to say before death stopped him.

There is no place for Comtesse de Witt in this narrative.

In Jassy, the doctors who open Prince Potemkin’s body find the innards awash with bilious fluid. The stench is such that even embalming cannot get rid of it.

Sophie cries so much that she has no more tears left.

Death, she thinks, can be a release.

When a door closes, a window is opened somewhere.

‘Mademoiselle Rosalia. I hope I’m not intruding.’

Dr Bolecki assured her that he had not abandoned his patient, in spite of his unconditional trust in Doctor Lafleur’s skills. As much as his practice allowed it, he was going to continue his visits to Graf von Haefen’s palace. After all he might have a thing or two to learn from his esteemed colleague. As he sat down beside her, she smelled cigar smoke and coffee. His shapely hands rested on his lap.