The edifice reflected the growth of the British bureaucracy under the pressure of war and empire, both in ambition and its half finish. Recent combat had robbed the taxes needed to complete this architectural elephant. Smith, however, had secured for our meeting a recently finished room overlooking the Thames, still smelling of paint and lacquer, warmed by a low coal fire, and lit by spring sunlight that played peekaboo through clouds to the south. Cradled in one corner was a globe a meter in diameter to keep track of world domination. There were crossed claymore swords, tea sets from China, otter pelts from the Northwest Coast, and wooden war clubs from Pacific isles. We entered exhausted from escape and travel and at the same time impatient to set out after our son.
“Ethan Gage! At last we are allies again!” The newly appointed lord had the smile of a Cairo rug salesman. “And the lovely Astiza is your bride? Who said endings can’t be happy? You look radiant, my dear.”
Well, that was friendlier than Napoleon. Smith and I had been doughty comrades in arms at the siege of Acre, and he remembered my wife’s courage.
“I’m flushed with worry over the fate of my son,” she coolly replied. “My husband attracts the worst kind of people.” It was clear from her tone that she wasn’t exempting Smith from this assessment. Frankly, our lives had been at a boil since meeting him in Palestine, and while we needed British help, she feared Sir Sidney would only add to the heat.
“And if we were truly at a happy end I’d be a retired country gentleman in America,” I added grumpily. “I’ve had quite enough adventuring and planned to settle down, Sir Sidney, but it never seems to happen.”
“But that’s because of Napoleon and Leon Martel, no?” Smith was never one to be rattled by discontent. “I’m trying to save you from them.” He was still fit and handsome, the kind of swashbuckling adventurer who’d built the British empire. Books about his exploits have made women swoon and men jealous, and now he could call himself a lord. I can’t say I envied his having to sit through debates in Parliament, but I did think, my emerald gone, that too many of the men I meet seem to do better than me. In a better mood I might have asked for friendly advice, but instead I wanted to puncture his good cheer.
“Fort de Joux was a fiasco,” I said.
“I’d say your escape was a credit to British pluck and engineering, thanks to the genius of George Cayley and Joseph Priestly. And you never give yourself enough credit for your own success, Ethan. It’s not every father who would leap off a castle for his son.” The man chugged ahead like a machine. “That scoundrel Martel is a skunk of a schemer, but you’re with the right side now. And you were saved, by my own Charles Frotte. It should be in the papers, but for the moment we need secrecy.”
“Saved to play a role in English intrigue and skullduggery?”
“Skullduggery!” He laughed. “Ethan, I am in Parliament! We statesmen are not even supposed to have knowledge of that word. No, no, not skullduggery. Alliance against the worst Bonapartist tyranny and intimidation. The man has not kept a single precept of the Treaty of Amiens.”
“Nor has England.” Thanks to my role as go-between, I got to hear the same complaints from both sides. Being a statesman can be as tiresome as refereeing quarreling children.
“Napoleon has betrayed every revolutionary ideal, set himself up as military dictator, aspires to dominate Germany and Italy, and plots invasion against your own nation’s Mother Country. He’s attempting to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue against every precept of his own nation’s declaration of rights, and steal an ancient treasure he has no rights to that could leave us defenseless. No one should see through his hypocrisy better than you. Ours is a noble league, you and I. A league against brutal Caesar, just as at Acre! We’re a bulwark against tyranny.”
I first met Smith when he helped defend the Ottoman city of Acre against Napoleon in 1799. The English captain was handsome, dashing, energetic, brave, ambitious, vain, and more intelligent than almost any officer he encountered, which meant he was thoroughly detested by most of his naval peers. His knighthood had come from service to the king of Sweden, and his escape from a Parisian prison, with the aid of women he’d wooed, had all the elements to make him celebrated. Bonaparte had railed at his success. The English, meanwhile, were never quite certain if he was a genius or merely odd, and so stuck him in Parliament, where he’d be at home in either event.
“I’ve taken up with Napoleon in a way,” I confessed. “As an American I’m not really sure which side I’m supposed to be on.”
“Expediency, Ethan, expediency. Yes, I’ve heard of your work on negotiations over Louisiana. You’re clever as a fox, but then so is Frotte here, who somehow draws payments from half a dozen governments at once. You’re both rascals but useful rascals, and now your interests are aligned with mine. Is that not so, Astiza?”
“Only because the French have kidnapped my young son,” she said. Women have a formidable single- mindedness when it comes to children.
“And the English are going to help you get him back.” Smith beamed.
She was skeptical, but I was of the mind we needed whatever help we could get. “See here, Sir Sidney, I agree that ours is an alliance of convenience,” I said. “I was simply trying to sell a jewel when a renegade secret policeman stole it, kidnapped my son, Horus, and demanded secrets I don’t have. We’ve no idea where Martel is, or what to tell him if we find him. Nor am I entirely clear what he really wants.”
“He wants to conquer England. Have some tea, please, and I’ll tell you more of what I know.”
We sat around a side table as the service was set, oil paintings of stern-looking dead Englishmen looking down on us as if in judgment from a secular Sistine Chapel. Life for the upper class is constantly trying to live up to the standards of ancestors who never seemed to have had a good time. Out the windows, the Thames through the wavy glass was a parade of watery commerce, sails slipping by like bird wings.
“First of all, Leon Martel is a scoundrel,” Smith began. “He was an underworld boss of some sort-the rumor is he turned country girls to prostitution and orphan boys to pickpockets-when he decided to join Bonaparte’s new secret police rather than risk being caught by them. His allegiance is to himself, and he reportedly had hopes he could succeed Fouche someday as police minister, either through promotion or betrayal. Instead, he’s now found himself out of the police and suspect to his fellow criminals as turncoat and informer, so he’s extorting people like you and shopkeepers like the jeweler Nitot. He’s made a close study of torture and uses it on people who cross him. He’s also a coward; he was drafted into the early French Revolutionary armies and deserted.”
“A man who makes anyone else look good,” I summarized, glancing at my wife. Those of us with flaws are encouraged by such comparisons.
“As the two of you know as well as anyone,” Smith went on, “England is a nation with a powerful navy. By the end of this year we’ll have seventy-five ships of the line and hundreds of frigates, while France has but forty- seven battleships. We hear nineteen are being built, and we must always fear alliance between Bonaparte and Spain. Still, our confidence in our navy is high.”
Indeed. The English seemed to win almost every sea fight they picked.
“However, we have a relatively weak army. We believe our soldiers are the finest in the world, but they are relatively few and spread over a large empire. If Bonaparte can get a hundred and fifty thousand men across the Channel, which our spies tell us he intends, London will fall. There will be an eternal reign of terror.”
I was of a mind that London cuisine could benefit from a French invasion, and that a glass of wine in late afternoon was preferable to a pot of tea, but I kept such subversion to myself. The English would die like lions to defend boiled mutton and dark beer.
“That means the English Channel is key,” Smith went on. “If Napoleon can control it, even for a fortnight, he could land an army and conquer our kingdom. He might achieve passage with a decisive naval victory, but we believe that unlikely. He might lure our ships away, but I hope Nelson is too clever for that. Then there’s the chance of strange new machines of war-yes, I’ve heard of Fulton and his plunging boat, or submarine-but it takes time to perfect new inventions. Or Bonaparte could take to the air.”
“Ethan and I have been in a balloon,” Astiza said.
“You never quite got all the way in the balloon,” I amended. I still had nightmares of her fall.
“I remember,” Smith said. His ship had rescued me when I crashed in the Mediterranean. “But balloons can be shot down, and are slow and victim to the vagaries of the wind. Cayley’s glider only descends. What if such a craft could go up as well as down, and travel exactly where you pointed it? What if men could fly like hawks, wheeling and plunging and sending down bombs from heaven?”
“A ghastly idea,” I said. “Unfair, to boot. Thank God no one’s close to doing it. I tried Cayley’s contraption, and I can assure you, Sir Sidney, if you can get Napoleon into something like that, your war is all but won. He’ll plunge like a shotgunned sparrow.” And yet Mexico’s Aztecs had apparently made a golden replica of just such a
