Josephine's Garden Page 7

  ‘Alessandro Volta,’ the man introduced himself with a tight smile. ‘Welcome to our beloved university.’ He spread his arms wide as he bowed before the commissioners.

  ‘We believe you have a magnificent collection of natural history,’ Thouin said, beaming.

  Professor Volta inclined his head.

  ‘Your collection of lava rocks is much discussed,’ Thouin continued.

  Volta said nothing.

  ‘You will continue your work here, there is no question of that,’ Labillardière blurted out, stepping forward, feeling his cheeks flushed red.

  Volta met his eye with ill-disguised contempt. Labillardière could not hold the man’s gaze.

  ‘We are here to take duplicate specimens only,’ Labillardière explained. ‘You will keep your collection intact.’

  ‘We will sanction your pillage, Monsieur,’ Professor Volta said in a low voice, ‘if that is what is necessary to keep our loved ones safe.’

  At last the doors flew open and the young general strode into the room. His heels clopped on the marble floor. Labillardière rose to his feet with all the others. The General greeted Thouin with a grunt as he passed. His air was hurried, impatient. His eyes were trained only on his wife.

  On close inspection, the General had a vital figure. His chin was angular and strong, his eyes slightly bulging with intensity, and he wore an expression of zeal and intelligence that Labillardière couldn’t help but admire. His legs were strong and shapely, his torso lean. This was a man of action, not some corpulent military fop. For all his youth, Labillardière had to admit, the intensity of the man was magnetic.

  Bonaparte reached his wife and buried his head between her bosoms and slid his hand between her legs. The looseness of her gown permitted the shape of her thighs to be starkly outlined. Labillardière gasped and looked away. He heard the woman squeal. The Milanese were scandalised. The women did not bother to conceal the sourness of their expressions. Already, Labillardière had observed their raised eyebrows at the attire of the General’s wife. They reminded him of Spanish women, devout Catholics, clothed from chin to toe in stiff brocaded fabric and lace ruffs.

  ‘Eat fast,’ Thouin whispered in his ear as they resumed their seats. ‘They say he never spends more than twelve minutes at his repast.’

  Dinner was quickly served, while Bonaparte pulled his wife onto his lap and nuzzled at her breasts. Labillardière flicked his eyes towards the pair just once, and caught the woman’s eye. How could she let the General maul her like that in public? The look she gave him he could not decipher, but she smoothed her husband’s hair and he at last came up for air.

  Bonaparte pulled her seat towards him. ‘I cannot bear to be parted from my Josephine,’ he declared and tweaked her nipple as he allowed her to slide onto her own seat. The woman’s laugh was high and artificial to Labillardière’s ear. He found his own appetite disturbed.

  The General hunched over the table and ate quickly with a serious, glowering demeanour, evidently a man with no taste for inconsequential talk. Of that, Labillardière approved. But that he pawed so openly at his wife with no regard for the stomachs of others disgusted him. The man was a brute. He felt betrayed by his hopes; this was no gentle man of science with whom he could converse on matters of natural history. He felt no kindred spirit here and he could not wait for this dinner to be over.

  ‘Have you been successful in your endeavours?’ the General’s wife asked as she leaned forward, addressing her question to Thouin. Labillardière thought both her gown and the amount of milk-white flesh exposed by the movement grossly inappropriate. His mother would’ve called her a talonneur.

  Thouin wiped his mouth with a napkin. ‘A great success, Madame. We have much to glorify the people of France from your husband’s accomplishments.’

  ‘I hope you have had time to collect botanical treasures for the Jardin des Plantes? I do love to walk the avenues and search for your new arrivals. It is a wondrous thing to bring life into the world, don’t you agree?’

  ‘We have lately been in Pavia,’ Labillardière interrupted. The diners fell silent at his words; only the quiet scrape of cutlery on plates could be heard.

  Napoleon briefly raised his hooded eyes from his plate. ‘I trust you found treasures worthy of our great Louvre. Were the savants … amenable?’

  ‘We obtained a magnificent herbaria,’ Thouin enthused. ‘Seventy-two volumes.’

  ‘Was it necessary, the violence inflicted upon that town?’ Labillardière asked.

  Every ear in the room was tuned upon the conversation. A serving spoon dropped to the marble floor with an echoing clatter.

  ‘A strong show of force will prevent further uprisings. The Directoire approved of my actions.’ Bonaparte did not look up from sawing the quail on his plate.

  ‘Do not make an enemy of this man,’ murmured Thouin. ‘He remembers every slight.’

  Ignoring him, Labillardière continued, ‘But poorly treated peoples have long memories.’

  ‘If a Frenchman had been killed by their revolt, I would have reduced their town to rubble, precious treasures or no.’ Napoleon looked up from his plate, stabbing his knife at Labillardière to make his point. ‘They can consider themselves fairly treated.’ He returned to his quail, liberating a wing from the bird.

  ‘I have seen the spirit of vengeance reduce men to consuming one another.’

  The General’s wife gasped.

  Thouin kicked his leg.

  ‘Perhaps you have lost your stomach for war,’ Napoleon concluded. He stood abruptly. Everyone rose. The General stalked out of the dining room with his hand clasping the elbow of his wife. She tottered awkwardly at his side.

  Thouin groaned. He snatched a quail and wrapped it in his napkin. ‘Fool,’ he hissed at Labillardière. ‘Have you no sense? You have cost us our dinner!’

  Labillardière watched the General’s departure with no regret. It had been a disappointing evening.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  Summer 1796

  It was not eavesdropping, Labillardière reasoned, if the words and deeds of the couple below were so plainly overheard. He sat up in his bed with his back to the wall, unable to sleep, feeling the pounding of the coupling in the chamber beneath emanate up through the wall to his spine. For hours he had endured the moans of their fevered rutting, the giggling of their games, and the General begging for more of her zigzags, whatever that depravity might be. It did not bear imagining. To make matters worse, their coupling would be followed by Bonaparte’s jealous ranting and the woman’s sickly pleading. The General seemed to think his wife was being unfaithful.

  Labillardière thrust himself up off his bed and paced before the window. It was unfortunate he must share this lodging with the General and his wife, but it was only for one more night. Tomorrow he would leave for Paris.

  The shutters were open and the sheer curtains hung limp and vapid without a breeze to give them life or alleviate the humid night. Moonlight cast the garden into shades of silver and black and illuminated the phallic shapes of the pruned cypress. Labillardière detested topiary. This need to control the form and shape of nature showed a predilection to dominate that appalled him.

  In the chamber below, the balcony doors must also have been opened wide, for here the sounds of fornication were louder. Labillardière took a deep and irritated breath. If it was not so sticky and hot he would have closed the window to the noise. Labillardière had never married and this physical urge he observed in others baffled him. He simply lacked the hunger. Sex was messy, awkward and distasteful, he had concluded when once he had been curious enough to try it.

  He supposed it would be companionable if he were to settle down with a wife, but so far his life of constant travel had precluded any such arrangements. In Alençon, his mother never approved of any potential matches and his father had been uninterested. As a young man, Labillardière had moved to Paris to study medicine before following his true passion for natural history and setti
ng forth on expeditions that took him to far-flung places of the world. Now, at the age of forty, only his brother still urged him to take a wife, but he was reluctant. There would need to be boundaries. He did not like to be touched; the accidental trace of fingers over his skin could make him tense with unexpected terror. And the act of sex itself would be pointless as he had no desire for children. An older woman might be suitable. Perhaps now that he was forced to return to Paris, he could entertain the idea.

  He paced, with his hands customarily clasped behind his back, thumbs flicking in irritation. It was late July (early Thermidor, Labillardière corrected himself, rolling his eyes), only two months into their expedition, and he was to be sent home to Paris. Thouin had delivered the news. Apparently, the General had ordered that he return to the Louvre with the first wagonloads of bounty—the fruit of their conquests. ‘It is an important role,’ Thouin had tried to convince him.

  Labillardière was stung. ‘Why have I been singled out to leave the commission?’

  Thouin sighed and shook his head. ‘You have no talent for diplomacy.’

  Perhaps it was for the best, Labillardière conceded. No longer would he have to face his fellow savants, men like Volta and Galvani, and strip them of their collections. Tomorrow he would set off for Paris where he would await the return of his own botanical collections, his conscience cleared.

  But the thought of all the vaults of learning that he would not see while the others went on without him to Venice pained him. He felt a physical yearning in his chest when he imagined Thouin, Berthollet and Monge walking beneath those hallowed arches without him.

  A fierce banging on the door of the room below jolted him from his thoughts. He heard the ambassador, Fouché, announce himself at the General’s door. Thoughts of Pavia returned to him. Was this a Milanese uprising? Labillardière pulled on a pair of breeches and exchanged his nightshirt for his well-worn travelling shirt.

  Labillardière heard Bonaparte lead Ambassador Fouché outside to the balcony. From his window above, Labillardière could look down on them. The ambassador was a strange and hideous-looking man. He had no lips, Labillardière observed, just a thin slit of a mouth in a face that was so gaunt it looked like skin stretched over skull.

  ‘The assassin who threatened your life has been found.’ Fouché’s voice was clear even though he spoke softly. Labillardière remained motionless as he listened.

  ‘Alive?’

  ‘She is—for the moment.’

  ‘A woman? A woman means to take my life? Who is she? Does she work alone?’

  ‘I thought you might wish to interrogate her yourself.’

  Through the sheer curtain, Labillardière could see the General drumming his fingers against the stone rail.

  ‘Why are they not grateful, Fouché? We are liberating them from the serfdom of Austrian rule. Under France’s protection we will bring them democracy.’

  Fouché said nothing.

  ‘We do no harm to the people here. The terms of the treaty were more than generous. All we ask of them is a few cultural trinkets, some coin to feed our armies. Why do the Italians care if we take from the Austrian nobility?’ He shook his head.

  ‘Perhaps they feel their trinkets belong here.’

  Bonaparte’s face turned thunderous and even Labillardière could see that Fouché had misspoken. He thought of the centuries-old codices, the accumulated knowledge of the Lombardy people that he had packaged into crates to take across the Alps to France.

  ‘Their trinkets belong to the victor!’ Bonaparte slammed his fist against the rail. ‘Do they know what terror we could unleash if that was our desire? We could burn their towns to the ground.’

  Bonaparte turned his back to Fouché, his arms spread out against the rail, shoulders hunched. The ambassador remained silent.

  ‘This woman,’ Bonaparte sneered. ‘Her death threat, was it serious?’

  ‘We believe so. We recovered a knife.’

  ‘She meant to stab me?’

  The balcony doors clanged open and the General’s wife rushed to kneel at his feet and kiss his hand. Labillardière watched her clinging display with distaste. She must have been listening at the door.

  ‘You are not safe,’ she sobbed.

  ‘Nonsense. You are too emotional. This threat is nothing.’ He drew her up and kissed the tears from her cheeks. ‘You know how it grieves me to see you cry.’ But he smiled after he said the words and Labillardière was confused. He seemed pleased that she was upset.

  When the General made to leave, she tugged at his arm. ‘Stay with me!’ Her entreaty seemed heartfelt and genuine.

  Bonaparte fell to his knees. ‘I shall soon return to your little black forest.’ He buried his face between her legs.

  Labillardière almost gagged. He could not understand these people. They repulsed him.

  He crossed his room and cracked open his bedroom door, listening as the General and the ambassador clattered down the marble staircase. Out of curiosity, he slipped out of his room, a half-formed idea in his mind to catch a glimpse of this female assassin. He had started down the stairs when he heard the sound of a door closing softly. Imagining he might be caught, he prepared his excuses. ‘It was stifling in my room,’ he would say. ‘I needed to take a turn about the garden.’ But no one tapped his shoulder and came to question him, so he took two more soundless steps. From there he glimpsed the flash of a pale figure on the floor below. Her nightdress was scarcely different from her formal gowns. He watched as the General’s wife ran swift and sure into the arms of a dark-haired, moustachioed Hussar.

  Putain. Whore. His mother’s voice came to him. Stunned, he could not look away as the Hussar wrapped his arm around her lower back and pulled her hips against him. The curve of her buttock was full and she swooned as their lips met, surrendering utterly in his arms, sacrificing herself to lust.

  Labillardière sank down onto the stair. He remembered another night long ago when he had perched on a staircase with his arms around his shins. He had watched the adults gathered on the landing. A slap. His mother’s sharpened voice. ‘Slut.’ Their maid in her nightdress with her head dipped before her mother’s rage. He saw his father in the shadow of a doorframe, his bare head almost touching it, the features of his face indistinct.

  ‘I will not have your bastard children in this house,’ his mother hissed.

  Jacques thought she meant him. He thought she meant to cast him out. He ran and hid beneath his bed, curling up with his jars of insects. They always gave him comfort. His mother did not like his collections so he hid them here. Cockroaches, beetles and slaters crawled over sticks from a plum tree and a moth beat its wings against the punctured lid. If he was to be thrown out of the house, he would take his collections with him, Jacques decided. He made plans to create a home for himself in a farm shed where his jars might have pride of place on the walls. He began to like this imagined future for himself and he must’ve fallen asleep, because the next morning his brother found him under the bed and dragged him out.

  Labillardière stared, transfixed by this brazen woman and her lover. Madness had overcome her reason. What could induce her to take such risks?

  The Hussar finally pulled her into the room and kicked the door closed behind them.

  The General was betrayed. Were all women as adept at deceit and lies? If he were to marry, it must be to an honest, loyal woman, someone who would be grateful for a quiet, simple life.

  Labillardière returned to his room. Tomorrow he would be gone from here and need never concern himself with the General and his wife again. These people and their entanglements tired him. He preferred the straightforward work of his laboratory, counting the stamens and pistils within flowers, following the Linnaean key to decipher the tangled diversity of nature. Now he looked forward to leaving Milan and the commissioners, his disappointment replaced with impatience. It would be a relief to deliver these ‘spoils of Rome’ to the Directoire and be done with it all.

 
; Early the next morning, Labillardière climbed up into a wagon behind a chain of mules, eager to begin the journey. The driver cracked his whip and the wagons creaked as they began to roll. They had a journey of many weeks before they would reach the mountain passes. He had almost forgotten the events of the night before, his mind now firmly focused on the task at hand, until he spied the mound left in the gutter. The realisation shocked him: her tortured body had been dumped in the street as a message. The wagon wheels rolled passed the mutilated and burned body of a woman willing to sacrifice her life to stop this invasion of her homeland.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Summer 1797

  Félix Lahaie sank down on the steps of the Ministry of Marine with two precious breadfruit stems by his side and a box of seeds at his feet. After so long wishing for this moment, imagining his triumphant return to Paris after his long voyage and crushing imprisonment, he felt truly defeated. No one remembered him. His mentor, André Thouin, had been sent away on a commission to follow France’s armies into Italy. So too had his comrade from the Recherche, Jacques Labillardière. He had hoped to be reunited with the naturalist here today, but now he found himself without a friend in Paris, uncertain of where to go and unsure where his home truly was.

  At the Ministry, a clerk had passed a harried eye over Félix’s worn clothes, his stained shirt, his torn waistcoat, and denied him an audience with the minister. To his horror, there was no one to appreciate his success in keeping the breadfruit plants alive throughout his imprisonment in Java, no one to enthuse over the precious collection of exotic seeds he had amassed from New Holland. Fleurieu, the Minister of Marine, had been imprisoned during the Terror and narrowly escaped with his life. The new minister had no interest in him. The clerk brushed Félix aside like a fleck of dirt from a sleeve and gave him a minor position in the Jardin des Plantes, as though he had never been on a great voyage of exploration around the world.