hummingbird’s wings, trying to keep warm, and I was furious at risking the life of my wife to rescue a man already almost a corpse. “All for nothing,” I growled.
“But it wasn’t for nothing, Ethan,” she whispered while she shuddered.
“What do you mean?”
“I’d time to explain the emerald and the treasure to L’Ouverture, and I could see he understood what I was talking about. His eyes gleamed with hope. Just before you lifted me, he gave a clue.”
I saw the spray of snow from the rescuers who would spirit us toward Switzerland. The French, I guessed, were mustering their own cavalry to pursue. “What clue?” I chattered, shaking with cold.
Astiza looked as miserable as I’d ever seen her, but her eyes were bright. “To look for the emeralds in the diamond.”
Chapter 13
The heat of the Caribbean in June, the beginning of the sultry hurricane season, was like a heavy shroud of sweaty muslin. As the British frigate Hecate ghosted into English Harbor on the island of Antigua, sails limp, pitch on deck seams bubbling, tarred rigging hot as a throbbing vein, my wife and I studied what officers called the Graveyard of the Englishman. The sugar isles were colorful hell, they said, a muggy mystery of thick green scrub, iridescent turquoise water, truculent black slaves, and poisonous vapors. A soldier or sailor assigned there was far more likely to die of disease than from a French or Spanish bullet. Europeans went to the sugar isles for one reason and one reason only: to get rich. Then they rushed home before fevers took them, vermin bit, their own Negro maids poisoned them, or a rebel Maroon-an escaped slave-slit their throats.
“The rain comes down like an overturned bucket,” Captain Nathaniel Butler warned us, turning the serene harbor into an enclosing net of menace. “The air is alive with insects, and the ground with ants. The groundwater is bad, so you must doctor it with spirits, but in order to drink enough the planters are intoxicated from breakfast to bedtime, and drunkards all. Every English item costs three times what it does in London, and a tropical tempest can knock down a decade’s hard labor. Yet just one of these islands produces more wealth than all of Canada. An ambitious man can carve a plantation out of jungle and double his money every year. Sugar, Gage, is white gold. And men die for gold.”
“I daresay this is a good hurricane hole,” I ventured. English Harbor was surrounded by steep, verdant hills, and the serpentine bay wound back into the island like a rabbit’s burrow. A hundred black cannon poked out from various batteries to deter attack. This was the most closely defended graveyard I’d ever seen. “Perhaps a dip in the sea would make it bearable.”
“Most unwise,” said the ship’s surgeon, Thomas Janey, whose bloodletting had hurried two seamen to the burial shroud in our brief passage, a record that kept three more sailors sick at their posts lest Janey get his hands on them. “I know eccentrics like Nelson bathe in buckets of seawater, but all physicians know that too much washing is a sure invitation to consumption, or worse.”
“Bonaparte bathes every day.”
“Then he is a dead man. I will tell the secret of health in the tropics, Mr. Gage. Keep bathing to a minimum. Wear stout shoes against insect bites. Do not open your windows to poisonous night airs. Fortify your constitution with strong spirits and, if feeling ill, have a physician bleed you profusely. It’s little more than common sense. Our race is healthier in England than here, so it stands to reason that to the degree possible, we must dress, eat, and treat our sicknesses like Englishmen.”
“But dark-skinned people seem to go around half-naked and feel better for it.” My clothes itched. I was sweating so much that Astiza kept her distance. All the Englishmen aboard were equally rank.
“Sin and savagery, sir. Sin and savagery.”
It’s hard to argue with an expert, but I was reminded of what Napoleon once told me: Doctors will have more lives to answer for in the next world than even we generals. Physicians are clever only in that they take credit for any cure and blame any death on the Almighty. Such odds making impresses a gambler like me.
“At least it’s beautiful,” murmured Astiza, surveying the bay.
“Beautiful? Madam, it is bright, I’ll grant you that, but remember it was the Garden that hid the serpent. What you see is the beauty of corruption. No sane white man comes here by choice, except to make his fortune. It is an isle of necessity, as hideous as Jamaica or Martinique.”
“Orange flowers.” She pointed to trees that spotted the hillside with blossoms. “A sign that I’m getting closer to my son.”
O ur transition from a frozen lakeside in the French Alps to the sultry airs of Antigua had been dizzying. Our calamitous but pioneering flight suggested that Leon Martel’s babbling about flying machines was not complete nonsense, and aeronaut Cayley was anxious to get back to his English workshop to perfect his designs. We galloped as planned with the spy Frotte to the Swiss cantons of the Helvetic Republic, the spy having purchased our border crossing in advance with English gold. It was odd how slow our escape seemed after flying. How convenient it would be if these dreams really worked, and you could cross the ocean above the pitching sea!
Then north to the German states and the Rhine. Our escape was helped by political preoccupation with the Reichsdeputationshauptschluss, or Napoleon’s ambitious reorganization of hundreds of Germanic duchies and kingdoms that bordered France. Some three hundred German states were reduced to thirty, disenfranchised petty princes compensated by having their private fortunes enhanced by lands seized from the Church. The compression was instigated by Bonaparte’s foreign minister Talleyrand and forced on the reluctant Austrian emperor Francis II as tribute for recent French military victories. It cemented French dominance of the continent and began to draw to a close the thousand-year history of the Holy Roman Empire.
The pope grumbled, but Napoleon had more cannon.
The winners in this reshuffling in theory passed into the French sphere of influence, securing his frontier with new allies. Yet I wondered if the political unification of the industrious Germans was the wisest course for France or Europe. As princelings they were robber barons charging tariffs for passage on the Rhine; as French satellites they were mercenary generals muttering about German nationhood. Princes who are elevated become ambitious, inevitably resenting the master who did the elevating because he didn’t promote enough. I wondered if these states would someday turn on Napoleon.
That was in the future. For the present, we fugitives fled down the river from Basel without undue interference because customs and tolling stations were in chaos from political change. We slid along the broad current under sail, sweeps, and rudder, admiring old castles that clung to gorge walls in picturesque ruin. At the Batavian Republic we took ship with the Dutch across the Channel and arrived in London in early May, just two weeks before the Peace of Amiens ended and war resumed between Britain and France.
London was a city of a million people, larger than Paris and even muddier and more chaotic. Here England’s naval power was apparent. The masts on the Thames formed a forest thick as Sherwood. Lighters crawled between larger vessels like water bugs, casks rolled on quays with constant thunder, and press gangs swept up sailors for His Majesty’s navy with the brutal efficiency of slavers. The crush of street traffic made it impossible to get anywhere, banks were grander than churches, and the extremes of wealth and poverty were more grotesque than in revolutionary France. Winding alleys were jammed with beggars, thieves, whores, and drunkards. My instinct was to hunt for a card game and brothel, but then remembered I was married and long since reformed.
London was also glorious, its steeples and domes catching the spring sun now that wind had blown away the worst of the winter’s coal and wood smoke. If the rims of carriage wheels were brown with shit and splatter, the hubs shone under the constant polishing of legions of footmen. If gutters were full of trash, windows gleamed like diamonds after polishing by indentured Irish girls. If the piers stank of tide, fish, and sewage, theaters and hotels were scented with perfume, flowers, and tobacco. The counting houses were a babble of languages, and there was money from the markets of empire, colonies counted like chips in a game. Britain could wage war forever.
Napoleon, I thought, should have kept the peace.
We met Sir Sidney Smith at Somerset House, the new government ministry built on the shore of the Thames. Its grandeur was a symbolic choice, a union between water and land, and the building was so intimate with the tide that arches gave entry to boats beneath its stone promenade. You could walk to its chambers or row to them; we walked from the rooming house we’d taken after being rowed ashore from our Dutch ship.
