The Dakota Cipher

ushered into the bathroom, the door clicking shut to hold the heat. There was such a fog of steam that I could barely see Napoleon, or anything else.

‘Gage, is that you? Come forward, man, don’t be shy. We’ve all been in camp.’

I groped forward. ‘You seem to like your bath hot, General.’

‘Four years ago I could barely afford my uniform. Now I can have all the water I want!’ He laughed, and splashed at a servant waiting with a towel in the murk, spattering the poor man with suds. ‘It wilts some of my correspondence, but most is mouldy in thought and soggy in prose anyway.’ As I came up to the tub I saw him in a convivial mood, dark hair plastered, grey eyes bright, the fine hands he was so vain of shuffling missives from across Europe. The brass basin had a relief of mermaids and dolphins.

‘You seem more relaxed than when we last met, when you seized power,’ I remarked. He’d been quite anxious to shoot me.

‘A pose, Gage, a pose. The Directory has left me at war with half of Europe! Italy, which I conquered just four years ago, is being taken back by the Austrians. In Germany, our troops have fallen back to the Rhine. In Egypt, General Desaix would have surrendered to Sidney Smith in January except an idiot English admiral wouldn’t accept the terms, giving our General Kleber the chance to beat them again at Heliopolis. Still, without a navy, how long can my poor colleagues hold out? And how can I deal with the Austrians? They’re pushing Massena back towards Genoa. I have to win or expire, Gage. Conquest has made me what I am, and conquest alone can sustain me.’

‘Surely you don’t want my military advice.’

He stood in the tub, water pouring off as a servant wrapped him. ‘I want to know how I can settle with the Americans. I’m wasting ships fighting your country when our two nations should be deep friends. Don’t think the British don’t want you back! Mark my words; you’ll have to fight them again one day! France is your greatest bulwark. And lack of a proper navy is my curse. I can’t waste frigates clashing with your republic.’ Servants ushered him to a dressing room. ‘Tell me how to deal with your Anglophile president, Gage. The man distrusts us French and flirts with the perfidious English. President Adams would move to London if he could!’ Adams had been a reluctant diplomat in France who found Paris effete and untidy. He’d spent his days cranky and homesick.

I waited awkwardly as Napoleon began to be dressed. Hair was combed, nails filed, and unguents rubbed into his shoulders. The general had come a long way.

‘John Adams?’ I opined. ‘He’s a prickly sort, to tell the truth. My understanding is that it’s become a test of national pride. Adams’s Federalists, who favour a stronger central government, are using the conflict with France as an excuse to build a bigger navy and levy larger taxes. Jefferson’s Republicans say we’ve picked the wrong enemy, that Britain is the real threat. He and Burr are vying to take the next election. If you offer Adams a way out, I think he’ll take it.’

‘I have agreed to new peace commissioners. You are to work with them and Talleyrand, Gage, and make everyone see reason. I need trade and money from America, not gunfire.’ He looked down. ‘By God, will you finish with those buttons!’ Then, dressed at last, off he rushed to the next room where a map of Europe, stuck with little pins, was spread like a carpet on the floor. ‘Look at the ring my enemies have me in!’

I peered. Little of it made sense to me.

‘If I march to relieve Massena in Genoa,’ Napoleon complained, ‘the Riviera becomes a narrow Thermopylae where Melas and his Austrians can block me. Yet Italy is the key to outflanking Vienna!’ He threw himself down on the map as if it were a familiar bed. ‘I’m outnumbered, my veterans trapped in Egypt, raw conscripts my only recruits. All Revolutionary enthusiasm has been lost, thanks to incompetence by the Directory. Yet I need victory, Gage! Victory restores spirit, and only victory will restore me!’

He looked restored enough, but I tried to think of something encouraging. ‘I know the siege of Acre went badly, but I’m sure you can do better.’

‘Don’t talk to me of Acre! You and that damned Smith only won because you captured my siege artillery! If I ever find out who told the British about my flotilla, I’ll hang him from Notre Dame!’

Since it was I who told the British – I’d been a little peeved after Napoleon’s riffraff had dangled me above a snake pit and then tried to include me in a massacre – I decided to change the subject. ‘It’s too bad you don’t have any elephants,’ I tried.

‘Elephants?’ He looked annoyed. ‘Are you once more employed to waste my time?’ Clearly, the memory of Acre and my ignorance at the pyramids still rankled.

‘Like Hannibal, out in the corridor. If you could cross the Alps with elephants, that would get their attention, wouldn’t it?’

‘Elephants!’ He finally laughed. ‘What nonsense you spout! Like that silly medallion you carried around in Egypt!’

‘But Hannibal used them to invade Italy, did he not?’

‘He did indeed.’ He thought, and shook his head. But then he crawled and peered about on the map. ‘Elephants? From the mouths of imbeciles. I would come down into their rear. And while I lack pachyderms, I have cannons.’ He looked at me as if I’d said something interesting. ‘Crossing the Alps! That would make my reputation, wouldn’t it? The new Hannibal?’

‘Except you’ll win instead of lose, I’m sure of it.’ I hadn’t dreamt he’d take me seriously.

He nodded. ‘But where? The accessible passes are too near Melas and his Austrians. He’d bottle me up just as he would on the Riviera.’

I looked, pretending I knew something about Switzerland. I saw a name I recognised and a chill went through me, since I’d heard it bandied about in Egypt and Israel. Do certain names echo through our lives? ‘What about the Saint Bernard Pass?’ This was farther north, away from the little pins. French mathematicians had told me about Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, who’d seen God in width, height and depth.

‘Saint Bernard! No army would attempt that! It’s twenty-five-hundred metres high, or more than eight thousand feet! No wider than a towpath! Really, Gage, you’re no logistician. You can’t move armies like a goat.’ He shook his head, peering. ‘Although if we did come down from there we could strike their rear in Milan and capture their supplies.’ He was thinking aloud. ‘We wouldn’t have to bring everything, we’d take it from the Austrians. General Melas would never dream we’d dare it! It would be insane! Audacious!’ He looked up at me. ‘Just the kind of thing an adventurer like you would suggest, I suppose.’

I’m the world’s most reluctant adventurer, but I smiled encouragingly. The way to deal with superiors is to give them a harebrained idea that suits your purposes and let them conclude it’s their own. If I could pack Napoleon off to Italy again, I’d be able to relax in Paris unmolested.

‘Saint Bernard!’ he went on. ‘What general could do it? Only one …’ He rose to his knees. ‘Gage, perhaps boldness is our salvation. I’m going to take the world by surprise by crossing the Alps like a modern Hannibal. It’s a ridiculous idea you’ve had, so ridiculous that it makes a perverse kind of sense. You are an idiot savant!’

‘Thank you. I think.’

‘Yes, I’m going to try it and you, American, are going to share the glory by scouting the pass for us!’

‘Me?’ I was appalled. ‘But I know nothing of mountains. Or Italians. Or elephants. You just said I’m to help with the American negotiations.’

‘Gage, as always, you are too modest! The advantage is that you’ve proved your pluck on both sides, so no one will be certain who you’re sleeping with now! It will take months to get the new American commissioners here. Haven’t you wanted to see Italy?’

‘Not really.’ I thought of it as poor, hot, and superstitious.

‘Your help with the American negotiations can wait until their delegation arrives. Gage, thanks to your elephants, you are going to once more share my fame!’

CHAPTER FOUR

Some fame. The Alps in spring, I learnt, are cold, windy, and wet, with snow the colour of snot. The Saint Bernard of Switzerland was not even the Saint Bernard of Clairvaux: there are too many saints in the world, apparently, including two Bernards within a few hundred miles of each other. And no one believed I was hiking to the pass out of idle American curiosity, carrying my Pennsylvania longrifle like a walking stick. Everyone assumed I was exactly what I kept denying, an early scout for Bonaparte, since the first consul was visiting the encampments near Geneva and taking the unprecedented step of actually explaining to the common soldiers what it was he