Garden of Venus (43 page)

She bites her lip and feels the warm flush rise to her cheeks.

‘Wouldn’t you rather slash my throat,’ she asks, daring him to withstand her look. He cannot. With all his hatred for her, he cannot look into her eyes.

Does he – like his elder brother – dream of touching her skin? Is she his temptress too? Should she remind him of the rumour that he was fathered by his mother’s footman?

Anger is gathering in her. She wants to break his smugness, his calm. Jeroslav is sitting in his favourite armchair, his legs stretched out. Her maid is saying that she has seen him sneak into the stables. Has he taken a fancy to one of the milk-maids – or grooms?

The child moves inside her. Its kicks are weak and furtive as if it were not sure about life. Her skin has erupted with blotches and at night she wakes up drenched with sweat. Last night she dreamt of Kotula, Nicolai, and
Helena. Three souls frolicking among the clouds, playing ball with the stars. She woke up with her face wet with tears. What if she dies with this baby? What if her little ones were left to the Potockis’ mercy?

Her old friend, Diane de Polignac, writes to her often. Long letters filled with longing for the past, dismay at the zest with which the upstarts assume new privileges. In Santo Domingo, Napoleon’s sister, Pauline Leclerc, orders her black slaves to carry her around the house and warms her feet on their bellies.
The years of exile have taught me to expect the unthinkable
, Diane writes.

I won’t die, she thinks. I’ll not give him that pleasure.

She takes a deep breath, feeling the air inside her. She moves her hands, her arms, her feet.

‘Shame,’ she points out to her stepson, ‘is a luxury I cannot afford. Unlike you I wasn’t born with a silver platter next to my bed, a silver spoon in my mouth and hundreds of servants to wipe my arse.’

He winces when he hears the word
arse
. Good, she thinks. The baby is due any day now. Jeroslav stands up and pushes the armchair away.

‘I hate you,’ he says, before leaving. ‘I hope this one kills you.’

‘The morphine is beginning to work,’ the French doctor said.

She raised her hands in the air, marvelling at their translucent pallor.

‘Is the pain gone?’ Rosalia asked.

‘Is it gone?’

‘Is it?’

She could almost believe that she might stand up and dance, fly through the room on the wave of happiness. The pain was still there, but strangely as if it were in someone else’s body. As if she and the woman in this
empire bed whose womb was rotting inside her were not one and the same.

‘What is it that you feel?’ the doctor asked.

He was like all the men she has met, hungry for all he could not understand. Wondering what her body was telling her, wishing he could record the rhythm of her heart, register each flow of the life force that washed over her, weigh and measure the progress of death. When she was gone he would write it all down, document the case of the Polish countess, dying of cancer, given a dose of morphine.

‘Now you are earning your keep,
Monsieur le Docteur
,’ she told him. ‘Now, you are worth your weight in gold.’

Asking a foreign power to intervene in the internal matters of one’s own country does not necessarily have to be a betrayal. The monarchists in France asking for a foreign intervention against the Revolution were not traitors, but political opponents.

Thomas had heard such arguments before, Ignacy made sure. But, in 1792, in Poland, there was no civil war. The May 3rd constitution united everyone. King Stanislaw August supported it. The nation supported it. The leaders of the Targowica faction: Felix Potocki, Franciszek Rzewuski and Seweryn Branicki,
were
traitors.

‘The best one can say about them,’ Ignacy liked to repeat, ‘is that they didn’t know what they were doing. Catherine II, the greatest whore of Europe, Thomas, was dying. Death was already waiting for her, in her water closet. But it wasn’t fast enough for Poland.’

There was a consensus in Ignacy’s circle that had it not been for the Targowica, the Russians would have swallowed the reforms of the new constitution. The war with
Russia and the third, final partition of Poland could have been prevented. For before Targowica there had been political cards to play. One could have set Russian interests against those of Prussia, whisper into the Emperor’s ear that a stronger monarchy in Warsaw would weaken the Jacobin dreams.

Every Sunday afternoon Ignacy received guests. His cook prepared Polish dishes: bigos, pierogi with kasha and thick sour cream, borsch. Sometimes, in response to special request, other dishes were made, some of them almost embarrassingly simple, like a bowl of boiled potatoes with pork lourdes.

‘Do please come,’ Ignacy said. ‘It’s not on bread alone …’

Topics of conversation in Ignacy’s singular salon did not surprise Thomas. Every participant of the gathering had once been Napoleon’s soldier. Captains Przybylski and Grójecki had gone all the way to Moscow, Colonel Sorek was with Marshal Poniatowski when the Marshal threw himself into the currents of Elstera. ‘Did he really say, “God placed the honour of Poland in my hands and only to Him I shall surrender it,’” Thomas had asked. Ignacy shrugged and said that it didn’t really matter, that was what the Poles wanted to remember.

The air of the salon was thick with snuff, cigar smoke and brandy. After spending time at the bedside of the dying, gatherings like this one, often felt slightly indecent. But it was precisely this indecent vitality that drew Thomas into the arguments that erupted in this room. One by one Ignacy’s guests came up to him, keen to explain yet another aspect of the political situation. He was French, after all. He could have missed the point entirely.

‘Fulhams, Doctor Lafleur, loaded dice,’ Captain Przybylski said. ‘I caught a fellow once. His dice were drilled and weighted with quicksilver to favour fives and
sixes. All the scoundrel needed were three small veins of mercury, a drill and some burrs for hollowing. He could get a pair that favoured the ace and the deuce. Or fives and sixes. “High men” he called them.’

Captain Przybylski was a strapping man with reddish streaks in his hair. It took Thomas a moment to realise that the story of his encounter with a hustler had not been brought up in vain.

‘After the Congress of Vienna the Tsar of Russia calls himself the King of Poland! General Zaj
czek has conveniently forgotten his allegiance to Napoleon and became the Tsar’s right hand in Warsaw. Konstantin, the Tsar’s half-sane brother rules over the Polish army. The Arch-Duke swears he will drag the last traces of the French disease out of their bodies. Napoleon’s
gragnons
are now being treated to good old Russian discipline. The number of suicides has quadrupled. The lashes are back. The traitors have won and we are left to pay for what they have done.

‘They call it luck,’ Captain Przybylski sighed. ‘A fulham, I say, and high men. Then the world quickly forgets the victims.’

The Poles, with all their faults, Thomas thought, had his sympathy. A nation betrayed, quartered and denied existence. He could see why they would feel cheated. Ignacy, however, did not believe in doctored dice. He would rather look for some mythical, exclusively Polish sins to explain his country’s fate, sins that would have to be redeemed with more sacrifice, with more blood. As if other countries were better and more worthy. Thomas liked the fulhams theory better. Fulhams and high men, he must remember that.

Captain Grójecki’s estate had been part of Prussia since the first partition of Poland. Now Captain Grójecki’s youngest son had joined the Prussian army. ‘This,’ the Captain declared, ‘is good.’ He liked to think that his son
was learning from the masters, that one day he might use what he had learned against his own teachers. ‘When the right time comes,’ he said with a knowing smile. Captain Przybylski, who had been waiting for a pause in the conversation, nodded and wrung his hands. Soon the two men were lost in a discussion on the merits of Prussian discipline and tactics.

Thomas sipped his coffee. The Poles made excellent coffee, and Ignacy’s household was no exception. Freshly roasted beans made all the difference.

‘Mycielski!’ Captain Grójecki’s voice again captured Thomas’s attention. ‘Small world, I tell you. I knew his father in Kraków.’ For a while the conversation hovered around Captain Mycielski’s amorous exploits in Berlin. Duelling might be considered foolishness by some, but obviously not by a dashing Polish captain in the Prussian Guards who had already been challenged a dozen times by jealous husbands. With pistols, too, not sabres like a mere hot-headed Jena student. A well-known society lady had taken ill on his account. ‘Not the only one,’ Thomas heard. There was an undercurrent of admiration in these voices, he thought, the Polish love of panache. In the end the consensus was that with Captain’s Mycielski’s slender waist, his broad chest, his hair, the calves of a Greek hero, who could be faithful to one woman?

‘One would make all the rest unhappy,’ Captain Przybylski laughed, smoothing his reddish hair, with, Thomas decided, quite a dose of wistfulness.

A maid approached Ignacy and curtsied. Her flaxen braid was tied around her head like a crown. Ignacy bent to listen, but then shook his head and sent her back to the kitchen. When the girl closed the door behind her, he rang the small silver bell. With some reluctance, the room fell silent.

‘Gentlemen,’ Ignacy said. ‘We have gathered here not
just for excellent company and for the memories of past glory, but to keep our souls alive with hope. I have something for you today. General D
browski’s last will from which I want to read but a few sentences.
Keep in purity the national spirit, unite in morality and be like one man, then all evil will abandon you
.’

General D
browski, the creator and commander in chief of the Polish Legion in Napoleon’s army – the Legion so cruelly decimated in Santo Domingo – had died three years earlier in Winna Góra. He asked to be buried in the jacket and cap of the Legion. Three bullets were to be put in his coffin, the bullets that had been extracted from his body, souvenirs of close calls. Beside the bullets the General wanted three sabres, one from the 1794 Insurrection, one from the Polish Legion, and one from the battle of Berezina.

‘These are his very words,’ Ignacy said. ‘He wanted us all to carry them in our hearts.’

What followed was a mêlée of voices. Thomas didn’t have to understand Polish to know what made these aging men jump at each other’s throats. Chances had been missed, mistakes made. Now at least two positions were being violently argued. One was that Russia should never have been trusted. Those who entered into alliances with Alexander were traitors. Traitors like those who signed at Targowica. The other view held that political realities could not be ignored. Alliances had to be made according to need. If Poland had to walk with Russia for a while, so be it. Was it really that different than walking with Napoleon? Losing so many good men in Italy, Spain or
Santo Domingo? If Polish soldiers were to get their military training in the Prussian army, that’s where they had to go. These were times of stealth and subterfuge.