The Emerald Storm

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.

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 device, putting me in this predicament. There’s something to be said for conservatism, where nothing ever changes.

“George Cayley is just at the beginning of his experiments,” Smith said mildly. “There is, however, an earlier civilization rumored to have mastered the art of flight, or at least to have produced models that look like flying machines. The speculation is that they not only enjoyed a controlled descent, but an ascent as well.”

“You mean the Aztecs. But how? What could make that web of sticks go upward?”

“We’ve no idea. A steam engine, perhaps? You yourself, Gage, are reputed to be somewhat of an electrician, a master of lightning. Perhaps that mysterious force can somehow drive an aerial craft. Mechanicians like Fulton and Watt are coming up with all kinds of peculiar ideas. In any event, the ancients were clever and might have had far better understanding of flight than we do. If the French could learn from an earlier civilization, they might swoop ahead of us and descend on our fleet like vultures.”

“Earlier civilization?”

“So the stories go. The recent notion that those in the future might know more than those in the past, or that the present age is the equal or better than our origins, is very new. For most of history, people believed the ancients knew more than us. The Aztec empire, Mr. Gage, believed it learned the arts of civilization from its gods, and is rumored to have immortalized the designs of their god’s flying machines in the gold and jewels of lost treasures. If the treasure of Montezuma could be found, and provides a model for flight, such a discovery might turn the tide of the war. The Channel could be leaped. That is what Leon Martel has heard, and that is what he’s after in the hoard.”

“But from Indians?”

“You understand better than anyone that the world has lost secrets in deep places. The pyramids? Mythic Norse artifacts on the American frontier? Greek superweapons?”

I had to give him the point. Our planet is a lot stranger than most people are willing to admit. I’d found a number of clever oddities in my time and had nearly died trying to harness them. Clever races or supermen seemed to be mucking about long before our own culture got started, and it wouldn’t surprise me if they flew, as well.

“We know the Caribbean is littered with the wrecks of Spanish treasure ships,” Smith continued, breaking into my thoughts. “In the century after 1550, as many as six hundred such vessels sank, each bearing an average of four to eight million pesos. It says something of the wealth of Mexico and Peru that even with such losses, enough survived that Spain became the richest kingdom in Christendom. Does Montezuma’s treasure exist? Was it lost, recovered, and finally rehidden? Who knows? But even if Martel’s theory is improbable, the barest possibility makes it imperative he is stopped. Empires are at stake. A true flying machine could tip the balance of power in an instant. Imagine a regiment of French cavalry mounted on the equivalent of flying carpets, swooping down the Thames like Valkyries.”

As I’ve said, Smith was barking mad, not to mention having the habit of mixing metaphors. “You enlisted me because you seriously fear Valkyries?”

“We enlisted you, Ethan, in hopes you could get L’Ouverture to tell us where the treasure is, so we can lay claim to them.”

“The French, alas, filled him full of holes.” The death of the Black Spartacus had been reported in the newspapers, but the French blamed L’Ouverture’s end on disease, not a failed escape attempt. “He was dying anyway, but they shot him as we hoisted him.”

“Barbarians. So… did he give you any clue?”

I hesitated. Did we want to share what little bargaining we had with the greedy British? Astiza, a mother, didn’t hesitate.

“He said the emeralds are in the diamond, but we don’t know what that means,” she spoke up. “Please, share that with Leon Martel and get our son back, Sir Sidney. We don’t care about this treasure of Montezuma. You can follow Martel when he goes looking for it and take it away from him then. We just want to get our boy and go home.”

And where did she imagine home was? I wondered. Would she follow me to a new one in America, after I’d helped lose our son?

Smith shook his head, sympathetic but stern. “Absolutely not. We don’t share secrets with the enemy, Mrs. Gage, and have no doubt, Leon Martel is your enemy. Moreover, he’s not easily contacted. In anticipation of war, he’s already crossed the ocean with Horus before he could be stopped by the British navy.”

“Crossed the ocean!”

“And not with Napoleon’s consent, I suspect. Martel’s a renegade, operating on his own, so far as we know. He rowed out to a ship bound for Saint-Domingue during a brewing storm, on the pretense of visiting a friend. When the gale came, the captain was forced to weigh anchor and sail to gain sea room, taking Martel and your son with him. Presumably, the villain has arrived in the embattled colony. We’re also informed that he has relations on the French sugar colony of Martinique. That’s the childhood home, I’m sure you know, of Bonaparte’s wife, Josephine. Martel thinks the treasure is somewhere in the Caribbean, and he’s no doubt sending evil minions out to find it, in order to ingratiate himself with the first consul and his family.”

I wondered if the French would call me an evil minion if I signed on again with the British. Astiza had given me back Napoleon’s little pendant, and I’d secreted it in case we needed to sneak about French possessions. If hung around my neck, it would make a splendid target for a firing squad from either nation.

But what choice did we have but to join Smith? We really knew nothing, and if we were to get my son and emerald back, we either needed a clue to bargain with or the British navy to back up our demands. “What do you want us to do?” I asked resignedly.

“I want you to go to the West Indies, find the treasure before Martel does, and lure him into a trap. At the end you’ll get your son, the emerald, ten percent of anything you find, and everlasting fame.” He nodded, already victorious in his head.

The West Indies! For many men they were a death sentence. I already knew Napoleon’s army was being destroyed by yellow fever and revengeful slaves. “But how?” I asked.

“L’Ouverture is dead, but his successor, General Jean-Jacques Dessalines, fights on in Saint-Domingue. I need you to go to the slave war, Ethan, and find out if the Negroes are hiding the most important golden models in human history. You have an enormous advantage: The French government has no idea it was you and your wife racing across the rooftops of Fortress de Joux. For all Napoleon knows, you’re still his go-between with the American negotiators, correct?”

“I told his ministers in Paris that I was taking leave to draw a map of my explorations for Monroe,” I conceded. “Then we sneaked off to rescue L’Ouverture.”

“That means you can go yourself to the French garrison in Saint-Domingue as an American agent and pretend to be their friend.”

Smith was even more devious than me, which is saying something. “But what good will that do?”

“You need to learn their military secrets and then trade them to Dessalines for the secret of the treasure.” He said this as if it were simple.

“But won’t the French hang us both as spies long before that happens?” Astiza asked. She has impeccable logic.

“Not if you pose as negotiators for Louisiana,” Smith said, “and explain you need to inspect the state of the war in Saint-Domingue to report to both the American and French agents whether a sale makes sense. Can France hold the colony, and, if not, is it best that Napoleon get money for New Orleans? All this is true enough. You can pretend you’re important, even though you’re not.”

Astiza thought out loud. “While Ethan poses as a diplomat in Saint-Domingue, I can look for Harry and Martel.”

“Exactly. You’re double agents, pretending to work for France and America while you really work for England and the slave army. You will pretend to Dessalines that you have been sent by L’Ouverture to find the treasure to finance their new nation. After lying to everyone, you escape and deliver the secret to us, the British.” He smiled with the satisfaction of a burrowed fox watching baying hounds thunder past, tongues out and saliva flying.

For Smith, of course, the question was simple. My loyalties were more complicated. I liked France, and the French, if not their henchmen. It had been France that had helped my own country win independence, bankrupting itself in the process, and the French Revolution that bankruptcy precipitated was closer to American ideals than England was. If I could just persuade Bonaparte to return to its precepts, I might be more at home in Paris than London. Yet it was England I needed now, thanks to treacherous Martel. So I must go back to the French in their tropic headquarters in the midst of pestilence? I tried to weigh the odds. “If I find Harry and the emerald in Saint-Domingue, why would I share anything with you?” I am honest to a fault.

“Because our navy will help you retrieve what must be a remote treasure, since no one’s found it. With your ten percent, you’ll be the richest man in the United States. Play the spy just once more, Gage, and you’ll have the retirement you desire.”