Josephine's Garden Page 15

  It was hard enough having servants under her feet, poking their noses into affairs that were not theirs, watching, judging and expecting her to order them about. Besides, she could feel their scorn—they knew she was little better than themselves. She did not belong here and well they knew it.

  It had been a shock to see the palaces of the Trianon for the first time. More opulent than Anne could ever have imagined, but ravaged nonetheless by the anger of the mob, like finding a woman in her finery tossed into a ditch on the side of the road, full satin skirts awry and her underwear stripped.

  The paintings, the furniture—all taken. Everything of value had been stolen. Red paint was splashed like spurts of blood across the gilt-panelled walls and obscenities scrawled over the mirrors. A chandelier lay shattered where it had been pulled from the ceiling and rainbows of light glittered across the floor. Splinters of glass crunched beneath her boots as she’d walked. She’d stopped, listening, like a child entering a forbidden domain and suddenly frozen by the thought of being caught. It was wrong to be inside the deserted palace. Looking around, the arched halls were like the ribs of a carcass with the heart ripped from its chest.

  God would surely punish us for this desecration, Anne remembered thinking, full of fear and glancing at her husband. To her mind, what the Revolution had done was sacrilege. The royal family were chosen by God and here she was profiting from their destruction. Sunlight streamed through high, arched windows exposing her in God’s glare. She’d picked up her skirts and run from the room and never returned to the gutted, neglected palaces.

  They had chosen a modest manor in the Queen’s hamlet as their home, but Anne still found it difficult to think that these same paths she walked, the pastures she admired, the wild herbs she picked to breathe their scent were ones that Queen Marie-Antoinette herself would have once enjoyed. Anne said nothing to Félix of her misgivings. He was blissful as a pig in rye to be chief gardener of the Trianon.

  ‘Are you happy here?’ Félix had asked her soon after they arrived. That day she had nodded and kissed his nose to cover her lie. But now, as she walked these tranquil paths with the warmth of her son’s hand in hers and a newborn child strapped to her chest, she believed that she was learning to be so.

  Abraham tugged at her hand. Up ahead, Anne saw Félix amid the garden beds with his workers. She shook her head in mock disgust. He had the bald-faced cheek to tell her off for helping the maids set the fire and strip the beds, and here he was with his shirtsleeves rolled up and a spade in hand, turning the soil!

  A shipment of plants had come from the Jardin des Plantes and Anne knew Félix was eager to prepare the beds for his first planting. It had taken more than a year to tend to the overgrown gardens, to pull out the shrubs and ornamental trees, to banish the flowerbeds. Thouin had sent a shipment of seedlings that now stood, skinny and gangly like new recruits in their nurseries, waiting for spring. Labillardière sent a terse note hoping that Félix would consider the importance of these duplicate specimens to scientific inquiry and suggested he plant them in alphabetical order.

  Félix had laughed good-naturedly and thrown the note away. As if nature would conform so easily to classification, he had scoffed, without thought of the vital needs of food and water, of sun and shade.

  As Abraham pulled on her hand, Anne opened her fingers and let her son slip away from her. He stomped towards his father, gathering speed. Anne laughed as he wrapped himself around Félix’s legs and clung to him like the trunk of a tree. Félix buried his spade in the earth and picked up his son, smiling at Anne as they walked towards one another.

  ‘The children were missing you,’ she said.

  Philippe stirred against her chest and uttered a tiny muffled cry, little more than the whimper of a dreaming dog. Félix bent his head and kissed his baby son.

  ‘And you?’ he asked her.

  She smiled and twined her hand in his. ‘Do you mind?’

  ‘I like nothing more in the world than a visit from my family.’

  ‘You may not say that when we have eight children!’

  ‘I will welcome each and every one of them.’ He held her eyes as he smiled.

  Abraham squirmed and wriggled to be free of his father’s embrace. No sooner had Félix set him down than he buried himself face first into the freshly turned soil, the beds rich and ready for new life.

  They laughed and pulled him out, brushing the dirt from him like a turnip.

  Félix bundled Anne out of the house early without waking the children, excited to surprise her. He draped a velvet cloak around her shoulders and pulled up the fur-lined cowl to keep her warm. He admired the flushed pink of her skin, the redness of her lips. Anne’s eyebrow was raised, questioning.

  ‘Where are we going?’ she asked.

  His eyes twinkled. ‘I have something marvellous to show you.’ He urged her into a waiting carriage.

  The gravel was crisp with frost and the horses shattered the icy puddles beneath their hooves as they trotted out. A light snow had been falling all week and covered the fields and gardens with a thick sugary coating. They passed hedgerows with their branches crystallised in white. This cold snap had hardened the earth and kept Félix and his gardeners inside for a week. There had been nothing for it but to wait by the fireside for the thaw. He didn’t like to be cut off from his garden, blanketed as it was under this winter coat.

  ‘Where are we going?’ Anne asked again.

  ‘You will like it.’

  ‘I don’t like surprises.’

  But Félix merely grinned.

  The carriage left the ambling lanes of Marie-Antoinette’s estate and passed the palaces of the Petit and Grand Trianon. Anne threw him sidelong glances but Félix gave nothing away, keeping his face mild and his smile easy. In the gardens of the Grand Trianon, the trees were clipped into evergreen conical shapes, dark sentinels dusted with snow. Not a soul stirred. From the carriage window, he saw the lonely footprints of a fox left behind in the white lawn. They had this winter playground all to themselves.

  Beyond the gardens the carriage travelled down long straight avenues into the woods. Here the trees were tall and close. The conifers’ limbs were bent beneath the weight of the snow and Félix fancied they looked like a row of courtiers bowing as they passed. Anne shifted on her seat, and he put his arm about her. Félix knew these dark forests reminded her of fairytales with wolves and frightened children. ‘Not long now,’ he murmured to her. The harness jingled as the driver urged the horses on, their hooves making a solid clop on the hard earth and the snow becoming a wet slush beneath their rushing wheels.

  The carriage emerged from the forest into a clearing and Félix called for the driver to halt. He turned to Anne, wanting to see her face as she looked out at the vista. Anne gasped. The full length of the Grand Canal stretched away before them. In the distance, the Palace of Versailles faced them, flanked on either side by forest, bare of leaves, but with branches tinged orange. A weak sun glowed behind the thick, pale cloud, and in the stillness a low mist sat above the water like a frozen breath.

  Félix opened the door of the carriage and saw Anne’s eyes begin to water with the cold air. He watched her taking it in, the majesty of the Grand Canal, and waited for her to realise that the water of the canal was white not from a reflection of the sky, but because it had frozen over in ice.

  A slow smile transformed her.

  ‘Come on,’ Félix urged, revealing a pair of ice skates he had stowed.

  ‘Is it allowed?’ she whispered, looking towards the palace.

  ‘There is no one there to see us!’ Félix pulled her down the frosted grass slope. The lake glittered with fine ice crystals, inviting them to play. At the lake edge he kneeled in front of her. He slid her foot onto the wooden platform and pulled the leather straps tight. The blade curled back over her toes. ‘Do you remember skating as a child? Did the lakes and ponds freeze where you grew up?’

  ‘When I was a child I could put my own skat
es on,’ she said, sitting abruptly and picking up her other skate.

  Félix laughed and strapped his blades to his boots. He pushed out onto the lake, turning a full circle on the ice, stopping in front of her with his arms spread wide. ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Anne hovered at the edge, peering at the ice. He wondered what his bold wife would’ve been like as a child. He suspected she would not have wondered if the ice was thick enough. At ten years old she would’ve raced her friends out onto the ice, skates clattering. Perhaps this new carefulness was what becoming a mother did to you.

  Her first steps were hesitant. Félix glided past her on one leg, grinning encouragement. She waved him away. He circled out into the middle of the lake, taking long strides, his hands clasped behind his back. He had forgotten how the ice could make even the most stolid child feel graceful. He remembered this feeling of slipping through the air, the ease of movement, the speed. It was exhilarating.

  Behind him, Anne had loosened the stiffness in her legs, bent her knees, and pushed herself out into the open space. He heard the scratch of her blades as she pushed harder, taking longer strides, finding the same exhilaration he had felt a moment ago. She laughed, her blue velvet cloak twirling with every turn. He smiled.

  Félix skated alongside her and they clasped their gloved hands. Her cowl had fallen back and her golden curls bounced free. He felt like they were the only two people in the world, in a magical forest, with a castle overlooking them. In days gone by, the frozen canal would be filled with skating couples: dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, princes and princesses. He imagined carriages lined up along the banks, children toppling over one another, a woman in a full skirt falling on her bottom with a squeal of shock.

  Anne pulled Félix to a halt in the middle of the lake and they both stared down the length of the canal to where the Palace of Versailles stood like a palisade on top of the hill.

  ‘It is empty,’ Félix said to Anne, meaning to reassure her. He wondered if she too had imagined the royal families that had once skated on this canal.

  ‘But for how long?’ she whispered.

  She was thinking of the coup, he realised. The revolutionary government, the Directoire, had fallen and been evicted from this palace. General Bonaparte had made himself First Consul of France.

  ‘Will he come here to live?’ Anne asked. ‘Will Napoleon Bonaparte make Versailles his home?’

  Félix couldn’t say. He too had felt a deep sense of disquiet, almost fear, when Thouin brought the news. That their elected government had fallen so easily had shocked him. But he smiled at Anne. ‘The man is a general, not a king.’

  She snorted. ‘He is our leader now. He can do as he pleases.’

  ‘Don’t trouble yourself, my love. They say he is a man of science. He will value our work here.’

  A murder of crows burst out of the hedgerow, cawing and cackling and chasing one another across the sky.

  Anne started, slipping on the ice, but Félix gripped her tight. ‘Our position is safe here. Trust me.’

  She kissed him and he took comfort in her warm, soft mouth. She loved him for his optimism, and he would keep his worries from her. But they both knew the Jardin des Plantes answered to a new ruler now.

  They drew apart and Félix looked up to the sky as the snow began to fall. He watched the gentle flakes catch in his wife’s hair and on her cloak, each one intricate and fragile and threatening to melt. He felt them glancing off his eyelashes and landing lightly on his lips. Looking across to the distant palace, the snow was falling slowly, like thousands of stars all dropping gracefully from the sky.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Spring 1800

  The grounds of Malmaison rang with the chorus of construction. A percussion of pipes ringing, shovels scraping, the chink of hammers, screech of nails being pulled and a crescendo of falling bricks. There was construction on the house, construction on the stables, and further down in the valley a whole hamlet to be conjured out of old barns.

  Josephine oversaw it all. She liked to ride out in the phaeton with the architects to see the progress. It was exciting to see the ideas in her head become reality. To have imagined something into life.

  From every direction the sound of hammers could be heard or the steady whine of the saw, rocking backwards and forwards, as comforting to her as the squeak of a well-used cradle.

  ‘But where is the money coming from, Madame?’ The architects, Fontaine and Percier, bored her with their constant worries.

  ‘It will come, it always does.’ She smiled at them, determined that their clouded faces would not dull the bright day. Now that Bonaparte had forgiven her, she believed anything might be possible. ‘Malmaison will be magnificent,’ she told her architects. ‘You will see.’

  She wrote to Thérésa, begging her to come and see what she was creating.

  Like Marie-Antoinette, Thérésa wrote back.

  Better than Marie-Antoinette, Rose replied.

  Bonaparte indulged her, though he grumbled about the expense. ‘Four thousand francs on a single tulip bulb!’

  ‘An exaggeration, my darling.’

  The construction of the gardens continued at a rapid pace, while Josephine took up her life as the First Consul’s wife. They attended balls, dinners and the theatre. They split their time between palaces, staying at the Luxembourg, the Tuileries or travelling out to Saint-Cloud or Fontainebleau. It seemed she never had a moment’s rest, always preparing for some new banquet. Not since her days with Barras had she entertained so often. Her life was a whirlwind. Only at the end of each ten-day week could they return to Malmaison. It was exhausting. When she was away, Josephine chafed to see what the architects were doing to her grounds. When they stayed at the Luxembourg Palace in Paris, she spent long hours walking in the gardens, sitting by the ponds, dreaming of her plans.

  She learned of the magnificent new glasshouse at the Jardin des Plantes. She wrote letters to the savants, begging for a tour of their hothouses. It was said a Captain Baudin had brought them new tropical specimens from the Caribbean and she hoped she would find plants in the new glasshouse that would remind her of Martinique. She missed the smells, the lushness and the warmth of her childhood home.

  But an invitation from the Jardin des Plantes was slow in coming. While she waited for a response from the savants, she bought magnificent volumes on horticulture from Europe’s most famous gardens. She studied the gardens of Catherine of Russia and Kew in London. As the weeks passed and she had no reply from the Jardin des Plantes, she decided she would no longer wait for an invitation.

  From the moment she stepped into the grand glasshouse, she felt transported. She breathed in the heady jasmine fragrance. The orchids dripped like jewels through the palms and banana plants. It was like stepping back into her youth. Sweat beads formed on her skin. She could almost hear the singing in the cane fields. She closed her eyes.

  ‘You cannot be in here.’

  Her eyes snapped open. One of the savants was striding towards her. ‘This is not open to the public.’

  Josephine prided herself on her memory. She never forgot a face or a name. ‘M. Labillardière, if I remember correctly.’

  He looked confused and she realised he had not recognised her. She smiled. ‘I had been hoping we would find some time to talk about your travels,’ she said to nudge his memory. ‘When we first met in Milan?’

  He raised one eyebrow in recollection. ‘These glasshouses are for scientific purposes. They are to acclimatise our exotic plants for study. You should not be in here.’ He turned on his heel and simply left her standing in the steaming heat.

  Josephine watched his retreating back. She had not met many men who were immune to her charms or who were foolish enough to dismiss her so rudely. Affronted, she refused to move. Instead she tilted her head back and gazed up to the shining panes of glass and imagined herself inside her own cathedral of glass.

  Afterwards, she wrote to her mother asking for
the seeds of as many plants and trees of Martinique as possible.

  ‘I have seen the hothouses at the Jardin des Plantes,’ she enthused to Bonaparte one afternoon when they lay together in her canopied bed. ‘They are truly magnificent. So lush and jungle-like one could lose oneself completely. How I would love to show you Martinique!’ Josephine pushed herself off the bed, reaching for her robe. She remembered the arrogance of the savant, Labillardière. ‘We must build something so much better. It will be ten times the size, a whole wall of glass, and so much more impressive than anything at the Jardin des Plantes.’

  Bonaparte sat up against the bedhead, chest bare and his arms crooked behind his head. ‘You mean to rival Russia’s Catherine the Great?’

  ‘Except her garden would pale when compared to mine! Already I have the first rhododendrons to be grown in Europe.’ Josephine felt herself grow taller as she spoke. ‘We have seeds of magnolias collected from the Americas and butterfly bush from China. We must collect seeds and plants from all the continents of the world!’ She drew back the sheer drapes of her windows to gaze out over her grounds. ‘Can you see it? We will be a showcase. We will have so many exotic species here—all of society loves the new and bizarre—we will be the centre of the world!’

  She imagined great urns filled with flowers decorating every room of her home. She saw luscious, creamy magnolias that would perfume her rooms with a delicious scent. The purple buddleia, the blue iris, the striking yellow tulips. Climbing vines of morning glory flowers trailing down plinths. Her vase of imagination was overflowing with blooms of all shapes and colours.

  ‘Truly, you have ambitions nearly as great as mine. And how much will this cost?’ Bonaparte had raised an eyebrow, but she saw a glimmer of a smile.

  ‘My nurseries will be a source of riches for the territories and departments of France.’ Her voice was light, teasing. ‘Think of it as an investment.’