The Coral Thief (14 page)
Authors: Rebecca Stott
“Italy?” I said, my voice shaking. “You’re going to Italy?”
“Yes, that’s where I live.”
“The child,” I said. “Delphine?”
“She doesn’t want to leave Paris.”
“Where is she?” I had looked for signs of a child in the atelier-toys, books, shoes—but saw none.
“She is staying at a convent on the north side of the city. The nuns run it as a school. It’s not safe for her to be here with me in the atelier. Not anymore. I see her almost every day—she is not far away.”
The heat in the room was stifling. I eased off my jacket, and when she stepped toward me and kissed me again, I felt an unbearable longing, softer and darker than the seabed.
“It is too hot,” she said. “You know, you were lucky to see the paintings in the Louvre when you did. The walls are full of gaps now. The Prussians took their paintings two weeks ago, and Wellington sent a hundred and fifty riflemen in today to reclaim the Italian paintings. They took them down in less than two hours, except for the ones that Denon has hidden away, the ones he can’t bear to part with. Come through and let me light some candles. We can’t sit in here. Soon it will be too dark to see.”
“The Louvre? You were there … today?”
“Yes. I was looking for you,” she said. “When the soldiers came up the main staircase with guns, Denon simply stood and watched. He’s
getting used to it. A few weeks ago, when the Prussian soldiers went to take back the marble columns that Napoleon had removed from Aachen Cathedral, Denon told them that if they took them, the Louvre roof would fall in.”
I followed her through a low doorway into a room that was empty except for a mattress on a rugless floor, covered in crumpled sheets, a pale, blue silk nightdress lying like sloughed skin. She carried in a candleholder and placed it on the floor near the head of the mattress.
“When … do you leave?” I asked, my words breaking up as she began to unbutton my shirt.
“Soon. There’s so little time. I wanted to ask you about your notebooks. There are questions you are asking that … there are books you could read…”
“I can stay in Paris now,” I said, “if you return my things. You could stay too, perhaps.” For a second I wondered whether I should warn her about my conversations with Jagot, tell her that there seemed to be a high price on her head, but when she pulled her shirt over her head and her hair came loose from its ribbon, catching the light from the candles, I forgot about that too. Underneath the shirt, her chest was bound with strips of white linen.
“You will have to help me with this,” she said.
As I reached to untie the white bands that bound her body, I tried to keep my mind on the soldiers in the Louvre. I imagined them climbing the ladders to reach the highest pictures, passing down paintings by Rubens, Caravaggio, and Titian, taking the canvases from their frames and rolling them up. If I kept my mind in the Louvre, I thought, my hands might stop shaking.
Without thinking, I leaned forward to kiss her in that hollow where her shoulder curved toward her neck as she slipped off the rest of her clothes. “You can change your mind,” I said. “You could stay.”
She was naked now except for her silk drawers, white against her dark skin.
“You are flushed,” she said as she turned to face me, smiling. She
reached for a sheet and draped it around herself. As I let the last strips of linen fall to the floor, she touched me, her fingers reaching for the skin beneath my unbuttoned shirt. “Wellington has told the Venetians they can have the horses back.”
“He has?” I tried to keep my mind on the empty white spaces on the walls of the Louvre as she took off my shirt and slipped the belt from my waist. “The horses? What horses?”
“The four bronze horses that Napoleon took from Saint Mark’s Square and put up on the top of the Arc de Triomphe.” She lowered herself onto the mattress, pulling me down beside her.
“The horses coming down,” she whispered, “that will be something to see.” Lying on her side facing me, her head propped on her hand, she traced the lines of my thigh and hip with her fingers.
“I can see purple now,” I said, my eyes closed. I pressed my mouth to hers, my hand on her breast, underneath the sheet.
“Paris will never be like this again,” she said. “It’s all changing. You will be here to see it all, even when I am gone. You will see everything.”
N THE NIGHT OF AUGUST 20,
Napoleon, having walked eight or nine times the length of the deck of the HMS
Northumberland,
had taken his usual seat on the second gun from the gangway on the starboard side. He was dictating his memoirs to his secretary, Las Cases, recalling on this particular night his childhood in Corsica—the smell of the houses in Ajaccio, his first military uniform, the history of his family, who were émigrés to Corsica from Italy, and the fact that, as he had been born prematurely, his mother’s nurse had placed him on the bedroom floor, on a carpet woven with scenes from the
Iliad,
while she attended to his mother. Those scenes from Homer were the first pictures I saw, he told Las Cases: Menelaus and Achilles in battle and Hector’s body being dragged around the walls of Troy
.
For days the Emperor had stared out from the deck toward an unbroken horizon or watched the distant landmasses slip by: Cape Finisterre on the northwestern corner of Spain, the dazzling bird-nested cliffs of Cape Saint Vincent on the southern coast of Portugal, down past the Strait of Gibraltar where merchant ships gathered to pass from the Atlantic
Ocean through to the Mediterranean Sea, the boundaries once known as the Pillars of Hercules. The HMS
Northumberland
and the warships that accompanied it continued to tack slowly down the coast of Africa toward Madeira and beyond Madeira to the equator. It would be at least another month before the Emperor would set foot on solid land, thousands of miles from Paris
.
The heat was so great that Napoleon could not sleep; he complained of swollen feet from lack of exercise. For hours every day he and Las Cases pored over maps in the volumes of the
Historical Atlas
Las Cases had published a few years before in England and had brought on board for the Emperor’s amusement. By night, after his walk on deck, the Emperor played vingt-et-un or chess with his generals, Las Cases, and his valet, then retired to his cabin. Only that day he had received word that Wellington had allowed the Louvre to be sacked by Prussian soldiers. Where would it all end, he wondered, now that vultures circled the imperial city? If you would only find me a musket, he whispered to Las Cases, then we might do something
.
9
HE CATS WOKE US THAT DAWN
with cries like human screams that echoed from the rooftops outside her window. We lay listening to the rain, the first we’d had in weeks.
“Stay a few more days,” I said. “I want to see you again. I want—”
“What does Daniel Connor want?” she asked, half-asleep. “It’s dangerous for me in Paris,” she said, her head heavy against my chest. “You keep forgetting.”
“I have forgotten everything outside this room,” I said, running my fingers through her hair, reminding myself she was no apparition. “There is nothing outside.”
“There is Henri Jagot,” she said. “He is always there. He doesn’t forget.”
“What can Jagot possibly want with you? It must be a mistake.”
I remembered Jagot’s suspicions about Silveira and what he had said about Dufour. Lucienne was not a woman who chose her friends wisely, I thought. For a moment I imagined what my father might say about such a woman—he would call her fallen—but then perhaps he
would use the same word for me now. It was a hollow word. It meant nothing to me anymore.
“It was a bad mistake,” she said. “There was a gunfight in an old warehouse in Montmartre six years ago. One of Jagot’s men died.”
“Did
you
kill him? Jagot’s man?” The thought seemed ridiculous.
“No, I didn’t. But Jagot arrested me and some other people—it was mistaken identities, you understand.”
“So he wants revenge. Saint-Vincent, the man in the Palais Royal. Was he arrested too?”
“Yes. And Manon. Four of us escaped from the Bureau, but my friend Dufour, he did not escape and was sent to Toulon. Jagot never sleeps and he never stops looking. Eventually he will find me even in Italy. Wherever I am. You are a beautiful boy, Daniel Connor, but even for your beauty and your cleverness and your questions that never stop, I cannot stay in Paris.”
