The Emerald Storm

Chapter 14

Our safe arrival at the English island colony of Antigua in the Caribbean was something of a miracle, given the tumult that ensued once Britain and France renewed their struggle. I’ve often pondered the popularity of war, the peculiar eagerness of nations for fleeting glory and insane butchery. Ten thousand deaths, and borders barely change. But the truth is that many people make money off conflict, and nowhere can fortune be made or lost so quickly as at sea. Ships become pawns, and we were captured and then recaptured in the first two weeks of combat. We started our journey on a merchant tub, transferred to a French privateer, and ended on a British frigate.

From London, Astiza and I took the express coach to Portsmouth to sail for the West Indies on the merchant brig Queen Charlotte in hopes of getting ahead of trouble. The ship was a regular transatlantic trader that was carrying a cargo of china, furniture, and fabric it would exchange for sugar, molasses, and rum. The Portsmouth Express, however, proved to be a waste, given that we hurried to the city only to wait a week in harbor for favorable winds and, it turned out, the onset of war. Astiza remained in a fever of anxiety about the fate of our son, and easily irritated since we both felt my procrastination in Paris had led to this mess. Like too many married couples, we didn’t talk out our resentments, and they festered. I was solicitous, but she remained cool. She was polite, but I was stubborn about admitting blame.

I had to get our boy back. I paced the port, trying to will the wind. Maybe steam engines aren’t such a ridiculous idea after all. I still wore my magnifying glass around my neck to confirm the identity of my emerald: no one can say I’m not, in my own way, an optimist. I also still carried that medallion of confidence from Napoleon. Yet I was on no one’s side but my own. Switching sides and trusting no one is a wearying place to be. Not only does every man seem a potential enemy, you also get confused about what you stand for. Another thing I plan upon retirement is becoming an unblinking American patriot and giving allegiance to my country’s policies, no matter how daft, so I can mix with neighbors who think that I think the thoughts they think I should have, even while I don’t have to think very much at all.

We finally set sail on May 18 and began working south to catch the trades off Africa, not knowing that our departure was the first day of renewed conflict. Accordingly, we were captured one week out by the French privateer Gracieuse, a brigantine of a dozen guns. A privateer is a pirate made legal with a license, to bring profit to the government that allows its piracy. This particular privateer fired shots off our bow, our captain discharged a single cannon from our stern for honor’s sake (taking careful aim at a swell, so as not to annoy the Frenchmen), and our vessel struck its colors without bloodshed. With a French supervisory crew and the English captain comfortably locked in his cabin, our little convoy of two vessels set sail for Brest. I had nightmares of Astiza and me returning to Fortress de Joux not as liberators, but prisoners.

Accordingly, I’d tried to talk our English master out of his hasty surrender. “Can’t we make a run for it?” I asked before our capitulation. Our captain was a rheumy-eyed drinker named Greenly, with failing eyesight and a limp he said came from being gnawed by a shark. The mate told me it had actually been caused by dropping a block and tackle on his toes while trying to load cargo in the rain after a night’s carousing.

“I judge her faster, Mr. Gage,” Greenly opined when I tried to arouse his martial spirit. He squinted at the trim of the French sails. “Better captained, too.”

“I’m really not eager to be captured by the French in what may be a frightfully long war,” I said. “My wife and I are in a hurry to get our boy back and positively must get to the Caribbean. How about we mount a well-aimed volley as they try to board, and then a sudden turn to knock off their bowsprit and bring down their foremast?” I don’t usually feel particularly brave, but the threat of imprisonment stiffens me. I suggested naval tactics I’d learned from a lurid adventure novel. “A predator will back off if stung.”

“Will it now? And if you’re wrong, and my head is taken off by a cannonball in defense of a cargo I don’t own?”

“Surely your employers would compliment your steadfastness. Perhaps with a pension for your widow, if there should be one.”

“I admire your ferocity, Gage, but we ain’t all of us heroes of Musselmen wars and battles with Red Indians. Surrender is more prudent, since the likelihood is that I’ll be swapped for a French captain within a month. Fortunes of war, I’m afraid.”

“But who will we be swapped for?”

“I’ve no idea. I can’t imagine you’ll be seen as useful by either side.”

“Ethan, they’ve got a dozen cannon,” Astiza prudently pointed out. “Maybe we can get the French to send us to Martel and Saint-Domingue.” As I’ve said, she’s practical and clever. “After all, they may think you’re still working for them. You have the pendant.”

“Working for them from an English ship? And if the daughter of Fort de Joux or her father gets another look at me, might I not be hanging outside her window permanently?” My pessimism about capture, and women, is justified. No man is friendlier than me, or accumulates more enemies.

“You can tell the French sailors humorous stories about Napoleon, and pretend you’re an American diplomat eager to go to Saint-Domingue,” she coaxed.

“I am an American diplomat eager to go to Saint-Domingue. Bonaparte, however, is not particularly amusing.”

“I’ll flirt with the captain and persuade him we were saved by his privateer. He will be our liberator, not our captor, and will be flattered to send us on our way.”

I was dubious, fearing that if we persuaded the French we were significant, they’d be even likelier to hold us in case we could be sold to one side or the other.

Fortunately, we didn’t have to test Astiza’s plan, because our captivity was brief. The beginning of war had unleashed a flurry of prize-hungry captains on both sides, and two days later, the British frigate Hecate intercepted and recaptured the Queen Charlotte and took Gracieuse as well. Fortunes of war, indeed, and now our captain’s pusillanimity seemed prudent. Maybe Greenly wasn’t an idiot after all.

The French privateer was sailed with a prize crew for England while our merchant brig and navy frigate set off again for the West Indies. I talked our way onto the faster warship by promising to tell tales of my own adventures. That offer didn’t seem to excite anyone, but the British officers gazed at my wife as a miracle of femininity. Adventurers never plan it, but it’s actually quite useful having a woman along. A damsel can distract an enemy, disarm a tyrant, and disable the angry. The British were entranced by Astiza’s stories about the gods of the pyramids, though the truth is she could have talked about insurance premiums and still held these female-starved officers in thrall.

She was useful for another reason. I retained Napoleon’s gold N and circlet of laurel wreath, but didn’t think the British navy would be amused by this favor. A ship is close quarters, and my trinket might be discovered. So I gave it back to Astiza to hold on her own body, reasoning correctly she’d be given privacy as a woman that I wouldn’t have.

“Is it risky to keep it at all?” she whispered.

“We keep volleying from side to side. You never know.”

So she slipped it in her undergarments, and we sailed southwest.

By boarding a warship we traded comfort for speed. The frigate was jammed with men needed primarily for the rare battle; discipline was harsh and cruelty routine. We were mustered to see three floggings in six weeks-for thieving food, talking back to a midshipman of thirteen, and sleeping on watch-and that was considered a relatively mild exercise of discipline. The beatings broke the men instead of reforming them, but the ship’s company couldn’t imagine a society not based on physical fear. There was also the camaraderie of shared misery and daily salvation in the form of rum. It was pointless to be critical; grimness ruled the world.

There was also gloomy foreboding. Astiza was in the habit of meditating, and while a frigate has little room, space for what she called a prayer chamber was found on the deep orlop deck, private because it was adjacent to the spirit room and guarded by marines to keep sailors away. There was no natural light in her cubby, but her lamp was deemed sufficiently far from the powder magazine so as not to pose a danger. (That room was covered in felt to prevent any stray sparks, and no lamp or candle was ever allowed inside. The dim lamp that sailors saw by shone through a thick glass window built into the magazine wall, lest some idiot blow the entire warship to hell.)

Astiza got her chamber by insisting she must study away from prying male eyes, a desire the officers were sympathetic to. Sailors tracked her movements like dogs entranced by a squirrel.

So, once out of sight, she quietly set up a secret temple to a democratic pantheon of gods that might have gotten us burned in a different century. I didn’t want my wife accused of being a heathen, so I stood watch while she lit incense, pulled out little bone and stone idols from Egypt that she carried in a velvet bag, and prayed for the future. Good thing, too, because we were admittedly peculiar. Astiza consulted the Christian pantheon but was considerably more ecumenical about religion than the narrow-minded norm. Sailors are a superstitious lot, and I didn’t want us pitched overboard. Her allotted chamber was hardly bigger than a confessional, and it was thick with that ship smell the brain remembers for weeks after disembarking: a musty reek of rope, bilgewater, wet wood, hundreds of inadequately washed men, kitchen coal fire, rancid cheese, moldy bread, and, until it ran out in the first month, beer. An Egyptian tomb would have been a cheerier spot, but Astiza needed solitary contemplation the way I need flirtatious conversation.

I explained to any officer who asked that her meditation tended to bring good luck, and that our own rescue by the British was proof. Just to be safe I threw out some additional nonsense about female modesty, piety, contemplation, and Egyptian eccentricity, and the crew generally swallowed it.

I hoped she’d emerge encouraged, but the idyll made her moody and uncommunicative. She looked at me sadly when coming up for air, and I feared she’d fantasized some supernatural message about the loss of our son.

I left her alone as long as I could stand it, but when she stood by the windward rail that night-by now the climate had warmed, and the sky was thick with stars-I finally approached to talk things through, which I should have done long before.

“Is Harry all right?” I asked.

She was a kind of witch, but a good one, and I’d come to trust in her witchcraft. I believed she could see distant places, and the future, too.

She didn’t answer for a long time, so I touched her elbow, as tentative as a stranger. She twitched.

Finally she turned.

“What if it was a mistake to marry?” Her tone was hollow.

No oath or insult could be more devastating. I recoiled, as if from a blow. “Surely you can’t mean that.” Astiza was all I wanted or needed, and to suggest fate didn’t want us together was like a stab to the heart.

“Not for you, Ethan,” she said sadly. “Not even for us. But for our son.”

“What did you see? Is he sick?”

“No. No…” She sighed. “Is the future fixed?”

“Certainly not! Certainly fixable!” I said so even though I secretly shared her dread about fate. “My God, what is it?”

She shook her head. “Nothing specific. Just a feeling of a severe test ahead, a test that might separate us instead of unite us. Danger when we’re together, as if we draw trouble.”

“But that’s not true. We escape it. You know we have, a dozen times. We must run down this French thief Martel. Once we do, then we have the rest of our lives for quiet happiness. That’s what I took the emerald for. Us.”

“I know that, Ethan. Fate is strange.” She looked over the waves. “I’m so far from home.”

I took her in my arms. “We’re going home. You’ll see.”