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  Félix looks up to the threatening sky. ‘But it might rain.’

  ‘Then I shall get wet.’

  Rose kicks off her slippers and digs her toes into the earth.

  CHAPTER ONE

  Summer 1794

  Rose de Beauharnais squinted at the light, blinking against the sting of sudden brightness. She took her first uncertain steps down the flagstone stairway and onto the street. Thérésa was beside her, holding her up, and they were walking. All around her men and women stumbled out of the prison. All were quiet, stunned. Her head felt muffled and she could hear the rasp of her own breathing loud in her ears. Rose looked up to the sky, her eyes streaming, the bright blue stretching away without end. She drank it up.

  And then noise. Screams of recognition. Families reuniting. Suddenly, Tallien was there and pulling Thérésa away from her. Rose watched her friend embrace him. The lovers pressed so completely together that no space, no light could come between them. Rose wiped her eyes and thought of Lazare Hoche. They had come for him weeks ago. Now she prayed he had survived long enough to have been spared. The hope was a bright flash in her heart.

  Rose ran trembling fingers over her rough shorn head. Only that morning, the guard had come to take her mattress. ‘No need for that where you’re going.’ A lascivious sneer from a man who’d found a better place for himself in a world turned over. That mattress signified her life. The guard would give it to a new inmate and she would be carted out of Les Carmes prison and made to kneel before the blade. Rose had panicked, pleaded, offered herself. She was not proud of it but there it was; when faced with death she knew now that she would cling to life. It did no good. He took her first and then the mattress.

  Afterwards, she took a knife to her hair. She wondered if she would be brave. If she would be as stoic as her friends were at the end and leave her cell with a cheerful wave of farewell. A good death was the only thing left to hope for and her pride begged her to have courage. But she shook so much that the blunt knife caught the tip of her ear and sent droplets of blood splashing onto her neck and breasts. They would take her head, she had thought as she sawed at her hair, she could do nothing to stop that now, but she would not let her hair be worn by another. Small victories.

  And then Thérésa was swinging back the cell door, lifting Rose to her feet, laughing and crying. ‘We are free, we are free!’ Rose struggled to make sense of it, but slowly she began to understand. On the day of her execution she was to be saved. She fell into Thérésa’s arms. They would live.

  Now, the streets swarmed. Rose swayed while the bodies knocked against her like rocks tumbling in a landslide. People were frantic, calling for their loves, while behind her Les Carmes continued to spill its horde. Her children! Rose felt her heart push blood into her limbs. She tottered forward, focusing now on the street, on her route home. Thérésa caught her hand. She was smiling, her beautiful face alight with joy. ‘Come with us!’ she cried. ‘All the world is rejoicing!’

  Thérésa. The burning light of these dark days. In prison, when fear was ripe in their sweat and loud in the howls of their night terrors, Thérésa refused to be afraid. Her words were fire and her body crackled with spirit. She could not be doused. She was our hope.

  Rose gripped her friend’s hand, wanting to let her know how much she had mattered to her, how Thérésa’s strength had kept her alive all these weeks, but when she opened her mouth to speak, her throat was as dry as dust.

  Three months she had been imprisoned in Les Carmes, sentenced to death for nothing more than being the ex-wife of an accused man. Her former husband, Alexandre de Beauharnais, had been named as a traitor even though he worked for the Revolution. She had no love for Alexandre, who had been cold and cruel to her, but he was still the father of her children. When he was arrested she had written to the president of the National Convention to beg for clemency. She should have known Robespierre trusted no one in these times—not even men like Alexandre, who were close to him. Robespierre had already sent his former Jacobin friends, Hébert, Danton, Desmoulins, to the guillotine during this Reign of Terror. Men who had been heroes of the Revolution. Paranoia and suspicion now ruled France. Her letter begging for her ex-husband’s release had only put her in prison.

  Everyone in Les Carmes had a similar tale and she soon exhausted her rage at the injustice. Named by jealous or fearful neighbours, it was accuse or be accused. The world as she knew it had gone mad.

  At least her children were safe with Alexandre’s father. How would she have borne this fate if they had been left destitute? All through this nightmare her children had sent her messages carried by her faithful pug, Fortu. It was like a dream to see him that first time. Unbelievable. Rose recognised his cheerful bark demanding attention, heard his obvious delight at finding her inside the prison walls. She snatched him up, pressed her face to his fur, let him lick her cheeks. She found the notes from her children under his collar. They loved her, they missed her. She saw their small and carefully formed words and treasured them. Do not fear for me, she wrote back to Hortense and Eugene, I am well. I have as much bread as I can stomach. I embrace you both from the bottom of my heart. She had kissed Fortu, his dear face permanently folded in worried frowns. Then tucked the note beneath his collar and sent him running out through the bars of the prison.

  Families were embracing all around her. People were lifting their sons and daughters in the air and children were wrapping their arms and legs around their parents, squeezing tight. Rose pushed against the crowd in the street, desperate to see her children, wanting to run. Eugene was thirteen and Hortense eleven, still young enough to need their mother. Especially now. Five days ago, five days before these prison gates were opened, Alexandre had been executed. Their father was dead and she was all they had now. She needed to get home.

  Home. Where would that be? she wondered. Her apartment had been taken on her arrest and she had no doubt her home and all her furniture and belongings were lost to her. Could she return to Alexandre’s father’s house, the home that held so few happy memories from her early marriage, and live with his family once again? No. That part of her life was behind her. She was no longer that naive child sent to marry a man she had never met and who did not care a jot for her. She would find another way to support her children.

  Out in the street the light was hard, falling into every crack, exposing her ravaged body to the world. She must look like a drab with her clothes unwashed and her body smelling like a gutter. Her face stared back from a greasy windowpane and she barely recognised herself: skin blotched with sores, her eyes sunken, hair gone. She let Thérésa pull her away from the reflection. How could she let her children see her like this? They would be terrified.

  In this unforgiving light, she saw more clearly the once-fine clothes of her fellow prisoners—the muck-stained skirts, the ruined slippers—made dreary by the prison squalor. Outside the prison, Paris looked as bleak and neglected as Rose felt. Along the roadside were stinking piles of rubbish, unswept manure and dirt-spattered walls. She felt the smashed cobblestones beneath her feet. Her gaze fell on a tiny violet growing against a wall, a seed dropped by accident and finding a crevice with enough sustenance to grow. She stopped and stared, letting the wave of prisoners jostle against her. It cheered her to see bright green leaves and purple flowers amid all the dull stone. This plant, too, had survived against all likelihood and found a way to bloom.

  She had lost hold of Thérésa’s hand. Her friend danced ahead, kissing men and women, spinning about like a child’s playing top. Rose moved towards her, drawn as always to the whirlwind that was Thérésa Cabarrus, but a big man in a long, curling wig cut in front of her. He embraced Tallien, pounding the young man’s back. He kissed Thérésa, and then turned to Rose, picking her up as though she were as weightless as a twig and as helpless to resist. He swirled her about. She felt dizzy. She did not recognise this man, but he was smiling as he set her down. ‘You are safe now,’ he murmured in her ear. He smelled
of perfumed leather and pipe smoke.

  Thérésa pulled Rose from him. ‘They have overthrown Robespierre! He has tried to shoot himself to escape the guillotine!’ Thérésa was laughing, tears streaming down her cheeks.

  Rose choked on the sand of her tongue. She needed water. Her lips cracked and stung as she tried to cheer. What did this mean for her?

  The big man smiled kindly at her. ‘Come.’ He swept an arm about her, not waiting for her assent.

  ‘This is the Vicomte de Barras,’ Tallien told her, brimming with pride. ‘Together we are the new Republic!’

  Rose could scarcely believe it. These ordinary men had replaced Robespierre and the National Convention. They had replaced the monarchy. Tallien looked no more than twenty-five years with his earnest, narrow face and bony nose. This young man and his friend were the new rulers of France?

  The Vicomte steered Rose towards a tavern. She pulled back for a moment, hesitant, the old rules hard to overcome. The tavern was not the sort of place a bourgeois woman was supposed to enter. Besides, she wanted to see her children, to feel them in her arms, to know they were safe. Yet the thought of their shocked faces at the sight of her gave her pause. She could not decide what to do, her mind would not focus. She was dizzy and her throat was parched.

  ‘One drink,’ Barras murmured. ‘To celebrate.’

  She sensed that from this moment everything would change. The Revolution had changed her. Life could not be taken for granted. She had known the terrors of an open prison and she had done what was necessary to survive. When Barras again urged her to follow him, she did not resist.

  Les Carmes had stripped her of everything, starved her, humiliated her. But it had also given her love for the first time in her life. It had given her Lazare Hoche. Nothing would be the same now that she had known what it was to be loved.

  Thérésa squeezed Rose’s hand and the two women shared a moment in each other’s gaze. Les Carmes had also given her Thérésa, who had such spirit, such joy of life. Rose felt overwhelming gratitude for this friendship and it welled in her eyes. Thérésa took Rose’s hand and pressed her knuckles briefly to her lips before attaching herself to Tallien, kissing him long and hard and leaving Rose under Barras’s arm. Together they found a table and Barras ordered a carafe of wine. All around her, the freed prisoners and their families began to sing, raising their voices together in solidarity.

  Barras was staring at her boldly, a gleam in his blue-grey eyes and a playful smirk in his smile. His face was not handsome but his confidence made him attractive, she decided. A man who knew his own worth.

  She averted her eyes and turned her face to its best advantage. Old habits. She hoped her flush of embarrassment had brought colour to her cheeks. Barras continued to stare, undeterred by her shattered looks, or perhaps compelled by them. She was vulnerable now and he seemed like a man who liked his women needful.

  Rose turned to Thérésa. ‘What happened? Is the Terror truly over?’

  ‘The Revolution is complete,’ Barras answered. ‘A new democratic era is dawning for France.’

  ‘Vive la République!’ cried Tallien.

  ‘Barras will take care of us,’ Thérésa whispered to Rose.

  Rose studied the man before her. He was dressed elegantly in sumptuous fabrics that were well tailored. His age was perhaps forty years, she guessed. There was something in his manner that reminded her of M. Blanque, her father’s overseer on their plantation in Martinique. A memory came back to her and she closed her eyes. She pictured M. Blanque after the hurricane, when they had squeezed out of the basement of the sugar house on a day of utter devastation. Rose had been three years old and convinced that a giant had screamed and roared and stomped for two days while they hid in the sugar house. Once, during the howling, she had peered out through a crack in the shutters to see the giant steal their house cow, lifting her high into the air before flinging her back to earth. When at last her family had crawled out, everything was flat: the palm trees, the sugar cane, the slaves—all lay where the giant had tossed them. She saw splintered white wood where their house had been and the bodies of their slaves lying on the lawns. Her mother and sisters were weeping, her father absent in Fort Royal with his mistress, and M. Blanque, standing amid it all, hands on his hips with his feet spread and planted in the earth, as solid and dependable as a mighty mahogany tree.

  Rose was jolted from her memories as the carafe of wine was delivered. Her eyes followed Barras’s hand as he began to pour for her and she noticed the size of his ruby ring. Red wine splashed into a glass. She watched the liquid with longing, her tongue remembering the flavour. Barras tipped the carafe while keeping his eyes fixed on her. He poured and poured. He filled her cup to the brim and continued to pour. Startled, she met his gaze. He grinned, lifting his eyebrows, and she found it made her smile. She did not tell him to stop. The wine gushed over the rim of the glass, splashing over the tabletop and swilling into a red pool that threatened to waterfall to the floor. She laughed with the delight of such excess, not caring that the liquor spilled from the table and stained her dress. Barras emptied the whole of the carafe into her glass and licked the last drops from his fingers.

  Barras offered the glass to Rose. ‘To new beginnings, Mme de Beauharnais. And fulfilling our hearts’ desires.’

  She understood his meaning perfectly. Without hesitation, she accepted the cup and drank.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Summer 1795

  Rose wanted to dance. Music thrummed beneath her feet and set her hips swaying. The musicians played in the ballroom below and Rose felt the beat rising up through the walls and spreading across the floor. She twirled and the chandeliers sent sparks of colour whirling around her. She ran to the window and watched the carriages jostling in the lantern-lit street. All of Paris wanted to dance.

  A year had passed since her release from the prison of Les Carmes. How different her life had become! Every night was a public ball, or a new theatre play, perhaps the opera, or a banquet. All of Paris was joyous. People did not walk, they skipped. There was lightness to each step, a tunefulness. Why turn about when you could twirl? Why speak when you could sing? Paris spritzed and fizzed. It was a firecracker with its fuse lit. Everyone who had lived through France’s darkest hours now hungered for the light.

  Tonight she was to be hostess for Barras’s soiree at his home in one of the most fashionable districts of Paris. In gratitude, Barras had filled her chamber with bunches of peonies. She adored their magnificent pink globes bursting with petals. It elated her to look at them and to breathe their delicious scent. Tonight she was filled with hope.

  On that first night of freedom from Les Carmes, Barras took her under his protection and she became consort to one of the men who now ruled France in place of a king. He soon established her in a rented house on the outskirts of Paris, modest and in need of decoration, but enough to reclaim her children from Alexandre’s father. The reunion with her children had brought both joy and pain. They had grown far older in those months apart than she would have expected from the mere passing of days. She noticed it in the depths of their eyes, their haunted faces. Boyish Eugene was solemn as he held her and she felt the shift in his embrace. He was no longer the boy who ran to his mother’s skirts for comfort, but a boy struggling to be a man who would protect his mother. Hortense, too, was hesitant, frightened by the apparition of her mother: the hacked hair, the harrowed face. Rose was thankful she had not returned to them on the day of her release; it would have distressed them more to see her ragged in body and clothes. Far better that Barras had taken her to his home first, supplied her with fine dresses and a carriage to collect her children. And Fortu, of course. The dog had welcomed her return wholeheartedly, leaping up into her arms and licking her face, twisting around to be scratched on his belly and making the children laugh. She loved him even more then, for that moment when the awkwardness dissolved and they became a family again.

  In her own home, Rose tasted what i
t would be like to live freely. She had a household of servants to do her bidding and no relations to bear with, no reminders of her former marriage. She had put the horror of the Terror behind her and was determined to live for the moment. The nights belonged to Barras and his friends, but the days were all her own.

  Rose checked her reflection in her mirror. Her chestnut hair had grown back but she chose to keep it cut short as was the fashion for everyone who had suffered in the Terror. It was a celebration of survival to wear your hair à la Titus, shorn at the back, tousled on top. Others wore colourful wigs dyed in unnatural colours. But tonight Rose didn’t feel like following the crowd. She had taken up a length of shocking red fabric and wound it like a turban over her hair, like the women of Martinique from her childhood. Three kiss curls peeked out on each side; she hoped they made her look youthful. She swivelled her head and smiled demurely, thrilled with the effect. À la Creole, she dubbed the style. Why follow the fashions if you could set them?

  Rose knocked lightly at Barras’s door and presented herself for his approval. He looked up from the papers on his desk as she raised her arms above her head and spun about, slow and languorous, revolving with the music that vibrated from below. Her gown was sheer and pale and it clung to her breasts, revealing the pleasing darkness of her nipples. Rose knew precisely what Barras needed her to be. Admired. Desired. The musicians played and she turned and turned and turned.

  ‘Radiant,’ he growled with a wolfish grin. ‘You will be the most beautiful woman in the room.’

  Looking at him bent over his papers and not yet dressed for dinner, Rose felt an unexpected tenderness. Without his wig, his hair was scruffy and wisping about his face. Yes, he could be coarse-mannered. Yes, he was demanding and spoiled and too particular. But she regretted nothing. If she had not accepted his proposal where would she be? At the mercy of François de Beauharnais in Alexandre’s family home? Or without a home at all? Barras had promised to pay for Hortense’s schooling. He clothed and fed them. Each time she passed the starving beggars with their cupped hands held out like empty bowls she had to give them something: a ring, a bracelet—anything to ward off this fate for herself. The winter had been hard. When the Seine froze over, every tree in the Bois de Boulogne had been chopped down and taken for firewood. Late at night her carriage had passed queues of starving families waiting for their ration of black bread. Was it any wonder she chose this place of safety?