“It’s Creation. Haydn’s one of your favorites, isn’t he?”
“I daresay Haydn is more popular with me than I am with him, since the surrender of Vienna.”
“You bring politics into it only to confuse me.”
Bonaparte scowled at his wife. It was the same expression he wore in Thomas Phillips’ official portrait, and in fact would wear in the hundreds to come.
“In any case,” he said, “the composer must survive without me for one night. I’ve been up since dawn, making laws, with imbeciles to tutor me in the language. They’re essential, but no fit company for a man with even a spark of intelligence. I’ve been wailed at by castratos enough for one day.”
“But you’re expected at the opera! You can’t disappoint your subjects tonight of all nights.”
“They’re citizens, like myself, not subjects. You talk like a Royalist. And what night are you speaking of?”
“Christmas Eve!”
“Christ is in exile, haven’t you heard? It was in every broadside.”
He was only pretending to be annoyed with his wife. She was at all events a pretty little thing, and especially fetching tonight, in snow-white ermine with her tiny hands buried in a muff to match, a creature impossible to hold a grudge against. He himself was in shirtsleeves. Without the high-collared tunic of rank, he might have been a common shopkeeper relaxing in his armchair at the end of a day of trading, and like any common shopkeeper, being badgered by his mate. He was six years younger than she, but looked older for his cares; it was no small thing for a man of thirty-one to govern a country.
“Don’t debate with me, Bonaparte. I’m not one of the other Consuls. Your sister and Hortense have been looking forward to this evening for weeks.”
“Then go, with my blessing. We both know you’re quite capable of entertaining yourself without me.”
“As are you, my little general; your every movement is an affair of state, and widely reported. But you’ll find this a pleasant distraction.”
They were in the drawing room, where he’d retired after bolting supper: “Versailles dining,” with its endless courses and meandering conversation, broke his patience. Logs chuckled on the grate: Even they were amused by his displeasure at the prospect of leaving them on such a night.
He drained his goblet and brushed uselessly at a fresh crimson spot on his white waistcoat. “I see my blunder now. I opened with an argument based on exhaustion, offering my own weakness as a defense. The battle was lost before it was joined. I capitulate.”
“Must everything be about war?”
“No. Yet it is.” He smiled; knowing full well the perfection of his teeth and the disaster that was hers. “Don’t furrow that child’s brow with things beyond your understanding. Be quick with your toilet. I wouldn’t wait for Murad Bey, and I won’t wait for you.”
She had no earthly idea who Murad Bey was, but flounced out on the heels of her victory, silk rustling against satin. Women, was there no defense against them after all these centuries? A single petticoat was worth a battery of cannon.
Fifteen minutes in his dressing room, with the expert assistance of Constant, his valet, saw him outfitted from the skin out in cologne, fresh breeches, crepe-soled pumps, Irish linen (pre-embargo), and a scarlet cloak, spun from fleece and brocaded in gold, with epaulets on the shoulders. That excellent servant adjusted his master’s bicorne hat at the preferred angle and stood back to let him regard his image in the cheval glass.
“What a peacock I’ve become.”
“Not at all, sir. You wear your clothes like the Prince of Wales.”
“You alone could get away with the comparison. I cut a better figure in the rags of a half-pay general.”
“Shall I ask if Madame First Consul is ready to depart?”
“Is César ready?”
“Yes, Citizen Bonaparte.”
“She’s had a quarter-hour to powder her nose. Tell her I’ll see her in our box.”
Constant bowed and withdrew. In the corridor that led to Josephine’s dressing room, he shook his head. While it was certainly true, as had been claimed, that no man is a hero to his valet, he admired his master’s ability to shatter a basic rule of marital accord with neither thought nor fear of repercussion.
César was drunk and disgruntled.
He’d been certain, despite popular expectation, that his master would be too exhausted by his labors on behalf of the people of France to venture out this evening. With no prospect therefore of leaving his quarters, the coachman had commemorated the Lord’s birth with a bottle of wine.
Now, flushed and lethargic, he buttoned himself into his greatcoat and stroked the muscular neck of the white gelding he prized above the other five in the team; above all the other horses in the world, and most men he had had the misfortune to know. (Dumb brutes, he’d found, were more pleasant company than others of his genus; for instance, they never borrowed money, nor argued politics.)
“Bad news, old fellow. We go out into the worst of nights.”
Mameluk tossed his head and shook his mane. He could be as irritable as his keeper and as imperious as César’s master. The horse seemed to know its own importance in the scheme of things.
The burly driver, who affected the moustaches of an old campaigner, was one of the few men living who could make a horse understand as if he spoke its language, and the only one the gelding condescended to acknowledge the fact. César poured wine from the long-necked green bottle into his palm and let Mameluk drink. After that he took the bit without resisting.
“Small enough comfort,” said the man, helping himself to another swig.
He dashed cold water into his face from the pump in the stable, breathed into a palm, smelled it, and frowned. He rummaged among his personal effects until he found a small sack of peppermints; a gift from the First Consul, who suffered from dyspepsia and assumed (not without justification) that the affliction was contagious among his intimates.
The coachman himself boasted a cast-iron stomach, but like most men partial to spirits he had a sweet tooth, and accepted the boon gladly. Now he helped himself to a handful, trusting pungent candy to wash his breath in the blood of the lamb.
Not that he ran risk of a sacking. He’d driven an ammunition wagon in the Marengo battle, and the First Consul knew that not a French life had been lost for want of a round in his musket.
He opened his battered footlocker, then changed his mind and tucked the sack under the footboard of the state coach instead. Beside it he placed the green bottle, securely corked. This was no night to enter without satisfactory provisions.
At the thought, César pulled at his moustaches, stimulating the faculties of memory. What was it his master was fond of repeating so often? “An army travels on its stomach.”
Just so; but it traveled just as far on its liver.
At last, activity took place before the palace.
Shadows crossed in front of the sputtering torches, the clink of a bit-chain and the sonorous snort of a grenadier’s horse registering its opinion of the conditions reached the ears of the three conspirators: The little cocksucker was headed out.
Carbon withdrew himself to a safe distance. Limoëlan crossed to the corner of the Place du Carrousel, leaving Saint-Réjant with the mare and cart containing its seasonal greeting. From there he could see to the end of the street. At first sight of the coach- and-six, he would signal for the fuse to be lighted.
“What is the signal?” he had asked.
Limoëlan had replied by inserting two fingers into his mouth and blew a note that split the ears.
A killer among killers! Between them, the others hadn’t saliva enough to raise a whistle.
Saint-Réjant, his breath smoking in the cold, stamped his feet and bent to tie the rope halter to—
What? There was no post visible in the darkness or within quest of a groping foot. None of them had thought to bring a picket.
He knew an icy thrill of panic. A fine group of assassins they were! Marguerite, the quintessential “old gray mare” of lore, surely would bolt when she caught the scent of a sparking fuse: She was not, after all, un cheval de combat, a warrior steed versed in the stink and racket of war. A comic-opera scene unfolded in the imagination of the unfrocked general: a bucking horse towing a burning powder keg the wrong way down the street, capturing the attention of Bonaparte’s coachman and causing him to haul back on the reins while the vessel of destruction veered away.
Quel ridicule! A man could not be expected to strike flint and steel and hold a horse at the same time. Not in broad daylight, and certainly not in a monsoon, with every limb shaking from cold and anticipation. And what of the time necessary to establish distance? He did not aspire to become a martyr to a principle; let that honor fall to the enemy.
Curse Carbon! A true general foresaw everything, and remained on post for what could not be foreseen. Saint-Réjant wondered, disloyally, if this sailor, this Channel pirate, had after taking his leave commandeered a café as his forecastle. He might be swilling buttered rum this very moment, warming his toes before a hearth, while his compatriots shivered in the cold in what were more than likely the last moments of their lives.
At that moment he heard a footfall.
In the light reflecting from a puddle, he observed a gaunt female creature approaching, huddled in a cloak and carrying a basket of coal. The cloak was threadbare, the piddling amount of fuel obviously intended for some poor hearth, witness to a household scraping to survive. Why were palaces always built in the worst neighborhoods?
But one did not question Providence.
Saint-Réjant groped in a pocket, counting coins by touch. When the girl came near, he cleared his throat politely.
“Your pardon, mademoiselle.” He lifted his hat.
The girl started, stopped, withdrew into herself, as if to create a smaller target for assault. Saint-Réjant knew that two hours in filthy rain had not made of him a stranger to inspire trust. And he saw then that she was even younger than he’d thought, a girl in truth. He could be her father. Her grandfather, if he were but candid with himself; soldiers had opportunity to spread their seed earlier than most. But surely this scrawny thing could not have sprung from the loins of a warrior.
The girl said nothing, holding her basket tight to one bony hip, as if it were the only thing on her person worthy of plunder. Naïve creature! Did their mothers teach them nothing, even in these times? He produced his handful of coppers.
“Would you be interested in earning six sous for the work of five minutes?”
César was feeling indestructible.
They did not call wine “spirits” for nothing.
A final long pull on the bottle, another handful of peppermints, and he was truly ten feet tall, physically and in temperament. His perch atop the First Consul’s grand ebony-and-mahogany coach flying the Tricolor of the Republic from each corner placed him precariously high above the ground, but he clambered onto his seat as agile as a cat and slid the whip from its socket. The whip was a fine supple one of braided calfskin, a Christmas gift from his master, who forgot no one, general or scullery.
About him the grenadiers of the Consular Guard were mounting, and he felt a little less tall among those plumed bearskin shakos and bayoneted muskets propped upright on their saddles. At least, the coachman thought, he wasn’t the only one turned out into this shithole of a night.
He blew his nose into the bend of his elbow. It was a preposterous display. The escort alone would outnumber the entire opera company, and all for a quarter-hour trot that a man on foot could have completed in the time it took to assemble the party. But logic was the luxury of the lower classes.
Beneath him the coach shifted, sighing against its leather braces, and he knew the First Consul was aboard along with Generals Lannes, Bessiers, and Lauriston, his aides-de-camp, like him mere junior officers but for the Revolution. The presence of a second coach behind César’s told him that Madame Bonaparte and her party would be traveling separately.
A good coachman, the Madame’s; although not on a par with César, or he would be sitting in his place, coddling the First Consul’s testicles like eggs. That one man in a thousand should set out ahead of his wife while she dawdled at her toilet was the stuff of legend. César himself would as lief ask his beloved white gelding to pull a plague-wagon. The waiting ritual alone had been sufficient to keep him a bachelor all these years.
A pair of thumps from inside—a stick against the roof—and he shook the reins. With a final snort of protest, the team started forward, muscles undulating in the rear pair’s rumps, as effortlessly as if they were pulling nothing at all, instead of the hope and future of a nation.