Josephine's Garden Read online

  And yet she did not love Barras, and he did not love her. One day he would tire of her. She remembered the advice of her dear friend Marguerite: ‘You must marry to secure yourself, ma petite. Beware the man who only wants to parade you.’ These thoughts discomposed her. She went to Barras’s mirror and took out her rouge pot from her purse. Her hands trembled as she added more youthful colour to her cheeks.

  Rose stretched up her chin, dabbing perfume at the pulse in her neck. She thought of Hoche placing his lips in just that spot and sensation exploded up from her neck into her ears and along her jaw. She shivered to think of the trace of his fingers over her skin. It now seemed so long ago. Would he still care?

  Lazare Hoche had survived the Terror. As soon as she’d learned he had been moved to another prison and spared the guillotine, she sought him out, driven by a madness of desire she had never felt before and risking everything to know if he still loved her. Their affair resumed in secret. She had dared not let Barras know she spent her mornings lying naked against her lover’s chest. Perhaps Barras would not care. But perhaps he would.

  Meeting Hoche in Les Carmes had lifted her from the despair of imprisonment. The cells were dank and crowded and the corridors ran like a latrine. She had squatted over the brim-filled buckets like everyone else and the smell could not be escaped. Each afternoon she longed for the hour when they were released into the courtyard to breathe and taste the clear air. She would run to her friends, those brave, stoic friends. Not one of them deserved to die.

  She remembered when he arrived, blinking and smack-faced, among the intake of prisoners in the courtyard. The new arrivals clustered together like flowering poppies in their bright, clean clothes. Hoche stood slightly apart in his military uniform. His hair was dark and lush, curling around his temples. His eyes traced the confines of the space like a bewildered bird trapped against a windowpane. She was drawn to him from the first, sensing that the fates had pulled them together. It was inevitable they would be introduced. And, later, she remembered running her fingers through the fullness of his hair, kissing the lobe of his ear and feeling him harden beneath her hand.

  It was well known that if a woman fell pregnant in prison she was released until the birth of the child. Couplings were frequent and urgent, anonymous ruttings against walls in the dark corridors or on the floor of crowded cells. At first, Rose had closed her eyes and ears to it. But in an open prison, bodies found each other for mutual need, Rose among them.

  With Hoche in her life everything was better. He had a private cell and she would risk the putrid corridors to run to him each night. They did not speak of his wife as they lay together, skin to skin, mouth to mouth. Here the past and future meant nothing, only the moments together mattered. Her heart peeled open for him and she suddenly understood how love should feel.

  When they reunited after their release, she dared to dream of a future together. Passion for Hoche utterly consumed her. He was in her every thought. She felt wild, exhilarated, reckless. She became jealous of Hoche’s wife, provoking him, urging him to leave her. ‘She means nothing,’ he had whispered, nibbling at her ear. ‘She is a child. Not a woman.’ His breath had been hot on her neck.

  Then Barras took him from her.

  ‘General Hoche is needed on campaign,’ Barras had informed her casually one afternoon, watching her closely. ‘I have sent him to Cherbourg.’

  Rose had gripped the sides of her chair. It wasn’t fair! Only that morning Hoche had promised he would leave his wife, promised that he loved Rose more than anyone in the world. She steadied herself, mastering her emotions poorly, all too aware that Barras enjoyed watching her while he prodded a knife to her heart.

  Months passed with no word from Hoche, nothing to let her know if he was safe. Barras seemed to enjoy withholding knowledge from her, fully aware of her infatuation. For the sake of her pride, she ceased to ask about him. After nearly a year, she had almost given up hope. But that morning, Barras had brought her bunches of peonies and the heart-stopping news. ‘Your friend, General Hoche, has returned to Paris,’ he said, his voice full of amusement. ‘I have invited him tonight.’

  The door behind her swung open. Rose turned, her hopes leaping, as Thérésa Tallien burst into the room.

  ‘There you are! Let’s have some fun. Everyone is here.’

  Everyone? Rose wondered, heart thumping. With a deep breath Rose recovered her composure, pushing her thoughts of Hoche aside. She smiled radiantly at her friend, letting her mask slip back into place.

  As arranged, Thérésa had dressed identically to Rose and wore her hair bound in red fabric in a matching fashion for maximum effect.

  ‘I’m stealing her from you.’ Thérésa poked her tongue out at Barras and looped her arm through Rose’s. Barras barely looked up from his papers. He reached out to stroke Rose’s bottom in farewell, but the attempt fell short. Rose let herself be dragged away.

  Outside the ballroom’s balcony doors, Thérésa pressed a finger to her lips and Rose smiled. Her young friend’s irreverent spirit always made her feel like a girl again. They waited while the musicians finished the quadrille.

  ‘Do I look alright?’ Rose whispered.

  ‘Of course!’ Thérésa laughed. ‘You look exactly like me!’

  On Thérésa’s signal, the doors were drawn back and the lights illuminated the two identical goddesses. They each struck an attitude, immobile as marble statues, their poses a mirror image of the other, with heads turned to the side and one arm raised as though plucking grapes from the gods. Rose felt all the eyes in the room look up to her. She heard the murmur of shock at their sheer gowns and flaming turbans. As always they were transcendent. The crowd burst into spontaneous applause.

  Barras’s ballroom glittered and shone with mirrors and light. The room blazed with expensive candles, dripping wax in puddles on the floor. In these enlightened times, everything must be bright and fresh. Dazzled by the chandeliers, she found it hard to focus on the faces in the crowd. If Hoche was out there, he surely could not have missed her entrance.

  The music began again and everyone returned to dance. New music, new fashions, new dances. The scene was joyful madness. Rose stood on the balcony and watched them all below her. Heads bobbed and jerked like marionettes. Colourful wigs made from hair dyed red, blue and even violet bobbed and swirled about the dance floor. Hair was so plentiful and inexpensive since the Terror, a woman could own more than fifty wigs. Looking down at all the heads of hair taken from the victims, Rose couldn’t help but wonder how many of her friends were with them still. She turned her face away.

  On the stairs, Thérésa had drawn a cluster of boisterous admirers around her. Rose accepted a glass of champagne and descended gracefully, pleased to see the crowd parting before her. She lifted her chin to lengthen her neck, aware of the eyes following her descent. Every man in uniform drew her eye and quickened her heart, but each time she was disappointed.

  At the rear of the ballroom, Rose glimpsed her new friend, the seventeen-year-old Juliette Récamier reclining on a chaise longue. The girl wore a white muslin gown and a permanent blush upon her cheeks. Her bare feet were tucked up beneath her, as though she was afraid to step down into the chaotic wilderness of Barras’s ballroom. Rose admired her beauty enormously. There was something about her naivety that inspired sympathy.

  ‘Rose!’ a voice called, and she turned to see a glittering woman at her shoulder. ‘Cherie!’ Fortunée Hamelin kissed her three times in greeting.

  ‘You look gorgeous!’ Rose said, holding her friend’s hands and leaning back to admire the flesh-coloured gown and sparkling spray of diamonds across her chest. ‘Everyone is talking about you,’ she said, pretending to be scandalised. ‘Did you really walk the length of the Champs-Élysées with your breasts bare?’

  ‘It was a bet. A dare. How could I not?’ Fortunée flashed her eyes wide.

  Rose laughed with delight. These really were changed times. A year ago she could never have imagined t
his life was possible. Her life was a whirlwind of champagne and fashion and music and she was at the centre of it all. Rose and her friends, the Merveilleuses, were expected to be joyous, scandalous, outrageous. Everyone looked to them to lead the way.

  Fortunée squealed and was pulled away by two laughing young men. She glanced back at Rose in apology and trilled her fingers in farewell.

  Despite the press of the crowd, their adoring glances, Rose suddenly found herself alone. Standing in the middle of the crowd with the music thrumming in her ears, she saw no one she recognised. Barras had not yet made his entrance to his own party.

  Again she looked for Lazare Hoche, tipping up onto her toes, wishing she were taller. She sipped her wine and found her hand was shaking.

  The whorl of wigs and fabric and the scent of powder and cologne momentarily overwhelmed her. Bergamot, rosewater, and lanolin to grease the curls, hair dyed and shaped and perfumed, but she could not forget that this was the hair of the victims, of people they had known. Now the faces around her seemed gaudily painted, mouths and cheeks blood red.

  Sometimes the memories of Les Carmes would creep over her. She itched as though the lice still ate into her skin. She would close her eyes and relive her first terrifying moments, seeing the blood on the walls from the massacres that had occurred two years before—more than a hundred prisoners bayoneted and impaled on pikes—and realising that she and her fellow prisoners were nothing more than cattle awaiting their turn in the abattoir.

  ‘There you are!’ Thérésa caught her hand and squeezed it. ‘Do not look so glum. We deserve some happiness, don’t we? After what we have endured?’

  Rose blinked, returning to the opulent ballroom. The Terror was over. This party was to celebrate the anniversary of their release, and she belonged to one of the richest and most powerful men in France. Why shouldn’t she be happy?

  ‘We are free!’ Thérésa clasped Rose’s forearms and whirled her around in the ballroom, the two women spinning in a blur, two dressed as one, and for the moment laughing, giddy, and falling into one another. Rose clung to her friend. She had not forgotten that Thérésa had saved her, saved them all. It was Thérésa’s letter from prison to her lover Tallien, accusing him of cowardice, that spurred him to act against Robespierre. She hugged Thérésa close.

  ‘Have you seen him?’ Rose whispered.

  ‘Hoche?’

  Rose bit her lip and nodded hopefully.

  Thérésa’s face was guarded. ‘Not yet.’

  Rose took a deep breath and released it, practising serenity. It would not do to age her visage with a forehead creased from worry. He would come.

  ‘Tomorrow night we shall wear the best Indian muslin dipped in scented oils,’ Thérésa said into her ear, ‘so that it clings more closely to our bodies.’

  Rose grinned. ‘We Merveilleuses shall drive our rivals to despair!’

  Just then Thérésa’s husband, Tallien, and four friends scooped her up to carry her above their shoulders. Thérésa leaned back, adopting the attitude of a reclining Greek goddess. The gold bracelets about her ankles glinted in the light. Rose too wore those bracelets to hide the scars of rat bites around her ankles.

  Juliette, Thérésa, Fortunée—all her friends were so much younger than her and all had secured themselves with marriage. How long could she truly be one of the carefree Merveilleuses? Admired by all; loved by none. Rose had just passed her thirty-second birthday, a day she kept secret from even her closest friends. When she lost the currency of her youth, what would she have left?

  At long last the Vicomte de Barras was announced. He appeared as resplendent as ever in his ox-blood velvet coat with gold embroidery and ceremonial sword. She raised her glass to him. Like her, Barras always knew how to make an entrance. With his arms outspread, he invited everyone to supper. The dining room doors were thrown open and Thérésa was carried through like a prized dish on a platter. Rose hesitated. She cast a long look around the shadowed corners of the room as the crowds began to file out. Surely Hoche must come. Did he not long for her as much as she missed him?

  Rose caught the eye of a sullen young soldier slouched against the wall. She saw his gaze rove over her diaphanous gown. She tilted her chin and turned her face to its better side, accustomed to being admired. As Barras’s lover it was mandatory. But the look on his face when she glanced back at him shocked her. It was contempt. He was sneering at her. Rose suddenly wished for a shawl to pull around her. How dare he?

  Barras came up to her and nuzzled his face into her neck. The long curls of his silver wig tickled her skin and made her shudder. Rose ignored the sulking soldier and gathered herself. Barras took her hand. She walked with exaggerated grace, a fluid hip-rolling sway that the women born of Martinique were famous for. She felt the eyes of the soldier follow her as the crowd parted to let them pass.

  To her dismay, Barras singled out the scowling young soldier and seated her with him. She glared at her lover, but he ignored her, taking his place at the top end of the table. The soldier fidgeted and scratched the sores on his hands. His complexion was yellow and flawed by scabies and his hair smelled of duck fat. Rose was determined not to speak with him. She reached for her glass, bending forward to scan the long table one last time for a glimpse of her general.

  ‘I’m not good at this,’ the sullen soldier blurted.

  Rose sat back and acknowledged him with a tilt of her head, her eyebrow raised, the only invitation she would make to communications.

  ‘Sitting still.’

  His eyes were trained across the table on Thérésa and her devoted entourage. Rose recognised his look of hopeless longing. She sighed, then assumed her most pleasant mask. ‘You must tell me about your campaigns.’

  As the young soldier talked, she gasped at his bravery, marvelled at the brilliance of his strategy and showed astonishment at his military audacity in all the appropriate places. She was well practised at flattery by now, a necessary skill for courtesan and mistress alike. Besides, she had begun to feel sorry for this pup of a boy and it cost her nothing to be kind. Barras must see promise in the soldier, she assumed, if he meant for her to charm him. All the while she cast surreptitious glances at the door, hoping that General Hoche would miraculously appear.

  ‘You are from Corsica?’ she said, half listening to her dinner companion as he attacked his lobster thermidor with ferocity.

  He nodded, raising an eye to her sideways, and she recognised the wary look of a colonial expecting scorn.

  ‘I grew up in Martinique,’ she offered. ‘Do you miss your home?’

  Across the table, Thérésa burst into a froth of laughter as Tallien licked her neck and spilled wine down her bosom. Rose observed a look of pain on the young soldier’s face. His nostrils flared with each breath, watching Thérésa.

  ‘There is nothing of my home that I miss. It is a backward place. Paris is culture, sophistication. Paris is the centre of the world.’ He put down his lobster shell and wiped his hands.

  Rose knew she should agree, but there was something in his voice that sounded rehearsed. She caught his gaze and held it. He was first to look away.

  ‘I miss the freedom of my youth,’ she said wistfully. ‘And the lushness of the jungle. Everything growing over each other, limbs entwined. Free. The scent of wild jasmine in the sticky night air.’ She inhaled as though trying to catch the memory. ‘There is nothing else like it.’ She smiled at the soldier, her eyelids heavy and languorous with pleasure.

  The soldier was looking at her intently now. She could almost see his heart bounding in his chest.

  General Hoche did not come to Barras’s party that night, or the dozens of parties afterwards. Rose buried her disappointment while all around her the young and rich of Paris danced and sang, intent on celebration and pleasure. The relief they felt to be alive was intoxicating and not yet taken for granted. Thérésa implored Rose to put Hoche from her mind. Begged her to live for the present. That time for her was over. Théré
sa was right, Rose knew. She could not waste her life on foolish longing. She had survived, so she must live.

  Tonight, Rose was invited to the most fantastic costume event of the year: the bal des victimes. She finished dressing by tying a red ribbon around her neck to represent the cut of the guillotine—a secret code to allow them entrance. This was a survivors’ ball. Only those who had experienced the Terror were permitted to attend and each reveller must carry a woven basket as if to catch their own head. She stroked the fine, short hairs on the nape of her neck, her coiffure à la victime, her hairstyle proof that she had suffered.

  Thérésa’s distinctive carriage was dark crimson, the colour of clotted blood, glistening under the lamplights of the street. Rose was helped up by a footman. Inside, Thérésa was bursting with excitement. ‘It is like a reunion, don’t you think?’

  Rose thought instantly of Lazare Hoche, the feel of his arms around her, holding her as if they were the last two people left alive on the earth. ‘Yes,’ she agreed, ‘a reunion.’

  Rose had promised Thérésa she would not think of Hoche, but a promise like that was impossible to keep. He would come tonight, Rose was sure of it. Perhaps he was already there, waiting for her. The idea set her leg jiggling.

  When the carriage halted she leaped from it, almost dragging Thérésa up the steps of the Hôtel Richelieu.