The Second Empress (41 page)

“What about the king’s soldiers in the Tuileries?” Metternich asks.

“By the time he reached Paris,” my father replies, “the king had escaped. They stand with Napoleon now.”

“So what does this mean for Austria?” Metternich asks.

My father says grimly, “We are at war.”

C
HAPTER
35

PAULINE BORGHESE

Château de Chantilly, north of Paris June 1815

I
LOOK AT THE BRILLIANT SWATHS OF CLOTH LAID OUT ON
the floor of the château and decide I want them all: the yellow silks, the rich velvets, the airy muslin. “Make me one in everything,” I decide.

The tailor stares at me but doesn’t object. After all, we are restored. The Bonapartes are once again the greatest family in Europe.

“And where shall I have them delivered, Your Highness?”

I smile at my lady-in-waiting, who’s been told to pack everything by tonight. “The Tuileries Palace.”

The dream of Egypt isn’t dead. My brother has regained the throne of France despite every Allied soldier who stood in his path. The gods have given him a second chance, and this time it shall not be squandered. As for those who betrayed us after his star fell—let them reap the same ruthlessness they have sowed.

I think of Marie-Louise fleeing to Austria with my brother’s son and want to rip that traitorous woman limb from limb. My brother can say whatever he wishes—
She was following her father’s orders. She was obeying the Allies
. But I know the truth. She fled into the arms of her two great loves—Count Neipperg and Austria. I asked him once how he could ever think to make her regent. I even warned him that she would give away Paris.
The thought wouldn’t even enter her mind
, he
replied.
She’ll be loyal to me
. So where is she now? Where is the king of Rome?

“Come,” I instruct my lady-in-waiting, who is seventeen and hoping for an important position in this new court. And why not? She is pretty and competent, and her family never hoisted the Bourbon flag—not once—after Napoleon was sent to Elba. She follows me into the lavish chamber that the Duc d’Aumale has furnished me with. The Bonapartes will not forget his hospitality in these uncertain times.

“I wish to compose a letter to my brother,” I say. I lie on the bed while she dips her quill in the ink. “Ready?”

“When you are, Your Highness.”

“I want him to know that I will choose my new suite upon my official arrival in the Tuileries Palace. Not a single lady should be chosen for me, and I will not entertain any woman who abandoned me after his downfall.”

The girl turns a little pale, and her quill hesitates above the paper.

“Write!” I exclaim. I don’t care that her friends are among the women who shall never be invited back.

She does as she’s told, then waits for me to continue.

“I also want him to know that Paul …” I take a ragged breath. What? Paul left me for a handful of dirt and memories in Saint-Domingue? That in the end, he abandoned me like everyone else? “That Paul … is not coming back,” I conclude.

The girl glances at me. “Monsieur Moreau is gone for good?”

“It would appear that way,” I snap. Although there was one moment, on the balcony of the Hôtel de Crillon, when I could have sworn he was standing there, watching me with my arms raised above the crowds. It’s not impossible to think he might have heard Napoleon announce that the slave trade throughout the French Empire was henceforth abolished. If he was anywhere in Paris, then surely he would have gone to the Crillon to hear my brother speak.

I imagine the look on his face when he heard the news. It’s what he’d been waiting for, why he persisted in quoting Rousseau to my brother
long after Napoleon warned him that France’s colonial slaves would never be freed. But as a prisoner on the island of Elba, my brother realized the value of freedom.

If Paul were here now, we would be speaking of this. He would bring me my medicine, then we would read together from
Cinna
, or Racine, or his favorite—
The Social Contract
. “Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.”

“Is there anything else you would like me to add, Your Highness?”

I lie back on the pillows and think. “Tell him not to worry. We will retrieve his son, even if it means destroying Austria.”

C
HAPTER
36

PAUL MOREAU

Haiti

“
Bondye bon
.”

HAITIAN PROVERB MEANING “GOD IS GOOD”

I
SEE THE GLOW OF THE HOUSES BEFORE ANYTHING ELSE
, and as the ship sails into the harbor of Port-au-Prince, I watch the dawn break over the sleeping city. It has been thirteen years and forty-seven days, but I am home.

The captain shouts that the ship has docked, but I wait at the rails to see the sun rise over the forested hills, and when the light touches the farthest reaches of the bay, I pick up my leather bag and disembark.

Everything is familiar and foreign, all at once. I recognize the smell of the charcoal fires on the shore, and the scent of cooking fish, snapper or kingfish. Even the heavy rolling mist looks like an old friend. A coachman recognizes from the quality of my dress that I’ll be needing a carriage, and I pay him to take me to the Moreau house.

“I’m sorry, monsieur.” He speaks to me in French, the language of our nation, despite our freedom from their tyranny. “I don’t know of any place like that.”

“It was a farm,” I say, “just outside the city. White farmer, black mistress—”

He scratches his head. “There were plenty of those types before the
war. They’re all gone now,” he says regretfully. “What have you come here for?” He glances at my dress and laughs. “Not many Haitians on this island like you.”

“I’ve been away for some time. I’m hoping to return to my family’s farm.”

The coachman looks profoundly sorry. “I hope you don’t expect to find anyone alive.”

I lower my head. “No.”

He nods. “There might be a building, but that’s all there’ll be.”

I climb into the coach and watch the city of Port-au-Prince wake up. She has been nearly razed to the ground, and on every corner there is evidence of her destruction. But my people are rebuilding. For each burned-out building, there is a brand-new shop. And the roads, which were almost destroyed during the war, have been repaved.

We pass the church where my father took me to school, and the courthouse where my mother received her freedom. Then we stop at a house with a white sign at its front, and I shout through the window, “This is it!”

He opens the door, and I read the black lettering:
Maison Moreau
.

I pay the old coachman and blink back my tears.

“No shame in crying,” he tells me. “If we don’t cry for the dead, then what will we cry for?”

Every house on my street has been abandoned. Where there were farms, now there are weeds and fallen trees. I step onto the porch where my father taught me how to carve leather and wood, and make my way into the house that sheltered me for more than seventeen years. Every piece of furniture is gone, looted by the French or by impoverished Haitians.

“Hello?” I call, but there is no one. Even the rats are silent.

I stand in the doorway to my father’s salon and can’t believe what has happened. In thirteen years, the room has managed to shrink. What had seemed like a palace is really just four small walls covered in paper.

I turn from the salon and make my way to my old chamber. The bed is still here! Not a bed, but a cot, with strings for a mattress and an old wooden frame. And they left my armoire. I carved it with my father when I was eleven years old. I go to the cabinet and open the doors, and there, like some ancient treasure from Egypt, is a woman’s comb. I take it out and hold it in my palm, flat and cold like the woman it belonged to.

I wonder where she is and what she’s doing now.

I sit on the bed and remember the captain’s words on the ship: “
The emperor has won the Battle of Ligny. Only God and His angels can stop that man now
.” But I don’t know. Love can inspire men to great feats. And Marie-Louise is deeply loved. Her father won’t give up so quickly. Nor, I hear, will Count Neipperg.

The Empress Marie-Louise once asked me if I believed in ghosts. “
I find it hard to believe in something I’ve never seen,
” I told her. But perhaps ghosts aren’t meant to be seen. Perhaps they are meant to be felt.

I walk to the back of the house and stand in the empty fields. The dry weeds look golden in the soft morning light, and the palms sway gently in the early breeze. For all the kingdoms the Bonapartes conquered, they never had riches like this.

C
HAPTER
37

MARIA LUCIA