Fortune

by Lenny Bartulin

  Van der Velde sat down again. Katrijn said, ‘Anja, help the captain with his boots.’

  The slave girl draped the soiled shirt on the verandah railing, then came over and turned her backside towards the captain and straddled his leg. She reached down to take up his boot (it was how she used to do it for Master Nederpelt), gripped the toes and behind the ankle and began to tug, eventually pulling the boot free. She did the same on the other leg.

  Katrijn Nederpelt said, ‘Go and clean them, girl. And don’t forget the shirt.’ She watched Anja go and smiled at Captain van der Velde. She felt there was some possibility they might understand one another. His eyes followed the slave girl. yes, she thought so.

  A young Negro boy came onto the verandah carrying a tray of fruit and smoked meats. He was dressed like a Dutch schoolboy, though barefoot.

  ‘Captain,’ Katrijn Nederpelt said, ‘this is Mr Hendrik. He is my best man here.’

  Mr Hendrik bowed.

  ‘He will assist you with whatever you may need during your stay.’

  Willem van der Velde smiled and nodded. ‘you are spoiling me, Madame Nederpelt. I am not used to such luxuries.’

  ‘Then you must apply yourself, Captain,’ Katrijn Nederpelt said. ‘And learn quickly.’

  That night, she delivered Anja to the captain’s room herself, and then sat down in a chair by the door to watch.

  ORDERS

  It wasn’t until Elisabeth von Hoffmann was actually in the carriage and speeding away that the reality of what was happening settled on her and became true. After the initial joy of lightness, of unshackling, of freedom, there was a sudden moment of fear and doubt. She’d stiffened with the keen surprise of it, her heart beating. The brilliant lightness of escape had instantly plummeted, had weighed down without warning (she’d felt it physically in her body and pressed the heels of her palms into the carriage seat to brace herself). And then, as quickly as the fear had come, it was gone, dissolved. The moment passed.

  Such doubts were naturally only ever fleeting in the young.

  She turned to the général, put her head on his shoulder, and gazed out of the carriage window again. Dark and gloomy Berlin went by. Elisabeth was happier than she’d ever been in her life.

  She had left a note for her aunt Margaretha on the side table in the hallway.

  The général is to be the new governor in Cayenne and I am going with him. Forgive me, Aunt. And wish me well! Your Loving Niece …

  Their plan had been hastily put together and they were giddy with it, the pleasure of its pending expressed in irrepressible smiles, even as they whispered and dressed and moved silently through the sleeping rooms that morning. Bergerard had already taken care of their luggage. They would ride for Paris and stay at the général’s house in rue de la Chaussée-d’Antin for a fortnight while he completed various duties (and, though he feared the encounter, dealt with his wife). They’d then travel to Bordeaux and board a ship bound for the French colony of Guyane, in far-off South America.

  In the coach, Général Fourés reached over and squeezed Elisabeth’s hand. She turned her blossoming, youthful face towards him. The général felt like a young man eloping. years fell away and the thrill was bright through his flesh, his bones. The horses’ hooves clattered on the road like iron drum rolls. He hadn’t told Elisabeth that his new posting was a demotion, but right now, by God, what the hell did that matter?

  A WALK IN THE WOODS

  The way it happened: Krüger, returning from his walk, came through the trees and saw Wesley Lewis Jr in the clearing before the carriage. The American appeared to be kneeling on the ground and bent over. Krüger’s mind took the image in lazily (had the American found something on the ground? Was he praying?) but within a few more steps he knew there was something unaccountable in it.

  Then Krüger began to run.

  He crashed into Wesley Lewis Jr, locking arms around the man’s shoulders and pulling him to the ground, ended up with the American writhing on top of him, furious and yelling. Then Mr Hendrik, half strangled, gasping, rolled over and, before Krüger knew what was happening (he was still pinned under the American), Mr Hendrik thrust a knife into Wesley Lewis Jr’s chest. Then he pulled it out and stabbed the American again, right through the ribs and into his heart.

  Wesley Lewis Jr choked on the blood filling his throat (his eyes were wide, horrified, there was a thick, liquid sound coming from him) and then the colour in his face drained away and, a few moments after that, everything in his body stopped and he was dead.

  Krüger felt the weight of the man pressing down on him. He breathed heavily and then realised his hands were wet, something warm, and when he brought his right hand up and saw it was blood, he pushed Wesley Lewis Jr off in a panic and rushed to his feet.

  ‘My God!’

  With his leg broken, Mr Hendrik couldn’t move and groaned quietly with the pain, lying beside the dead American. Krüger tried to fathom what had happened. It was tremendous, unbelievable. A maelstrom of incomprehension.

  THE COMTESSE D’ANJOU AND THE GIRL FROM ANGOULÊME

  After peace was brokered and signed with the Russians (on a ridiculous canopied raft to which the Emperor and the Tsar were rowed on the river at Tilsit, in early July 1807), the Emperor returned to Paris to discover the Portuguese had changed their minds and their allegiances and were flirting with the English once again. In truth, they’d never stopped flirting, but now it was out in the open, and right in the Emperor’s face too, and that just wouldn’t do. So Bonaparte sent Général Jean-Andoche Junot and about twenty-five thousand men down to the Iberian Peninsula to sort the Portuguese out. Johannes Meyer and the 4e Régiment Étrangers were among the marching columns.

  Home in Paris once more after the long Prussian and Polish campaigns (he loved the long campaigns), Bonaparte was soon enough restless and unsettled in his domestic day-to-day and the banal affairs of state. Divorcing Josephine was on his mind too, of course, and his libido (given greater concessions) was as keen as ever to roam. Naturally, like his maréchals and générals and hundreds of weary campaign officers, he succumbed easily and willingly to the gossipy, scented, velvet world of Parisian boudoirs. And just as naturally, and like all despotically inclined rulers, he indulged fantastic ideas as they occurred to him (with no regard to repercussions) and set about bedding the willing young ladies who presented themselves, nowadays, with little ceremony or subtlety. To conquer! To enact the will! For this was the way Bonaparte saw each successive moment that made up his life: an accumulation of moments and each an opportunity for victory, loss or surrender. ‘It is a simple thing,’ he often said to Talleyrand, ‘to act! you philosophes have never understood!’

  As soon as Général Junot was gone, the Emperor had in mind to seduce the man’s wife again. An earlier encounter had been somewhat embarrassing (he’d drunk too much champagne) and he was determined to redeem himself.

  In a stroke of luck for Junot’s beautiful wife, who doubted she had the strength to resist Bonaparte, or, failing that, to pretend that he was irresistible (rejecting the little man was fraught with all sorts of unpleasantness), a ball held at Fontainebleau provided a formidable distraction in the fresh, bosomy form of Dominique-Adèle de Papillard, Comtesse d’Anjou, a pretty young thing who loved to flirt and be seduced in turn. Sparks flew when the Emperor noticed the comtesse and soon enough he was there beside her, gracing her with his full attention. A relieved Madame Junot (her husband would have called the comtesse a successful military diversion) was able to enjoy the ball and eventually leave with her own lover, the much younger, more brilliantly capable and far better endowed Major Louis-Armand Chaptelle.

  Talleyrand saw what was happening (in fact had always known that it would happen) and leaned over to whisper in Bonaparte’s ear.

  ‘I have been told she has an itch, sire,’ he said in a low voice, smiling across at the breezy, laughing Comtesse d’Anjou, who sat on the other side of Bonaparte now, her hand already resting on his
arm. ‘An itch where she should not.’

  Bonaparte turned to his bishop.

  ‘In this instance, sire, it might be best to consider a tactical retreat.’ And not act the fool.

  ‘Very good, Talleyrand,’ Bonaparte said. He nodded solemnly, disappointed, and left the ball soon after.

  The following day, he bestowed upon his bishop the new title of His Serene Highness, Prince de Bénévent and Vice-Grand Elector et cetera, et cetera. Seemed the philosophes knew a thing or two as well.

  And on the long march to the peninsula with Général Jean-Andoche Junot, strange coincidences and converging events, though there were no Talleyrands to warn the unsuspecting, horny soul how to act.

  ‘I’ve got the itch!’ Wolfie said, putting a hand down the front of his pants and scratching vigorously. The men laughed, and so did Johannes.

  ‘The girl in Angoulême?’ someone said.

  ‘By Christ!’

  Johannes began on the drum and the men fell into song.

  ‘The girl from Angoulême, by Christ! The girl from Angoulême!’

  THE COLEOPTERIST

  The 4e Régiment Étrangers were marched south-west, back across Poland and Prussia and all the way down through France (including Angoulême), about thirteen hundred miles or thereabouts to the Pyrénées, then up and over the mountains into Spain, and then further on, finally, into Portugal.

  Along the way, men bandaged their feet and treated their sores, cut and bled their swollen blisters and shoved army communiqués into their boots for padding. They stole food and liquor and seduced village daughters (there were rapists, too), helped themselves to horses and sheep and wheels of cheese. Other men deserted and disappeared, as though blown off the marching columns by a sudden gust of wind, as easily as dust.

  Johannes Meyer ran twice (against Wolfie’s advice) and was caught twice and both times he was beaten with a cane. He was fortunate to live (it was considered bad luck to execute a drummer) but he hardly seemed to appreciate his position. Every other deserter who’d been caught was shot by firing squad, their trials over within seconds; just a reading-out of the inexcusable crime and then the musket salvo and their bodies dragged away into a greasy ditch.

  Wolfie grew exasperated. ‘you’ll take it too far,’ he said. ‘The drums won’t save you forever.’ He didn’t think the boy had it in him to survive on his own, a fugitive.

  ‘Next time I won’t get caught.’

  ‘Where do you think you’re going anyway?’ Wolfie said. ‘What, there’s a young princess waiting for you somewhere, in an enchanted castle? She makes the best dumplings in the world and all she wants to do is feed and fuck you?’

  ‘Come with me,’ Johannes said. ‘She’s got a sister.’

  ‘They’ll shoot you eventually! Don’t you understand?’

  But Johannes Meyer simply didn’t care anymore.

  Wolfie had many contacts in the Grande Armée, similarly keen and cunning men, of sharp eye and moral indifference. Through these subterranean associations he’d been able to procure tobacco, brandy, meat, new boots—even a lotion for his itch. He’d also come to hear about Colonel Pierre François Marie Auguste Dejean, a count and a uniquely mild man, loved by his soldiers and, as it turned out, a committed collector of beetles, willing to pay cash for any six-legged specimens that came a soldier’s way. To distract Johannes from trying to run off and get himself shot, Wolfie convinced him to catch beetles for the colonel.

  ‘you’ll get pins, glass vials and boxes,’ Wolfie said. His heart gladdened when he saw interest spark in the boy’s eyes (it was a memory, the room in Berlin filled with specimens and cabinets, and Beatrice, and the girl, yes, the other girl in the window).

  ‘Scientific equipment?’ Johannes said. ‘Out here?’

  ‘I just said, didn’t I?’

  Johannes looked into Wolfie’s eyes, which were the colour of rain clouds. And then his friend smiled and his face broke into a thousand granite lines and crevices and crags. And there in all that stone, in all those sharp planes and weathered edges, Johannes saw the kindest face that had ever been shown him before.

  ‘Trust me,’ Wolfie said. He patted Johannes on the shoulder, then pushed him away, unable to endure his own affection for the boy.

  A few days later, a lieutenant from Colonel Dejean’s regiment came with the equipment. His name was Gustave and he showed Johannes how to glue pieces of cork into the inside top of his shako and then pin the beetles there as he found them.

  ‘Just try not to get shot or blown up,’ Gustave said. ‘At least, not until you’ve got the specimens to us.’ His face was serious. ‘And understand the difference in species. We don’t need any Porcellio scaber, or that kind of thing, right? Don’t bring me any of that crustacean in the order of Isopoda shit, because I’m not interested. What we want is beetles, in the order of Coleoptera, so count the fucking legs, for Christ’s sake, right? Anything over six, forget about it.’

  Johannes Meyer began collecting beetles.

  The days were no longer an eternity. They possessed a beginning, a middle and an end. The nights, too, passed restful and dreamless. Hunting for the beetles took his mind off war and death. The world acquired scale again.

  And he fell in love with the beetles. They were little gods in gleaming armour, blue-black and purple, red and coppery bronze, iridescent, beautiful. Johannes was disappointed at having to hand them over (‘It’s money!’ Wolfie said) and so he began to sketch them in a notebook that Wolfie procured for him, along with a nib and a bottle of India ink.

  Johannes Meyer proved skilful in catching them. During the action at Óbidos he caught seven different varieties. The following day, at Roliça, he found five more while marching through the dry, flinty gullies in the hills overlooking the village. He pinned them all inside his shako and looked forward to drawing them in his notebook that night. But then the battle began mid-morning and went on for hours and he had to forgo that happiness until the fighting was over.

  The Battle of Roliça was a slaughter and the outnumbered French were defeated. They suffered seven hundred casualties, the English and Portuguese four hundred and eighty-five. The last Johannes had seen of Wolfie was during the assault by the 29th Regiment of Foot (the brazen English charge up the hill), an attack the French had initially repulsed and almost turned to victory, but there was a second full-frontal assault immediately after the first and then it was all over. Johannes had drummed the men down into the fray and he’d seen Wolfie charge at the English with his bayoneted musket, but then he’d lost him in the cannon smoke.

  In the morning, the Portuguese peasants came with their donkeys and rough boarded carts, dead soldiers stacked in the trays. It took a number of trips to collect and deliver them all, it was miserable work, but the villagers of Roliça didn’t want the bodies strewn over their hills and in the gullies, and nor did they think it was their duty to bury so many dead into the dry, hard-packed earth. They delivered them and said, ‘Here are your soldiers,’ and waited for coins, standing beside the carts. They were poor and some of them had looted the bodies, but not all, and they hoped for payment because bringing the bodies up was respectful and dignified them.

  Général Delaborde sent a man around with a shako and the small collection was handed to the peasants. They took their empty carts back down to the village.

  The sun was already blazing and there were many flies. The soldiers drew lots for who’d wield the shovels and picks first, then tied handkerchiefs over their noses and mouths like bandits. Johannes found Wolfie in one of the lines of bodies on the ground. Wolfie’s arm had been blown off at the elbow and his belly was bloody, chewed up with shrapnel.

  Later that night, under a cold scattered belt of stars, Johannes took his notebook and his collection of beetles, some water, a bayonet and a loaf of bread, and took off into the silvered darkness, and nobody caught him this time as he set off alone through the pine stands in the hills behind the camp. He’d never play a drum again.<
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  TO KILL A MAN IS NOTHING

  Through pure luck and the adrenaline of fear, they managed to eventually drag themselves to the small town of Borken. Exhausted.

  They’d strapped Mr Hendrik’s leg and made a crutch, then stumbled on for miles, across fields and through groves of birch, oak and pine, along muddy trails pressed with small animal prints in stuttering diagonal lines, down empty, stonewalled lanes in the middle of the night. Mostly, Krüger carried Mr Hendrik on his back (he was feverish and unable to walk without intense pain). It was all impossible and pointless, and often when they stopped to rest the burden of their bodies almost crushed their will. And yet neither man complained. They went on. They endured together. They exchanged barely a word (what was there to say?), but the silence between them deepened and fused their plight. The silence contained the truth of their presence inside it, nobody else in the whole wide world but them. They, exclusively, shared what they had created, and had created what they shared. It was not the intimacy of brothers (nor of lovers) but of friends, willingly beholden.

  They slept in abandoned houses without roofs, with sheep and cows in cold barns, out in the open sometimes, even on the harshest nights. They had initially avoided villages and towns and had drawn out the distance between themselves and the carriage (and the body of Wesley Lewis Jr) for as long as they were able. One night, finally, an inn on the outskirts of Borken: a meal and a bed, safe enough now, surely. It was the first bed they’d slept in for weeks. A cold night, but their blankets were warm, even if they were wretched and Mr Hendrik’s leg had turned a shade of deep purple.

  They ate and went to sleep. And then, in the moon dark, a man.

  Krüger woke with a lamp in his face and the barrel of a pistol pressed into his cheek.

  ‘Shhh …’ a voice said. ‘Not a word now, son.’