child’s father had insisted upon naming the new infant Neapolus after an obscure Egyptian martyr instead of Carlo-Maria, as Letizia herself would have preferred, Letizia had made sure to christen all her daughters with the prenom of Maria: Maria Anna, who would later be known as Elisa, the Grand Duchess of Tuscany; Maria Paula, called Pauline, the Princess Borghese; and Maria Annunziata, later called Caroline, Queen of Naples. And they called her Madame Mère – Our Lady Mother.
The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.
Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered,dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.
But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.
For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.
Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.
It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.
For if this man whom they called the Falcon had indeed arisen as if from the dead, Letizia knew precisely what she herself would be called upon to do.
Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:
The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.
Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara
Autumn Equinox, 1822
We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.
– Lord Byron, Manfred
Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.
This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.
This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s watar, or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his
The Queen of Heaven had indeed blessed all the girls with health and beauty, while their brother, later known as Napoleon, had given them wealth and power. But none of it was to last. These gifts had all dissipated, just like those roiling mists she still could recall surrounding her native isle of Corsica.
Now, as Madame Mère moved through the flower-filled, candlelit rooms of her vast Roman palazzo, she knew that this world would not last either. Madame Mère knew, with a palpitating heart, that this tribute to the Virgin today might prove to be her last in a very long time. Here she was, an old woman left nearly alone, her family all dead or scattered,dressed in perpetual mourning attire and living in an environment so alien to her, surrounded only by transitory things: wealth, possessions, memories.
But one of those memories may have suddenly come back to haunt her.
For only this morning Letizia had received a message, a hand-delivered note from someone whom she had neither seen nor heard from in all these many years, throughout the rise and fall of the Bonaparte Empire – not since Letizia and her family had departed the wild mountains of Corsica nearly thirty years ago. It was from someone whom Letizia had come to believe, by now, must be dead.
Letizia slipped the note from the bodice of her black mourning dress and read it again – perhaps for the twentieth time since she’d received it this morning. It was not signed, but there could be no mistaking who had written it. It was written in the ancient Tifinagh script, the Tamasheq tongue of the Tuareg Berbers of the deep Sahara. This language had always been a secret code used by only one person in communiqués with her mother’s family.
It was for this reason that Madame Mère had sent urgently for her brother the cardinal to arrive here at once before the other guests. And to bring the Englishwoman along with him – that other Maria who’d just recently returned to Rome. Only these two might be able to help Letizia in her dreadful plight.
For if this man whom they called the Falcon had indeed arisen as if from the dead, Letizia knew precisely what she herself would be called upon to do.
Despite the warmth of the many fires in her chambers, Letizia felt that all too familiar chill from the depths of her own past as she read the fateful lines once more:
The Firebird has arisen. The Eight return.
Tassili n’Agger, The Sahara
Autumn Equinox, 1822
We are immortal, and do not forget, We are eternal, and to us the past Is, as the future, present.
– Lord Byron, Manfred
Charlot stood on the high mesa, surveying the vast red desert. His white burnoose flapped about him in the breeze like the wings of a large bird. His long hair floated free, the color of the coppery sands that stretched before him. Nowhere on earth could one find a desert of this precise hue: the color of blood. The color of life.
This inhospitable spot, high on a cliff in the deepest Sahara, a place where only wild goats and eagles chose to live. It had not always been so. Behind him on the fabled cliffs of the Tassili were five thousand years of carvings and paintings – burnt sienna, ocher, raw umber, white – paintings that told the story of this desert and those who had peopled it in the mists of time, a story that was still unfolding.
This was his birthplace – what the Arabs called one’s watar, or homeland – though he had not been here since he was a babe in arms. Here was where his
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