The General's Mistress (31 page)

My heart sank a little. “That sounds nice,” I said. “I take it you’re not planning on touring the provinces this summer, then?”

“No,” Isabella said. “I’ve got something better. Auguste is a lodge brother of General Lannes, and he’s been assigned to Lannes’s corps of the Army of Italy, under Bonaparte. I’m putting together a troupe to follow along with the baggage train. We’re going to Italy. Want to come as second girl?”

“Italy?” For a moment I was stunned. Italy. Where I had grown up, had gotten what Cousin Louisa described as an ideal education for an adventuress. Italy. Where I had been happy. I did not need to consult my cards for this, dug out of the trash that Moreau had thrown out and carefully kept in their bag. I knew a good thing when I heard it.

“Well?” Isabella asked. “Are you interested?”

“Absolutely,” I said. “I’m yours whenever you’re ready to go.”

W
e left on a gorgeous morning at the beginning of May, a company of six with a wagon and two servants. I didn’t ride in the wagon. Instead, I sold everything left of my finery and things in Paris and bought a horse. He was a fifteen-year-old gelding, a bit slow and short of wind, but he was sound enough. I named him Nestor, and we got along fine.

I was Charles on the road. Of course, the company and the servants knew that I was their second girl, but none of the fellow travelers met at inns or on the road did. It seemed safer that
way, since the leading man and the second man were both rather timid sorts, and the second man was at least sixty and prone to drunkenness. He was a thoroughgoing professional on the stage, but offstage he was insensible most of the time. I didn’t ask what misfortune had put him back on the road at this point in his life. It seemed rude.

Charles didn’t have a sword, but I talked the second man into loaning me one of his pair of horse pistols. It was safer to be armed, under the circumstances.

We made slow time across France. The supply columns for the Army of Italy stretched seemingly endlessly, and in the glorious spring weather it seemed that everyone in France must be on the way to Italy. Sutlers, farriers and horse copers, cantinières, and replacement troops all crowded the roads.

While I had been paying no attention, the Directory had given way to the Consulate, in which a triumvirate of worthy men held executive power rather than the band of Directors. Foremost among them was Bonaparte.

What Moreau thought of this, I could only imagine. But perhaps he had his hands full. One of the first acts of the Consulate had been to restore him to his overall command on the Rhine. He now commanded the largest French army, with more than 120,000 men facing the Austrians. The First Consul, Bonaparte, preferred to take on the supposedly softer wing of the Austrian army in Italy, aided by the men to whom Moreau had referred once to me as a band of undernourished schoolboys and grimy old grumblers.

Presumably the latter had referred to General Masséna, who was presently holding the city of Genoa against a besieging force twice the size of his. Everyone said that eventually he must surrender. The question was how long they would hold, and
whether Bonaparte’s army would reach Italy before they were lost. Everyone wondered. In each inn all across France, men talked of nothing else. Not once did I hear the name Moreau.
Victor might have the greater command,
I thought,
but once again he is not making himself loved.

Traveling in what was essentially one giant baggage train, with papers signed by General Lannes, we met little trouble.

As we rumbled along with our wagon, Nestor keeping pace beside it, I felt a stirring. Nestor was strong and solid, and days in the sun and good plain food made me feel myself again. Or at least made me feel Charles. He was less cynical than previously, more willing to be charming, more willing to lean from the saddle and pay elaborate compliments over Isabella’s hand while the Angora cat spat at him. I liked being Charles. He could rise to any occasion, get out of any trouble with a twist of a smile and the right word, a golden trickster who feared nothing. He was the master of his own fate.

Unwillingly, I felt my spirits lift. How could I not, with the open road in front of me and the glorious sun of spring in the heavens, with all the trees in bloom and the shadow of the Alps growing closer every day? I had not seen those peaks since I had come this way as a child. Snow-covered, they glittered like a promise, closer each day. Soon we were in the foothills. Cloaks came out of our packs.

We stopped at an inn before we began the ascent. Isabella had us sing for our supper, playing
Blue Beard
before the fire in the main room. I sang the ghost of his wife, and it was eerie and strange, coming in a dusky alto from what appeared to be a slender young man. It was there we heard that Bonaparte had beaten the Austrians at Marengo.

The next day we started up the pass. The weather was good
and it was June. The army had crossed a month earlier in a howling storm. In the gullies we could see what was left of the carcasses of their foundered mules and horses. Now the rocks were studded with alpine flowers.

With each step, something lifted. I was young and I was free, like the hawks that soared on the updrafts over the valleys. Once, I thought I saw an eagle.

What did it matter if I was poor again, and if I had no idea what awaited us in Italy? I had a horse and a pistol at my side, my health and friends. If I had no lover, so much the better. Perhaps I would not need one.

Or perhaps even now the dice were rolling, the cards turning. That night, encamped on the mountain beside a small fire, I took out my deck and felt them in my hands, cool and smooth as silk. Wordlessly, I laid them out. The Chariot gleamed gold and white, the Emperor’s red cloak billowing soundlessly behind him. The Star gleamed in the heavens. The Sword Queen held her blade before her while the tempest raged about her, grip foremost, like a crusader bending to kiss the cruciform hilt. Six staves entwined, gold and blue.

Isabella came and sat down opposite me wordlessly, her pink shawl bundled tightly around her shoulders.

“What is next?” I asked, and turned the card.

The Emperor sat enthroned, the orb of the world in his hands.

“What do your cards say will happen in Italy?” Isabella asked.

“Battles,” I said. “I didn’t need the cards to say that. Masséna has surrendered Genoa, but Bonaparte and Lannes are on the move. Battles go without saying.”

“Masséna surrendered?”

I nodded. “I heard it from a man going the other way, a
horse coper going back to get more remounts. He said they got terms and surrendered the city, but took the wounded out and paroled everyone else.”

“I wonder if Auguste is all right,” she said.

“I’m sure he is,” I said. “He’s with Lannes, after all.”

“You can win victories and still die,” Isabella said.

T
he next day we saw the carts. We had just begun the descent and they were on the way up, carts drawn by donkeys on the steep path. The little beasts put their heads down, but they kept moving slowly upward.

I rode down on Nestor, moving in reverse along the column, looking for the easiest place to get our wagon down.

Some of the men in the carts were sitting up, joking and calling out. Isabella appeared, walking beside the wagon in case of a runaway, and her beauty seemed to make a great hit. She returned their calls gaily, blowing kisses and promising them tickets someday.

I stopped to wait for her. “Carts,” I said.

A donkey cart toiled slowly up beside me and halted. Isabella was standing beside the cart just ahead, letting a gallant with one arm kiss her hand, her shawl stirring in the fresh breeze. I looked down.

A young man was lying in the bottom of the cart, a cloak half thrown around him. His long black hair was matted with sweat and had escaped from its queue to lie across his shoulders. His skin was the faded, sick color of olive skin pinched by the starvation of a siege, then bled white from a wound. I stopped. I dismounted without hardly being aware of it.

Lying in a cart like this, a cloak half across him, long black hair . . .

His head moved a little from side to side in some fever dream, and I let out a breath that I didn’t know I was holding.

“The wounded from Genoa,” Isabella said, coming up beside me.

He had fine, strong lines to his face, a face I should have known, so like was it to some other. No doubt his eyes would be dark, if he opened them.

The column started moving again, the patient donkeys plodding forward.

Isabella reached for my hand. “Come on, Charles,” she said. “Let’s lead Nestor and give him a little rest going down.”

I nodded. The cart moved past. What was I to do? Follow it for no reason at all? Because something in the face of a stranger filled me with a sorrow I could not name?

W
e reached Milan a few days behind our troops, some of whom had returned to the city following the twin victories of Marengo and Montebello. The Austrians had been soundly defeated and were in full retreat.

Isabella had us ready to perform inside of a day. We opened in the camp with
The Comical Romance
and moved on to
Alexander in Asia,
a special double program—three francs for both shows.

The audience was beyond enthusiastic. When I let down my hair and opened my shirt to show Sébastienne’s camisole, the men cheered and roared with such enthusiasm one would have thought that I was Venus rising from the waves. And that was the camp show. We were to have the finest theater in Milan the next night to perform for the officers.

Isabella ran about madly, producer and leading lady at the same time. “We need a prologue,” she said. “Something appropriate and martial. Something flattering but not sycophantic. If I write it, can you learn it by tonight?”

“If it’s not long,” I said. “Twenty or thirty lines I can do. Fifty and I’ll flub.”

I
t was nearly fifty. And it sounded like it had been written on the fly, which of course it had.

I was to wear a filmy white dress meant to resemble classical drapery, and to represent “the Spirit of Triumph, or Fama Who Rests Her Hands Upon Laurel’d Heads.” I was to carry a laurel wreath, which took most of the day to locate. Isabella could not be convinced that such wreaths were not for sale on every street corner in Italy, regardless of ancient Roman triumphs. Fortunately, the Italian I had spoken as a child came back to me, and I managed to find someone to sell me enough leafy branches to make into a circlet. Then I had to learn my lines.