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  Anne frowned. Had she heard him right? Takes us from this city? Félix beamed at her, trying to speak through the joy in his eyes and the bounce of his eyebrows, but she wished he would just spit it out. Were they to leave Paris?

  ‘Versailles, my love—we are going to Versailles!’

  Her eyes popped wide. ‘To the gardens of Versailles?’ she breathed. Her first thought was the countryside. She would be returning to the country. Away from these cramped and stony streets. She would have acres of green fields spreading around her. It would be a place to grow, a place to have their own large family.

  Félix bobbed his head. ‘I am to rebuild the gardens of the Trianon!’

  The Trianon … Marie-Antoinette’s own garden. A twist of fear shot through her.

  The savant abruptly snorted. ‘I hope you will not turn the gardens into some sort of botanical amusement. The woman destroyed the place of learning with her pretty follies.’

  And the Queen paid the price for that, did she not? Anne wanted to snap, but held her tongue.

  Abraham began to cry again. Turning her back, she latched her baby to her full breast. Truth be told, her growing dislike of her husband’s friend gave her a moment to hide her face from Félix. Versailles? The royal palace, after everything that had happened there? She heard her mother suck the air between her teeth in warning.

  Anne was wary of this new regime, this Directoire. We are no better off with different cats to lick the cream, she thought, but would never say so to her husband. God had chosen the royal family, not these men. If man put himself above God’s chosen ones they were only inviting His punishment, her mother would say. And if these people could put themselves in power so easily, what was to stop others from thinking they could do so too? Everyone knew that when you put a new horse in with the herd they would fight until each horse knew who was above and who below. Without God’s order, no one knew their place, there would be chaos and bloodshed.

  At home she kept these worries to herself, although she knew she was not alone in her concerns. Simple folk didn’t care for high-minded ideas. They cared about food on their tables—and not upsetting the God above who put it there.

  The gentleman stood suddenly and Anne pulled a shawl across herself to cover her babe. The chair sat empty but she did not feel she could sit in it, even if it would ease her task. Her son lost her nipple in the movement. She shifted him to her shoulder and turned to see Félix smiling at them, her handsome tousle-haired man, his face soft like a puppy.

  She wanted to go to him, to ask for reassurance. What was their new life to be? What was the shape of it? She had no picture in her mind. All she hoped was that they were to live in a cottage with its feet firmly on the ground, where she could walk out into a garden and dig her own hands into the soil. She would grow vegetables and herbs. She would show her children the secrets of feeding yourself as she had been shown by her parents, and their parents before them.

  ‘Have you ever wondered,’ Labillardière asked Félix, looking at the baby on Anne’s shoulder with puzzlement, as though he had just noticed him, ‘what is the point of your existence?’

  Anne jiggled her boy, unsettled by the question. No one she knew asked such a thing. It seemed sacrilegious. Was he questioning God’s plan?

  Félix frowned. Labillardière was staring at her husband, head cocked to one side. He seemed to be waiting for an answer. ‘Mine?’ Félix asked.

  ‘Yours, or any man’s.’

  ‘To be a good husband, to be a good father. To raise my children well.’

  Anne smiled at him.

  ‘You do not want more? More than this endless cycle of birth and death, lives passing unmarked by greatness? What is the point of it?’ He threw up his hands.

  He seemed aggravated by his own questions. Anne wished that he would soon leave.

  ‘Our lives mean much to those we love,’ Félix said. He too looked confused.

  ‘But why procreate if you have not achieved? Perhaps you think one day your offspring will do something memorable if you cannot yourself?’

  Félix spluttered. ‘I am not without ambition. I will be the chief gardener of the new botanical gardens at Versailles, in case you have forgotten.’

  ‘You do not wish to be remembered as men of war and science are remembered?’

  ‘My children and grandchildren will remember me.’

  ‘Perhaps, but not for your deeds.’

  Anne had not seen this side of her husband before, this loss of easy temperament. Anne watched her husband’s face grow shiny and mottled. He stripped off his cravat.

  ‘If you mean do I seek everlasting glory for myself, then no. I am content to leave this earth as my plants do—without a trace.’ He threw his hands and fingers open wide to make his point.

  Anne placed her hand on his shoulder.

  Félix recovered himself. ‘Labillardière speaks and thinks unlike other men—do not be alarmed,’ he said to her, his voice as crisp as autumn leaves. ‘Many do not warm to his manner.’

  Labillardière did not seem to mind being spoken of like this. ‘I am interested in the state of mind that marriage induces. I have heard that few family men achieve greatness. I am worried, you see, as I too intend to marry.’

  Silence greeted his announcement. Félix threw a startled look at Anne. ‘Congratulations,’ he said eventually, as if he could not quite believe it. ‘And your wife-to-be?’

  ‘She is a widow. A mature, quiet woman by all accounts.’

  ‘By all accounts?’

  ‘My brother François has arranged things. I think we will be well suited.’

  ‘You have not met?’

  ‘Not as yet.’

  Anne saw the twitch in the man’s face, the tremulous smile. He was nervous. Ah! This great man was terrified of the thought of marriage. She understood him better now. He was a man out of his depth, about to venture forth on a journey he had no conception of. An arranged marriage for a bachelor of many years! She saw him reach out with one finger towards her child’s hand and hesitate before touching the tiny fingers. Abraham did not stir. He had at last begun to doze.

  Gently, Anne laid their son down in his cot. Her mother had sent her this sturdy walnut bassinette, the one Anne herself had slept in, soon after her wedding day. Félix moved beside her and stroked his baby’s soft cheek. Abraham struggled against sleep, his eyelids flicking up and dropping slowly.

  ‘Then you too will soon know the joy of fatherhood,’ Félix said to his friend, while beaming down into the crib.

  ‘Certainly not,’ the man scoffed. ‘Children blunt the intellect. No man achieves great things if he allows such distractions to cloud his purpose.’

  Beside her, Félix gripped the edge of the cot, his fingers white against the wood. ‘It is just his way,’ he muttered through gritted teeth, ‘to be infuriating.’

  Anne snorted, covered her mouth. The savant amused her. It was comical the way he could not see that his words might wound. What must his passage through life be like with so little understanding of the impact of his words? Rather than being insulted, Anne felt sympathy for her husband’s strange companion. It was just like Félix to have collected a friend whom no one else would want. While Félix grappled with his temper, she steeled herself to address the savant for the first time.

  ‘What is your fiancée’s name, sir?’ Anne asked.

  Labillardière paused for a moment, casting his eyes up towards the rafters to recall it. ‘Marthe Desfriches.’

  Anne nodded, thinking of a prayer for her. ‘I hope I will meet her one day, your Marthe. I do hope we will be friends.’

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Winter 1799

  Marthe put her valise down on bare boards at her feet and looked around. Her new home was not as her new husband had led her to believe. It was smaller than she was used to, certainly, but the windows were large and the sunlight streamed through into the salon. This would be their parlour room, where they would receive guests, or where
she could sit with her crocheting and look out across the Seine.

  Marthe moved to the window and looked down at the hawkers selling their wares along the banks and at the sandstone walls of the Conciergerie across the river. Through the bare plane trees she could see the passing water, the boats, the pulse of city life. She was to live in the centre of Paris. She could scarcely believe her luck.

  Behind her, the boys were swearing as they lugged and thumped her cases up the narrow stairs. Jacques had forewarned her that his circumstances did not allow for the sort of residence that he would’ve hoped to offer her. True, the apartment was on an inconvenient level, and it would be awkward if she was pregnant, and even more so with a baby carriage, but perhaps by then they would have moved to a ground-floor apartment. Too soon to think of that. She pressed her hands against her flat stomach and felt her nerves flutter. For now she was determined to be happy.

  Jacques cleared his throat at the door. She turned with a shy smile. She hardly knew this man who was now her husband. He was tall, like her, so they were well matched in that regard as well as in age. She was forty and he just three years older. Her family didn’t know what to do with their twice-widowed daughter, so it must’ve seemed a miracle when her father’s friend, François Labillardière, a former surgeon like her father and now the mayor of Alençon, came to call. He had a brother in need of a wife.

  Marthe had been overjoyed. Nervous, of course—who wouldn’t be on agreeing to marry a man she had never met?—but on balance she had considered this marriage the best outcome that she could expect.

  ‘There is not much furniture,’ her husband said apologetically, gesturing around the spartan room. ‘I haven’t felt the need to entertain.’

  She saw a worn rug on the floor and one hard sofa. It didn’t matter. She would make this house a home for him. The thought of starting again from a bare room was exhilarating. No weight of history bearing down on her shoulders. No dark-stained wood from centuries ago, no portraits of glaring forebears, and no family to come and take it all away from her.

  The house of her first husband had been a mansion by comparison. Claude Frenais had inherited his family home, a home purchased from a fallen aristocratic family and filled with expensive furnishings by Claude’s father, who in life had much rejoiced at the idea of a merchant tanner living in the home of a nobleman. Likenesses of their ancestors were imagined into oil paintings. She remembered her arrival down the long driveway to the château. It sat high on a hill, a wall of windows with a dark copse of spruce trees behind it. The house seemed to grow larger and larger as she approached, craning her neck out of her carriage window. Claude’s five siblings were waiting for them on the front steps of the house. Marthe was shy and painfully aware of protocol and expectation. She saw their scornful, suspicious faces. Her dismount from the carriage was not as graceful as she would have hoped, but she drew her shoulders back and breathed.

  They never liked her and she never warmed to them. For thirteen years she endured their visits until that shocking day of Claude’s death. She hated Claude’s lawyer brother. She would never forgive him. He hadn’t even given her time to mourn! As soon as the will was read the house was put under seal and the family swooped in to take their share of the furniture. Marthe had to imagine the scene—the squabbles over masterpieces, the rush to carry out the silverware and the servants ordered to remove her marital bed—because by then she had already been evicted.

  She felt a lump form in her throat even now to think of it. The ignominy of homelessness, of returning to her mother and father while they searched again for a husband to take her. Dispossessed. If she had given the Frenais family an heir then she would not have been cast out from her home. She would’ve had a place as a mother of the heir at least, a position to keep her safe.

  Fortunately, her second marriage was arranged quickly, and within eighteen months she was married to another merchant tanner. Dear, sweet Michel. Michel Mars la Rivière, twenty-two years old and fourteen years her junior. He was a beautiful boy in temperament, if not so blessed in countenance. His ears and nose were too large for popular fashion and his family not successful enough to overcome these blemishes. She remembered he had curling brown hair, so lustrous and alive, and an impish smile. But marriage couldn’t save him from Napoleon’s conscriptions. They would’ve had many fine children together, she was sure, if he had come home from the war in Italy.

  Three years ago Michel had died on a battlefield. She had no body to bury, no funeral to mourn him. His whole life was reduced to a tally mark on a page. He was lost within a number, she thought, heat building behind her eyes: a callously rounded number.

  How they crowed! The papers celebrated, so few were lost, only ten thousand men when the Austrians lost so many more.

  So few, they said. Ten thousand. She only needed one.

  Marthe wrapped her arms around herself, clutching her elbows for strength. Michel was gone. She had to think of her future and must not let herself fall into morbid thoughts. A third marriage lay ahead and she could not afford to be a witless fool. She stiffened her spine and stretched up her chin. This time, if she were to be widowed again or the marriage should fail, whatever property she and Jacques amassed together would be equally divided and could not be claimed by his family. It was her only stipulation in the marriage agreement. She would not lose everything again.

  Jacques interrupted her thoughts. ‘And I will be bringing some of my specimens home from time to time. Did my brother explain to you? About the importance of my work?’

  She tilted her head. Had he? She didn’t remember.

  ‘Come, I will show you to your room.’ Jacques Labillardière ushered the boys carrying Marthe’s cases towards a door. Marthe ducked her head, pleased he could not see her cheeks grow flushed. Did he mean her room, or their room? After all, this was their wedding night. The rented apartments on the top floor of the building were not large. What would be their living arrangements? She had never lived in a house without servants, and here she would be alone with a man she had met only once before. Her first impressions of him had been mixed. He was a handsome man, but not warm. Perhaps he is reserved, she had thought, and unused to female company. She knew he had not been married before.

  A new year, a new life. It must be February by now, in the old calendar. It was hard to keep the new dates and names for the months in her head, far easier just to think of the seasons and not concern herself with specifics. But the date of a wedding should be recorded and remembered somewhere. The small civil service had been held that morning, with her father and mother beginning their journey home to Alençon after lunch. The service was quick, perfunctory, but what else would you expect when you had been married twice before? This was no lavish affair. Still, she had been surprised that Jacques had not arranged a church service. ‘Is this not perfectly satisfactory?’ he had asked her. She had nodded.

  She followed as Jacques ducked through the doorway. The room was small but bright with walls painted cream. It took a moment for her eyes to adjust. The windows overlooked the Seine and Marthe was glad, for it made the room feel larger to be able to look out across the water. Jacques stood with his neck bent beneath the sloping ceiling. A single bed was pushed against one wall. Marthe stared at it, blushing, while Jacques followed the porters from the room, leaving her alone.

  The coverlet of the bed was white and edged with lace, Alençon lace, and it reminded her of home. She ran her fingers over the detailed work with its spray of floral motifs and scalloped edge. Such skill and so many hours this must have taken the woman who made it, with the mesh so fine and even, each picot the width of a horse’s hair. This lace was worth a fortune, or else it was a family heirloom that had passed down through the generations, perhaps from the lace maker herself. Marthe knew so little of her husband’s family history. Later she would ask him more. She smoothed the coverlet of the bed beneath the flat of her hand. She heard Jacques pay the boys and send them away.

  J
acques coughed at the doorway and she leaped up from the bed. ‘It is not what you are used to, I am sure.’ He gestured to the room. She murmured something that she hoped sounded grateful. True, she had never slept in a room as small as this. It meant that her new husband was by necessity standing close to her, close enough that he might reach out and draw her to him. She waited silently, her head bent, focused on the white lace of the coverlet. It was going to be alright. It would be better if they got it over with quickly, this first time. After that they would both relax. She waited for her husband to move behind her, she expected to feel his hands on her stays, perhaps his lips on the back of her neck. It was bound to be awkward, this first time, when they barely knew one another. Her heart was beating loudly and she was sure that he must hear it.

  ‘I will leave you to settle in and unpack.’

  When she looked up, Jacques had already left the room.

  Marthe exhaled slowly. She sat on the bed. He was giving her space to become accustomed to her new life. She should be thankful, she told herself, that her husband was a gentleman, not a brute who pawed at her skirts the first moment he could. Theirs would be a mutual and respectful relationship. They were not young. Passion was for the young. He would be a tender lover, she was sure of it.

  Soft light filtered through a gauze curtain. From here she could watch the clouds change shape across the sky—she saw a dragon, or perhaps a unicorn—the puffy clouds were tumbling quickly. Did Jacques prepare this room for her so that she would feel at ease? He was waiting for her to be ready. He was honourable, she felt that already about him. She surveyed her small domain. Apart from the bed, her room was furnished with a tall but narrow wardrobe that she doubted would fit her clothes. Never mind. She was mistress of her own household once again. Perhaps there would be more room for furniture once they shared a bedroom.