Betsy and the Emperor (9781439115879) (7 page)

I
had plenty of time to savor my victory as we wended our way along the narrow pathways of the cavern. I led the way. It gave me a good deal of pleasure to know that this man, who'd led a million men to their deaths on the field of battle, was now reduced to following me, a mere girl of fourteen years. A fitting fate for a man who had brought so much misery upon the world. Who never did anything of value, nor gave a thought to anyone but himself.

Perhaps if he had gone to a strict English school like mine he'd have turned out differently. First, the teacher would rap the young Napoleon's knuckles, a bit, with the ruler. Bonaparte would bawl like a brat, no doubt. For my part, I never cry when I get it. Next, the headmaster would administer the paddle to his
derrière
—as the French politely call the “bottom”—until it was as purple as a plum pudding.
Now, Master
Bonaparte,
he'd lecture him.
You have been a very obstinate little boy. You shall go and sit in the corner and ruminate about what you've done.
Oh, yes—he'll be sitting in this corner of the world for a long, long time….

“Mademoiselle Betsy,” the emperor said, interrupting my delicious speculation. “Your cave is
très charmante
—very charming—but I think I have seen enough, and it is getting late. Shall we retreat? I would not want to give our Captain Poppleton the apoplexy.”

I ignored him for a few steps more—down a steep incline—and then we arrived at our destination. I reached in the crevice, and the stickiness of a spider's web enveloped my hand. Was the lamp still there? Ah, yes! And with fresh oil and flints, to boot. Huff must have been there recently. I struck a flint against a striker and lit the wick.

Holding the lamp aloft, I turned to face the emperor in time to see the astonished look on his face. You see, it was not just the lamp that caught him by surprise. It was the laboratory.

It had not changed much since I'd been here last. Oh, perhaps there were a few more glass flasks and beakers, filled with liquids every color of the rainbow. The book collection still covered both sides of the cavern walls from floor to ceiling. There were
books and papers, all shapes and sizes, written in every tongue known to man. Some had been there so long, they were encrusted with green limestone drippings.

The animals were just the same as they'd been—no surprise, since they were all dead and stuffed. The hungry lioness sank her fangs into the graceful neck of the gazelle, frozen in an eternal embrace of death. The mangy hyena cackled silently, and the gorilla stood boldly, baring his teeth and pounding his chest to proclaim his dominion.

The mahogany worktable looked smaller than I recalled. But perhaps since I was bigger now it just seemed that way. A collection of creatures, recently slaughtered, lay on a blood-spattered white sheet on the table. I moved the lamp closer for a better look. The emperor peeked over my shoulder. On the table were detailed anatomical drawings—of what sort of creature, I knew not—done by a steady hand. And nearby a bullfrog was nailed to the sheet with a silver stake through its heart. A set of small pins fixed the skin back, exposing muscles and parts that most people, given a choice, prefer to keep out of public view. I saw Bonaparte wince.

How odd,
I thought.
With all the gore he must have
seen on the battlefield, he can't stand the sight of blood!

Bonaparte turned to face me. “This workshop belongs to you?” he said, incredulous.

“Oh, no,” I replied. “Of course not. These are Huff's occupations. I just come here when I want to get away from things.”

“Huff?”

“My brothers' tutor. He's a little—well, some people think he's rather…eccentric.”

The emperor ran his hand against the grain of the hyena's fur, kicking up a cloud of dust. “I can't imagine why,” Bonaparte said wryly.

I gave him a disapproving look.

“What is he up to here?” the emperor asked.

“Experiments. He's a brilliant scientist,” I said, feeling somewhat defensive. “People just don't…understand him.”

“Ah…,” Bonaparte said. “Just as they don't understand Mademoiselle Betsy?”

I was taken aback by his insight. But I tried not to show it.

“Quite so,” I said. “Of course, not for the same reasons,” I added quickly.

Bonaparte took off his hat—a white, broad-brimmed islander's hat that had been a “welcome”
present from Toby—and swept off a rickety chair with it. Then he sat down, put his chin in his delicate hand, and looked at me curiously.

“They do not understand you because you have the gazelle's
liberté
in your soul. But now you are trapped in a pose—as this stuffed creature here.” He pointed to the gazelle, frozen in its moment of utter helplessness.

In spite of myself, he had captured my attention, and I didn't say a word. Encouraged, he went on: “Trapped. The role they have written for you does not suit you—like a good actress in a very bad play. You dream of doing great things, but no one expects it of you. Your heart aches to break free—and write your own destiny on the wind. You are not taken seriously. You want to be taken seriously. And someday they will see what they have missed in you—you will make them see. And they will be sorry.”

He studied me.

“Ah, with Betsy's jaw dropped open like that, she resembles even more our unfortunate gazelle.”

 

Yes, I confess I was astounded by Bonaparte's analysis. I must have looked very ridiculous, standing there with my mouth gaping open. How could this
man, who'd met me only a few days prior, know my feelings so well? It was as if he were one of the girls I'd gossiped with in the darkness of the bunk room after curfew at Hawthorne.
Perhaps Toby has been talking about me,
I speculated, annoyed.
I'll have to have a long talk with Toby….

“And now mademoiselle is wondering how I could see into her soul,
n'est-ce pas
?” Bonaparte said.

I stared at him. Unfortunately, he could tell by the look on my face that he'd guessed correctly, again.

“You see, mademoiselle, you and I are very much alike.”

“What?!” I began angrily. “How can you say—”

“Now, now,” the emperor interrupted soothingly. “Hold your fire. When I spoke of your feelings, I merely spoke of my own—when I was your age. You and I are as much the same on the inside as Roberaud and I are on the exterior. And kindred spirits can always recognize one another.”

The emperor had a self-satisfied smile on his face that irritated me like an overstarched petticoat.

“What could you and I possibly have in common?” I demanded.

“
Beaucoup!
A great deal. Born in the middle of a large
famille
—though in my case, there were eight
enfants
—I knew when I drew my first breath that I was unlike the others. I struggled to find myself, but there was no niche for me. Then I was sent away to school, far away from everyone known to me—just as you were, mademoiselle. I attended the military academy at Brienne. I did not play by the rules. Like someone else I know,” he said slyly. “I was lonely. An outsider. Did not ‘fit in,' as the English say.”

“Outsider?” What on earth did the man mean?

“I was not French, you know.”

Bonaparte? France's greatest “hero”? Not French? Impossible!

He saw my skeptical look and added, “
C'est vrai,
mademoiselle. Quite true. I am Corsican. Born ‘Buonaparte.' On a little island that was passed back and forth between France and Italy like a baton. At the academy, shunned for my strange accent and foreign ways. And my…er…diminutive stature. No one expected I would ever accomplish anything. Little Napoleon do anything of consequence?
Jamais!
But I was determined to prove them wrong. And that would take some time. I ended my glorious career as a scholar forty-second—in a class of fifty-one.”

Ninth from the bottom? Even I had done better than that! Well, except my first term, of course.

Still, from this moment forth, I found it increasingly difficult to view Bonaparte as a strange being from another cosmos.

Just then we heard the sound of footsteps approaching. Bonaparte swung around in a flash, hand on his sword. It seems his old warrior's instincts were still alive.

It took a few moments for the intruder to come into the lamplight, but I knew him instantly by his hesitant, arthritic gait.

H
uff!”

“Betsy? Can it be? Betsy? Is that you, my dear child?” Huff said, squinting in the dimness. He looked much the same as when I had seen him last—still the peculiar red fez on his head, with tassel dangling, still the long white robe like an Arabian prince. His ragged beard was now completely gray, though, and almost reached his navel.

He shuffled toward me, extending his long, bony arms. “Oh, my dear child! How you have grown!” Huff embraced me, and I daresay he shed a tear or two. “Let me look at you.”

He stepped backward, and it was then that he noticed I was not alone, for Bonaparte had been lurking, sword aready, in the shadows. Oddly, it seemed the emperor had been intent on defending me, should the need arise.

“Have I…interrupted you, my dear?” Huff said, embarrassed. “I will go, of course….” And he turned to leave. I was puzzled at first by his unease. And then it dawned on me: He thought he'd interrupted a romantic tryst!

I couldn't contain a laugh. “No, no!” I said, almost choking with laughter. “Please don't go. It's nothing like that. He's just a…”

Bonaparte listened expectantly, waiting to see what word I'd supply to describe him, I suppose. But I was at a loss.

“Acquaintance,” Bonaparte supplied in my behalf. “Of the most respectful kind.”

“Ah,” Huff said, as if that made everything clear.

Apparently, his eyesight was none too good. He clearly did not recognize the emperor.

“I hope you don't mind my bringing him here,” I said to the old tutor. “We didn't mean to give you a start.”

“Quite all right,” Huff said, tugging at his beard. “I can use the company. You look to be an officer, young man. Betsy, you've done well for yourself, my dear.” He clapped Bonaparte feebly on the back. It was clear the emperor was not accustomed to such familiarities, but he did not protest.

“Yes,” Bonaparte said, amused. “An officer, indeed.”

“Well, that's a most commendable profession,” Huff said, lowering himself slowly into a chair. “Where are you stationed?”

Bonaparte seemed to be enjoying the charade. “St. Helena,” he said. “My orders are that I shall be assigned here…indefinitely.”

“Marvelous! Then we shall be seeing a lot of you,” Huff replied, peering through a lens at an insect specimen pinned to the table. Huff scribbled a few notes with a quill and stood up with agonizing slowness. He extended a veiny, arthritic hand to the emperor. “What is your name, young man?”

Bonaparte said nothing but gave the old man his hand. I wanted to break the news to Huff as gently as possible. But there was no time for shilly-shallying.

“This is Emperor Napoleon Bonaparte of France,” I said.

To my astonishment, Huff grabbed on to the seat of his chair and lowered himself painfully to one knee. He doffed his hat and bowed his head. The lamplight danced off his shiny bald spot.

“Forgive me, Your Majesty,” Huff said quietly.

Bonaparte seemed as mystified as I by the old
man's actions, but he was clearly pleased. For my part, I was afraid Huff would fall and break his hip.

“Huff!” I protested, taking him by the arm. “No need to do that. Please stand up, my friend. He's just a prisoner now.”

Bonaparte's eyes flashed fire at me.

Huff raised his bowed head and stared at me with what can only be described as horror.

“Just a prisoner?!” Huff said. I'd never known him to look so angry. He pounded the seat of the chair, albeit weakly. “Young lady, it seems they have not taught you properly in your fancy school!”

“Now, now, old man,” Bonaparte said, helping Huff to his feet. I was surprised by the tenderness the emperor showed him. He could not have been more gentle had he been assisting his own mother. “No need to kneel to me. I can see you are a man of accomplishment yourself.” He glanced around the room. “Why secrete it away here?”

“Thank you, Your Majesty,” Huff said as he settled back into his chair, wheezing. “When I had my laboratory at the Briars, one of my experiments with electricity—I shall show it to you if you like, sir—caused some commotion—”

“He blew up the cellar,” I amplified.

“—and I was banished forever from doing my work there,” Huff continued. “And when the magistrate got wind of it, anyplace else on St. Helena was forbidden to me as well. Betsy told me of this cave, where she went when in search of solitude. She offered it to me so I could continue my experiments in secrecy.”

The emperor nodded solemnly, as if to promise he would keep the old man's secret. Huff fixed me where I stood with his cloudy blue eyes. I sensed I was about to receive a lecture.

“Now, young lady, let me attempt to rectify the deficiencies in your education. The man who stands before you is a political and military genius. Now, don't look at me that way, Betsy. Take heed. Bonaparte is the greatest conqueror of our time! The victor at forty battles. Lord and master to seventy million souls.”

“Eighty,” the emperor corrected him politely.

“The rightful successor to Alexander the Great!” Huff continued with a flourish. He nearly toppled from his chair, and the emperor reached out to support him.

“Ah,” I said sarcastically. “You mean he was a dictator.”

“Dictator?” Huff said. “Do you call the president of the United States a dictator?”

“Don't tell me he was president, too,” I remarked, pretending to yawn.

“None of your nonsense, young lady,” Huff scolded me. “Bonaparte was elected as surely as any American president—by a vote of the people. The constitution that first brought him to power in France was approved by a vote of three million—to only twelve hundred against!”

“I must be truthful,” Bonaparte said. “You are not correct, monsieur.”

Huff and I looked at him questioningly.

“It was fifteen hundred against,” Bonaparte said, smiling. “And how I would have liked to have conversed with them.”

Huff chuckled.

“And when they made him first consul for life, more than half a million more people gave him their votes,” the old man added.

“But now there were ten thousand against,” Bonaparte interjected. “They did not mind the company of Napoleon for a little while, but for some, a lifetime seemed
excessif.
As old Docteur Franklin used to say in his
Poor Richard's Almanac:
‘Fish and visitors stink after three days.'”

I was not impressed. I had already known of
Bonaparte's military exploits. Knowing he was elected to the post of “professional murderer” did nothing to increase my admiration for him.

“You seem quite interested in my life, monsieur,” Bonaparte said to Huff.

“I am half French,” Huff replied. “My mother's side.”

“Ah,” said Bonaparte playfully. “I suppose that's why you knelt only on one knee.”

Huff smiled toothlessly at him. “And I am also an admirer of greatness,” the old man added.

Bonaparte swept off his hat and nodded in acknowledgment. I wrinkled my nose in disgust.

“It seems mademoiselle does not agree with your assessment,” the emperor remarked.

“She is young,” Huff said with a sigh. “She will learn.” His condescension was an annoyance, at best. Huff turned to me once more. “Napoleon Bonaparte brought the blessings of civilization to all of Europe. A gift of knowledge, justice, and order. Had Wellington not stopped him at the Battle of Waterloo—”

“I should have sent my reserve troops up sooner on the seventeenth,” Bonaparte muttered, as if refighting the battle in his brain. He shook his head.
“I wish I'd died in Moscow. Till then my fame was undiminished. If only heaven had sent me a bullet in the Kremlin! History would have compared me to Julius Caesar!”

“If those fools hadn't stopped him at Waterloo,” Huff said again, “he would have gone on to unite the globe, cleaning out the cobwebs of ignorance and injustice from every nation on earth!”

Bonaparte seemed well pleased with Huff's summation and added nothing to it. As for me, I merely shrugged.

“Look here,” Huff said to me, standing up with difficulty. He took my hand and led me to an old trunk. Huff struggled to release the catch on a chain around his neck. But his hands did not work too well for such a delicate operation.

“Allow me,” the emperor said, undoing the catch. A key dangled from the chain, and with a trembling hand, Huff used it to open the trunk.

Inside was a large flat rock with strange letters carved into its shiny black surface.

“
Mon Dieu!
The Rosetta stone!” Bonaparte exclaimed. “But—how?”

“Not the original, Your Highness,” Huff explained. “Just a copy.”

I held the lamp over the peculiar rock with its indecipherable message.

“So?” I said.

“This stone,” Huff said, taking both my hands in his and staring at me with singular intensity, “will unlock the mysteries of the ages. The secrets of the Pyramids! The riddle of the Sphinx!”

To me, it looked like a rock, not a riddle—with a bunch of boxes and birds and squiggly lines drawn all over it.

“Hold the lamp closer,” Huff instructed me. I did as he said. “This stone comes from Egypt, land of the Pharaohs. It is very ancient. Written on it is a single decree in three different tongues. Here we have Greek. Here, the same message in another ancient language, demotic.” The emperor and I looked over his shoulder as he pointed. “We scholars know how to read those languages. And here, our great mystery to solve: Egyptian hieroglyphs. We have only to compare the letters of the known languages to the symbols in the unknown one, and we will break the code.”

“So?” I said again. “And what does this have to do with the emperor?” Bonaparte surely did not like that I was talking about him as if he weren't present, but for the moment he said nothing.

“The emperor and his men retrieved the original of this precious relic during his military and scientific expedition to the shores of the Nile River in 1799. And, with it, we will be able to open a whole new world of understanding. We shall open a window on the magnificent world of ancient Egypt! How did they mummify their dead? We shall find out. Who built the Pyramids, how, and why? Where are the tombs of the great Pharaohs, with all their golden treasures, to be found?”

“Have you broken the code, as you say, monsieur?” Bonaparte asked.

“I am working on it,” Huff replied. “Not yet.” He lowered the trunk lid.

“It is treasures like these,” Huff said, “that Napoleon Bonaparte lifted from the depths of intellectual darkness into the sunlight of reason. Wherever he has gone, he has left the treasure of enlightenment behind.” The old man brushed the dust from his hands, as if he felt he'd had the final word.

I would have responded with an argument, but I really didn't know what to say. I had always admired and respected Huff. He had been one of my few confidants when I was younger. His admiration for Bonaparte took me entirely by surprise, and, I must
confess, my respect for Huff's judgment made me feel rather confused. Was it merely because he was half French that he praised the emperor? Or might it just possibly be that Huff was correct about our famous visitor's merits and that I was guilty of misjudging Bonaparte?

Before I could say anything, the emperor removed a pocket watch from his coat and glanced at it. He addressed both of us.

“Marchand is waiting to cut my hair,” he said. “So I fear we must be on our way.”

He kissed the old man on both cheeks, in the French manner. Rather excessive, I thought, but Huff seemed pleased. I gave Huff a hug in farewell, in the English manner.

As we left the laboratory, Bonaparte took a misstep and bumped into the bookcase. One volume toppled from it. Bonaparte picked up the book, blew the dust from the cover, and recited the title in French. It translated to
Aeronautical Experiments
—by Joseph-Michel and Jacques-Étienne Montgolfier.

“Ah!” Bonaparte said in recognition. “The Montgolfier boys!”

“You knew them?” Huff asked, excited.

“Mais oui!”
Bonaparte replied. “They wanted to
build one of their hot-air balloons for me—for aerial spying on the battlefield. I dismissed them, of course. A good general knows his enemy without viewing the top of his head.” The emperor returned the book to the shelf.

We bade
adieu
to Huff, who was staying behind to work on the hieroglyphics, and made our way out of the cave. I couldn't help wondering how feeble old Huff managed the difficult journey through the cave to and from his laboratory every day; but I suppose he had in determination what he lacked in vitality.

Twenty minutes later the emperor and I emerged into the daylight.

“It looks like rain,” I said. “We better go back.”

“Yes,” the Emperor replied. “But, as Docteur Franklin said, it is wise to make haste slowly.”

Hope was nuzzling Belle like an amorous suitor.

“Ah,” Bonaparte said. “Hope is like myself. He cannot resist a pretty face!”

We mounted up.

There was something I wanted to say to the emperor, now that Huff was no longer with us to take offense at my words.

“You stole the Rosetta stone, didn't you?”

The emperor shrugged. “Borrowed it, one could say.”

“My sister Jane says that you have hidden vast treasures. You have stolen from—”

Bonaparte turned on me angrily. “Would you like to know about Napoleon Bonaparte's treasures? Would you, Mademoiselle? Yes, they are vast, but they are not hidden away. The harbors of Antwerp and Flushing, where there is room for the largest fleets in the world. The waterworks I built at Dunkirk, Havre and Nice. The huge docks of Cherbourg, the port of Venice. The high roads from Antwerp to Amsterdam, from Mainz to Metz, and from Bordeaux to Bayonne. The passes over Simplon, La Corniche, and Mont Genèvre, which open the Alps in four directions and excel all the constructions of the Ancient Romans. More treasures? More?”