The Emerald Storm (15 page)

“I can’t understand them. They can understand us?”

“More than you know.”

We took a lane through the cane fields to a rocky outcrop with a view over a forested valley. Beyond was the deep blue of the Caribbean, its shallows the color of angel eyes, its beaches seemingly poured from the produced sugar. What might such an island be like with a less ruthless economy? Even in the wind I continued to sweat in my coat and vest, a necessary uniform when visiting with a governor. I kept sipping from my flask.

“I’m told by Sidney Smith that you’re the last man to see L’Ouverture alive,” Lovington said. “Is this true?”

“Yes. Except for the guards who killed him, I suppose.”

“In his introductory letter, Smith said you found part of an ancient treasure the French believe could hold strategic secrets.”

“A cad named Leon Martel apparently has a strong imagination, but yes.”

“Do you know where the rest of the hoard is?”

“No.” I thought it best not to mention L’Ouverture’s enigmatic clue; let that be a card that Astiza and I kept until we learned more. “But if the Black Spartacus knew, probably other blacks in Saint-Domingue know, too. That’s why you must send us there.”

“I hear they want to call it Haiti. Imagine that, choosing their own name.” He was pensive, a man who suspected that his way of life was slipping away as we marched into the modern nineteenth century. Everyone gets old, and all of us are eventually defeated by change.

“I need passage to the island so I can contact their generals,” I said. “I understand a man named Dessalines has taken charge.”

“A black butcher. Worse than Toussaint L’Ouverture.”

“But a winner, too. The French are falling back.”

“Yes.” Lovington bit his lip.

“I’ll learn what I can from the French, trade it to Dessalines for their own secrets, and discover whether this treasure exists and how to get it.”

“And then what?”

“Get your garrison’s help to fetch it.” It was a lie, but a necessary one. I’d no idea who would prevail if the blacks, French, and English battled over treasure, but I didn’t see any of them deserving it more than me. I hoped to use the secret of its whereabouts to get back Harry and the emerald long before the rest of them had at it, and then take all I could carry. I’d also give payback to Martel, killing the villain once I had my boy.

“How will you persuade Dessalines?” the governor asked.

“First, I’m American, and the blacks have relied on trade with my country the entire decade of their revolt. They will listen. Second, I tried to save L’Ouverture, and they’ll be curious about his fate. Third, I’m going to spy on the French and offer my military expertise to their Negro strategists.”

“You’re going to help the blacks win?” The thought made him uneasy.

“To help Britain conquer the French. It’s a game of enemy and ally. You know that.”

He nodded reluctantly. “You’re white. Dessalines may just impale you on a stake as he has many others.”

“But affable.” Actually, I was fearful of going to Saint-Domingue, but what choice did I have? “Once we betray the French positions, everyone may want to hang us. A pox on all of them. They shouldn’t have taken my son.”

Astiza smiled at this, a reassertion our host noticed.

“Your wife should stay here. Lady Lovington would enjoy the company.”

“You’re very kind,” I said, as a way of sparing Astiza from having to answer.

“You’ll find Carlisle very comfortable,” the governor told her. “And safe.”

“I care more about my son’s safety than my own.”

“Yes.” I was surprised he wasn’t more insistent at her keeping to a woman’s place, but he was shrewd in his own way, and maybe not all that eager to have my spouse give his wife odd ideas. “And there is one advantage to going with your husband.”

“What’s that?”

“The French commander, Rochambeau, has a weakness for ladies.”

“Your meaning?” I asked, even though I knew perfectly well his meaning.

“He’s the son of the general who helped your nation win independence at Yorktown, but he doesn’t have his father’s intelligence or character. His strategy is terror, which has united the whole island against him. His distraction from disaster is women.”

“You want me to prostitute my wife?”

“I think he’s suggesting I play a role again,” Astiza said.

“Exactly. Rochambeau is the French weakness, not their strength. Instead of leading an attack on Dessalines, he holds balls and carnivals. If you want to learn the French strategic positions, I believe Mrs. Gage may discover more with flirtation than you will with a sketchbook and telescope.”

Well, she’d already posed as L’Ouverture’s concubine. And we needed
something
to take to Dessalines. “Flirt, nothing more.”

“Of course.”

“I know where to draw the line, Ethan.”

“Rochambeau is ruled by his emotions,” Lovington said. “Such a man is vulnerable.”

This was a terrible idea, except it wasn’t. Astiza would cutlass her own arm off before being stuck for weeks or months with an aristocratic twit like Lady Lovington. She was hot to hunt for Harry and would castrate Leon Martel herself if she got the chance. Her sorceress reverie in the ship’s hold had warned her of things, and she wanted to manipulate fate by doing the unexpected. And I would be along to defend her honor. “Surely this French general is too cautious to woo the wife of an American diplomat,” I said.

“On the contrary, I think making men cuckolds gives him as much pleasure as the sex itself. He beds with impunity, protected by his soldiers.”

“That’s not reassuring.”

“Ethan, it will never go that far; I’m pretending only.”

I sighed. “Yes. What could ever go wrong?”

Astiza turned to the governor. “You must deliver us to Saint-Domingue.”

Lovington nodded. “Your wife has a decisive frame of mind.”

“That’s one way of putting it.”

“We’ve captured a French privateer. We’ll take you to Cap-François in that, still posing as a frog vessel. You’ll both row ashore as Yankee diplomats.”

“Then it’s settled,” she said.

“I don’t get a husband’s vote?”

“What
is
your vote, Ethan?” She was erect as a knight.

Well, it was clear enough what my answer was supposed to be. I reluctantly saluted her. “That you use your charms to find our son so I can shoot Martel once and for all. Maybe this Rochambeau, too. I’ll aim low.”

“And once more you get to play the hero, Mr. Gage,” Lovington said. “A spy in the French camp and an adventurer in the jungle, conspiring with savage black rebels on an island set afire.” He beamed. “The ultimate object of which is, let’s be clear, to keep Carlisle here safe.”

Part II

Chapter 17

Y
ellow fever starts with sharp pain. Not just in stomach and loins but, oddly, in the feet and eye sockets. Eyeballs feel as if they might explode, the afflicted told me in Saint-Domingue. Then they become glazed and gush with tears.

Each case follows the same progression. Faces flush. Fever rages. The sick find it hard to breathe and fear suffocation, puffing in terror. A thick, white-yellow fluid coats the tongue and teeth, vomit yellow, feces red. The mouth blackens with a crust. Patients cannot drink. Wounds open spontaneously, inflamed and eerily deep. It’s as if the body is dissolving from within, and the inflicted’s weight drops by half.

A ghastlier disease can scarcely be imagined.

Cruelly, the patient recovers, or seems to. Usually this rally only signals the end. A few hours respite, and then there are agonizing cramps, nosebleeds, and a flagging pulse. Liquids gush from all orifices. The body is “already a corpse,” in the words of one doctor. Physicians can think of little to do but drain pints of blood in a vain attempt to balance the body’s humors. In the French hospitals, every bed was accompanied by a bowl of blood.

The bleeding never works. The only thing that can be said for this cure is that it hastens the end. Soldiers viewed confinement in a hospital as a death sentence. Of ten who contracted the disease, nine died.

Doctors were defeated. Then they died, too.

Such was the horror that had annihilated Napoleon’s Caribbean legions. Bonaparte recruited two regiments of Polish mercenaries, and half were dead within ten days of landing. A Swedish ship arrived with military munitions; every crew member expired but a cabin boy. Newly arrived French officers succumbed so quickly that those already on the island avoided befriending them, lest the new companion be in a shroud a week later. What the French called
mal de Siam
, named after similar fevers seen in the kingdoms of Asia, retreated in the cooler winter months. But it doomed every campaign and made a mockery of every march. The white race seemed cursed.

The remnants of French power had retreated to Cap-François on the north Haitian coast, a ring of fortifications keeping their former slaves at bay. Here they held, and withered. The grand avenue of trees that led into the city from the plantations was denuded, its palms chopped down to make breastworks. Between the stumps were crosses and the freshly heaped red dirt of graves, both filled and waiting. The few slaves who’d not escaped the city were made to dig dozens of new holes each day in anticipation that they would soon be filled by their masters.

The disease was worse in humid summer, and medical belief held that miasmas of air that rose from the swamps caused the malady. But as food grew scarcer and the siege continued, what the British called yellow jack persisted into the cooler months of October and November. Anxious celebrations were held by the French aristocracy to stave off despair. As wine cellars emptied, courage became more and more dependent on rum.

Here in this sunny death house we’d seek our son, Harry, and his kidnapper, Leon Martel. It was early November. We’d celebrated his third birthday of June 6 in his absence, and prayed he was well enough to see a fourth. Nothing was more commonplace in 1803 than the death of young children. For Astiza, separation had been agony. For me, it meant guilt and anger. I condemned myself for not better safeguarding our boy and chafed under my unaccustomed saddle, responsibility. I was a father, but so far mostly in name only.

From the sea, Cap-François still had the pleasing prospect of many a tropic town. A broad bay on Saint-Domingue’s north coast was fronted by a palm-lined boulevard at the water’s edge called the Quay Louis, a name left from royalist days. The city behind was like a stage set, its narrow flat platter of buildable land a porch in front of steep green mountains. It shimmered in the sun as if lit for effect.

Next to the quay was a row of sturdy brick and stone warehouses with red-tile roofs, such as one might find in a European port. In happier times this harbor area was thronged with wagons of rum and sugar, swank carriages, auctions of slaves, and quick commerce: island planters averaged higher annual incomes than French royalists had once boasted at home, and the nouveau-riche colonists spent their money as fast as it came in. Luxury furnishings would be hoisted from ferrying longboats. Trunks of dresses arrived from Paris shops, and tea and dinnerware came packed from China after transit in Europe. Trains of chained African captives would shuffle to be inspected, just as I had shuffled in chains in Tripoli. They were stripped naked and prodded like pieces of fruit.

But now the warehouses and factories were shuttered after a decade of war. The promenade looked tired and dirty, dotted with broken carts no one bothered to repair. There were drifts of refuse. Homeless blacks camped there in thatch shelters, their owners dead from massacre or fever. These Negroes didn’t flee because they feared being drafted by Dessalines and his rebels outside the fortifications. They weren’t claimed by anyone else because there was nothing for them to do, and no food left to feed them. They foraged, stole, and waited for the city to fall.

Beyond the quay were Catholic steeples and a grid of streets as neat as a Roman camp, leading to government houses, barracks, parks, and a parade ground. Backing all were tropical mountains so precipitous that they formed a natural wall, the height exaggerated by towers of cloud poised like opera curtains and colored by rainbows. The tangle of jungle and slippery mud was so steep that it made trying to attack from that direction a strategic impossibility for a large army. In a rain, muddy torrents ran down from the hills and through the city.

To the east, however, a river debouched from the Haitian plain that had once been a rich network of plantations. Between this river and the protective mountains, Cap-François was nearly flat and open toward the dawn. There the old sugar fields seemed to run forever, and there the rebel army prowled. French ramparts and redoubts built of piled dirt, logs, and stones snaked across from river to mountains to protect this last French capital, tricolor flags marking the position of cannon batteries. Beyond were columns of smoke and, Astiza and I assumed, the notoriously cruel general we had to seek if we were to learn more about the treasure of Montezuma. If Toussaint L’Ouverture had been the Black Spartacus, Jean-Jacques Dessalines was portrayed by his followers as the Black Caesar, and by his enemies as the Black Attila.

We were ferried ashore from the captured privateer that Lord Lovington had provided, an English crew flying the French flag from the ship until they could creep back out of the harbor.

We told authorities at the quay steps that the brig, the
Toulon
, was en route from Charleston to Martinique and had dropped my wife and me on a diplomatic mission. With Bonaparte’s permission, I was to judge if the French attempt to hold Saint-Domingue could ever succeed and, if not, make recommendations to the American and French governments on the disposition of Louisiana.

It was plausible enough. Yet sentries stared at us as if we were lost.

Why had we been put ashore in Hades?

What a wonder the Paris of the Antilles must once have been! Clear, warm water lapped at mossy stone steps that led from the boat landing to a stone plaza between town and sea. The bay was blue sapphire, the shallow sands golden. A stone balustrade worthy of Versailles marked the perimeter of the breakwater, but after years of war it was marred, chips knocked away by cannon and musket shot. Decorative pillars held up what once must have been a welcoming monument, but that statuary, too, had been blasted away like the nose of the Sphinx. Other royal statues in the parks were headless, a reminder of revolution a dozen years before.