Two Empresses Read online

  Books by Brandy Purdy

  THE BOLEYN WIFE

  THE TUDOR THRONE

  THE QUEEN’S PLEASURE

  THE QUEEN’S RIVALS

  THE BOLEYN BRIDE

  THE RIPPER’S WIFE

  THE SECRETS OF LIZZIE BORDEN

  TWO EMPRESSES

  Published by Kensington Publishing Corporation

  TWO EMPRESSES

  BRANDY PURDY

  KENSINGTON BOOKS

  www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  Table of Contents

  Also by

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART 1 - ROSE

  CHAPTER 1

  CHAPTER 2

  CHAPTER 3

  CHAPTER 4

  CHAPTER 5

  CHAPTER 6

  CHAPTER 7

  CHAPTER 8

  CHAPTER 9

  CHAPTER 10

  CHAPTER 11

  CHAPTER 12

  CHAPTER 13

  PART 2 - AIMEE

  CHAPTER 14

  CHAPTER 15

  CHAPTER 16

  CHAPTER 17

  CHAPTER 18

  CHAPTER 19

  PART 3 - JOSEPHINE

  CHAPTER 20

  CHAPTER 21

  CHAPTER 22

  CHAPTER 23

  CHAPTER 24

  CHAPTER 25

  CHAPTER 26

  CHAPTER 27

  CHAPTER 28

  CHAPTER 29

  CHAPTER 30

  CHAPTER 31

  CHAPTER 32

  PART 4 - NAKSHIDIL

  CHAPTER 33

  CHAPTER 34

  CHAPTER 35

  CHAPTER 36

  CHAPTER 37

  CHAPTER 38

  CHAPTER 39

  CHAPTER 40

  EPILOGUE

  TWO EMPRESSES

  DISCUSSION QUESTIONS

  To the extent that the image or images on the cover of this book depict a person or persons, such person or persons are merely models, and are not intended to portray any character or characters featured in the book.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  KENSINGTON BOOKS are published by

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  119 West 40th Street

  New York, NY 10018

  Copyright © 2017 by Brandy Purdy

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the Publisher, excepting brief quotes used in reviews.

  Kensington and the K logo Reg. U.S. Pat. & TM Off.

  eISBN-13: 978-0-7582-8894-3

  eISBN-10: 7582-8894-8

  First Kensington Electronic Edition: February 2017

  ISBN: 978-0-7582-8893-6

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  This is a work of fiction based on the lives and legends of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine and her cousin Aimee Dubucq de Rivery. Creative liberties have been taken throughout with both characters and chronology.

  Fortune sides with him who dares.

  —Virgil

  It is more honorable to be raised to a throne than to be born to one. Fortune bestows the one, merit obtains the other.

  —Petrarch

  So freely wooed, so dearly bought,

  So soon a queen, so soon low brought,

  Hath not been seen, could not be thought.

  O! What is Fortune?

  As slippery as ice, as fleeting as snow,

  Like unto dice that a man doth throw,

  Until it arises he shall not know

  What shall be his fortune!

  They did her conduct to a tower of stone,

  Wherein she would wail and lament alone,

  And condemned be, for help there was none.

  Lo! Such was her fortune.

  —Sir Thomas Wyatt

  PROLOGUE

  1777

  The Island of Martinique

  The drums pulse like a hundred heartbeats, rhythmically, seductively, hypnotically. They lull the listener like a baby at its mother’s breast and cast a spell that few have it in their power to resist. There is no nay-saying them; they creep under the skin and sneak into the soul and take control, willing or no. They excite and ignite the passions. To some they even bring madness and thrashing, tongue-swallowing fits—a divine gift from the trickster gods who are known for possessing a strange sense of humor.

  Caressing, coaxing, at once indolent and lusty, the tempo of the heathen drums is urgent, yet gently urging, like a serpent’s hiss the rhythm whispers a slithery silken kiss against the open ear: Come! Come here! Come! Now! An imperial summons disguised as an invitation that cannot be ignored or defied. Only fools gamble with their souls. Even those who scoff at the voodoos—their all-powerful queen, the divine serpent they worship, spells, sacrifices, spirits, curses, and the walking-dead zombies—in the depths of their hearts still secretly fear them and shut their windows tight on the nights when the drums beat and the hellish flicker of bonfires peeps through the trees like glowing demon red eyes. That rhythmic enticement arouses and makes the flesh crawl at the same time; it issues a challenge to a sensuous, ominous dance, gliding between Heaven and Hell, a duel between excitement and dread.

  While a precious few sleep peacefully, undisturbed through the night, and many only suffer a mild annoyance or fits of nerves, for some there is no rest. For those, no pillow hugged, no matter how tight, over frightened, anxious ears can deafen the call when it speaks to the soul. Every islander knows the drums of the voodoos could rouse a deaf man; they have even been known to wake the dead, to make them rise and walk again. The voodoos have the power. Everyone knows . . . even those who don’t believe.

  The hot, heavy, sultry, sluggish air of Martinique always smells like sugar, but tonight something has set it on fire. It simmers and shimmers with a power that cannot be named, an intense, relentless thrumming passion that the Grands Blancs, the wealthy whites in their sprawling white plantation houses, tucked up tight in their four-poster beds, shrouded in mosquito netting like bridal veils, with the covers pulled up over their heads, can never understand.

  But the drums speak to some regardless of color, and tonight they are calling to a girl named Rose who is standing, breathless and exuberant, on the threshold of womanhood. The rhythm passes, like a ghost, though the glass panes of her bedroom window in the big white plantation house called Trois-Ilets, Three Islands. The drums find their way into the hot blood pulsing its own sensual rhythm through her veins and beating heart, snap her green-speckled amber eyes open wide, and pull the sleepy sweat-dampened head of heavy dark hair from her pillow. They compel her to turn and shake the flaxen-haired child slumbering peacefully beside her, as fair and beautiful as an angel in her white cotton nightgown, utterly untroubled by the thrumming hedonistic beats.

  “Aimee! Come! Get up! It’s time!”

  In this child’s head, groggy and befuddled by sleep, understanding slowly rises, like a fat bubble from the black bottom of a swamp, and Aimee’s little white feet are already padding reluctantly across the paving stones of the moonlit courtyard. Leafy ferns and palm fronds, mango, tamarind, frangipani, breadfruit and banana trees, big red, pink, and orange hibiscus flowers, and white lilies the size of dinner plates cast sinister shadows as Rose tugs her cousin insistently along. There is no need to ask why or where; Aimee already knows, because she knows Rose. They are going to seek the voodoo queen, the all-powerful
, all-knowing Euphemia David, to have their fortunes told.

  It is always like this with Rose; though she is the elder at fourteen, a ripening woman ready to do more than just contemplate marriage, Aimee’s innocent seven years trump her in common sense every time. Rose has never been able to spell practicality, let alone practice it. Sense, another word she cannot spell, falls by the wayside every time and has neither a hope nor a prayer of ever governing her life.

  Rose is all raw, naked impulse, running wild, defying all restraints, including corsets and shoes, forever rushing and, more often than not, falling, tumbling heart over head, right into the open and waiting arms of Disaster, the one lover who will never forsake her, at least not for long. Rose never stops to think, to consider the situation, to weigh the dangers, ponder the possibilities, the risks and liabilities, the potential profits and losses; she just hurls herself heedlessly ahead and leaves everything in the hands of Fate, in which she believes implicitly. She is forever the reckless, greedy diver who plunges in for pearls without first testing the waters, never thinking they might be too deep or even too shallow, or harbor sharks or stinging jellies.

  Desire is the ruling passion that takes precedence over peril every time. Even the precious pearl of her reputation loses its luster when desire beckons like the Devil and leads Rose to succumb to the ballroom blandishments of handsome plantation gallants and dashing officers from Fort Royal and let them lead her out into jasmine-scented moonlit gardens and surrender to their stirring kisses and hot caresses. She has even been caught, more times than her mother likes to count, swimming—with boys and, even worse, young men!—in the clear, warm turquoise waters that turn her muslin shift transparent and reveal quite plainly that she is no longer a child. When her mother complained of the indecency Rose rebelliously shucked off her shift the next time she went swimming by moonlight, brazenly revealing all to her swain. Telling Rose that she is old enough to know better or asking her to stop and consider what her future husband would think were he to hear of such escapades wastes words and accomplishes nothing; far easier to bridle and harness the wind than rein Rose in.

  Perhaps this is what comes of being born in a hurricane? Her despairing relatives always shake their heads and sigh over their rash, wild Rose, remembering the day the whole family and their house servants frantically fled to take shelter in the stone sugar mill with Rose’s mother already in the first pangs of labor. The child came into the world as the hurricane laid waste to the plantation house and everything for miles around. Not a stick was left standing. When it was safe to come out all that remained where the great white house had been was a dead pig lying in the middle of a crater of mud with a lady’s pink brocade high-heeled shoe perched daintily atop its head. It would take years to rebuild it all and some of the losses could never be recouped.

  Who else but Rose would dare venture out, unprotected, without a chaperone, past the midnight hour, barefoot, naked but for a thin white nightgown, with her hair streaming down her back like a horde of tangled black snakes, without pausing to at least put on some shoes or throw a shawl around her shoulders, and drag her little cousin out of a sound slumber to share her folly, with only the moon to light their way? Who else but Rose would dare to blindly brave the treacherous jungle and the manifold dangers lurking there—the poisonous scorpions, spiders, ants, toads, foot-long centipedes, bats that suck the blood of man or beast, and risk setting a bare foot down upon the lance-shaped head of that most venomous of vipers, the fer-de-lance, whose bite is certain death, or, if legends be true, encountering the wide-eyed walking dead, the damned and soulless zombies? Would any sensible soul dare venture out to beg a favor of the voodoo queen, on the night of one of their hellish rituals no less, where Euphemia David is presiding in maleficent majesty, with her lips perhaps even still wet with the warm blood of the sacrificial black cock or goat? No one but Rose.

  Aimee is too young to understand, Rose insists, stone deaf to every attempt at common sense. At fourteen, Rose’s future is very much upon her mind; it presses, pains, and throbs like sugar on a rotten tooth and gives her no rest. Who will her husband be? Will he be tall or short, dark or fair, rich of course, but will he treat her like dirt beneath his feet or worship her like a queen? Will she be ignored or adored?

  The drums have told her that tonight is the night and it will never come again. Euphemia David will rip the veil away and reveal all if Rose only dares ask her to. But it is now or never. If Rose stays home, safe in bed, she will have to bumble her way through the future led by blind and dumb luck with no guiding star to light the path. But Aimee cannot, or will not, understand, and Rose is too excited to stop, stand still for a moment, and even try to explain in any comprehensible fashion; her words come in sporadic, nonsensical bursts about the Queen, the night—this is the night!—her only chance, and the drums calling her, a summons from the Queen.

  Still, Aimee keeps trying to be the voice of reason; that is her way. Her doting parents always say this daughter who came to them many years after they had resigned themselves to barrenness was born with an old soul and a mind like a machete cutting through sugarcane.

  “Surely this is an errand better suited to the safer light of day?” Aimee insists, reminding Rose that the Queen is not at all capricious about telling fortunes or receiving visitors. The door of the bloodred cottage where Her Majesty sits in sinister splendor upon a throne made of grinning skulls and gleaming bleached bones, with her great snake draped about her shoulders like a living shawl, is open every day to those who can pay or proffer a worthwhile favor in return for the Queen’s aid. No one with money, or something useful to barter, is ever turned away from Euphemia David’s door. Some even come in the evening after their work is done or if they require the discretion of darkness and still they are welcomed, as long as they can pay, in one way or another. Rose and Aimee are planters’ daughters; they can pay. So why not wait until tomorrow? What good will the brilliant future the Queen is sure to foresee for Rose be if it is snatched away tonight by a fer-de-lance’s fangs?

  But Rose is deaf to reason; all she can hear is the drums calling her onward, drawing her deeper into the jungle. Rose’s mother is right; rather than a comely young man, smiling blithely, with his head in the clouds, striding blindly off the edge of a cliff, Rose’s likeness should adorn the tarot card for The Fool.

  Can blood freeze and burn at the same time? Can the heart gallop like a wild stallion at the same time as terror strikes it corpse cold still? The scene in the clearing provokes such questions but gives no answers.

  Huddling together and hiding amongst the bushes, fear making them forget the dangers that might be lurking there, the cousins feel like they are mere steps away from walking right into the heart of Hell and surrendering their souls the way one hands cloak and hat to a servant at the door.

  Gleaming black bodies, dark as ebony, and a few red as the fearsome ants that can strip a body down to bones in moments, yellow as bananas, or lightened by the white blood of their masters, like milk poured into coffee, they are gathered in the clearing, lit by a full moon and the flames of Hell. A hundred or more, slick with sweat, loins swathed in scarlet cloth, gold rings in their ears, and tiny tinkling bells tied around their ankles, they caper like demons, leaping, twirling, whirling, and writhing, silhouetted against the bonfires, emitting the most unholy shrieks, rhythmic chants, or gibbering like the mad in unknown tongues. The spirits, the loas, have taken control of their willing bodies; they are possessed, touched by the divine. Just for tonight, the slaves and poor, free blacks are the darlings of the gods; the powerless have the power. Hips sway and pelvises swivel and thrust to the rhythm of the drums and rattle of the gourds. Breasts swing unabashedly free. Bodies buck, jerk, and tremble, every inch aquiver. They put their bodies through the most grotesque contortions; heads roll and loll on their necks at seemingly impossible angles as though they are broken; joints seem to slip their sockets; limbs jerk like puppets controlled by a satanic master. Some
fall to the ground, alone, in pairs and trios, in the throes of passion or fits; sometimes it is hard to tell which. They paw and claw and bite one another until the blood flows freely. Some rut and grunt like animals mating or tear at the earth and chew the grass like famished cattle. Some women squat or lie flat on their backs with their knees drawn up and go through motions mimicking childbirth. They are all together, yet alone, in their own little world.

  In a ring of fire, upon an altar made of bleached skulls and gleaming bones, the Queen of the Voodoos, Euphemia David, stands in regal, terrifying splendor. Taller than many men, she towers well above six feet; an ageless beauty, she is said to be 177 years old, the seventh daughter born of a seventh daughter born of a seventh daughter going back till mankind began. She wears a gown made of fifty Madras handkerchiefs of bloodred and turquoise, royal purple, emerald green, and banana yellow all stitched together with golden thread, each one a gift from a grateful customer whose life, love, fortune, family, property, health, or sanity the Queen saved. The points on her crimson tignon, the turban-like kerchief that hides her hair traditionally worn by all colored island women, angle up toward Heaven like red devil horns. Great golden hoops sway in the lobes of her ears, bangles clank on her wrists and ankles, and a necklace of gilded snake vertebras and fangs surrounds her throat. A pendant hangs between her breasts, a gilded skull the size of a man’s clenched fist. Some say it belonged to a monkey, a cherished pet given to her by a pirate king who was once her lover; others claim it was a small child whose soul she saved from the Devil at the cost of its life.