“AH, SERRANO …” The Austrian rousted himself from his travel cot and struggled to his feet. “What a surprise. How did you find your way here?”
Diego recounted his journey, a confusing trek that had involved much doubling back and mistaken turns but that had eventually led him here, to this large room on the second floor of the Convent of the Cross, a disused building long ago looted of almost everything it had once contained.
“Dear God. You came through republican lines?”
“Yes. I managed to obtain a letter of safe passage. From Juárez.”
“You spoke to him?”
“I did. Yes.”
“May I see it? The letter? You have it with you?”
Diego produced the document. Despite his show of bonhomie, Maximiliano was clearly in a miserable state, ashen-faced and sickly. He slumped back onto his narrow cot gripping the letter from Juárez as though it were a holy relic. It was as close as he would ever come to meeting the man in the flesh. At the same time, of course, it was proof—if proof were needed—that Diego was on the other side. They were enemies now.
While Maximiliano pored over the letter, Diego examined his surroundings. Although nearly empty, the room was spacious, with high ceilings and ample light. A large window afforded a view of the chapel across a small interior courtyard ornamented with what might once have been orange trees but now were mere scrawls—a few scraggly branches attached to thin, barkless trunks. Maximiliano’s long-time retainers, his cook and his valet, rested on the floor atop large burlap sacks stuffed with straw. Diego was surprised to find the Prince of Salm-Salm holed up here, too. He rested on another pair of sacks, his arms clasped around his knees. Every few seconds, he shifted a little and moaned.
“Dysentery,” said Doktor Basch. “The poor fellow has an awful dose.”
The physician occupied a lone chair set in a corner of the room near the window. Once rotund, he was barely recognizable now, little more than a rumpled suit and patches of pallid skin wrapped over an appliance of bones. They were all starving. That was obvious. In a weak voice, Basch observed that Diego seemed to have suffered some reversals of his own.
Diego thought of his broken nose, his two black eyes, his limp. “A misunderstanding,” he said. “A reaction to circumstances.”
Just then, another shell whistled through the air, and the doctor hunched his shoulders. A thunderous boom resounded from somewhere not so far away, followed at once by a crunch of wood, a cacophony of tumbling rocks. Briefly, the walls shook.
“I must say, one tires of this very quickly,” said Basch.
“Well,” said Maximiliano. He held up the letter of safe conduct signed by Juárez. “The man possesses a handsome script. I admire that.”
He reached out with the missive and at once began to cough. Diego took the proffered letter, slipped it into the pocket of his jacket. He lowered himself onto a small wooden bench near Maximiliano. He didn’t imagine the man would remain attentive for long, and there wasn’t much time. He went to work at once. He said what he had come to say. It was time to surrender. This war had ground on far too long as it was. Victory was impossible. It was better to let the dead rest and to allow the living to put down their weapons, to resume their lives. Nothing could be gained by fighting on.
But Maximiliano refused. No, he would not surrender. He would not abdicate. He was the emperor of Mexico, and nothing could alter this truth except the intervention of the Lord. If it were God’s will that he die, then so be it. But he would breathe his last breath as a monarch. He was a Hapsburg and had a lineage to uphold. He would fight to the end, for his own blood and for Mexico. That was his destiny.
Every several minutes another shell whistled overhead and crashed to earth with a deep rumpus, followed by the clatter of collapsing rock, the shriek of twisting wood, sometimes accompanied by the shouts of men, the cries of women, the wails of children.
“You will be staying here with us?” Maximiliano said. “Shall we make up another bed?”
“No. No, Your Majesty.”
The emperor frowned but said nothing. He was evidently reflecting on what had just been implied. At length, he nodded. It seemed he now understood the significance of this conversation. He must have understood that Diego knew his exact whereabouts … and Diego would be leaving.
“Very well,” he said. “So be it.”
Diego looked around at the room once again. Something was missing. Before long, the realization surfaced. Agustín. Ángela’s son. Where was he? A terrible thought gripped him—the child was dead. Pray God that it wasn’t so, that he was alive and that Maximiliano would surrender him into Diego’s care. He turned to the emperor. “Give me the child,” he said.
“I can’t.” Maximiliano rubbed his forehead. “Boy’s gone. This morning.”
Diego furrowed his brow. “What?”
“This morning,” said Maximiliano. Again he began to cough.
And Diego remembered. The balloon. He’d seen it as it rocketed above the alley of corpses. So, it had carried the boy. They’d packed the child off in the emperor’s balloon. He hadn’t known it then, but he had watched the child vanish into the cool blue air.
Maximiliano explained that the idea had come to him in a vision only the night before. They must salvage the child, the innocent boy. They must deliver him from evil.
“You sent him off in that device alone?”
The emperor nodded. Yes.
They stared at each other, and both then looked away, both contemplating what this meant—a three-year-old child hurtling through the clouds in a wicker basket. God knew how high the craft would rise or when it would descend—or where. It might as readily plummet to earth at a deadly speed as gently decline.
Maximiliano shook his head. “I’m very tired,” he said. “I can’t seem to stay awake.”
He settled back upon his cot and placed his head on a pillow encased by a discoloured linen slip that was stitched with the letters MIM. He glanced at Diego. Their eyes locked. For a time, his gaze did not waver. It seemed he understood. Surely he understood. Perhaps he welcomed this fate.
Diego rose from his chair, nodded to the others, uttered a few parting words, turned and withdrew. Outside the emperor’s chambers, in the amber light of the late afternoon, he stopped and leaned against a low wall of stone overlooking a small patio. He heard a shuffling of footsteps, a voice being cleared, and he turned to watch as Doktor Basch hobbled toward him. The physician put a pair of fingers to his lips and asked in a low voice if he and Diego might speak in private.
“Of course.”
The two men trudged along a corridor of arched stone porticos, past the interior courtyard and another grove of tatty, denuded orange trees. In a laboured voice, Basch described conditions in the city, the lack of food and water, the predations of disease, the death rattles of children.
“I, too, have begged His Majesty to consider the possibility of surrender, but he will not hear of it, any more than he will entertain the thought of abdication.”
“I don’t understand,” said Diego. “There was a time when I was sure he would renounce his crown.”
“As was I.” Basch stopped and supported himself against a pillar of stone. “But his wife persuaded him otherwise.” He paused. “She is mad, you know. We received reports of it in the early days of the siege. She had a breakdown in Paris, caused an unholy scene, they say. It happened again in Rome. Hysteria. Paranoia. I take it she’s been committed to an asylum.”
“And Napoleon? Did the empress change his mind?”
Basch gave a sour smile. “No. Of course not.”
“Maximiliano knows this?”
“He does now.”
“But still he won’t surrender?”
“He can’t. His is an ancient family—five centuries of nobility. That weighs on a man. Besides, his older brother would never let him forget it. Europe would be torture for him now.”
“He will die then.”
Basch nodded. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, he will.” He swallowed with difficulty. “You are aware, I suppose, that Márquez has abandoned us? Three days ago, I think? He left with a dozen or so of his men. They fought their way out. They were supposed to round up reinforcements somewhere. But now I’m sure it was a lie.”
“So. Your fate is sealed.”
“I fear so.”
Basch coughed, a deep, crepitating cough, and it was clear he was seriously unwell. He wiped his lips, flaking from dryness. He eyes were shot with burst capillaries, slender rivulets of blood. His skin was mottled, peeling. His bones sagged. He looked half-dead.
“You can help, you know,” he whispered. “You can bring this story to an end. Please. Will you help?”
Diego surveyed his whereabouts and fixed them in his mind—Maximiliano occupied a suite of rooms on the second floor of the Convent of the Cross. The suite overlooked a narrow plazuela, a small grove of orange trees, now dead, and the ancient stone chapel, with its wooden entrance gates. He fixed the place in his mind. He felt he knew it exactly.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes, I can.”
Late that night, Diego slipped out of Querétaro. He encountered no difficulty with the imperial sentries, who might themselves have deserted by now. He clambered through a series of trenches and barricades and then picked his way through the wreckage and waste of the no man’s land that divided the two sides. He forced himself to avoid looking at the swollen, festering corpses still dangling from the branches of the fresnos. He saw their shadows though, cast upon the barren ground and gently rotating in the moonlight. He scrambled up the precipitous ravine, desperate to be away from this terrible place. Beyond the battered city walls, he climbed to the republican line and presented his laissez-passer, along with a password he’d been issued that morning by General Escobedo. A pair of sentries marched him directly to the quarters occupied by their commander. It was late at night on the thirteenth day of May in the year 1867.