Josephine's Garden Read online

  Six years before, Félix had left France as the gardener aboard the Recherche on a voyage to the South Seas. He had been recommended by André Thouin of the Jardin du Roi and he left filled with hope of advancement. But he returned to a country made unrecognisable. The day he landed was the twenty-first of Messidor in Year 5 of the Republic. Even the calendar had changed. A week was now ten days long and the months had changed their names. It unnerved him to have the passage of time whipped out from beneath his feet.

  Before him was the Place de la Révolution, where the guillotine, the beheading machine, once stood. He had heard the stories—it was said this square had so much blood soaked into every crack and crevice that a herd of cattle had refused to cross. Sitting on the steps, with his head resting in his hands, Félix fancied he could smell the blood. Was the Revolution truly worth all this suffering?

  For so long he had harboured ambitions to be the chief gardener of the royal gardens. And now the Jardin du Roi was no more. Royalty was no more. He was adrift. He was a seed bobbing on the tide, hoping for a safe place to plant his roots. This was not how he imagined his homecoming. He had expected these breadfruit plants would give him some small measure of notoriety, at least among men who valued botanical treasures.

  It was a humiliating end to his great journey of exploration. Félix had been the ship’s gardener and a hardworking assistant to the naturalist Labillardière, but both men had been forced from the expedition ship and imprisoned in the Dutch East Indies for their support of the Revolution when they discovered Republican France was at war with the Dutch. Their royalist captain despised them, taking the opportunity to rid himself of troublesome savants, like Labillardière and Félix’s friends, the chaplain Ventenat and artist Piron. All the arrested men were marched overland in the middle of the rainy season. The jungles of Java were the thickest Félix had yet encountered. The mud clutched at his legs and the vines were an impossible tangle. Each step took an age. The roads were bogs and the rivers swollen. For two weeks they fought the jungle’s wet heat and voracious mosquitoes. Labillardière and Félix were accustomed to exertion in their researches, but the others were not. Piron suffered dreadfully and was plagued by insects that crawled beneath his skin. Félix was convinced that Captain d’Auribeau meant to end their lives by this banishment.

  In Samarang, to his great and welcome surprise, they were treated civilly by their Dutch jailors and given positions at the botanical gardens. Félix was allowed to keep his ten remaining breadfruit plants. He and Labillardière were free to explore and collect as many seeds of exotic plants as they might desire, but in his darker moments, Félix bemoaned the futility of these endeavours if the Dutch would never allow them a passage home. Only Labillardière seemed unshakeable in his conviction they would return.

  Then one wet, monsoon day, without warning, Labillardière and Piron were taken from him. The men were shipped out to a prison in Batavia, the capital of the Dutch East Indies, where Ventenat and the other prisoners had already been sent. ‘They wish to exchange us for Dutch prisoners,’ Labillardière had surmised, packing his most precious journals. ‘We shall soon be on French soil’. What about me? Félix railed in silence. Why am I to be left here alone to rot?

  Félix watched the ship set sail against the ominous clouds of the horizon, feeling desolate and abandoned. Those were bleak and fearful times. Despite the lush beauty of the jungle, the vibrancy of its flowers and birds, despite his relative freedom, Félix languished in Java, not knowing if he would ever return home. After two years without word from any of his compatriots, he fell ill with dysentery and despair. He imagined his life would end in his jungle prison.

  Then, miraculously, a French ship docked in Samarang and an officer came to negotiate for his release. Félix felt like a seed bursting open after the rain. He took up his collections and his travelling box of breadfruit plants and set sail for Isle de France. There he learned he had missed Labillardière by a matter of months; the naturalist was already sailing for home.

  Now, on the steps of the Ministry of Marine, Félix got to his feet, tucking the breadfruit plants under his arm. Labillardière would not sit here idle and helpless. He would make the best of the situation. He would act. Félix picked up his case of seeds and set off for the Jardin des Plantes.

  He found the royal gardens in transformation. A museum of natural history now greeted him at the gates, with tall columns rising resplendent in the morning sun. New glasshouses were being built. An enclosure meant for a menagerie was under construction. He delivered his breadfruit plants to the curator and they were duly catalogued and taken from him. He watched as they were carried away, leaves bobbing above the shoulder of the curator. Those plants he had nurtured from Tongatabou, through sea voyages and all the years of his imprisonment. With a catch in his throat he saw them disappear into a vault. The last of his duties complete. He said nothing of the box of seeds at his feet.

  He wandered the streets with his jewellery box of seeds in his hand, reluctant to take up his old position as assistant nurseryman at the Jardin des Plantes just yet. I am thirty years old, he grumbled to himself. How am I to raise a family on this wage? If only André Thouin had been here. He kicked at a pile of filth in his path. It was as if the last six years had meant nothing at all.

  The more he walked, the more he noticed the beggars and paupers around him. Food was scarce and it shocked him to see that starvation was still commonplace. He saw thugs wielding walking sticks like clubs chase and beat a man openly in the street. No one came to the man’s aid. He was a known Jacobin, Félix was told, and they deserved whatever they got for what they did in the Terror. The streets of Paris were not a safe place to be. He should be grateful to have a wage, he told himself, when so many others did not.

  A delicious smell wafted past his nostrils. It seemed heaven sent in these putrid streets. He followed his nose and traced the source of this aroma to an unassuming bistro. A gust of hearty beef stock and sweet onions enveloped him as he entered the bistro. His mouth was watering.

  He took a stool at the bar and put his box of seeds on the counter in front of him, unwilling to let them out of his sight. He still hoped the seeds he had collected from around the world might one day be the key to his advancement. For now, he was content to console himself with a rich broth and hunk of soft bread dripping with cheese.

  The onion soup was steaming when it arrived. Beside him another man sat hunched and slurping noisily on the soup. Onion soup seemed to be the specialty of the house, or perhaps the only food they served. Félix put the spoon to his lips and closed his eyes. The taste was both meaty and sweet and just as delicious as the aroma had promised. The onions were soft and slippery and the broth nourishing and full of flavour. He felt he had never tasted anything as wonderful.

  ‘What’s in the box?’ a woman asked.

  Félix’s eyes flew up. The waitress. Red cheeks and golden curls, and he felt his jaw drop open.

  ‘Oh, oh this?’ he stammered. ‘A box of treasures.’ He laughed but was disturbed to hear it come out as a giggle. He deepened his voice. ‘I have recently returned, you see, from a great voyage of exploration.’

  She raised her eyebrows appreciatively.

  ‘The d’Entrecasteaux expedition, in search of the lost explorer La Pérouse. I assume you have heard of it?’

  ‘No.’

  Félix cleared his throat. He so wanted to impress this beautiful goddess but what did he have to offer? He was no better than an apprentice.

  He opened the latch on his box and pulled back the lid to reveal an array of wooden trays. Hundreds of tiny seeds of all shapes and sizes were neatly contained by wooden partitions. She leaned over the counter for a closer look and Félix couldn’t help but appreciate the swell of her bosom.

  ‘Are they herbs? Vegetables?’

  He took heart in her interest. ‘Plants from all over the world,’ he said, spreading his hands wide, eager to point out the most marvellous of his collection. He
thought of the towering trees that lay contained in these tiny seeds. But before he could speak, the cook appeared in soiled apron and tossed a rag at the waitress. She turned to go. Félix gently closed his box of seeds. ‘What is your name?’ he called after her.

  She turned her golden head. ‘Anne Serreaux.’

  He had her name, a beautiful name, it felt like receiving a gift.

  Félix took up his role at the Jardin des Plantes with vigour. He turned the compost heaps and prepared the flowerbeds for autumn planting, while imagining himself rescuing the young woman who served his soup. Perhaps he would be walking past one day when she was about to step out in front of a coach. He would have to rush out and encircle her waist beneath her full bosom and drag her to safety. Or what if there was some accident in the kitchen, a pot overturned, her clothing needing to be stripped from her soft, luscious skin?

  For a full month he ate nothing but soup.

  Each day he returned to watch her as she worked, ordering more onion soup than one should comfortably attempt without causing digestive distress. Her accent was not Parisian. She spoke like him. He learned that she had come from a farm in the north, that she did not much care for Paris and missed her family but they needed her wage. He told her of his own family and their farm, how he had loved to watch things grow ever since he discovered the wonder of digging a potato patch as a boy and retrieving those surprising nuggets from the earth.

  ‘It is a miracle,’ she said, ‘that humble plants can give us so much to feed and soothe us.’

  Her mother was a bonne femme, a herb woman, and Anne had grown up in gardens of calamint, borage and comfrey. He could imagine her as a curly-headed child running down avenues of flowering chamomile. He longed to show her the physic garden at the Jardin des Plantes. The poppies were blooming: cups of orange, yellow and red waving on their slender stems. He could walk arm and arm with her along paths lined with artemesia and lavender. The Jardin de Roi began with this medicinal herb garden over a hundred years before, he would tell her, impressing her with his knowledge. He wanted to suggest a picnic, but each time he opened his mouth to ask, he convinced himself she would laugh at him and think him pitiful. It was better not to risk the disappointment, he decided, for at least he would still have his imaginings. Once she refused him, even they would be taken from him.

  Eventually, Anne took matters into her own hands. ‘Could you make yourself useful with these barrels?’ she asked one day. Félix shot to his feet. He ripped the napkin from his shirt, blotted his mouth, and followed her to the courtyard. She cast him a delicious smile. He was already in love with her laugh. It was like honey drizzled over truffles, both earthy and sweet.

  In the enclosed courtyard, Anne sat down on an overturned barrel, facing him. Félix had his hands on his hips, looking about, ready to be of assistance. Anne was watching him, her head tilted slightly to one side. Félix noticed that her legs were loose and parted and her skirt welled between them, outlining the fullness of her thighs. He looked away.

  ‘Are you going to ask me then?’ she said.

  ‘Ask you what?’

  ‘I’ll not be raising these skirts until you do.’

  Félix blushed hot and fierce. Already he had imagined her falling back among the vegetable scraps, her bare legs shooting upright. The crotch of his trousers strained.

  ‘My lot breed like rabbits,’ she continued. ‘I’ve got thirteen brothers and sisters. I can’t risk it.’

  Marriage. She was talking of marriage. He had not considered that. To wake up beside this delightful creature every day, to have her forever, for himself. He had never imagined his infatuation for her might be reciprocated. In his fantasies, he never saw beyond his miraculous rescue of her and the inevitable boisterous sexual gratification between them.

  Why not? Why shouldn’t he have love? But how did one go about the proposal? He looked around the filthy courtyard with its slop-stained walls and strong aroma of rotting onion.

  ‘Will …’ he began and faltered. Screwed up his nose. ‘Here?’

  Anne threw back her head and laughed. It was the sound of summer. She rose and approached him, standing just below his chin. She turned her fresh young face to him and for the first time he noticed the faint freckles across her nose.

  ‘Here,’ she said with husky surety. She tipped up on her toes to kiss his lips while her hand pressed his crotch.

  Félix groaned. He reached for her, lifting her onto his hips. He bounced and twirled her around the sordid courtyard. ‘Marry me, marry me, marry me!’

  CHAPTER NINE

  Winter 1798

  Rose had a pounding headache. Bonaparte’s foreign minister, Talleyrand, had filled the ballroom at the Hôtel de Gallifet with vases of blooms and hundreds of flowering trees and more than five hundred guests to celebrate her return to Paris, but it did nothing to soothe the pain. Bonaparte was furious with her. He hated her renovations to the house they leased. ‘You have spent three hundred thousand francs! The house is worth only forty thousand!’

  He had returned to Paris weeks before and raged at her for taking so long to travel across France to join him. She was supposed to have arrived before Christmas, but it was now some days after the New Year. The roads. The weather. She blamed anything that popped into her head. She burst into tears. Real tears, because her head hurt and she was tired of his bombast.

  She could not tell him the truth. The truth was that she had enjoyed intimate dinners and long nights with her lover on a lingering journey through the countryside. Hippolyte Charles had joined her in Nevers with a stash of smuggled diamonds that paid for their privacy.

  Now she had to endure this appalling banquet that the foreign minister Talleyrand was clearly using to curry favour with her husband. She was to be feted for tending to her husband’s happiness, for being a dear companion to the conquering hero. Talleyrand had revived an old custom just for this one night and called for all the men to attend the ladies while they ate. Bonaparte dutifully took his place at her right shoulder, filling her cup with wine and serving her fillets of sole. Rose went along with the pretence, smiling graciously, accustomed to her role as diplomat. Had she not done so recently in Venice? For him? She would remind Bonaparte of that later tonight when he began another tirade.

  Venice was breathtaking. On a gondola festooned with flowers she floated along the Grand Canal in a procession of hundreds of boats. She lay back on sumptuous cushions and stared up, amazed, at the people hanging from windows, cheering and waving for her. Incredible, unbelievable. In her bejewelled new gowns, dresses worth more than she could imagine, she pretended to be a queen. It was thrilling and surreal. She had dined with the doge in his palace, at a banquet held in her honour, with fireworks sparking the night sky overhead. She had given a speech in front of an assembly of dignitaries, promising the Venetians she would persuade Bonaparte to favour them. And they had given her a magnificent diamond ring. But it had all been a lie. Bonaparte had already sold their beloved city to the Austrians.

  How could Talleyrand’s ambitious, pretentious banquet compare? He had hired an architect to turn the courtyard into a faux military camp as a tribute to the conquests. She had pretended to be impressed to see the actors in their uniforms representing all the regiments of Bonaparte’s Army of Italy gathered around a bonfire. Fireworks boomed like cannons above their heads and Talleyrand cheered: ‘Vive la république!’

  The noise in the banquet hall was deafening. She looked for her friends, but Thérésa, Barras and Tallien were not invited, or had been seated so far from her table she would never see them. Was it Talleyrand or Bonaparte who sought to distance her from her friends?

  Talleyrand had dressed in a costume draped with myrtle leaves. Did he intend to symbolise new life or honour the goddess Aphrodite with her sacred tree? Rose did not understand it. She wished for Thérésa, knowing that if she had her friend at her side they would have enjoyed Talleyrand’s folly.

  The foreign minister had drawn her
husband away from her, leaving her cup unfilled. They whispered together like children. It was comical to see the great General Bonaparte murmuring to a tree. But her smile soon faded. She knew they would be discussing another ruse: this planned invasion of Egypt. Only a handful of people were to know of their plans. Bonaparte confided in her and she kept his secrets well. They were to go along with the Directoire’s wish to invade Britain. For now.

  Talleyrand and Bonaparte turned their gazes on her. Soon they would ask her to talk to Barras, to convince him that Egypt was a more glittering prize. Rose was tired of these games and tired of pretending to be in love with her husband when her heart was held by another.

  Hippolyte Charles attended a table of young ladies with great enthusiasm. Rose observed that he had not glanced her way this whole evening. He dashed about and filled their cups with wine while their own partners wandered away to the card tables. Was he true? Would he be hers alone? It burned to see him with those women, flirting and laughing with them. He tortured her.

  Her only solace was that Hortense was at her side. She glanced across and Hortense beamed back at her. In the year and a half that Rose had spent away in Italy her child had become a woman. Now she wore her hair tightly curled and pinned to lift it high and accentuate the elegance of her neck. Her daughter was beautiful. She was grown. It almost hurt Rose to see it.

  If Bonaparte was to go about making war in yet another country, Rose knew she needed to protect herself and her daughter. She needed a home of her own. Now that she was back in Paris she would make it her sole business to procure one. Determination straightened her back. She closed her eyes. The image of a quiet country house at the end of an overgrown lane came rushing back to her. She remembered the lonely and unloved Malmaison.

  ‘I have a terrible headache, Hortense,’ Rose whispered.