Authors: William Dietrich
“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 Fouché 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, Joséphine. 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.”
O
ur 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.