The Second Empress (13 page)

“What if she can’t speak any French at all?”

The queen cuts her eyes at Collette. “Then life will be very boring for her in Paris, won’t it?”

As we descend from the carriage, a pair of liveried guards open the wooden doors of Schloss Hagenau, and a man in an eye patch emerges from the castle. His black hair is tied back with a golden cord, and his embroidered cloak is exceedingly fine.

Queen Caroline turns to me. “My God, he’s even taller than you.”

And like mine, his shoulders are broad. He has either worked on a farm or spent a great deal of time preparing for war. Perhaps Germans aren’t so fat and lazy after all.

“
Really
,” Caroline adds as the man comes closer, “he must be a giant.” She looks from one of us to the other, as if she’s expecting some kind of trouble. “You remember what my brother said?” she asks nervously. “Nothing can go wrong tonight. He’s desperate for this match.”

“The ceremony has already happened,” I reply.

“That doesn’t mean anything until he’s had her.”

The man stops in front of us, and he looks furious. Clearly, his French is good. “Count Adam von Neipperg,” he says shortly. The bow he gives us is as brief as decorum can allow. “I expect you are Caroline, queen of Naples.”

“I am.” She brings her black sable muff up to her cheek and shivers for effect.

He takes in the velvet seats and plush satin pillows of the coach behind us. “It must have been a very difficult journey,” he says, then adds dryly, “Terribly unpleasant.”

“We have been on the road for eleven hours today,” Caroline replies, caught off guard by his remark. “I hope you are not mocking me.”

“Not at all, Your Highness. It is a pleasure to have the emperor’s sister in Austria.”

As soon as Count Neipperg says this, an army of servants appears from the castle to take our belongings. “And you must be Paul,” he says to me, “the Haitian chamberlain.” I bow, and this time his smile is genuine. “We’ve heard of you even in Vienna,” he says.

I can’t imagine what it is the Viennese have heard, but there is no time to find out. Collette’s teeth are chattering, and the count ushers us quickly through the icy courtyard. The scent in the air tells me it will snow tonight, making the roads slick and dangerous for travel. Still, we must leave early in the morning if we are to achieve the emperor’s schedule.

We follow Count Neipperg through the paneled halls. I inhale the
rich scents of cedar wood and coffee. In Paris, the emperor spends a king’s ransom on heating; these halls retain a chill the emperor would never allow. We walk through a passage lined entirely with mirrors, and the queen can’t keep her eyes from her own reflection. She is an imposing figure, a twenty-eight-year-old woman who appears forty-five. She tries a brief smile, but the act looks painful. I wonder how she behaves toward her four children in Naples, and whether she sees the same old woman I do in the glass.

We pass through a series of chambers decorated by someone with a love for thick carpeting, and when we reach a cozy salon, I recognize the empress at once. She’s sitting calmly in the middle of the room with a dog in her lap, surrounded by women the same age as she—eighteen, nineteen, twenty perhaps. She nods formally when she sees that we have arrived, but it’s only when she recognizes Queen Caroline that she rises. The artists have been faithful to her appearance. She is plump, with large lips and a slightly hooked nose. But her hair is thick, and her eyes are an extraordinary shade of blue.

Queen Caroline whispers, “She’s as tall as the count!”

It’s an exaggeration, but as Marie-Louise makes her way toward us, it’s clear that she will tower over the emperor. Napoleon doesn’t like his women tall. Or plump.

“Your Majesty.” Queen Caroline curtsies low, and behind her, the seven ladies she’s brought with her do the same. “It is an honor to greet the new empress of France.”

“Welcome to Austria,” the new empress says. A flush comes over her cheeks, and I wonder what it must be to have skin so translucent that every emotion shows on your face. “I imagine your journey has been difficult so far. Would you like to stay here and speak with my ladies,” she asks, “or retire to your rooms upstairs and rest for the night? We have some lovely excursions planned for tomorrow.”

Queen Caroline exchanges a look with Collette. The empress’s French is absolutely flawless.

“That is gracious of you,” the queen replies, and I am reminded
anew that the Bonapartes speak French with an Italian accent. “But this is the only time we’ll have together.”

The empress frowns. “What do you mean?”

“We leave for Compiègne in the morning.”

The empress turns swiftly to Count Neipperg, and a heated conversation is exchanged in German.

The count clears his throat. “I’m not sure we understand, Your Highness. Your party has just arrived. Surely, the emperor would want—”

“What the emperor wants,” Caroline interrupts, “is his bride. The ceremony has been performed, so why wait?”

The empress touches Count Neipperg’s arm, and a tender look passes between them. Francis I has sent his daughter’s lover with her as an escort, I realize. I glance at the queen to see if she has noticed, but she has eyes only for the spaniel in the empress’s arms. Unlike Pauline, the queen has no affinity for dogs. A coolness descends over the salon. Finally, it is the empress who says, “Tomorrow, then. Shall we talk in here, or somewhere more private?”

“This will be fine.” Caroline moves across the room, and the empress’s ladies step back to make way. She takes a grand chair with padded arms and heavily embroidered cushions. When she has arranged herself, she surveys her domain, and the rest of the women hurry to take their places.

The empress, by contrast, joins Count Neipperg on a small settee near the fire. He briefly touches her knee, and I gasp. He had might as well be openly courting her! But there is only the thrill of the hunt on Queen Caroline’s face. She has been waiting for this moment, and as she sits forward in her chair, I have a good idea what she’s going to say.

“So tell me, Your Majesty, how does it feel to be the empress of France?” Caroline, a queen with riches beyond imagining, is envious of this nineteen-year-old girl.

Marie-Louise hesitates. She has no idea how competition runs in the Bonaparte blood. “It—it is a tremendous honor,” she replies.

“Not yet twenty, and the entire world before you. What do you want to do, now that you’re married? What goals do you hope to accomplish?” Caroline wants to know how her life will change on Marie-Louise’s arrival.

The room waits tensely for her answer. Perhaps it’s the firelight on her golden hair, or the earnestness in her gaze, but there is something appealing in this second empress. “I can think of nothing I wish to accomplish,” she says, “but to be a good wife to my husband and serve the nation.”

Caroline turns to Collette and laughs. She thinks Marie-Louise is toying with her. “A good and obedient wife,” she repeats. “How charming.”

“You asked what I hoped for,” the empress replies, “and those are my desires.”

Queen Caroline stiffens. “Well, the first empress was loved in Paris,” she says. “
No one
in France had more class or style. So if you wish to be a good wife, I suggest you pay attention. Tomorrow I will give you appropriate clothing. And that dog”—she wrinkles her nose in distaste—“will have to stay here.”

“No one is taking Sigi!” The empress rises, and Count Neipperg stands as well. “He goes with me or I do not go at all.”

“Your husband does not like animals, Your Highness. I suggest you make your farewells tonight. And not just to Sigi,” she adds cruelly, “but to all things Austrian. Including your ladies. These are instructions from the emperor himself.”

“That she leave her
spaniel
?” Neipperg challenges.

“It’s an
animal
,” the queen replies, as if no one could ever grow attached to such a thing. “It will find a new owner.”

Marie-Louise buries her face in the dog’s fur, and the only sound in the room is the crackling of the fire. When my father taught me history as a boy in Haiti, he spoke of just such a scene when Marie-Antoinette was sent from Vienna. “I won’t leave Sigi behind,” she swears.

But Caroline is unmoved. “You do not have a choice.”

Marie-Louise looks at Neipperg, as if the final decision rests with him. “We are done here,” he announces, and takes her arm.

The Austrian women hurry to rise, and Queen Caroline calls after them, “We leave at eight.” But no one is paying her any attention. “Tell them, Paul! Make sure they understand—”

Marie-Louise spins around. “We understand
perfectly
. My hearing,” she explains, “is as good as my French.”

Collette covers her mouth in shock as the new empress turns on her heel and walks away.

As soon as the Austrians are gone, the queen whispers, “He will lock her in his rooms and throw away the key. Paul, I want you to be sure that girl is ready for eight. That means up at five and dressing by six. She will look French whether she wishes it or not.”

“And the count?” I search Caroline’s face, to determine whether she can really be so ignorant. “Shall I wake him as well? He will want to come.”

“He may want all sorts of things,” she says viciously. “Unless his name is Metternich, he stays here. In Austria. Our little swan is a married woman now. If she was foolish enough to take the count as her lover, that is no concern of mine.”

So she did see the way he touched the empress’s knee, and how she watched him when he rose angrily to defend her.

Half a dozen servants arrive to show us to our chambers, but when I reach my room, sleep does not come. It’s bitterly, bone-chillingly, impossibly cold. But that is not what is keeping me awake. Tomorrow a young woman’s life will be altered. Whether or not she has bedded the count, the empress’s childhood will come to its real end when she crosses the border from Austria into France. Braunau will be the last Austrian city she ever sees, and the food she’s had tonight she will never taste again. Tomorrow she will ride toward Compiègne to meet her husband.
Like a lamb to a pack of wolves
, I think, and close my eyes, remembering what I had hoped for on my first voyage to Paris.

I was almost eighteen—nearly the same age as the empress—when
Pauline convinced me to leave Haiti. But unlike this girl, the choice had been my own. The war was tearing apart my family, and my mother refused to speak with my half brother when she saw how he supported Napoleon’s invasion. She had been like a parent to him. Luc’s own mother had died when he was seven years old. Yet here he was, offering the French soldiers free food and wine, knowing they wanted to enslave the woman who had raised him. I was tired of the anger poisoning our house, and with Pauline, there was the promise of a future—and calm.

My mother cried tears of relief that I was leaving and would no longer be caught up in France’s war. But by leaving my father’s plantation, I abandoned my family to a fate far worse than discord. The message that arrived telling me of their deaths was written by our neighbor.

“
They are gone
,” he wrote a year after I arrived in Paris, “
and I am returning to France and civilization
.” But it was the
French
who killed my family, the
French
who enslaved my Haitian mother, and the
French
who started the war.

Yet if not for the French, I wouldn’t exist.

I think of my father and how happy he would be to know that of all the learned men in Paris, I am the one the emperor seeks out when he wants to discuss Voltaire. If he were alive, he would be writing me letters about the winter’s harvest, telling me how tall the beans have grown and how lazy Luc is still. We would joke about Maman’s weariness of the rain and avoid the subject of war at all costs.

No one should lose their family. But tomorrow, when we set out for Paris, this is how the new empress of France will feel. I think of the sacrifice she is making for her father as the cold hours pass. Then a cock crows on the grounds of this palace of ice and snow, and I rise to dress. When I open the door to peer outside, the halls are still dark. There are guards positioned at every stairwell, and I ask the nearest man how to find the empress’s chamber.

“Up there. Largest door on the right.”

I climb the stairs and imagine how warm it must be right now in the Tuileries Palace. A careless servant has forgotten to shut a window,
and outside a heavy mist has enshrouded the trees. There is no understanding how these people can survive like this, in cold so intense it can take away your breath.

When I reach the empress’s door, a pair of Austrian guards step forward.

“What is your business here?”

“I’ve come to wake the empress.”

“Her Majesty has ladies for that.”

I look at the young man and can see him fighting to keep awake. “This is by order of the queen, who has been given her orders by the emperor of France. The empress must be woken at five o’clock.”

The boy glances at his fellow guard, and the other man shrugs.

The men move aside and allow me to knock softly. I am expecting a sullen maid instructing me to come back later, so when the empress herself answers, I step back. “Your Majesty.” I bow quickly, and behind me, the guards immediately do the same. It is obvious she has not had any sleep. Her eyes are red and swollen. I peer over her shoulder into the dimly lit chamber, but there is no sign of Count Neipperg. If he has been here, she has hidden any traces of him.

“You’ve been told to bring me to Caroline,” she guesses.

I nod. “The queen’s desire is to leave by eight.”

“Her desire, or her instructions?” she asks.

We stare at each other in the flickering light, and I can see the cleverness in her gaze. She knows this is not a woman’s decision. This is the whim of a man who is accustomed to getting everything he wants, a man who doesn’t like having to wait.

“Her instructions,” I say honestly. When her eyes well with tears, I add quietly, so that not even the lady-in-waiting behind her can hear, “He will be surprising you in a week at Compiègne.”