Alexander Chee - The Queen of the Night

A draft blew faintly, shaking the taper’s flame and reminding me the door was still open.

I followed the breeze, found my way to the far wall, the way to open it easy to see — a simple bar and latch. I stepped into what could only have been the Empress’s office, decorated much as her other rooms had been and then undone by a storm. A massive directoire desk sat near another for a secretary, but all their drawers were thrown about the room, the contents strewn, and the chairs kicked over. The place had been ransacked. Several empty bottles sat on the desk.

I went back through that secret door and dressed quickly, slid the little pouches with my jewels back into their hiding places on my body. He slept through this all, deeply; his thick snore told me he would not know I was gone for hours.

I passed through the secret door one more time. As I did, I left the ruby rose by the Empress’s bracelets and then was gone.

That, then, was the room I speak of. And there that cursed flower would sit until so many years later when it would somehow leave this room and return for me.

A LONG DREAM HAD closed its doors to me.

I walked away into the dark, into the street, the buildings huddled close like kindling, rattling emptily in the winter wind.

He seemed nothing more than a story I had told myself, a way to stay alive as I passed the days in Baden-Baden.

And it had led me astray.

As I walked through the deserted Marais, his ring at my neck grew cold in the wind and reproached me.

I could not return to his bed and I could not stay.

If I could save myself, I might forgive myself, but only then.

Never love came Cora Pearl’s warning, floating back to me on the air and her mocking eyes in the mirror reappearing before me, enormous in the night. Her advice that night had seemed to me that of a cruel fool; her wanting to keep a distance from any of her admirers so she could dispose of them or add them as she saw fit. But I had misunderstood her. You kept yourself from love so you could always leave, yes; you did this so you would never stay a moment too long in harm’s way. They would never have your interests in mind. Most men would be more careful with a horse.

He was a prisoner to something I could not see, as I had just been, and I would die if I stayed, waiting for him to free himself. My asking him to leave for London was as impossible for him as it would have been if he had appeared in Baden-Baden the year before and begged me to return with him to Paris.

I would have told him no, just as he had told me no to London. And so I at least forgave him that.

I still wanted to live, and to stay there was to wait for death. And to wait for death this way was to die in advance of death. If I could not have the dignity of my own life, I at least wanted to have it in death. And so I would not die in a house the Empress had bought for her lover, I would not die in the night for having led the tenor to that house, I would not die obeying the tenor’s ridiculous instructions. I would instead prefer to die trying to escape as I should have escaped. As the Commune was now in charge, I would go to them, and I could bribe or charm whatever guards or officials I found, I could make my way to the nearest boat.

I would try to get to London and use those francs the tenor had left me to leave an ad in the Times to pay my way.

I consoled myself with this new plan of mine until the sight of the ruins of the Tuileries came into view, and I understood I had walked here through the dark like an automata, a girl in a cuckoo clock, returning as if drawn along a wire beneath my feet.

The palace looked broken open, like something monstrous had hatched from inside it, scorched, pocked, and cratered, but still somehow very beautiful, graffiti scrawls coloring the walls like bruises.

An entrance had been shelled and fallen in, but the stairs beyond were still good and so I walked in, finding my way into what was once the Salon Vert. Mirrors there had been tossed to the floor and smashed, curtains burned and cut to pieces, the beautiful floors charred and the wood sticking up in places like broken black teeth. I walked through the glittering refuse and smelled smoke somewhere inside; the palace still burned.

I found the stairs to my old room remained intact. I climbed them carefully, my thoughts full of the Empress’s flight. I couldn’t imagine her running — had I even seen her run once? — the sisters and Pepa throwing clothes into cases, too serious to cry out until later. Pepa would have been the one to have with you when you needed to escape, perhaps that was always the secret of her, the reason the Empress kept her — she would know which guard to trust; she would have a cache of coins for bribes, horses, and supplies.

If I had stayed, I would have been expected to flee with the Empress past the crowds screaming for her death as the Tuileries became a pyre they hoped to burn her on. How surprised she would have been: no parley for the Emperor’s return and no thought of keeping her without him. Instead, her people had moved to expel her viciously, as if some honor of their own could be saved by destroying her.

And I had learned from Pepa. I had my own cache of coin, I recalled, as I pushed open the door to my room. The one I had kept safe, hoping to take with me, abandoned when I ran from Compiègne but still, I hoped, hidden in my bed post in a chamber I’d hollowed out with a knife.

I lit a match as I pushed open the door. My little stuffed otter friend greeted me, still at his post. The room seemed whole, as it once had been. No one thought to defile this. But as I went to the bed, a young man moved in sleep in my bed, using his coat as a blanket, his arms tucked carefully underneath, and still wearing his boots. It was all done so carefully, I first feared he might be dead, as if he were laid out here, until he started and sat up as I blew out my match.

I lived here, I said, when I served the Empress. This was my room. Who are you?

I am Eugène, he said, part of the Commune force here to protect the palace from further attacks on the property that should rightfully belong to us all. And who are you?

This question could still confound me. I could say anything; anything could begin as a result. But I surprised myself.

Lilliet, I said.

Saying the name was like catching something that had briefly fallen from a table. I could not give her up, not yet. Not when so much had been destroyed. There was something in this little lie of a life I had found that was real; I would keep it a little longer.

I have information I need to get to a Commune commander, I said, and am uncertain to whom I should speak.

You are in luck, he said. And he gestured to his chest. I present Eugène, Communard commander.

It made me smile, that the palace had once belonged to a Eugénie and now to a Eugène.

I told him about the tenor’s message to me, of the deal he said the government had struck with the Germans. And the dates and his plot to get me out of the city.

Do you trust this man? he asked.

No, I said. But I believe him… I believe this. I paused, for the next I’d never said aloud. He is a Prussian agent.

It is possible he has done this to save you. But not one of our balloons returns to us yet — they can only leave. And the Prussians took to shooting them down or chasing them to meet them as they land — this explains the signal you are to tie to the rope. He might also have done this knowing you would come to us and tell us something to get us to prepare for the wrong day. It could even be just to kill our spirit. And, given the record of survival for the balloons, to kill you. Or all could be as he says. We simply do not know.