§
As I returned to Aristafeo’s house, I passed a doorway I had only ever seen closed. Today the doors were open.
The courtyard was empty and the wings to either side seemed abandoned. A bronze plaque still sat atop the center of the door. MAISON EUGèNE NAPOLéON, FONDéE EN 1856, PAR SA MAJESTé L’IMPéRATRICE.
A charity, apparently, named in honor of her son, the Prince.
I walked to the door and then did not go in.
Instead, I walked back to the street, to where I’d turned the wrong way, and went to Aristafeo’s house.
The back wall was shared, it was clear.
She was never here, he’d said.
All of the ways I’d imagined the Empress kept him—in that secret dungeon below Compiègne, in some gilded cage, on a leash—I had not imagined anything like this, an office that she would visit regularly so as to look like a woman of good works and then to pass through the back wall into his house. Or he, through the wall to her.
Aristafeo hidden just under the surface of her life.
This house, it was an Empress’s théatre du désir. As clearly as if Odile herself had set it up for Eugénie.
I found Aristafeo in a remarkably good mood, at his piano. I showed him first the letter from the tenor and then the handkerchief.
He read the letter through and grimaced at the end.
Do you think he is having you watched?
Perhaps he was always having me watched, I said, as I walked to the back wall where it adjoined the building behind. It would not be a servant’s door, it seemed to me. Or would it? Perhaps it would be disguised as one. Or it would require some secret switch, some ordinary item, which, when moved, would unlatch it.
How to feel, then? I wondered. It seemed he had lied to me about her being there, this was clear; but the reason was not, not entirely, except I knew well you only lied to keep a secret if it mattered.
Was this why we could never leave? Was there some vigil she had required of him, or someone else had required for her, some invisible hand that kept him here, like my own? Or was the vigil all his own?
§
That night I woke from my sleep and left his bed. I went downstairs.
Along the back wall were his study, a butler’s kitchen, and a dusty, empty butler’s quarters. I traced out the butler’s room then the kitchen to no avail. His study seemed likely to be also possibly protected in some way; he had by no means confided in me despite our time together.
It was a handsome study, fit for a gentleman, I thought with some pride.
After some reluctance, I lifted books from shelves, picked up lamps and candelabra. I was as quiet as I could be.
I stood at last before the musket and the sword in the middle of the wall. I had never seen him take either down or clean them, not once in the time I’d been there.
I reached out and lifted the musket up.
The mechanisms of the door opened smoothly with almost no noise at all. So quiet, in fact, the loudest noise was my gasp.
Her scent, which I remembered, was still in these rooms. The door opened into a windowless suite with a bedchamber, a salle de bain, and a sitting room. In the bedroom was a handsomely appointed bed done in her red and gold, gold candlesticks, an armoire, no doubt where she could hang her dress. On opening it, I saw one of her dressing gowns. I wondered how many times I had sent a dress up for her before she had come here to visit her charity for the afternoon.
I saw him undressing her, dressing her again, and remembered how well he undressed me; he had practice. As many times as I had tied her corset, his hands had often undone my work.
I sat down on the bed.
The rubies and diamonds in the two bracelets on the side table glowed softly in the light of my taper. They lay one on top of the other. Two of the stones in the one had been pried out. I remembered them from Compiègne when they were whole. They were gifts from the Princess Metternich. The Empress had often held her arm out, admiring them before setting off to dinner.
They looked to be a last gift, the Empress no doubt guessing she was unlikely to see the Princess again. And unhappy, perhaps, to have gifts from her German friends, no matter how beloved.
Did he still come here, take down her dressing gown, and press it against his face? He had not washed it. The room was unchanged since her last visit, it seemed, except for the stones he’d removed from the bracelet to sell. I had grown so accustomed to the myth that I was the one who’d stolen him away from the Empress, it had not occurred to me it might not be true.