Free Far Flies the Eagle by Evelyn Anthony Page A

with her head cradled in his arm, and in the darkness he smiled and kissed her gently.
    Unlike Elizabeth, Marie had borne him children. She could have given him the heir he would never conceive with his wife, but the happiness they shared could never be regularized by marriage. He knew it and so did she; no Czar had officially married a commoner since Peter the Great, and whether Alexander loved or hated her, Elizabeth Alexeivena was a Princess of the Royal house of Baden.
    He knew this to be the reason why Marie, usually so carefree and good-natured, treated the Empress with open rudeness, and always informed her in person when she was pregnant by the Czar; jealousy made her cruel, and like all women in love, whose way is barred by a rival, she was very cruel. Everyone was cruel to Elizabeth. He remembered the murder of the cornet Okhotnikov, and the horror of Constantine sitting at the Imperial table getting drunk that night and grinning like a demon. But she had courage, he admitted, and she was loyal. Nothing could or ever would induce her to intrigue against him, and he knew it. ‘If you could ever find it in your heart to forgive me, I might find happiness again,’ she had said at the end of their interview before he went to Erfurt, and he thought for a moment that it was an odd remark for her to make … and then forgot both the words and the woman as he always did. Marie stirred beside him and murmured something, but she didn’t wake. He moved his arm away from her shoulders and raised it behind his head, knowing that sleep was far away for him. In the silence he began to think of Erfurt and Napoleon.
    Spain was bleeding him, Austria meant to attack him, but Napoleon was still too strong, far too strong to challenge openly. He would wait as he had had to wait after Tilsit, wait and see what the outcome would be between France and Austria, and hurry the reorganization of his own armies, for this time there would be no margin for mistakes.
    He pulled back a corner of the hangings and saw that the room was growing light. He turned slowly and looked down at Marie Naryshkin; she lay in the shadow of her own hair. He let the curtain fall and lay back in the darkness, listening to the twittering of the birds nesting in the trees outside, until a movement told him that Marie was awake beside him, and he leant over and took her in his arms.
    In Spain an army of a quarter of a million men, led by Napoleon himself, were fighting the raw Spanish troops who numbered only 90,000. They fought savagely, driving the rebels across the dusty plains and through the ruined towns and villages of Spain, leaving death and desolation behind them, penetrating the mountain districts, where they engaged in a final battle with the patriot forces at the pass over the Somosierra mountain. From the heights, Spanish gunners poured down a hail of grapeshot on the mass of struggling troops; dust, gunsmoke, the screams of the wounded and the pounding of cannon had transformed the peaceful mountain slopes into an inferno of noise; officers were yelling themselves hoarse above the bedlam, urging the French troops forward over the bodies of their comrades, into the blast of the Spanish gunfire.
    Napoleon watched from the fringe of the battle, a tiny figure on his white horse, unshaven and covered in dust. Forgotten was the borrowed dignity of kingship; the Emperor had once again become the General, with the roar of the fighting in his ears and the sharp cordite smell drifting on the hot air, the smell of Marengo, of Austerlitz, Jena, the smell of cannon, of victory and death. He stared upwards at the mountain slopes where the batteries were belching down shot on to his army, shielding his eyes from the sun. He remained rigid for a few moments, till some of the Spanish irregulars on the slopes pointed him out and began aiming at him. Bullets whined and ploughed into the ground a few yards away, and his aide-de-camp called to him