The General's Mistress (5 page)

“Oh yes, Jan. I will,” I promised solemnly, petting the mare he held for me, and swinging up with his aid. “I will be very good from now on.”

He did not answer, but only mounted his own horse. Together we swung about and trotted off across the fields, under the bright sky. Of course there was a full moon for my elopement. It was part of the scene. There was always a full moon in books. My blue-black cloak belled out behind me, and my long blond hair streamed in the wind. I thought that I must be really lovely tonight for the first time.

Before us the fields stretched out, plowed and planted but not yet greened. I wanted to kick my mare to a gallop, but I knew Jan would tell me to spare the horse. I decided I must start becoming more serious now that I was almost a married woman. I sat up very straight and stiff in the saddle. After a few minutes it was making my tailbone hurt. I supposed I hadn’t got the moral backbone for it yet. I allowed myself to relax back into the mare’s movements, promising myself I would start sitting up straight tomorrow.

“How far is it?” I asked after a few minutes. Jan had been glancing back nervously for several minutes.

“It’s still a few miles to the border,” he replied.

It was three miles to a little village in German Pomerania where we were to be married. It was late when we arrived, with the moon westering behind the trees, and all the buildings locked except the inn. A sleepy stableboy took our horses.

“Jan,” I said, touched by the thoughtfulness of it all, “did you tell them we were coming?”

“Of course, my dear,” he said, assisting me to dismount. “They are waiting with supper for us.”

Inside, the inn was scrubbed as clean as any housewife could want. There was a large, cheery fire, though the night was not cold, and a large woman in a starched apron waiting for us. “Monsieur Ringeling! Mademoiselle Versfelt! What a great honor!” She beamed at us with a beatific expression, a blessing upon young love. “Please sit by the fire! Allow me to bring you something to refresh yourselves while I see to your dinner.”

“A bottle of your best burgundy,” Jan ordered, allowing her to take his cloak. He was wearing a dark-green velvet coat, dark breeches, black stockings, and a waistcoat worked with silver thread. My heart swelled at the thought of this perfect creature as my husband. When the innkeeper handed him the wine bottle, he uncorked it deftly and poured a full glass of the ruby liquid into a cut-crystal goblet. He presented it to me as though it sanctified our wedding.

“Drink up, Elzelina. It will warm you after the night’s chill.” He cupped my fingers around it.

Smiling at him, I lifted the goblet to my lips. The wine was full and tasted of fruit and oak barrels, burning a little in my throat. I could feel the blood rising in my cheeks.

Jan nodded approvingly. “I must check on arrangements with the minister. I’ll be back in a moment. Just stay by the fire and get warm.” He slipped out the door. It was so considerate of him, I thought. So very kind.

I took another big drink of the wine. It tasted so good that I had another. The innkeeper came back in and hung our cloaks near the fire. She looked at me as I kicked off my boots and toasted my toes at the hearth, my blond hair spread across my shoulders. “How old are you, Mademoiselle Versfelt?” she asked.

I giggled. “Sixteen,” I said, the lie that Jan and I had agreed on. He said that people wouldn’t understand the truth if I said I was twelve, and I was sure he knew best about it. After all, he was twenty-five.

She looked at me as if she didn’t believe me. “Truly?” she said.

“Truly,” I agreed solemnly, and giggled again. I took another long drink of the wine. Somehow, I just felt like giggling.

Jan came back and sat down beside me. I giggled. “What are you doing?” Jan said as the innkeeper brought in a tray of roasted meats, bread, and cheese.

“Nothing.” I giggled again.
I must have deportment,
I thought. Brides should have deportment.

He lifted the wineglass to my lips, and I drank. It tasted good. He smelled good. Dinner smelled good.

We ate by the fire, drinking the whole bottle of wonderful wine. Wonderful burgundy. “Burgundy must be a wonderful place,” I said, trying to sound grown-up and conversational.

Jan stared at me.

“I mean,” I said, “it must be nice to travel. I enjoy travel.” I giggled.

“I think you should retire,” Jan said.

“Oh no!” I said, lunging forward and pouring more wine with unsteady hands. “I’m having a lovely time. Lovely.” I simpered, waving an invisible fan in front of my face.

Jan looked nervously back toward the kitchen door. “Elzelina, I think you had best go to bed.”

He was so handsome. So concerned. “I don’t want to go to bed. I want to talk about Voltaire.”

“Not just now, Elzelina,” he said, helping me to my feet.

I tripped on something and landed against him, looking up from the middle of his chest. “Hello, Jan,” I said.

He took my arm, half-lifting me. “We are going upstairs. It’s time you retired.” He was nearly dragging me up the stairs, into the nicest room on the second floor. There was a bed and a washstand, a candle by the bed, blue and white curtains drawn tight against the night. He shut the door.

“You smell nice,” I said. He was tall. Tall. I wished he would kiss me again like the time he did in the arbor. It was nice. And then he did.
The room was spinning around me, and I felt curiously light-headed. I supposed that brides were supposed to faint. I’d never fainted before. I’d never understood why. Brides fainted. I could faint.

The room was spinning and dissolving into a riot of colors and sensations that made no sense. Somewhere there was the softness of the sheet beneath my bare back, the feel of his scratchy face against my chest. I giggled. I could have been floating on a cloud. I was not sure what happened next.

When I awoke, it was morning, and my head was pounding. Or maybe, I thought, it was the door that was pounding. I covered my head with the pillow to keep out the noise and the brutal light from the window. The door swung open.

“Good God!” I heard a man’s voice say.
Oh,
I thought drunkenly,
I’m not wearing anything but a pillow over my head.
The door slammed shut.

Jan and his father were having a shouting match on the upstairs landing.

“Twelve years old! Jesus Christ! Jan, you’re not my son! Jesus Christ! I told you to stay away from her! I ordered you! Jesus Christ!”

“Sir,” said Jan dispassionately, “I informed you that I was going to marry Mademoiselle Versfelt.”

“You are not!” his father shouted. “That little girl is getting dressed and I am taking her straight back to her mother, where I am going to grovel to her family and hope that you don’t face criminal charges. And you are going to be on the next ship to the Dutch East Indies, where you are never going to mess with her again!”

I sat up in bed suddenly, hardly believing that Jan’s father could be so cruel. My body was very stiff and sore, a little blood streaking the insides of my thighs.

Jan didn’t raise his voice. “No, sir, I am not. Because if I am, then Mademoiselle Versfelt is ruined. The marriage has already been
consummated. If it does not take place, it is she who will be the injured party. No other suitor will ever wed her. She will remain unmarried the rest of her life, cooped up with her madwoman mother.”

There was a long silence in the hall, so long that I wondered if they had gone away.

Then I heard his father say, in a low, strangled voice that sounded almost like tears, “Damn you. There’s not a drop of human feeling in you, is there? You would do anything for money, regardless of decency.”

“That is your opinion, sir,” Jan said.

His father’s voice was very low. “Tell your fiancée to get dressed. I am taking her back for her mother’s blessing and consent. I will not have her speculated about by all good society. You will be married in the First Reformed Church in Amsterdam like respectable people. God help the poor girl, married to you!”

I lay back on the bed, listening to his father’s footsteps on the stairs, suddenly frightened to death.

T
hat had been seven years ago, and I was no longer the naïve girl I had been then, blinded by dreams of love. I had given him two sons and brought him a great deal of money. I was a good hostess, a personable wife on the arm of an ambitious man. And of course, I brought my family connections, as awkward as it was to trade upon them, showing up at house parties to which we had not been invited.

As a result, I tried to be as pleasant as possible to our hosts. M. van der Sleijden, my distant cousin, was married to a woman of my mother’s age, who immediately bade me call her Aunt Sofie. Their eldest daughter was a lively dark-haired girl of fifteen named Maria.

Maria and I shared many interests, including a love of
early-morning horseback rides—Jan was never even up at that time, having stayed up until the wee hours talking politics.

The second day after I arrived, we had a very nice ride, cantering across the fields in the gray morning, the mist rising off every stream and canal, doves calling and crossing the pearly sky. We stopped at the top of a gentle rise and watched the sun come up. Neither of us said anything. It was too beautiful.

Along the line of the canal a man was riding toward us on a black horse, his shadow flung out before him in the morning. I sighed. It was too early for social pleasantry.

“Oh!” Maria said, and I was startled to see her blushing.

I looked at the man again. It was General Moreau. “Do you know Moreau?” I asked Maria.

She bit her lower lip. “I’ve just met him this week. He’s terribly gallant, don’t you think? And a bachelor.”

“Maria, he’s forty if he’s a day,” I began, but could not finish because Moreau rode up, doffing his hat and making a pretty bow from the saddle.

“My dear ladies,” he said.

“Good morning, General,” I said.

Maria blushed again. “It’s nice to see you again.”

“The pleasure is mine,” he said. “Surely your fair countenance lends more to the day’s beauty than does mine.”

I made some sound that might have been a snort.

He raised black eyes to mine, a look of amusement rather than insult there. “Perhaps my countenance does not give Madame Ringeling the same pleasure. The last time we met, she roundly whipped me on the subject of feminine virtue.”

I lifted an eyebrow. “I would hardly characterize our brief conversation that way.”

Moreau inclined his head. “Believe me, Madame, being whipped by you gave me the greatest pleasure.”

“There’s no accounting for taste,” I said tartly.

Maria was gaping. Her eyes were huge, and she stared at me as though to send me some secret message. “If your presence does not please my cousin, it certainly pleases me. I am by no means ready to return to the house. General, would you accompany me on the rest of my ride? Elzelina was just saying how tired she was.”

Moreau inclined his head politely. “Of course, Mademoiselle. I am sure that such an independent woman as Madame Ringeling will have no objection to returning to the house alone.”

“Of course,” I said sweetly. “I am on my way just now to take breakfast with your mother, Maria. Shall I tell her you will be returning soon?”

“Fine,” Maria said. She was looking at Moreau as though he were made of marzipan, a look I distrusted immensely.

A
t luncheon, Maria would not speak to me. And that evening Jan wanted me at his side constantly to run off anyone who tried to impede his progress at political conversation. I had no chance to talk to Maria until late, when she had already retired. As I came along the corridor, I saw the light under her door and knocked.