The General's Mistress

by Jo Graham

  “I have become used to it in recent years.” He reached out and put his hand on my upper arm, where the cascades of blue silk fell away, but his eyes did not leave my face. “You’ve changed your mind?”

  “Yes,” I said, and lifted my chin.

  He did not kiss me, though he was close enough that I could feel his warm breath. “It was the money,” he said.

  “Almost entirely,” I said.

  “Almost.” He nodded. “That will do.”

  “Will it?” I raised my hand and rested it against his cheek, flesh and smooth skin, the faint stubble of evening. “You do not want me to worship you?”

  “On bended knee?” Bonaparte smiled against my fingers. “I prefer sweets to spices. And I think I see enough sycophancy.”

  “Do you always know exactly what you want?” I asked.

  “Yes,” he said, and I kissed him, drawing his face to mine.

  His arms went around me, not tentative and gentle, but hardly as though storming a fortress either. Solidly.

  Our kiss was a ballet of tongues, slow and warm as though we expected an audience, as though dancers reached and touched in sensuality that was ritual. Like gypsies at a fair, I thought, my hands sliding up his back under his coat, like commedia dell’arte, improvised and polished at once. And there was pleasure in the grace of it, each movement matching.

  The door opened, and there were heavy footsteps. I sprang away from him.

  An enormous man with a long black moustache wearing outrageous Mameluke garb stood just inside the door, a huge scimitar at his side. He scowled.

  Bonaparte seemed unconcerned. He dropped his hand from my waist and walked over to the desk. He bundled up the papers in an oilskin pouch. “Here you are,” he said cheerfully, handing them over. “That’s the lot of them.”

  Wordlessly, the Mameluke bowed and walked out, the papers clutched close to his massive chest. For some reason, his silence discommoded me more than censorious words would have.

  “We could go into the other room,” Bonaparte said, stoppering the bottle of ink on the desk. “People feel free to disturb me in here.” He looked up at me, eyebrows raising in one last question.

  I nodded.

  He lifted a tapestry aside that half-covered a door, motioned me through. It was a small enough bedchamber, obviously recently redone, with a draped ceiling styled to resemble a tent, striped scarlet and gold, and a massive bed decorated with gilded laurel wreaths. It looked like a schoolboy’s fantasy of a Roman conqueror, lacking nothing but a couple of recumbent Gauls.

  Instead, there were windows opening into the branches of an almond tree and the warm Italian night. I heard the distant sound of thunder. Storms had rolled across regularly every night in the heat, light playing over the city.

  He came and stood behind me, bent and kissed my neck, lifting the tendrils of curls with careful hands. I leaned back against him.

  I remembered this. What it felt like to be worshipped, to be all that was beautiful for a moment, to fill the senses like Venus.

  He slipped his arms around me, and I turned in his arms, kissing him again. There was no hurry. “The night is long enough,” he said.

  I bent my lips to his throat, feeling with a sense of triumph the racing of his pulse just there, where his life lay beneath my lips. I laughed, and undid his neckcloth and the top of his shirt. He shrugged out of his coat, which fell to the floor in a heavy pile, weighted by the gold bullion. His hands slid around me, reaching for the buttons at my back.

  “Did you know,” he said, “that your dress doesn’t fit right in the back?”

  I leaned my forehead against his. “I had it made today. There wasn’t time to make it perfect.”

  “Then you should take it off,” he said. “Nothing should be imperfect.”

  I reached back and undid the buttons with one hand. “Nothing is perfect.” I lifted the dress up and over my head, let it fall in susurrant folds to the floor between us. I wore nothing beneath it.

  “You are,” he said, watching me. I saw his breathing quicken.

  I shook my head, smiling, and walked forward into his arms.

  It was long and slow and quiet. There was nothing we needed to say, just the movement of bodies in the darkness, darkness in darkness. Only a moment of fumbling over shoes and stockings, but I knew well enough how to get around that. When he laid me back on the bed, my hair spread out in a glory of gold beneath him, escaping from pins he removed one at a time, carefully.

  “You wouldn’t want to get stuck,” he said.

  “No,” I replied, running my hands along his back, the shape of his lean shoulders. Affection is harder to pretend than passion, but fascination and desire require no pretense. When he thrust into me I was ready, slick and waiting, and the pleasure caught me by surprise. My hips rose, and I grasped at him.

  “Did I hurt you?” He held still, joined, both of us held perfectly in check.

  “No,” I said. “It’s been a long time.”

  That pleased him. I could tell from the smile, and the tremor that ran along his body. He murmured some wordless Italian endearment, and bent his face to mine.

  When he finished I was so close that I nearly shrieked in frustration, so close and yet not quite there. He slid off me and to the side, and forgetting everything else, I seized his hand and brought it where I needed it, pressing against the side of his hand, rocking against him.

  “There, cara, there,” he said, and I felt the rolling change, not deep as it had been, but enough.

  And then I clung to him as though he were my friend, as though I claimed him, as a wounded man clings to the hand that offers him water, with no thought of who he was, a head of state, an important man, a patron. I held on as though I were drowning. I closed my eyes and turned my face to his neck.

  He said nothing. He stroked my long hair spread across the pillows and waited until I lifted my head.

  “You know,” Bonaparte said, smiling, “I wondered at first if your hair owed more to art than nature, but I see now that it doesn’t.”

  “No,” I said, “it’s really that color.”

  He pulled his arm out from under me, and for a moment I wondered if he meant for me to leave so abruptly. Instead, he crossed the room to the little table beside the window and poured a glass of cool water out of an earthen carafe that waited there. He took a long drink, half-turned to the window. The lightning was playing in the sky far away, and the freshening breeze stirred the leaves outside. It felt good.

  “Do you want some water?” he asked.

  “Yes, please.” I sat up and he brought it to me, sitting down on the side of the bed. I took the glass between my hands and drained it.

  “Are you always that intense?”

  “No. Yes.” I stretched to put the glass down. “But I told you it had been a long time. Since things were like that, at any rate.” I did not look at him, but stretched out on the red sheets on my stomach, pulling one of the pillows under my chin.

  He slipped under the sheet, propping on his elbow. There was nothing but curiosity in his voice. “Did you love Moreau so much, then?”

  “No,” I said. “But I respected him. And he was very good to me. I can speak no ill of him.”

  “He never knows what to do with loyalty,” Bonaparte said, running one hand down the curve of my back, admiring white skin against the scarlet sheets. “He spends it like coin, and never thinks where more will come from.”

  “And you?” I asked, turning my head.

  “Loyalty is a treasure beyond price,” he said, twining one lock of my hair around his finger, all his attention focused upon it. “You can buy sex. You can even buy men who will die at your word. You can buy gratitude or cooperation or peace. But you can’t buy loyalty. If I had the loyalty of one such as you”—he paused, and his eyes met mine—“I would not squander it.”

  “Sir, what would you do with a whore’s loyalty?” I asked, pressing my cheek against the pillow.

  “Th
e same thing I would do with anyone else’s,” he said. “See what you are made of, and let you do it.” He released my hair, watching the lock uncurl in the dim light.

  I closed my eyes, hardly knowing what to say. The words that crowded at my lips were ridiculous, words meant to be said over a blade in a chapel, or on some bloodied field. They were not meant to be said by someone like me. If I were younger, perhaps I would have said them, if I had still believed in heroes and the sons of gods. Instead, I lowered my head against the pillow.

  “So tired, then?” he asked.

  “A bit,” I said. “I hardly slept last night, thinking.”

  “If you were a better coquette, you would say ‘thinking of you,’” he said, and there was amusement in his voice.

  “You know that part,” I said. “You have the power to throw all into disarray.”

  He shrugged and moved a little closer, one arm stealing around me. “I do. But order is much harder. It’s easy to make a mess of things. Bringing order out of present chaos is much harder.”

  “Is that what you are doing?” I looked up at him. “Reordering the world?”

  “I put it to you that the world has already changed,” he said. “In the last century, we have charted the globe, even to the vastest reaches of the South Seas. We have created machines that do the work of men, and now words may flash across the miles faster by semaphore than any dispatch rider ever rode. Our governments must change along with it. If we do not accept the realities that already are, and change our way of doing things accordingly, we will all be swept away by the tide and engulfed.”

  “Like the Terror,” I said. “If change is blocked, when it breaks the dam it runs wild. I had not thought of it.”

  “Most people don’t,” he said. “Most people don’t think far enough—or if they do, they see only vast tides and can’t see the waves right before them.”

  “You see both,” I said.

  “The flood is here,” he said. “We will never return to the ancien régime, to the way things were. We can either learn to master the flood and to make deliberate choices about what we do, or just be swept along.” He snorted. “In Austria, they pretend there is no flood. In England, they say that it can be resisted, that their houses will stand against it. It has already washed over our rooftops. It would be purest folly to pretend. We must instead be the masters of our fate.”

  I rolled over on my back and stared up at the draped ceiling. “I wish I were the master of my fate. Instead I am a bark that has been thrust here and there by the tide.”

  “Give up, Madame,” he said, but not angrily. “You make choices, some for good and some for ill, and you reap the consequences. No storm has tossed you here.”

  “No,” I said slowly, looking up at the carved wreaths holding the curtains. “I suppose not.” I knew well enough that if I had refused or pleaded illness, he would not have forced me to come. For that matter, I was in Italy of my own choosing. I had asked Isabella for a place, taken an opportunity that came. I was not a child bride, given to a man who owned me body and soul, or even a virtuous wife bound by law. If law did not protect me, it did not bind me either. No one owned me.

  And for the first time I felt a curious lightness, as though I understood the word for the first time. “Liberty,” I said.

  “Liberty is hard, Madame,” Bonaparte said, one hand tracing a pattern down my arm. “As we are all learning.”

  “Yes,” I said. I was still filled with this idea, so vast and uncontrollable that it seemed I held it only by the corner. These politics that Jan had played, that Moreau had played, were more than just a dangerous game for money or position, more than the snapping of dogs over spoils. It was a game for life itself, for who we are to be, a game stretching centuries behind and dizzying centuries ahead, a game of deciding what we would believe and how we would live, whether I should be regarded or despised, freed or imprisoned.

  “How much the common good may demand of us . . .” I said, trying to get my head around it.

  “And how much our individual inclinations, how much our natures, may be given free rein,” he said.

  “Whether I am an abomination—”

  “Or a treasure,” Bonaparte said. “Just so.”

  I looked at him. “And you think?”

  He put his head to the side. “Everyone has their uses. And I see nothing in you to despise.”

  “Not my loose virtue?”

  He laughed. “Cara, if every woman of loose virtue were an abomination, I should be Augustine, not Napoleon!”

  “And why should there be a different standard for men than for women?” I said, thinking of Charles and the liberty I felt in his clothes, in his skin.

  “There is,” he said.

  “But why should it be so?” I asked. “You have put it to me that we may change civilization as a whole. Why should I not wear trousers and ride into battle, or choose my lovers as a man does? Why should I not face the same dangers and dare the same risks? Why should I not be your Paladin, as surely as Lannes or Masséna?”

  He ran his hand over my golden hair, a strange and rueful expression on his face. “You are running far ahead of me. I think there are not any Amazons. But if there were, I am sure you would be one.”

  He did not know the half of it, I thought. He did not know Charles. He did not know how thoroughly I could be him.

  Instead of a hot retort, I put my arms around him, feeling the solidity, as though he were the realest thing in the world. “Love me again,” I said.

  His eyebrows rose. “Politics is an aphrodisiac?”

  “Yes,” I said, and drew him down to me.

  Fama Volat

  In the morning he was awake a few minutes after five, something I was less than enthusiastic about, since we had not slept until after two. I was generally an early riser, but this was ridiculous. I moaned and pulled the sheet back over my head, not stopping to consider that he was the head of state, and that it was probably a severe breach of etiquette.

  He laughed at me and hurried into the adjoining dressing room. The sounds of very noisy bathing drifted out to me. It was impossible to sleep through all the splashing and talking with his valet and the singing of random Italian comedy songs. By the time he returned, I was sitting on the edge of the bed, wrapped in the sheet. He wore a cream-colored dressing gown and was toweling his hair dry.

  “Do you never sleep?” I asked.

  “As little as possible,” Bonaparte said, shaking out his hair like a dog. “Whatever is taken from sleep is added to real life. And there are never enough hours for everything.”

  His valet followed him in, and I pulled the sheet more tightly around me. Bonaparte ignored it, and continued talking while being handed smallclothes and breeches, shirt and waistcoat and stockings. “And now especially there is no time. I have written the Austrian Emperor to begin negotiations, and we must gain as much as we can before a treaty is proposed.”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “To keep what we have won.” He looked at me sharply, in the midst of shrugging into his coat. “Politics, Madame. It may interest you to follow it.”

  I flushed, still wrapped in the sheet. My dress was on the floor some little distance away.

  The valet picked up the wet towels and carried them out.

  Bonaparte walked over to me, lifted my chin, and smiled. “I’m leaving for Paris tomorrow, so I won’t see you again now. I will be interested in seeing what you do with money and liberty both.”

  “I am sorry to hear that, sir,” I said, rather stiffly. I had not expected more. I had not expected anything of longer standing. But I felt a real reluctance to say good-bye that had less to do with money than I had thought. I wanted to know more. My fascination was not quenched.

  He picked up my dress and brought it to me, smoothing out the folds and tucking a bulging purse into it. “Fama volat,” he said.

  I took it from him. “Do you always spend so much money on women?”

  He lif
ted the dress and held it for me to duck into it. My head emerged. He gave me a half smile. “It stimulates the economy of France.”

  “Ah,” I said, slipping my arms into the sleeves, “I’m glad to know that’s what it stimulates.”

  Bonaparte laughed. “Good-bye, Madame. I will see you again.” He did up the buttons on my dress with deft fingers, planted a kiss at the base of my neck, and went off about his work whistling, all before six in the morning. I watched from the hall as his trim form went down the wide marble staircase, his cocked hat in his hand.

  I went back to my lodgings and fell sound asleep almost before my head hit the pillow.

  It was late afternoon when I awoke, almost time to be at the theater. I got up, splashed my face with tepid water, changed clothes, and ran. I made the curtain, but it was a rather breathless Sébastien in the first scene.

  Isabella passed me in the wings during the first comic interlude with the servants. “Are you all right?” she whispered, her long purple wrapper drifting around her trailing feathers. She was about to go on as the beauty who sought the hero’s hand and would be sadly disappointed.

  I nodded. “He was fine. But he leaves for France tomorrow.”

  Isabella rolled her eyes. “Well, a small windfall is better than none.”

  “Yes,” I said. And of course it was. While the money wasn’t enough to set me up in style, it was more than enough to live on for a few months. Enough to rent an apartment of my own when I got back to Paris, without having to worry how I should pay for it for a while. By the time the money ran out, I would have had time to find a new patron. Or succeed as a great lady of the theater. Or something.

  The next morning I went in search of Colonel Meynier at the Hotel Battachio, where he had said he was staying. I arrived not a moment too soon. Meynier was in the courtyard saddling a lean ebony gelding, its tail clubbed with green ribbons.

  “Madame St. Elme!” He took both my hands in his and kissed each, his pleasure in seeing me evident on his face. “I hoped you would come before I left.”