The Emerald Storm (39 page)

Incongruously, on Astiza’s neck was the golden pendant Napoleon had granted us, that
N
surrounded by a laurel leaf. Maybe that was the curse! I yanked it off her and let it drop in the sea.

Around my own neck was still the magnifying glass for the emerald I had swallowed.

The three of us clung to the wheel fragment, but now our weight was almost doubled. The wood sank, and we sank with it, the sea closing over our heads.

Astiza released her grip and we floated up again, Harry and I carried by the wheel and my wife thrashing.

“We need more wood!” I cried. “There! Salvation!” One of the ship’s masts rolled in the tempest like a log.

She gasped and paddled to me again, exhausted. As she grabbed we sank again, so I decided to let go. But when I tried she insistently pushed Harry and the wheel against me and let go herself.

We surfaced.

“Ethan, you’re stronger. Hold on.”

“You take it, too!”

“It won’t float the three of us.” She coughed. “My strength is almost gone. Hold Harry, and we’ll both swim for the mast.”

“Then you take the wheel!”

She shook her head. “Harry needs it. I can’t carry him anymore, Ethan. I’m fading.” She was drifting out of my reach. “Keep the wood and our son.”

“Come here! I’ll help you swim!”

“Don’t you dare let him sink.” Her eyes were glazed, but her tone still urgent. “You mustn’t let him go, Ethan. He’s your responsibility now.” She made swimming motions, but they were feeble. She almost lolled in the waves, trying to take a breath. In my exhaustion, she was a thousand miles away.

“This way!” I don’t think she heard me because I sobbed the words and didn’t have the strength myself to chase both her and the mast. Harry was wheezing, half full of water, and the wheel seemed pitifully inadequate. I glanced back. The breakers on the reef were close, furious, crashing down to throw off huge clouds of spume. Would any of us survive crossing those shallows? We needed the mast! A wave closed over Harry and me, pushing us down, and so I kicked until finally the wheel fragment helped bring us up.

The mast rolled closer.

Where was Astiza?

There, on a swell.

I saw the wave lift her up as if she’d floated free of our miseries, her beautiful black hair framed against green water like a sea fan. As her head slipped below the surface the wave kept lifting her up, up, up, so that I saw her entire body for a moment, suspended as if captured in glass, backlit by a watery sun, a silhouette that left me aching with longing, regret, and shame. Her legs, her dress, suspended in green amber.

There was something else in the wave, too, a dark blob just below the surface. It was our diving bell, I realized, like a waterlogged cork. When the mainmast went over, it must have floated free.

Then Astiza slid onto the swell’s backside and was gone.

“Astiza!” It was a croak, not a cry. Harry and I went under again, about to follow his mother. I had energy for one last rise, breaking clear, the wheel beginning to loosen.

The wood, our last hope, slipped away.

So we sank a final time. We, too, were doomed.

And then something gripped and hauled, as strong as the arm of Poseidon.

We erupted out of the water and were thrown onto the mast. I retched, trying to get air. “Hold, white man!” It was Jubal. He’d been clinging to the timber and snagged us. I tucked my arm inside a rope, and as Harry threatened to slip free, the Negro grabbed him and pulled my boy to his own chest, his other arm locked on the mast as if welded. No, he was
tied
; he’d lashed himself to the wood.

“Astiza?” It was merely confusion. I was about done.

“Hold!” And then it was our turn to be lifted skyward, higher and higher, impossibly high, rising on the crest of a breaker as if the mainmast of
Pelee
had become a flying machine itself. We were hurled forward, impossibly fast toward whatever was beyond that line of white, and then fell as it broke. We plummeted down like going over a waterfall.

Thunder as the wave hit and broke on the coral, the whole mast underwater. We bumped and skidded on the reef. I clung from instinct, not sensibility, while we rolled.

Then somehow we were beyond, tumbled upright into the air for another agonized breath, and skimmed toward a beach where sand was almost black. The log grounded, started to suck back out, and then another wave struck and we lurched even farther in. Water hammered, sand filled every orifice, and I had no sense of where I was or what I was doing.

“Let go!” Jubal was waist-deep, yanking to free me from the rope. I came clear, body battered. Harry hung from Jubal’s arm as if dead. The sight of my son was the only thing that kept me going, so I stood, staggering in the swirling surf, and then we awkwardly plunged toward land. The mast pursued, as if to knock us flat after saving us.

I fell and it struck, but it just knocked me farther ashore. I crawled in foam while the wooden spar rolled away from me.

A final wave carried me far enough to get clear of the sea. I wiggled upward like a turtle.

I was on terra firma.

I looked back at the fury we’d survived. The reef was a leaping boil of crashing waves, and the water between it and shore a soup of foam. Beyond was a tormented sea, some swells picked out by the sun and glowing green and blue, and others shaded by dark cloud and gray as iron. My body ached as if beaten by a club. I was half blind from salt, reddened from cuts and scratches, and emptied of will.

I was also alive, and horrified by that fact.

Because it meant that I was still conscious enough to recognize that Astiza, who’d seen our fate as she peered into the future, was gone.

Chapter 45

I
shuddered as I’d never shuddered in my life, from cold, exhaustion, anxiety, sorrow. Harry! I couldn’t stop shaking.

I looked dimly about. There lay a great still form, almost as dark and massive as a sea lion. It was Jubal, lying on his side on the beach.

Blowing sand made a horizontal hail that stung like insects. I couldn’t stand, or even properly crawl on hands and knees; the strength required was beyond me. So I bellied toward him, pitted by grit, dreading the vacancy I might find on his other side.

But no, there was little Horus, coughing and shivering as the great black hero kneaded his chest and served as human windbreak. Jubal’s staring eyes bulged from exhaustion, like stones of quartz and obsidian. He was enfeebled as I was, but he gave a weary grin. “Alive.”

The Negro had saved my son. And me.

I dragged myself around so we formed shelter on both sides of Harry. The beach was dark volcanic sand. Just yards behind us mountainous surf was crashing, but I couldn’t bear to look at it. I dreaded that it might give up the corpse of my wife.

So the three of us fell unconscious.

When I woke, it was late day. The sun was lost behind black cloud to the west, where I presumed the hurricane had gone, but the sky to the east was clearing. The sea was pitching chaos, and I was stiff with cold in this tropic clime. We were pimpled with blown sand, and surf had thrown so many great white drifts of foam upon our strand that it looked as if it had snowed. Palms had been stripped of most of their fronds. No bird dared fly yet. The world had been scoured.

Groaning, I sat up. I felt completely hollowed: of strength, of emotion, of purpose. I’d presided over catastrophe. I’d failed in what I now realized was the only important task in my life, to love and be loved, and to preserve that love by all means possible and necessary.

Love, the
mambo
had said, that was the basis of faith.

My wife was gone for jewels and glory, the vanity of my being important, the nudging of world affairs. She’d suspected her fate when we first crossed the Atlantic. We’d tried to steer destiny a different direction. Futility.

And yet she’d gone with me onto
Pelee
in the end, never breathing a word of fear. Somehow she thought it would save Harry. Somehow she still loved me, she’d said. I clung to those words with wonder.

It took a while to steel myself to squint up and down the beach. Yes, there were bodies there.

None looked like that of a woman.

Jubal was stirring, too.

“Can you take the boy up into the scrub while I check for survivors?”

He followed my gaze; we both knew there wouldn’t be any. Why expose Harry to a line of corpses?

“Oui.
I’ll look for uncontaminated water and meet you at that shattered palm.” He pointed, and I nodded. My mouth was cotton, too.

I stood, bent as an old man, and staggered down to where the drowned rolled at the edge of the surf. Out beyond the waves still boomed on the reef, and a thousand fragments of wood had been cast ashore from
Pelee
. Enough to build a warm fire, if I could figure out a way to light it.

I fingered my chest. The magnifying glass was still around my neck.

Maybe tomorrow, if the sun came out.

Astonishing how quickly we begin to think of the future, even when defeated by the past. We close ranks like a Roman legion stepping over its own dead.

The beach was a quarter mile long between headlands. I found five corpses. Two blacks, three whites.

One had his mouth set in a rictus of a snarl. It was Martel.

Napoleon’s agent seemed smaller and deflated in death, his clothes shredded by coral, his shoes missing, his feet wrinkled and white. Our nemesis would have only one aerial flight, it seemed, a glide down to hell. His eyes were open and staring with horror as if he’d seen that descent.

Yet was he really a tool of the first consul? Could his last act have been to lie about Napoleon simply to torment me, to mislead me that the political Prometheus I’d been tied to for years, the great Bonaparte, had betrayed me and my family for a miniature model of what might or might not be a flying machine? I still had one of the toys in my pocket and reached to finger it.

With horror I felt a chain as well. Astiza’s pendant, with Napoleon’s cursed
N
, had not sunk in the ocean. It had perversely fallen back into my vest like a curse I couldn’t get rid of.

Was Martel laughing from Hades right now, amused to think he’d left me trusting nothing?

I nudged with my foot to roll over his body. As I did so an arm flopped free, its sleeve disintegrated. The skin was so laced with coral cuts that for a second I didn’t even spy the design on the inside of his bicep. Then it startled me. I leaned closer.

It was a tattoo.

Burned into his skin was a
N
, surrounded by a laurel wreath, the mark of Bonaparte that the villain could tuck privately against his body. Leon Martel hadn’t lied. He had not been a renegade policeman, a refugee from the criminal underworld, or at least not
just
that. He’d truly been Napoleon’s agent.

As if on God’s cue I doubled over then, my gut wrenched, and I scampered up the beach to answer nature’s urgent call at the edge of the scrub. A gush of waste and seawater came out of me, the filthy torrent leaving me shaking. And there it was, spattered with shit, the stone I’d arguably sacrificed my wife and happiness for: the wretched emerald.

Cursed indeed.

I looked out to sea. Somewhere on that reef was the treasure of an ancient empire, and I’d leave it to Jubal whether to lead Haitians back someday to dive if they dared. Salvage when the sea was smooth sapphire and angry gods were remote. I couldn’t bear it anymore.

And my own stone? I was sorely tempted to kick it away or bury it in the sand. Its beauty was bitter reproach. But then I thought of my boy, motherless now, and his father with no trade but gambling and adventure. What kind of upbringing could I give him?

Life doesn’t stop, and he had all of his ahead. If Astiza was truly gone, I was his sole parent now and would have to decide what to do next. Maybe Philadelphia, and Quakers, to help put sense into him that I didn’t have. Maybe he’d absorb Franklin’s wisdom when I had not. I owed him time, and hope.

Or maybe a school in London, where I’d be closer to my enemies.

So, grimacing, I wiped the damnable stone off and pocketed it, too, determined to sell it as a trust for my son.

I must remain destitute myself to remind me of the dross of dreams. I must commit to something larger than my own retirement.

I had to find grim meaning out of disaster.

So I limped to make reunion with Jubal and Harry.

“Papa!” No cry gladdened my heart more, that at last he seemed to recognize and need me. He clung like a little monkey, sobbing for reasons he didn’t fully understand himself. Finally he asked, which he must, “Where’s Mama?”

There was no corpse. I’d seen the diving bell, and other jetsam. Yet there could be no reasonable hope, either. “Swimming, Horus.” I hadn’t the heart to tell him what must be true.

“She’s not coming?”

I sighed. “I hope she’s saved herself somewhere else. We’ll pray for that, you and me, because she’d like that.”

“I’m cold, and scared of the ocean.”

“We’re safe for now, and tomorrow we’ll find help.”

“I miss Mama.”

“Me, too, more than I believed possible.” And so we wept, united by tragedy. “I’ve missed
you
, more than you know.”

We slept as best we could, the wind slowly dying in the night, and by the next morning the sun was bright and birds were flying above a ravaged forest. The sea had settled a great deal, and thankfully sucked the bodies back out of sight. Of Jubal’s remaining comrades, including Antoine, we saw no sign.

So I’d killed them, too.

I still trembled lest the sea give up Astiza. So long as it didn’t, there was the cruelest kind of hope. I knew she must be dead, so why did my heart deny it? Because there was something magical about her I’d sensed when digging her out from that first cannon-shattered room in Alexandria. I couldn’t imagine the world without her light. I’d watched her drown, yet didn’t have the instinctual sense of loss I would have expected. We’d ended, but I didn’t feel it. I needed a body and didn’t have one.