There came another long moment of silence. In the distance Rosalia could hear Doctor Lafleur’s voice, asking if the sacks of oats had been placed by the kitchen fire the way he had ordered. ‘They have to be ready whenever I send for them,’ he said. ‘Ready at any time, day or night.’
The strange contraption that looked like a wringer made of brass, she had explained to Doctor Lafleur only the other day, was the machine from Tula she had the presence of mind to bring from St Petersburg. She showed him where the charcoal was placed and how perfume was poured so that fumes scented the rooms the machine was whisked through. Attar of roses was the countess’s favourite.
Doctor Lafleur said the machine was most ingenious. His cheeks were flushed, for he had just taken a turn in the garden, as fast as he could. His gait had the awkwardness of a growing boy, the eagerness of hope tampered by restraint. Only in his case experience not innocence had caused it. ‘But the air is quite warm outside,’ he said. ‘The bedroom could be aired. Fresh air will clear the blood.’
‘You do agree with me, Mademoiselle,’ he added. ‘Doctor Bolecki tells me you are very fond of walking.’
He wasn’t looking at her when he said that, and she noted this with disappointment that made her ashamed of herself.
It must have been the rustle of her petticoats that woke the countess this time.
‘You are trying so hard to take care of me, Rosalia,’ she said. ‘What will you do when I am gone? What will you do when you have to look after yourself?’
Outside the closed door Rosalia could hear Frau Kohl scolding someone. A maid, for soon she heard a second voice, high-pitched, on the verge of tears. Something had not been done to her specification. A duty was neglected, a task was shoddily done. The maid hurried upstairs sobbing, and Frau Kohl gave a long sigh of exasperation.
Her new father-in-law calls Joseph a fool. General de Witt, the commander of Kamieniec, has been bled three times, to relieve his heart from too much pressure. For two days he has refused to leave his room, screaming at anyone who approaches him. He doesn’t eat, and drinks nothing but water.
On the third day she opens the door to his room. He is sitting with his back to the door, his eyes fixed on the fields, refusing to move.
‘Is there anything I can do?’ she asks quietly.
His eyes are a watery blue. They follow her as she comes closer and falls to her knees. ‘Joseph should have asked for his father’s consent,’ she says. ‘It’s all my fault. I shouldn’t have allowed him to take me to the altar without his father’s blessing. I’m so sorry, Sir, to have caused you so much pain.’
‘Dou-Dou. A daughter of a cattle trader and a whore.’
He points to the letter lying on his desk. A letter from Charles Boscamp warning him that a former
Greek paramour
of his might, against his express wishes, his attempts to send her back to Istanbul, appear in Kamieniec and make outlandish claims.
A harlot, a strumpet, and a liar
, he reads.
She tells her stories with such conviction that the wisest of men do not know where she has bypassed the truth
. This letter warns not to be taken in by her sweet words and the sighs of innocence.
‘My daughter-in-law,’ the General says, spitting on the ground. The blob of saliva is yellow and thick. Boscamp must be laughing now, telling the story to anyone in Warsaw who would listen. Anyone with half a brain. The swift ascent of his Greek whore. The story of these aristocratic connections Joseph repeats to anyone who would listen without laughing in his face.
She gasps and is just about to speak, but he stops her.
‘Save your breath, you wretched thing. I’m too old to be fooled.’
She stands up and looks at him. General de Witt bears little resemblance to her husband. The husband who insisted on hanging out the bloodied sheets after their wedding night, who boasts to his officers about the size of her breasts and the smoothness of her buttocks.
Her father-in-law’s eyes are piercing her skin as if he wants to penetrate the mystery of her body. The flow of her blood. Eyes of an eagle, she thinks. She lifts her head and looks right into them, without turning away. She has a business proposition, a fair deal that he, a man of the world, should appreciate.
What’s done cannot be undone. What good would it do to reveal Monsieur Boscamp’s warnings? Madame de Witt can be made the talk of the town, but will that really be what General de Witt desires? Wouldn’t it be better if she, given the position she now has, made sure that de Witts rose in the world? Made sure that the son would succeed the father, or even rise higher than that?
General Joseph de Witt.
Alone, her husband cannot do it. With her beside him, all is possible.
She will leave her father-in-law with this thought. Let him think and make his decision. She will retire to her room and await her fate.
Her silk dress rustles as she walks away; the heels of
her new shoes click on the marble floors. Behind her she leaves a trail of attar of roses.
In the afternoon, Joseph rushes upstairs to her boudoir. He places a kiss on her lips and laughs. A horsy laughter at the triumph he attributes entirely to himself. His blindness will never cease to amaze her. There is the smell of vodka on his breath, and she rolls her eyes.
His father has summoned them both. To his official study. They are forgiven.
They walk in hand in hand. They fall to their knees. Two children asking for a father’s blessing.
‘I don’t have any choice,’ the General says. ‘My son will have to drink the beer he has brewed for himself. Fools are not sown, they sprout by themselves. What has been broken cannot be made whole again.’
His daughter-in-law is now a Polish noblewoman.
‘Don’t bring shame to the de Witt name,’ he says.
She bows in front of him, making sure he gets a good glimpse of her bosom.
‘Your son’s future is my future,’ she says. ‘His prospects are my prospects.’
For a while she believes it too.
Doctor Ignacy Bolecki appeared just as she began her walk in the palace garden. The air was cold but clear. She had thrown a dark blue overcoat over her pale yellow dress and put on her walking shoes.
‘I was hoping you would take a morning walk. It’s what I would have prescribed,’ he said. ‘Do you mind if I join you? There is a delicate matter I wish to talk to you about.’
There was an air of suave ease about him, she thought,
the self-assurance of a man well-liked, and the smell of tobacco, slight but persistent. His clothes were impeccably ironed, his cheeks clean shaven. A shadow of sadness was hidden deep in the very shape of his wrinkles. Aunt Antonia would have liked both his promise of solidity and the sadness. A widower, she would have stressed, a widower with a grown-up child, but not too old to have children of his own. What better could she hope for?
She extended her hand to him and he kissed it, a fraction longer than it could have been. A sign that there might be something more to this walk, in the expressions of concern over her health. The thought made her hurry her steps in the direction of the twin oaks. She slid her hands inside her fur muff. ‘How it becomes you,’ the countess said when she gave it to her for the St Petersburg winter.
‘Madame la Comtesse,’ Dr Bolecki said, lifting his top hat, ‘thinks very highly of you.’
‘The countess is very kind,’ she said.
It pleased her to notice Dr Bolecki had to strain to follow her.
Dr Bolecki apologised for the French doctor’s abruptness, for what amounted to the sentence of death. His friend was an excellent surgeon and a remarkable man, but he shouldn’t have left the countess without hope.
‘Sometimes he is so hard to fathom, Mademoiselle Rosalia. Maybe because he is French.’
‘Madame la Comtesse wanted to know the truth.’
Doctor Bolecki hesitated, as if reflecting on her words. His steel-grey eyes kept grazing her as they walked. She tried to keep her own trained on the gravel path.
‘Perhaps. Perhaps this is why Doctor Lafleur is going to America, and I’m staying. I’m not modern enough. However, my illustrious friend must be given some credit. He says you are the best nurse he has ever observed.’
‘Doctor Lafleur is very kind, too,’ she said, ‘but I’m hardly a proper nurse. He must have noticed that too.’
‘He is a kind man, I agree, but what he says about you has nothing to do with kindness. He merely observes facts. He is a man of reason. He says you are endowed with a natural ability to heal. A rare talent but easy to spot when one sees it.’
‘I’m much obliged,’ she said. A thought began flickering in her mind, wild, improbable, but strangely satisfying. A silly thought she should have dismissed right away but could not. What if Doctor Bolecki were sounding out her feelings on his friend’s behalf?
‘Your cheeks are gaining colour, Mademoiselle. A brisk walk I always say, is the best prevention against disease.’
He now walked in step with her, talking incessantly. The countess had called her ‘the blooming flower of her sickroom,’ but flowers needed sun and fresh air. Mlle Rosalia shouldn’t forget to take care of her own health, to nourish her spirit so that she, in turn, could nourish the sick.
‘I find it hard to leave her.’
‘Such a sense of duty is your dear father’s legacy, Mademoiselle. Obvious to see for anyone who has ever met him.’
She watched his teeth flash as he spoke, front teeth overlapping slightly. He was glad, he said, that he could offer her the gift of this memory, however short.
In Paris, his step-father had many illustrious visitors, and Captain Romanowicz had been one of them. He remembered him very well, for Captain Romanowicz had been particularly kind to his daughter, Konstancja. One incident he remembered well. Captain Romanowicz told his daughter that if she took a big metal sphere and removed the air from it, not even sixteen pairs of horses tied to both ends would be able to break it apart. Such was the power of vacuum, he said. He even brought her
a sketch that showed the horses and the sphere. His own daughter, Rosalia, he said, was also fond of experiments.
‘So you see, I’ve even heard of you before,’ he said.
‘My father died in Santo Domingo.’
Rosalia did not mention that her mother never forgave Napoleon for sending the Polish Legion, so eager to fight the enemies of Poland, to Santo Domingo to suppress the slave uprising. To kill the very freedom, she said, they wanted so much for themselves. She never forgave the secrecy of these orders, the fact that, until they reached the Manzilla Bay, they did not know what their God of War had in store for them. Her bitterness had never diminished. ‘If your father knew where they were going,’ she kept saying, ‘he would have resigned. He would’ve stayed with us. He would still be alive.’
She never mentioned how close she felt to her mother in moments like that: joined by their loss no one else in the world could share in the same way, fused with pain.
‘Your father,’ Doctor Bolecki said, ‘sacrificed himself for the following generations. Paid the highest price for the common good. Mademoiselle, dear Mademoiselle Rosalia. Such is our Polish fate.’
She listened.
That they have found themselves together in Berlin, he continued, was not perhaps a mere coincidence. Everything in this world happened for a reason. All lives were interconnected, linked to one another in most mysterious ways. Yes, life was a chain of events echoing one off another, their significance hidden until something innocuous, a chance encounter perhaps, a flash of realisation, revealed it.
She listened.
It would be his greatest pleasure if he were allowed to call upon her more often. There was so much they had in common. Didn’t she agree?
‘Yes, of course,’ she said, blushing. ‘Only I find it hard to leave the countess.’
‘As I have said before, such a sense of duty is your dear father’s legacy, Mademoiselle.’
‘It is hard to compare his duties to mine,’ she said.
One more turn and they would be heading back toward the palace.
‘How do you like living in Berlin?’ she asked, quickly.
He liked it well enough. Not as much as living in Paris, but well enough. He was closer to Poland and he had an opportunity to watch, firsthand, how Prussia governed itself. Such knowledge would one day be invaluable if Poland were to throw off the yoke of slavery. To know your enemy was half of victory he believed. He also believed that one should take one’s lessons wherever one could. There were many others of the same mind, far less fortunate than he. She must have heard already of the recent reprisals that befell the Polish students in Berlin: the black list, the arrests, the expulsions from university. This poor fellow, Köhler, whose ill-fated notes from a clandestine meeting started the whole affair. Wasn’t that the most frightening example of Prussian nationalism?
‘I don’t know enough, I’m afraid, to judge for myself.’
‘Quite right. Quite right.’
Such a statement, he added, was one more sign of the superiority of her character. Remarkable and worthy of admiration, like everything else about her. There was a pleasant note of embarrassment in his voice, and she savoured it for a while. They were now approaching the palace gate.
‘Is that the delicate matter you wished to speak to me about, Doctor,’ she asked, aware of the playful note in her voice.
‘No,’ he stammered. ‘No … Not at all.’ What he wanted to tell her was far more mundane. Frau Kohl and
Graf von Haefen’s butler noticed strange goings on in the kitchen. A very delicate situation. The Russian servants were taking liberties. The pantry was being raided, as if a troop of Cossacks went through it each night. Seven pots of jam disappeared two days ago, yesterday a whole quail pie vanished without a trace.
‘And the cellar,’ he added. ‘The whisky is missing, too. At least three bottles.’
She wondered why Frau Kohl did not speak to her directly.
‘Perhaps, Mademoiselle Rosalia, all you have to do is to make inquiries. Let the Russian cook know that nothing is overlooked. Frau Kohl said that Countess Olga was still too young and too inexperienced to manage the servants.’