"You should divorce her, brother." Pauline's voice came faintly through the tightly shut door. "While you were away, she certainly didn't sit idle. First the governor, then her dance instructor—the officer you threw out of the army before. He's a military supplier now. She arranged all of it."
"That young man isn't even much older than Eugene," a man's voice said. "They appear together openly, as if you were already dead."
Eugene sat in the room with his hands over his ears, as though that could block out the voices from next door.
Rustam, the Mamluk Napoleon had recently taken in, stood silently with the sword Napoleon had given him in his arms. He was a very handsome young man, with blue eyes as deep blue as the sea. It was already difficult to see any trace of Eastern blood in him.
Then Eugene began to cry, as if the pressure in his heart had finally become too much and he had broken down.
That pressure did not come from the desert or the lack of water, nor from enemies who might appear at any moment.
It was merely gossip, nothing more—and besides, what they were saying was not baseless rumor.
That boy, barely seventeen and not yet eighteen, was bearing things no one his age should have had to bear.
"Don't let them defeat you," Rustam told Eugene in halting French. "Don't forget who shares your flesh and blood."
"Shut up!" Eugene screamed at him uncontrollably. "Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!"
"Do you want me to shut up, or do you want everyone else to shut up?" Rustam said.
"Wonderful." Eugene laughed. "I don't even have the right to make a slave shut up."
Rustam drew the Mamluk sword and tossed it before Eugene. It landed on the