The Princess of Nowhere

by Lorenzo Borghese

  Sophie grinned at her. “We didn’t talk much.” Then she sighed. “Really, when we were not in bed, he was a very boring man. Hunting and shooting. And everything had to be English. Hunting was only good in whatever silly county it was he came from; shooting was only good with a pistol made in London.”

  “You should have listened to me,” Pauline said, looking smug.

  “What did you tell her?” Camillo asked.

  “That she should take him as her lover; he wasn’t good for anything else.”

  “Well, I didn’t listen, did I?”

  “Because you wanted to show me you were independent.”

  “Yes, and because I thought I wanted children.”

  Pauline looked down. “Sophie, I’m so sorry,” she said in a low voice, her bright mood suddenly gone.

  “I know.” Sophie went back to her letters. “And really,” she added, “Charles’s children might have inherited his brains. Or lack thereof. And that would have been a challenge.”

  Camillo knew they should leave this subject, but he was suddenly curious. “What did he look like? Was he handsome?”

  “Oh, yes.” Sophie smiled. “He looked a bit like you, only very English. Rosy cheeks and lighter hair. But tall, and rode like a god.”

  His eyes automatically went to Pauline.

  “No, I did not flirt with him,” she said, indignant. “I didn’t flirt with anyone on Elba, did I, Sophie? I was Napoleon’s hostess; I had responsibilities.”

  Perhaps that was why she liked to talk about that brief six months in the exiled emperor’s miniature kingdom, he thought. It was safe. No lovers to avoid during the reminiscences. Sophie had a different theory; she told Camillo that it was the only time in her life Pauline had ever felt that someone truly needed her. She was the only one of Napoleon’s seven brothers and sisters to join him in exile (“ungrateful beasts” was Sophie’s judgment of the others), and she had created an entire mock world on Elba for her brother, down to a tiny theater replicating the Comédie-Française.

  Other subjects usually led back to Elba, too. One evening Pauline got out all her jewelry and began trying it on.

  “I look like a hag,” she said cheerfully. “But oh, how pretty they are!”

  Necklaces were draped over the backs of chairs; bracelets and tiaras sat on the tables; earrings and rings rolled around in the saucers Sophie had brought in to hold them. Camillo stared around at the largesse; many were pieces he had given her. But there were some notable and very valuable absences.

  “What happened to the large diamond necklace?” he asked. “And the collar from Napoleon’s wedding? And the emerald parure? You still have the ring; I saw it. What about the necklace and earrings?”

  “Oh, I sold all those pieces.” Pauline lowered a tiara carefully onto her head and looked in the mirror. “Napoleon had very little money after he abdicated. I sold the emeralds and the collar right away, to help buy some property on Elba, and when he left the island, I gave the diamond necklace to his valet. It was the most valuable piece I had, and I thought he might need it. In case anything should happen.” She glanced over to her brother’s portrait, which had been hung in the place of honor above the fireplace. “I never saw him again, you know. I tried and tried, but the British wouldn’t let me go to St. Helena.”

  “I know,” he said.

  “You shouldn’t have married me, Camillo.” She gave him a wry look. “You should have been my brother. I am a terrible wife but a very good sister.”

  “I don’t think of you as a brother does,” he said lightly.

  She laughed.

  In December, the sleeping days began to outnumber the awake days by larger and larger margins, and Camillo woke every morning with a black abyss gaping in his stomach. And then suddenly, in the middle of January, she was awake. Awake without pain. Sleeping again, instead of dozing. The yellow in her skin receded, as did the lines around her eyes. Everything about her seemed to come back to life—her hair, her posture. Even her fingernails, which had become cracked and discolored, began to heal.

  None of them trusted it at first. Two days went by, three. She was eating at every meal. Sophie reported, glowing, that Pauline’s stools were normal—they discussed such things openly now, even at the table. On the fifth day, Pauline asked Camillo to take her out in the carriage. She had only been out once or twice, for very short rides, since her arrival. They drove along the river first, and then to the park. Camillo winced inwardly at every bump in the road, but Pauline had tilted her head back, drinking in the sky and the clouds. It was late afternoon, and the sun was sinking behind the trees on the avenue, casting long shadows onto the paths and bare flowerbeds.

  “We should come back when the flowers are blooming and the fountains are on,” she said.

  “That isn’t until May,” he replied absently, and then could have bitten his tongue out.

  Cautiously, they began to entertain. Pauline had been receiving callers on her awake days all along, but only one at a time and only in her own rooms. Now they invited two or three people and greeted them in Camillo’s spacious drawing room, with its deep-gold walls and frescoed ceilings. Next, they hosted a dinner. Soon they began to go out, at first to small, brief events. In early February, they tried the opera and did not go home, as planned, after the first intermission. Pauline hung heavily on his arm in their box, but as people pointed her out from the pit or came, bowing, to pay their respects, he stopped asking her whether it was time to leave. She was flushed, laughing, brilliant. She was happy.

  “Camillo,” she said the following day. “Doesn’t Carnival begin soon?”

  “Next week.” A month ago, he had planned to move her out of Florence into a house in the hills; Carnival in Florence was a nonstop riot of noise and commotion. But he didn’t think she would want to leave now, and he was right.

  “Let’s have a ball.”

  “What?” he said, taken aback.

  “A ball. A masked ball. Please, Camillo.”

  He didn’t have the heart to remind her that at the last Carnival ball they had hosted, she had disappeared with another man. It sometimes seemed unfair to him that he had a better memory of her many lovers than she did. “Oh, him,” she would say. “I had forgotten all about him.” Camillo hadn’t.

  “A masked ball,” he repeated.

  She gave him a dazzling smile that would have been unthinkable three weeks earlier.

  “Why not?” he said, feeling as though he were living in some bizarre dream where life and death were all mixed up together and no one could tell which was which.

  Pauline woke every morning and went to bed every night obsessed with the ball. Sophie and Camillo and Camillo’s secretary and majordomo tried to persuade her to let them do more of the work, but she fixed on every detail as if she would collapse back into her old lethargy the moment she stopped thinking about it. She designed masks for herself and Camillo, a pair of turtledoves. (“Don’t you dare say one word” was Camillo’s comment to Sophie when she saw them.) She ordered hangings for the ballroom, interviewed musicians, drilled the footmen on their stations for the evening, and frowned over menus.

  “This is what she was like on Elba,” Sophie told him one afternoon. Pauline was fretting over the guest list. “But there, we had three and four events every week. She wanted to distract Napoleon.”

  “No wonder you ran away and got married,” he said gloomily.

  Pauline lifted her head. “Dearest, can we invite your mistress and her oldest daughter?”

  He was shocked. “Of course not. It would be a terrible insult to both of you.”

  “But we will all be masked.” Her voice took on a familiar, coaxing note. “I want to see her. I want to imagine you with her after I’m gone.”

  “No.”

  She pouted. God, he had never thought to see her pout again. But he held firm. The thought of Livia and Pauline in the same room was insupportable.

  As the fateful Tuesday drew closer, he and Sop
hie seemed to be holding their breath. How long would the respite last? What if she fell ill again today, or tomorrow, or the next day?

  On the morning of the ball, Pauline did not emerge from her bedroom until two in the afternoon. Camillo and Sophie were both waiting for her, in a state of near panic. She had not slept this late in months. But her maid had assured them she was merely sleeping, not ill.

  “What’s wrong?” she said, looking at their worried faces.

  Sophie pointed to the clock.

  She glanced over. “I needed my beauty sleep,” she said, very grande dame. She began to laugh. “Look at the two of you! Mother hens! Honestly, Sophie, sometimes I feel as though you are older than I am.” She made a shooing gesture at Camillo. “Go away. You’re not allowed to see me until tonight.”

  Obediently, he left. He went for a walk, he read, he wrote a few letters, he ate, he took a bath. At some point, he decided, Pauline’s obsession must have become contagious. He could think of nothing except the ball. He didn’t even like balls.

  He took special care with his toilet that evening, letting his valet fuss as much as he liked and adding a few touches he thought Pauline would like: a ribbon awarded him by her brother and a stickpin she had given him right after their wedding. His jacket was blue, which meant, he suspected, that Pauline would also be in blue. His waistcoat was a dull gold, embroidered in blue thread. His smallclothes were white, as were his stockings and shoes. He settled the mask over his eyes and went downstairs to wait for his wife. Sophie was there before him, with her escort for the evening, a distant connection of Camillo’s who had hinted lightly, and then not so lightly, and then very plainly, that he was available for the job. He was a widower, a few years older than Sophie, with two small children. Not for the first time, Camillo wondered what would become of Sophie once Pauline died.

  “This feels familiar,” Sophie said, looking up the staircase. Her mask, a shimmering band of fish scales, was dangling from its straps around her neck. Then she gave him a rueful glance. “No, I forgot. You were at the top of the staircase with her, last time. In Turin.”

  Turin. The banquet. Their last, most terrible fight. Really, didn’t he have any happy memories of balls with Pauline?

  “She told me that men like to see women descending to them,” Sophie informed him.

  At the top of the staircase, with her gloved hand just skimming the banister, Pauline appeared. She was in blue, as he had anticipated, and as she floated down, he thought he had been transported back in time. Her dress was cleverly cut to conceal how thin she was, and all one saw as she came forth was a graceful sweep of sky-colored silk below the cameo of her face. She had her mask in her hand, and as she came up to him, she held it out to him. “Would you help me put it on?”

  Her maid could have done it. Would have done it, normally. But now he stepped closer and tied the strings in her dark curls. She bent her head, and he smoothed the ends of the ribbon down over the back of her neck. He could feel the bones at the top of her spine. She was wearing perfume. That was his life now. Bones and perfume.

  “Well. Shall we go across the courtyard and receive our guests?” she said brightly.

  He danced with no one else. When Pauline had another partner, he stood and watched her. It seemed to him that time was spinning away from him so fast that he could no longer even keep track of it. One minute he was dancing, then he was standing, then he was dancing again. Pauline herself never stopped moving. Even when she stood talking with someone, she shifted lightly from one foot to the other, as though she were a bird, about to take off. She ate nothing; she drank a few sips from each glass she took and then set it down and darted away.

  He had spent two weeks worrying that she would collapse before the ball; now he began to worry that she would collapse during the ball. His eyes stole constantly to the clock. When the orchestra began playing the sequence of dances they had selected for the end of the ball, he breathed a sigh of relief.

  “The dummy, the dummy!” everyone shouted as the last dance concluded. There was cheerful confusion as all the guests simultaneously demanded their cloaks and wraps; it was nearly time for the traditional ceremony at the river where drunken Florentines burned the Carnival King made of straw and papiermâché and tossed fireworks off the bridges.

  He practically ran over to Pauline, who was standing, flushed and bright-eyed, bidding farewell to a large group of guests.

  “You are not going to the river,” he said in a fierce undertone, taking her arm and fastening his hand around it like a manacle. “We had fireworks here earlier; that will have to do.”

  “Yes, Camillo,” she said, looking up at him.

  “I mean it,” he said. “I’m surprised you are still standing.”

  “I said yes. I meant it, too. We can stay here.”

  “Good.”

  Then she smiled.

  Pauline had one particular smile that Camillo had never thought to see again. It was her “take me to bed” smile, and when he saw her give it to other men, he wanted to kill everyone in the room, starting with the unlucky man and ending with Pauline.

  This time she was smiling at him.

  No. He shook his head very slightly.

  She took off her mask and held it up next to his matching one. Yes, her decisive nod replied.

  He carried her up the stairs for the second time in four months. She still weighed nothing, but at least she wasn’t tinted yellow and covered in shawls. When he set her down on the bed, he still fully intended to ring for her maid and leave. He was exhausted, and he wasn’t even ill. Nor had he danced every dance. Or skipped supper.

  She clung to his hand. “Camillo, please don’t go.” She tugged. “Stay here. Just for a little bit.”

  “You need to rest.”

  “I’m going to have a very, very long time to rest.” Her expression was wistful. “Right now I have just danced all night at a wonderful ball, and I don’t know what will happen when I wake up tomorrow. I know I won’t feel this well for very much longer. Sometimes I am afraid to go to sleep; I tell myself that if I stay awake, perhaps it will last.”

  He sat down beside her and held her hands. “You want me to keep you awake.”

  She nodded.

  “We could just talk.”

  She gave him a dark look. “Camillo, I have not been a very good wife. But one thing even you cannot accuse me of. I do not talk in bed.”

  He had to laugh.

  “You’re afraid you will hurt me,” she said softly. “You’re afraid you’ll make me ill again.”

  His face must have given him away.

  “Maybe you will. So what?” She turned his hand over and traced the half-sphere of flesh below his thumb. The Mound of Venus, palmists called it. “I want to remember you as my lover, not my nurse. Is that so wrong?”

  “Perhaps not.” He was weakening.

  “Just think,” she said. “For the first time in seventeen years you can make love and not have to go to confession afterward.”

  They turned down the lamps—her request, not his. She did not want him to see her body naked. “And I will not have sex with my clothes on,” she informed him. “I never have, and I am not going to start now.”

  He knew that she often had pain in her abdomen, so he curled up behind her as she lay on her side and entered her from the back. Every movement was careful and gentle; he was holding her in his arms and with his hands circling her breasts, but he barely touched them, just letting her nipples brush his palms. Every once in a while he would feel the bones of her spine against his chest and remember how ill she was; he would just rock himself slowly back and forth inside her, making a little soothing noise that was more for him than for her, until the grim reminder receded to the back of his mind. It was very slow, very tentative. At one point they both dozed off for a minute; he came awake again rock-hard from some little movement she had made as she shifted.

  “Did I fall asleep?” Pauline sounded indignant.

&nbs
p; “We both did. Just for a moment.”

  “How do you know it was just a moment?”

  He nudged her inside with the evidence.

  “I’ve never fallen asleep before.” She sounded curious, not upset.

  “It was nice.” He nudged her again. “Now I think I’m going to keep both of us awake.”

  His hands shifted down to her hips, then folded in and cupped her as he pressed into her more firmly. He could feel her respond, feel her pushing back against his thumbs. His thrusts deepened, and she began to move with him.

  “I have nothing to hold on to,” she gasped. “I want to grab you somewhere.” She groped down and found his hands, notched between her thighs. Her small fingers curled over his thumbs and pressed them deeper and deeper as he rode her from behind. The sensation was exquisite.

  “Don’t stop,” she panted. “Don’t be afraid of hurting me, Camillo, don’t.”

  That was all he needed. He lifted her upper leg slightly and pulled back to get a better position. Then he drove into her, hard and fast, feeling her hands tightening on his and clenching with the rhythm of his thrusts. She came just as he did, with a series of shuddering pulses that reverberated through his fingers all the way up to his wrists.

  They lay there panting for a few minutes, still entwined.

  “Thank you, prince husband,” she said at last.

  “My beautiful princess.” He smiled. “You had your way with me, as usual.”

  “Oh, this was the easy part.” She rolled over so that she was facing him. “You can turn the lamp back up.”

  “What was the easy part?” he asked, climbing back into bed. He didn’t turn it up very much. He didn’t want her to be self-conscious.

  She didn’t answer right away. She studied his face, his chest, his shoulders. “When I found out I was dying, I decided I needed to do three things,” she said, looking carefully at his collarbone. “I needed to persuade you to take me back. I needed to make love to you again—if I could.”

  He thought she would go on, but she didn’t. “And?”

  She shook her head. “I’ve been lucky so far. Luckier than I deserve. I don’t want to ruin it.”