The General's Mistress (2 page)

W
e had been in Rome. An elderly cardinal was persuaded that my father was his distant kin, and insisted that we stay in a lovely house he owned in the Eternal City. For all I knew, it was true. My father was a big man, broad-shouldered, and he smelled of tobacco and sweated velvet. He wore his light-brown hair in an unpowdered queue, the strands on the sides coming loose and falling forward over his stubbled cheeks. He shaved before the evening’s activities began, so daylight always caught him unshaven, if it caught him at all. My father was the illegitimate son of a Hungarian count, or so he said, but it was his word against that of my mother’s kin.

My mother’s people, the van Ayldes and the Jonghes, were old merchant families in Amsterdam, men with warehouses and ships and fine multistory houses overlooking the harbor. My mother was an orphan and an heiress who lived with her uncle in an old house full of tiny rooms and teak paneling brought back from the other side of the world. When she was sixteen she climbed out a barred window and ran away with Leopold Versfelt, who might or might not be the illegitimate son of a Hungarian count, and whose income was precisely nothing per annum.

Rome was pestilential. All I could remember was tossing and turning in the bed beside the window, my nurse talking to me in Italian and sponging me off. I knew my parents were sick, and Charles too.

I woke one night from fevered dreams of sacrifices and funeral pyres, shivering and calling out, “My lady, dear lady, don’t let him go. The omens are bad, the fire dies in the brazier. Dear lady, do not let him go!”

“Shhhh,” my nurse whispered. I saw her face in the firelight, heard her speak to someone behind her: “She is burning up.”

“Iras!” I cried. “Come on! Bring the child!”

The priest stepped into the light of the candle. “She’s raving,” he said, and made the sign of the cross over me. He leaned down. “Dear child, do you understand that I am about to give you Extreme Unction?”

I struggled with the bedclothes. “Iras! Come on! Aurelianus can’t hold them forever!”

I felt the priest’s cool hand on my brow, heard him speaking the Latin words softly.

It only made me wilder. He could not get the wafer in my mouth.

“Requiescat in pacem,”
the priest said. The candle flared, illuminating a face like that of a knight on a tomb, then plunging me into darkness.

My nurse sponged me with a cool cloth. “There, sweet child,” she said. “There, sweet child.”

“The boy, the boy . . .” I whispered.

It seemed to me that her voice broke. “Rest now, child. Rest now. You can do nothing for him.”

“I can’t?”

“No,” she said, drawing cool water across my lips. “Sleep, little one. Sleep.”

“I must get to him,” I insisted, curling onto my side. “Sun and moon and the sons of gods. I have failed in every charge and I shall know no peace.”

“You’ve done nothing wrong,” she said. “Rest now, little one. There is nothing you must do.”

I lay by the window half-open on the Roman night, streets quiet and still. I fell into fevered dreams and woke in the chill hour before dawn. My sheets were damp and twisted, but I was not cold. My hands shook as I sat up, but I did not shiver. In the night, the fever had left me.

“Giulia?” I said.

I heard her voice in the hall talking to someone. It was my father who answered. He sounded shaken, and his voice was thready.

“She’s sleeping now,” my nurse said. “Her fever’s broken, praise to all the saints! But she was that close, I tell you, sir, that close to heaven. And at the worst of it, she was calling for her brother.”

My father was weeping. “And he will never answer,” he said, and his voice choked on a sob.

Charles had died, and I lived.

I
n our second week at the spa, Cousin Louisa arrived. She was my mother’s first cousin, raised with her. Like my mother, she was fair, but shorter and plump, with pink cheeks, as lively as my mother was quiet. I was by then incredibly glad to see her.

Louisa embraced me, and then the three of us sat down to the serious business of luncheon and all of the stories about cousins I had hardly sorted out. My mother picked at her food and at last said she was too tired from taking the waters that morning, and that she believed she would retire. I returned to Louisa’s rooms instead.

Her maid was still busy unpacking. Louisa traveled with at least ten trunks, all filled with frills and robes and little lawn ruffles. She didn’t even wait for us to be seated before she asked, “Well, how is she? The doctor hoped that she would improve.”

I shrugged. “She’s better than she was in Amsterdam. She knows who I am half the time.”

“And Charles?”

“No change,” I said. I sat down on Louisa’s bed. “Surely you don’t expect one.”

“Not really,” Louisa said. “No going out lurking as Charles tonight. You have to stay here and bear your old cousin company!”

I smiled in spite of myself. “Cousin Louisa, it will be a pleasure.”

Louisa rang for a collation in her rooms that evening, and we sat beside a comfortable fire that took the chill out of the air, munching on bread and cheese and tiny sausages wrapped in pastry. There was a box of cards on the side table, and I suggested a hand.

Louisa laughed. “You can’t play cards with those! Well, I suppose you could, but someone would die!”

Seeing my confusion, she took up the box. “It’s an Italian deck for fortune-telling. A friend gave them to me. Parlor tricks, but fun. Will I marry a handsome man? That sort of thing.”

“I thought you already did,” I said. Her husband, Ernst, was fifty and as wide as he was tall, but he and Louisa seemed to get along.

She laughed again. “Very well, then. Will you find a handsome lover?” She looked at me and raised both plucked eyebrows.

“Now, that’s something I’d like to find out,” I said. “I’ll play.”

Louisa lit more candles so we could see better, and I spread the cards out in the light. Round gold coins. Swords interlocked in intricate patterns, printed in blue and green and gold and red. Knights and kings holding the globe in their hands.

“You’re supposed to lay out three piles, like this,” Louisa said. “You ask a question, and then you shuffle and cut three times. The first one is what, the second one is how, and the third one is why. I can never make them work at all, not even enough to be funny.”

I shrugged. They were beautiful. I ran my fingers over them, feeling them warm in my hands, creamy paper flowing like water. Chalices and staves, pages and queens. I pulled one out.

A woman sat enthroned, her blue robe flowing around her feet. Roses surrounded her, and behind her were two pillars with a veil between. She wore a crown surmounted by the horned moon, and her face was serene.

Louisa squinted at it. “So are you going to see about a lover or not?”

I cut the card back into the deck and shuffled, my hands enjoying the familiar feel of the cards. If there was one thing I had learned from my father, it was how to shuffle. “Tell me then,” I said to them, “will I find a lover whom I truly love?” The cards flashed, colors bright and gleaming. “Tell me what will happen,” I repeated, bending my whole will toward them. “Whom will I find, and how, and why?”

I cut them and laid them out in three, then turned the first one over.

The King of Chalices looked up at me, his red hair garish on the printed paper, a golden cup in his hand. Behind him was the sea, and in his other hand was a sword ornamented with pearls.

“A red-haired man,” Louisa said.

“Quick in emotion, in anger or love,” I said, peering at the picture carefully, the storm waves tossing behind him. I felt distinctly odd. “That’s what the waves mean. Generous and dangerous too.”

I flipped the second card over. “Fortune’s Wheel,” I said. “See, Louisa? How the poor souls bound to the wheel go up to fame and riches and then tumble down to the grave, only to go around again?”

“That doesn’t look very nice,” Louisa said. “Do you think your fortunes will tumble? Does your husband have any risky financial transactions?”

I shrugged again. “Not that I know of. But with the revolution in France and all, even kings are going to the guillotine. And peasants are coming up.” My eyes ran over the wheel. Up, up, up on the wheel of fortune to the dizzying pinnacle, and then suddenly tumbling over. Over and over, up and down, cradle to grave.

“Elzelina?” Louisa touched my shoulder. “Are you all right?”

“Fine,” I said. I felt odd, as if the pictures were drawing me into them, unnaturally bright. I smiled at Louisa reassuringly. “I’m fine.” I turned the last card over.

An emperor rode in triumph in a chariot, his hair wreathed in victory, his arms extended, holding the reins. One black horse and one white horse drew the chariot, fine, prancing steeds, but they pulled in different directions, the black one stamping at the ground. Only the Emperor’s strength kept them yoked together. Behind him the artist had suggested the slave at his shoulder, the one whose task it was to whisper that all glory is fleeting.

“The Chariot,” I said. “That’s why. The wind through the world. It’s starting again. It’s already started.”

“What are you talking about?” Louisa said.

. . . 
A pyre on a beach, the flames rising to the sky, a prince of a people who were no more, his face washed in firelight.

A pyre glittering with gilded ornament and bright with silks beginning to smolder while elephants trumpeted and incense fumed, the smoke rolling over his body beneath its magnificent pall, his eyes
weighted with coins, long red hair swept back from a face that was still young.

A red-haired girl turning suddenly, her face lit by flaring torches, illuminating the pale lines of her throat and her old black velvet dress—

Louisa’s hand on my wrist. “Elzelina? Are you all right? I think we’d better put the cards away.”

I focused on her face. It was real and close, concerned blue eyes, skin a little blotchy along her chin. “Yes,” I said. “I think we’d better. I’m sorry. I just felt a little faint for a moment.”

I scooped the cards together and put them in the box without looking at them. I should have been frightened, but I wasn’t. I wanted to touch them again. I wanted to see. “Would you mind if I kept these for a while, Louisa?”

She shrugged, though she still looked at me a little strangely. “Not at all.”

I went back to my room. Mother was asleep in hers. She would never wake, not with her laudanum every night.

I lit one candle and took off my shoes and stockings, garters and all. I unfastened my dress, removed it, and hung it neatly. The stays were next, and then my chemise. In the candlelight, the body in the glass certainly did not belong to Charles. Honey-blond hair fell over my shoulders, not quite covering white breasts, rose-tipped and soft. My thighs were long and muscled, my stomach rounding forward just a little over a mound of Venus covered in gold curls. One hand rose, traced the circle of my navel. I traced it with my finger, round and round. My hand slid lower, entangled in soft hair. I bit my lip.

Abruptly, I turned from the mirror and opened the box, shaking out the cards onto my white bed. Gold and scarlet, garish blues and greens, falling like leaves. Crossed swords entwined with roses. Cups ranged in rows. The golden sun shining over
boy and girl twins who stood together hand in hand. A tower fell and the sea lapped about it.

I threw myself on top of them. The soft paper crinkled under my weight. I shook the covers, and the cards fell around me like blossoms.

“Tell me,” I whispered, but I did not know what question I was asking.

The World of Men

A
fter two weeks at the spa, I returned home. My husband had secured an appointment in Lille that he thought would advance his career, and of course I traveled with him to take it up.