The Dakota Cipher

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Mackinac Island was a green knob between the reflecting blue platters of lake and sky, its American garrison of ninety men guarding the straits that led to Lake Michigan. It represented the edge of the United States. Beyond were only British posts, trappers, and tribes. Our little cutter banged a one-gun salute as we coasted into the island pier, and the fort replied in turn, the bark of its guns flushing great clouds of birds from the forest and then echoing away into emptiness.

The fort was in the shape of a triangle, with three blockhouses and two ramparts for cannon, earth and stone on the water side, and a log stockade facing the land. The high white officers’ quarters, with hipped roof and twin chimneys, was the dominant building. Other cabins and sheds marked out a parade ground. The forest was cut back around the fort to make pasture and cropland, giving the outpost light to breathe.

‘We British moved the post here after Pontiac’s Indians overcame the old French fort of Michilimackinac on the mainland shore,’ said Lord Somerset, pointing. ‘It was a masterful attack, the braves pretending at lacrosse, following the ball through the fort gate and then seizing weapons from their waiting women who had hidden them under their trade blankets. The fort fell in minutes. The new post doesn’t let the Indians land, though in winter you can walk to Mackinac across the ice. With the boundary settled we’ve passed this fort to you Americans, while we build a new one on the Saint Mary’s River, near the rapids that lead to Lake Superior.’

‘Ninety Americans to guard all the Northwest Territory?’

‘In North America, empire hangs by a thread. That’s why our alliance is so valuable, Ethan. We can prevent misunderstandings.’

Here the commandant was a mere lieutenant named Henry Porter, who met us on the dock to escort us up the dirt causeway to the fort gate. He was impressed by my letter from Jefferson – ‘I’d heard there’s a new president, and here he is,’ he marvelled, looking at the signature as if written in the statesman’s blood – and he positively gaped at Aurora in a moony way I found annoying. The lieutenant seemed less plagued than Colonel Stone with duelling and bowling, and in fact his fort felt empty. ‘Half the garrison is off-post at any one time fishing, hunting, cutting wood, or trading with the Indians,’ he said. ‘We’ve room aplenty in the officer’s quarters while you wait for your freight canoes.’

There might be room aplenty, but not enough for Lady Aurora Somerset. She took one look at the spare military cubicles and announced that while her trunks might fit in a closet, she certainly could not. After brisk inspection of every possibility she declared that the top floor of the eastern blockhouse would just barely serve for her privacy and comfort. With inherited authority, she ordered Porter to shove its two six-pounders out of the way, asked for a squad of American infantry to carry in a cornhusk bed with down comforter, declared the ground floor sufficient for her maid, and said she would require a certain number of furs to carpet the rough planking of her new abode to make it habitable.

‘But what if we come under attack?’ the young lieutenant asked, clearly overawed by the imperiousness of the English nobility.

‘My dear lieutenant, none would dare attack a Somerset,’ Cecil replied.

‘And I will take my cousin’s squirrel gun and shoot them between the eyes if they do,’ Aurora added. ‘I am a crack shot – yes, my cousin has taught me. Besides, the blockhouse is the safest place, is it not? You do care, Lieutenant, for the safety of women?’

‘I suppose.’ He squinted at Jefferson’s letter again, as if it might include instructions on handling this demand.

‘I will keep a sharp lookout for red savages – and for any of your garrison that dare intrude on my privacy! This is how we do things in England and it would be well to pay attention. It will be instructive for you.’ She sniffed. ‘This has a little of the smartness of a British post.’ She touched his cheek and gave a thankful smile. ‘I do appreciate your hospitality, Lieutenant.’

With that Porter was in full retreat, Bunker Hill taken, Yorktown avenged, and Britannia triumphant. If she’d asked for his own washbasin, he would have surrendered it in an instant, and Indiana Territory, too.

I, of course, am more experienced when it comes to women. But, alas, no more sensible than poor raw Porter: I am a man, after all, anxious as an insect, and I immediately set to scheming.

‘You want to jeopardise our passage north and infuriate Cecil by going after his cousin?’ Magnus hissed while I looked hungrily at the blockhouse, just begging to be assaulted. ‘This is as irresponsible as your dalliance with Pauline Bonaparte!’

‘He’s not her husband or father. And believe me, Magnus, conquering Aurora might prove as useful to our safe passage as Pauline Bonaparte was in getting us away from Mortefontaine. Women can be resourceful allies when they’re not betraying you.’ I am ever the optimist.

‘She’s above your station and has two cannon to hold you off.’

‘Which means I have to be as wily as Pontiac’s Indians when they took Michilimackinac.’

I didn’t think I could follow a lacrosse ball to her boudoir, but I had a Trojan horse of another sort. I took my most prized possession, my longrifle, and enlisted Aurora’s maid to place it on the bed of my quarry’s blockhouse sleeping quarters, with a note offering it for her protection and amusement and applauding her claim of marksmanship. Meanwhile we dined at the officers’ mess. Everyone was curious about Jefferson, so I told them what I thought.

‘The man writes like Moses, but can’t speechify enough to hold a schoolhouse. He keeps a live bird and dead elephant bones in his office and knows more about wine than the Duke of Burgundy. I think he’s a genius, but mad as a hatter, too.’

‘Like all leaders not born to the post,’ sniffed Cecil. ‘The American democrats are admittedly quite clever, but there is breeding, is there not?’

‘At table he’s the most entertaining man I’ve met since my mentor Franklin,’ I said. ‘Insatiably curious. He’s fascinated by the west, you can be sure.’

‘I admire your young country’s talent,’ Aurora said, ‘given that the highest-born fled to Canada or back to England during the Revolution. I’ve read your Constitution. Who would have thought such genius could be found in common men? It’s a remarkable experiment you’re defending, Lieutenant Porter. Remarkable.’ She gave him a smile so dazzling it made me jealous.

He blushed. ‘Indeed, Miss Somerset. And the bitterest of enemies can become the best of friends, can they not?’ Then he smiled like a courtier. I swear, the young rascal had recovered his grit!

When she obligingly left for her little fortress so we men could talk over port and pipes – Somerset making a show of lighting a cigar, an innovation out of the Spanish Main – I made an excuse, crept out before Porter or anyone else could manoeuvre ahead of me, and scampered across the parade ground to her blockhouse. My knock was answered by her maid. I announced I’d loaned out my weapon and wanted to make sure it was handled properly. Smirking, the girl let me in.

‘Is this what you’re inquiring about, Mr Gage?’ Aurora’s voice floated down from above. The muzzle of my longrifle appeared in the trapdoor entrance that led to her chamber above, like a probing serpent. ‘I was surprised to find this tool in my bed, though I’m informed by a note that it may be useful.’

‘Your comment about shooting savages made me think you might enjoy practicing with a well-made rifle,’ I said. ‘We could study this evening.’

‘Forged in Lancaster, I presume,’ her disembodied voice said.

‘Jerusalem, actually. It’s a long story.’

‘Well, if we are to go shooting together, do come up and tell the tale. Aim is improved with understanding, don’t you think?’

So up I scrambled, closing the trap and dropping a couple of furs over it to muffle her expected cries of passion. At her invitation I perched myself on a trunk while she smoothed her gown to sit daintily on the edge of her bed, her eyes flashing and her wondrous hair glowing in the candlelight. She was just dishevelled enough to look erotic, two buttons carefully undone, escaping strands of hair artfully aglow, her slim boots slipped off her white stockings.

‘The gunsmith was a British agent, and the stock was carved by his beautiful sister,’ I began.

‘Was she really?’ Aurora tossed her hair.

‘Not as beautiful as you, of course.’

‘Of course.’ She stretched like a cat, giving a dainty yawn. ‘But you’d tell this other woman the same thing, wouldn’t you? Naughty man. I know your type.’

‘I’m sincere in the moment.’

‘Are you?’ The rifle was across her lap. ‘Well, Mr Gage. Then do come over and show me how your weapon works.’

And so I did.

Now the most astonishingly beautiful being in all nature is a woman, and the best become a gate to heaven. I appreciate a sweet girl. But then there are the hotter, more disturbing, more tempestuous types who are a gate to a place of an entirely different sort. That was the ruby fire of Aurora, her auburn hair tumbling to white shoulders, eyes flashing, mouth hungry, breasts pink-tipped and as taut and aroused as I was, skin flushed, all curve and fine waist and wondrous, mesmerising shank: there was no mountain as glorious as the rise of her hip when she lay beside me, no glen as lush and mysterious as her particular vale. She was a paradise of fire and brimstone, an angel of desire. I was lost in an instant, except I’d already been lost when she came down the stairs at Detroit. The smell of her, the glow of her skin, the beauty mark on her cheek that demanded obeisance: oh yes, I’d thrown the reins away and would go wherever she stampeded. We writhed like minks and gasped like fugitives, and she coaxed sensation out of me I didn’t know was there, and suggested things I’d never quite imagined. Yet pant as we might, she never seemed to lose her curiosity about the famous Ethan Gage, her sly questions about my rifle giving way to murmured entreaties as we embraced that I share just what exactly it was that we were looking for beyond Grand Portage.

‘Elephants,’ I mumbled, and went at her again like a starving man.

My mention of pachyderms only added to my mystery and so when we finally caught our breath I tried to put her off by explaining curious ideas I’d picked up from Napoleon’s savants and the new American president. They thought that the world might be older than the Bible, and home to strange creatures now entirely extinct, and that the whole puzzling cornucopia of life, while testimony to the Almighty, also raised questions about just what our Creator was up to, so as a naturalist myself …

‘You are toying with me!’ She was beginning to stiffen, just as I was not.

‘Aurora, I’m on a diplomatic mission for President Jefferson. I can’t share all the pertinent details with every bedmate …’

Then I was rolling from her furious push, landing with a thump on a wolverine pelt on the floor.

‘Every bedmate!’

I peeked above the mattress. ‘That’s not what I meant. We just don’t know each other well yet.’

So she attacked me with a pillow, breasts heaving, and it was such a wondrous sight that if she’d smothered me then and there, I would have died happy. Blazes!

But at length she was spent, flopping on the bed, her rump graceful as a snow drift, her lips ripe and pouted. ‘I thought you loved me and would share everything.’

‘I have shared all I am capable of this evening, believe me.’

‘Pah.’

‘I am entirely boring, I know. I go where greater men direct me, a simple savant with some slight knowledge of electricity. To find Venus on the edge of the wilderness is a greater discovery than any elephant.’

She rolled onto her back, her gaze lazy, and blessed my compliment with a slight smile. ‘So you think I’m pretty?’

‘I think if you were painted, it would set off such frenzy that there would be a riot. If you were sculpted, it would cause a new religion. I think you are manufactured of moonbeam, and fired by the sun.’

‘Fancy words, Yankee Doodle.’

‘But so true they should be chiselled into the stone of Westminster.’

She laughed. ‘What a flatterer you are! But you are a scamp not to trust me. I don’t think you can go in my cousin’s canoes after all.’

This was worrisome, since our only transportation off this island was with the British. ‘But we will be useful!’

‘How?’

I looked at my longrifle, which had found itself onto the plank floor in all our manoeuvring. ‘I can shoot that, too.’ I gave my most fetching smile. ‘We’ll practise together.’

She shook her head. ‘What an ungrateful rascal you are.’

‘Not ungrateful, believe me.’

Now the look was hard. ‘All right then, you and your hairy Norwegian can come with us to Grand Portage, but in a separate canoe, and when you look at me across the water, when I’m beneath my parasol, I will not deign to return your glance because I am a great lady of England and you are a directionless adventurer who will not share any confidences.’

‘I am a victim of your beauty.’

She wriggled back to rest herself more upright against the pillows. ‘You will be punished for your secrecy, at camp, by my indifference. You must attend to me or I will persuade Cecil to leave you behind for the Indians. They eat their enemies, I’ve heard. But we will have no more intimacy there until you demonstrate your trust by confiding in me. Until you reform, this is the last time you can gaze upon my body.’

‘Aurora, I believe we are already the deepest of friends.’

‘So prove it. Again.’ She parted her thighs. ‘And again. And then maybe someday I will take pity on you – if it suits me, and if you have earned it.’

I gulped and nodded, summoning new enthusiasm.

It’s a challenge being a diplomat.