A heavenly citrus scent wafted across on the gentle breeze. Napoleon’s nostrils twitched, and he knew it was the smell of victory.
“How far can that thing reach?” he said quietly.
“Effectively? A kilometre. And,” Lavoisier said, slowly and slyly, “just think the effect it will have on the powder magazines of the English, that new and highly volatile gunpowder that I showed the English how to make.”
Napoleon turned to Lavoisier and, without saying a word, kissed him on either cheek.
“There is one note of caution. This device requires a clear sight of the sun. No sun, no beam of light. Understand?”
Surely even the Emperor would grasp that fact.
AUTHOR’S NOTE: It all came true, just as Napoleon had predicted. He sailed for France and arrived in Paris on 20 March, his son’s birthday, without firing a shot, just as he foretold. The night before, Louis XVIII panicked and fled the city. By June the Grande Armée was reborn, and engaged the British forces commanded by Wellington at Waterloo.
Everything was as the Emperor had declared it would be, with one exception.
It rained.
VIENNA, 1912
Mal Peet
I watch him beating carpets, and it breaks my heart. I stand at our thin window and look down into the courtyard and watch him beating Frau Metzner’s carpets and it just breaks my heart. He’s hung them on a rope he’s stretched between the back-entry gate and a hook set into the wall. He’s hitting them with an English cricket bat that he got from God knows where. Every whack brings forth a cloud of dust and he steps back out of it, coughing. He shouldn’t have to be doing it. He’s an artist. And he isn’t strong.
The two Metzner brats are watching Addie from the corner of the yard, giggling at him. Their stupid little dog yaps every time the bat bangs against the carpet. Their mother will pay Addie a measly fifty groschen for his morning’s work, and without saying anything he’ll go and buy bread and sausage and a paper twist of tea, even though he needs paints. He’s painting autumn landscapes now because he’s almost run out of green.
The living room is also Addie’s studio. He paints at the little table, on old door panels usually, canvas when we can afford it, propped against the wall. It’s bad for his back, working like that. And the light from the small window isn’t good enough. It suffocates his colours, he says. Suffocation is a word Addie uses a lot. It’s one of the bees in his bonnet. He has lots of bees in his bonnet. It’s a hive.
“This isn’t a living room,” he’ll cry. “It’s a dying room! It’s crushing me!”
It’s very small, it’s true. And it’s the kitchen as well. When there’s washing drying by the fire there’s hardly room to move. But it’s all we can afford.
“I need space,” he says. “Space! Room to breathe! To create!”
That’s why he paints landscapes, I think. Big open spaces he can go into. It’s terrible for him that he has to paint them so small.
I used to ask him to paint me. I liked the idea of posing for him, of his eyes fixed on me. He has wonderful eyes, Addie. I once told him that he could be a stage hypnotist, like Mesmer. He smiled at that, and said, “Well, if I don’t make it as an artist perhaps I’ll give it a go.” He did try to paint me, once. I wore my blue dress and sat in the chair holding a book. After a long time I said, “Can I see?” And instead he let out this terrible groan and slashed black paint all over the picture.
He’ll never marry me. I’d like to be the mother of his children, but I know I won’t.
Just when things were getting really desperate, Addie came home with money. Eleven whole schillings! And a bag containing a meat pie, potatoes and cabbage and five tubes of paint. Also a bottle of Riesling, which worried me a little because drink doesn’t agree with him. He was in a strange mood. Happy, because of the money and the paint, but also agitated. The work had come through his friend Werner the carter. Werner’s usual man had been taken sick, so he’d asked Addie to help him with a job. Which was clearing the house of a widow who had died, on Lindaustrasse. A Jewish lady.
I peeled the potatoes and chopped the cabbage while Addie sat on the chair and brooded. His silences have a darkness to them, so after a while I managed to get him talking about the job.
He said, “Werner had the keys to the house and when we went in I couldn’t believe my eyes. The hallway, the hallway, was bigger than this flat. The damned old Jewish bourgeoise had more room to park her umbrellas than we have to live in. Can you imagine that? Then there were two more floors and an attic and a cellar. She’d lived alone in all that space for more than fifteen years. The attic had windows that were full of light. Sucked in light. She’d kept a servant up there. I thought, I would die for such a space to paint in.”
I said, “Light the lamp, Addie.”
But he didn’t. He swigged some wine and pulled a face, swallowing it. The room grew darker.
He said, “All the quality stuff had already gone, of course. The furniture and everything. There were pale patches on the walls where paintings had been. I wondered if they’d been any good. Probably not. People like that, what do they know about art? Anyway, we filled the cart with what looked like dreck to me, but Werner was pleased enough. We drove it all to a dealer Werner does business with. Another Jew.”
Addie has a bit of a thing about Jews. A bee.
“The old rogue offered Werner thirty schillings for the lot. Werner laughed in his face. Then they argued the toss back and forth for what felt like an hour, the Yid waving his arms about and moaning that Werner was taking the food from his children’s mouths and so on. In the end he coughed up forty-two schillings like he was parting with a pound of his flesh. Werner gave me twenty, which was bloody decent of him, I thought.”
“He’s a good man,” I said.
Addie nodded. Then he stood up. “I’m going down to the baths,” he said. “I feel dirty.”
Addie has a thing about hygiene, too.
On Sundays, if the weather is good, Addie takes his paintings and his little postcard sketches to the Volksgarten. He hangs his paintings from the railings, like lots of other artists. He leaves the flat early, because there is always competition for the best places. Sometimes I go with him. I did today. Spring was turning into summer, and I knew that the flowers in the park would be opening to the sun and the trees would be dressed in fresh new shades of green. It would have been a perfect day if Addie had sold something.
There were so many people taking their afternoon stroll! And so many carriages that the boulevard was a rocking sea of horses’ heads. The whole length of the railings alongside the park was hung with pictures, like a mad carpet. That’s the trouble, of course. Addie’s thoughtful little paintings get lost among the lurid sunsets, the garish portraits, the sentimental pictures of dewy-eyed dogs and children in frilly frocks. He needs to paint on big canvases. Huge canvases. But he sits there on his little folding stool, too proud to ask for recognition. It breaks my heart.
A man walking alone stopped and peered at one of Addie’s pictures. One of my favourites. It’s a house perched on the edge of a precipice. It looks as though it might fall in, but somehow you know that it won’t, that it has the strength to cling on for ever. You see it in the distance, through the trunks of trees, as if you had made a long journey to reach it and feared that it might not be there. There is a light in one of the windows. The colours are mostly violet and ochre, because they were almost all that Addie had left when he painted it.