we were alone together. “Your wife is intelligent, yes, but wholly unpresentable.”
“That’s as silly as it is ungrateful. Napoleon and I captured Astiza to be a translator, and she helped get me inside the Great Pyramid. Good swimmer, too.”
“It may be too late for annulment, but certainly you should explore divorce. The revolutionaries have made changing wives as easy as changing shoes.” The cheapening of marriage was another royalist lament, although they took advantage of the laxity as quickly as anyone. Since the revolution, a couple living together was as likely to be unmarried as wed, and few brides came to the altar as virgins. Census takers estimated that up to a third of the children in Paris were illegitimate.
“On the contrary, Comtesse, I’m desperately in love with my wife. You may recall I came to avenge her.”
“That was for honor. I’m talking about standing. Your faithfulness is entirely out of step with the times.”
Certainly the era was licentious. A former priest named Banjoir had organized saturnalias under the guise of his newly invented religion. Audiences wore masks to watch naked actors in the play Messalina. Police confiscated pornography from the Barabbas Bookshop to share with their own dinner guests. Even with a swelling police force, Paris still had ten thousand prostitutes. It also claimed six thousand writers, the consensus being that the scribblers were considerably less useful than the trollops.
“Bonaparte is trying to reestablish propriety.”
“Bah. He fornicates like a sultan. And love has nothing to do with marriage. A wedding is a contract of rights, property, and reproduction. Sleep with whomever you want, but marriage requires a strategy as careful as a military campaign or the seeking of court favor. It’s true you had limited prospects, but an Egyptian serving girl? My poor American, I shudder at the advice you were given.”
“I didn’t have advice at all. She’s gorgeous.” Why did the comtesse obsess about my marriage? Ladies do find my company irresistible (given enough time, and convincing) but I was not about to swap wives. Catherine seemed to be prying us apart when we should all be pulling together. But then the female heart could stampede heedlessly, I’d learned from the romance novels, so maybe the girl simply couldn’t help herself.
“Beauty can be rented,” Catherine said.
“And she’s wise,” I defended doggedly. “Astiza knows more than any royalist I’ve ever met.”
Catherine was oblivious to my comparison. “Hire expertise. Blood, you must marry.”
“You’re living on our charity while insulting my wife?”
“I’m helping you face the truth. She is wise, since she married a handsome rogue who also claims to be an electrician, a Franklin man, an explorer, and a soldier. You’re common, but a commoner of an interesting sort. It’s only your judgment that is faulty. A proper comte would make Astiza a courtesan, deny paternity of any offspring, and cast her off before she begins sagging. I entirely understand her determination to follow her husband to France; it’s unlikely she’ll do better. But you need to marry breeding if you’re ever to rise.”
“Which you could supply,” I said dryly.
“Certainly not.” The comtesse sniffed. “It would be as foolish for me to marry down as it was unwise for you not to marry up. Only in an exigency do we cooperate in this hovel. We’re pretending to be democrats until natural order is restored. You cannot aspire to me, but you need a powerful father-in-law. I’m saying all of this to be helpful.”
“It’s you who doesn’t understand marriage,” I countered, truly annoyed now. “It didn’t matter that Astiza had no property, and I no title. Have you ever looked at the half moon and seen the dark wedge that blocks out the stars and completes the sphere?”
“We’re talking astronomy now?”
“That was me before my wife. Astiza came in and began to lighten my dark half, day by growing day, as I came to love her, until the moon was full—representing not one of us, mind, but both of us combined. I fear that’s a completion you’ve yet to understand.”
A shadow passed then; she looked stricken for just an instant at my jab, and even vengeful. There was some wound on her that I didn’t know. Then she gave a short laugh, forced gaiety. “And you’ve yet to understand how big your moon could be with the right person. Or listen to realism.”
The odd thing was that Catherine could be as charming as she was maddening. She actually warmed to her governess role, playing with Harry when we went on errands.