Ah. You pity the Empress, he said, as he searched my eyes for a clue to my thoughts. But you should not. He shrugged and then smiled as if to console me for the foolishness of my sympathies.
I tipped my head down, and he reached to pull my chin back up, checking to see if I wept. When he saw I did not, his earlier uncertainty seemed to grow and overwhelm him.
He withdrew a package from within his coat, tied in another of those blue and white handkerchiefs. He tugged and off it fell to reveal a bronze medallion, a cross hanging from a blue and white ribbon with gold bars, one that read PARIS and the other, COMPIèGNE. At the edges of the cross, Gott war mit uns, Ihm sei die Ehre.
God was with us, to Him the glory.
With our thanks, he said. For your invaluable service.
He pinned it to my chest.
He withdrew a scroll then and tied it tightly with another of these ribbons and unrolled a declaration honoring me as a citizen of Germany and a hero of the war with an income to be given in gratitude for my service.
I rubbed at the bar along the ribbon of the medal that read PARIS. Should this say TUILERIES instead? I asked.
No, he said. Paris. It is correct. He looked to the medal on my chest and smiled at it as if it were greeting him. There was some discussion as to whether you should receive the bronze or the steel, he said. The bronze is for combat duty, soldiers on the front line only. The bronze medals are made from the rifles of the defeated French—there’s more honor in them, he said, and placed the scroll down beside me. Steel for everything else. But I insisted, as you were there at the front like the rest.
A memory of the Commune soldiers’ bayonets, their bread perched on each one, passed through me as I looked down.
He smiled at me, still uncertain as he knelt again. Will you forgive me? he asked.
What am I to forgive? I asked.
He blinked. Yes, he said. And here he seemed truly ashamed. I did use you, you see. I sought to punish you. I never expected you to come to me. I was sure you’d betray us to the Commune and choose to die with them, and so I conspired to use you quite foully. I gave you bad information I was sure you would pass to them. But when I heard you had made it as far as Metz, it was then I knew you had faithfully done all I’d asked, that you were mine; you truly belonged to me.
He had said this to me before, and as I heard it, I felt as if I were vanishing into all the other times he had said this to me, returning to a single place where I was always leaving him, and on my return, he was always saying something of this kind.
This occasion was different, though.
This was, to be sure, quite a spectacle, his kneeling before me, tentative, even afraid, but it was also not the moment the Prince had told me to watch for—surely I was not meant to repudiate this gift or insult it—and if this was not the moment, then why was he here and what was the moment? I knew the tenor meant for all this to enlist me, somehow. This gift was meant to deny the very real distance between us, a distance he at least knew was there even if he could not admit to it or know it for what it was, and this was what he sought to close now in order to begin whatever next life he believed waited for us. He wanted me to believe I was as he believed I was, his beloved, the recuperating invalid, nearly well, and apparently, if I understood him, a hero in the war, if unwillingly and unknowingly. But he could never close this distance between us because he still did not know why I had been returned to him. He was gathering everything in himself to keep me here forever, sure he would succeed even as another plan was already in motion to keep us apart—a plan set in place by the man who had always controlled him.
He did not know. He did not know his place here, and I did. Mine was the upper hand. And so I listened as if I believed him and waited for my moment.
We must speak of something of great importance, he said, his voice hard and confident again. I nodded for him to continue.
After your debut in Leipzig, I ask that you do the honor of becoming my wife. We can be married in the very church where Mozart was choirmaster.
This, of course, was what the Prince had meant. I knew at last what the Prince wanted from me now.
You must never escape me again, he said.
I laughed.
The tenor, descended from a noble if not too noble Prussian family, one of the younger sons with an eldest brother who’d bred heirs early and successfully, had once told me the best he could hope for was an estate of his own some day and a few dutifully produced heirs, though their fates would have circumstances even more diminished than his. The gift of being his father’s third most important son was that he was free to have his musical career and live as he liked there in Germany or abroad. For him to marry an untitled woman from an uncertain background would guarantee he would lose his claim—not just to his money and lands, but to the company of his family. And as I knew well, he loved them still. He would not give them up for me no matter what he believed, and they would never accept me.
The challenges before me were precise. I had to fulfill my agreement with the Prince and yet I could not cut the tenor so deeply that I lost my value to him, and thus to the Prince. If I did that, I would be dead before I reached the border.
I also needed to protect myself. I would be a fool to rely only on the Prince’s word and his little declaration, which the tenor had shown me so proudly. I needed to ensure my own safety and perhaps enact even a little revenge. And as I had spent this time among my captors observing them, I knew there was one way to do all that I wanted, and at that moment, I saw it as clearly as the tenor’s eyes before me. I nearly smiled into them in anticipation as I began my surprise.
I stood and removed the medal from the nightdress, which I let fall to the ground until I was naked before him.
What is this? he asked, with a faint smile.
Do you remember? The first time you took me to a dressmaker, you told me you weren’t sure you wanted to dress me at all.
He smiled.
Do you remember that day?
I do, he said. Very well.
I stand before you this way to remind you. We will never marry, I said, and put the medal and the letter together on the mantle.
What is this?
We will never marry. We cannot.
What do you mean?
What do you not understand? If you were to marry me, you could never present me at court. This letter may make me a citizen, but it does not provide me with a noble family or title to match yours.
But I will, he said. And as a hero of the war. You don’t understand.
I do, I said.
I walked to where he stood. He was studying my body, which I understood would look new to him with this monstrous new pallor—it excited him. He was trying to contain this, even acting as if we were playing at an amusement of his devising.
I held out my hand, and he took it, and I drew him with me to the bed. There I sat and crossed my legs and extended my right leg before him. He took it and ran his hand back and forth, smoothing my foot.
The foot never so white as it was then.
I do not refuse you lightly, I said. I do not refuse because I do not love you. I refuse because of the Comtesse.
The Comtesse? She is our friend, he said. And a friend to you. She is even a friend to Paris. You all owe her your lives. Do you know why the shelling stopped? She made it so. She intervened with Bismarck. When she got word he was set to shell Paris to rubble, she left Florence at once and arranged to meet with him. She convinced him it was the greatest possible sin to risk the destruction of the Louvre. She and the Prince, they are very old friends, he said, and gestured at the mirror as if at the Prince. You need not worry about her.