Authors: William Dietrich
The Emerald Storm (8 page)
Frotté nodded. “And then kill Martel, on ground of your choosing.”
S
o after the robbery of my emerald and the kidnapping of my son, I found myself scaling a prison wall in wretched spring weather at the edge of the Alps. When the woman at the window of the Fortress de Joux opened her mouth to scream, I put my finger to my lips and raised my brows suggestively. It’s difficult to appear suave when dangling from a grappling hook above a precipitous drop, laden with equipment and spattered with snow, but I do have practiced charm.
Accordingly, I wasn’t surprised when she hesitated in her alarm. An encouraging smile from me, and she bent forward to peer into the blackness at my peculiar situation. Motioning for the damsel to wait, I finished crab-walking to a crenellation and hauled myself over the lip of the wall, muscles shaking. I looked back down. I couldn’t see aeronaut George Cayley or his contraption, but I tied off the rope to the stonework and jerked the line as a signal. It jerked back, like a fish on the end of the line.
Well, first things first. Glancing about for sentries (they were huddled inside as promised, the idlers), I danced lightly to the parapet door of the tower I’d just scaled and rapped. The beauty opened it a crack and looked out cautiously. “Monsieur, why were you hanging like a spider outside my window?” She was ripe, rumpled, and Rubenesque. Lord, it’s hard to be married.
“Not a spider but a butterfly, my wings opened by the fires of love,” I cheerfully lied, a necessity with strange women. I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, which gave her a start but also a blush of excitement. And yes, I was mindful that my wife was in theory somewhere in the castle below, pretending to be L’Ouverture’s long-lost mistress. What can I say? Ours is a unique marriage, and the fate of nations was at stake, not to mention the rescue of brave little Harry. “Prepare yourself, my love, while I haul up a surprise.”
“Monsieur,” she said, confused but intrigued, “do I know you?”
“If you know longing, if you ache for beauty as I do, if you dream desire, then you know my heart. Please, patience for just minutes more! I will confess all, soon!” And I gently pushed her backward and shut the door. With any luck she was a romantic nitwit who would sleepily confuse me with some other swain who’d given her the eye.
Then I hurried back to the fortress edge and hauled on the rope. Cayley’s flying machine, a twenty-foot-long cylinder of sticks and twine wrapped in canvas, as delicate as a veined leaf, came lurching up toward me. I heaved it over to lie on the parapet and cast the rope back down for the inventor to pull himself up. The plan was he’d assemble his flying machine while I rescued the Negro. Assuming either of us was still alive by then, we’d trust our lives to something that was little more than lattice and oiled cotton.
Well, it would be quicker than waiting for the guillotine.
For days, Cayley had tried to assure me he knew what he was doing. “The wings of Daedalus and Icarus need not be mere myth, Mr. Gage,” he told me as we prepared for our mission. “Not only is man destined to fly, he already has.”
I had peered upward skeptically. “Not that I’ve seen.”
“The Berber Ibn Firnas launched himself from a mountain near Cordoba with artificial wings in about 875. The monk Eilmer flew from a tower at Malmesbury Abbey just before the Norman Conquest. Leonardo da Vinci sketched flying machines, and the Spaniard Diego Aquilera flew from the highest part of the castle of Coruña del Conde just ten years ago.”
“What happened to them all?”
“Oh, they crashed. None died, however. A few broken bones for the early ones and just bruises for Aguilera.”
“I suppose that’s progress.”
“I’ve studied bird wings and learned from my predecessors’ failures, which included the lack of a tail. I believe we can launch from Fort de Joux and glide for miles, far outdistancing any pursuit. All it takes is courage.”
“There’s a fine line between heroism and idiocy.” I’m an expert.
“My test models suggest curved wings provide more lift, just like a bird, and the knack is adjusting the weight. The real problem is stopping. I’ve yet to duplicate the legs and talons of a raptor.”
“So you’re proposing a controlled fall down the side of a mountain and a crash at high speed? Just to be clear what we’re planning.”
“No, I’m proposing that we aim for a lake for our landing.”
“Landing where there is no land? End of winter? Freezing water?”
“Frozen water, perhaps. It will take the French entirely by surprise, won’t it? Ingenuity against élan, Ethan, that’s the English secret. This is just a first step. Someday ordinary men will fly everywhere in luxurious comfort, in enormous padded chairs in floating cabins, attended by beautiful servant girls feeding them courses worthy of a Sunday dinner.”
Obviously the man should be packed off to an asylum, but what stopped me from laughing is that while we had a plan to get into L’Ouverture’s prison, we didn’t have one to get back out. Or, if we did, we could expect the entire angry garrison to hunt us down. The French would spare no effort to recapture the Black Spartacus, and Cayley was the only person with a scheme to give us a head start.
When every other option means imprisonment or execution, lunacy becomes attractive. So I’d signed us on.
Cayley called his artificial bird a glider. “Unfortunately, it can only descend, not ascend,” he said.
“I can do that already, by myself.”
“But not with the gentleness of a feather, right?”
“Frankly, I don’t like falling at all.”
“It will be like sliding down a banister.”
Our strategy was threefold. The glider for escape, I to crack open our prisoner’s cell, and Astiza laying the groundwork with womanly charm. L’Ouverture had a reputation as a prodigious womanizer that left me, frankly, a little envious. He’d had black, white, and brown wives and concubines, and Astiza had approached the French commandant by posing as one of these. She suggested to the French that she might solicit treasure secrets with warmth where cold wouldn’t do, seducing L’Ouverture for his secrets in return for a share of any treasure. She’d fled the war-torn tropic colony and was trying to make her way in cruel France, she explained.
I wasn’t entirely happy at her calm confidence in being able to pull this charade off. The less innocent a man is, the more innocent he hopes his wife will be. But I knew better than anyone just how irresistible Astiza could be when she put her mind to it. I was sending her into the lion’s den and hoping she could persuade L’Ouverture to join our lunatic escape without too many objections. Worse, I knew she’d likely achieve the coup. She’d be seductive and ruthless, persuasive but distant, winsome but steely, with hardly an extra breath. Women are by natural law inferior, Napoleon insists, except that every time I meet one I’m forced to doubt the truth of his maxim.
We had two reasons for this seduction. One was that Astiza as pretend mistress could demand that the viewing port into Toussaint’s cell be closed for conjugal privacy, giving me time to break out L’Ouverture from the roof. The other was to alert the imprisoned general that he was about to be rescued and to prepare him for being hoisted through a hole and catapulted into space. There’d be no time for debate. We’d flee across the castle battlements and use Cayley and his flying machine to meet Frotté and his mix of spies where they waited in a snowy meadow. Then we’d flee to the Swiss border and onward down the Rhine to the North Sea and Britain.
Or such was the plan.
“How many can this flying machine carry?” I’d asked Cayley.
“By my calculations, three,” the inventor had replied.
“I count four.” Gambling gives one familiarity with arithmetic.
“One of you will surely be dead by the time you launch,” Frotté pointed out. “And we don’t have time to invent a bigger flying machine.”
He had a point. The only thing worse than our scheme was doing nothing at all.
The first problem I must overcome was that the only way out of our prisoner’s cell was an overhead skylight, bare of glass but grilled with stout iron bars.
“It will take me until Easter to saw through them,” I’d objected. That holiday was four days after our planned assault.
“English science has the answer, Ethan,” Frotté assured. Why a French-born spy was so enamored of English ingenuity was unclear, though I suspected it had something to do with the payments he received from Sir Sidney Smith. Or perhaps it was my own reputation. I am, after all, a savant of sorts, an electrician, antiquarian, marksman, and expert in plunging boats.
But first I had to keep the girl in the window quiet. We hadn’t predicted that I’d encounter a sentry of such beauty, a woman as fair and encapsulated as Rapunzel, anxiously awaiting rendezvous with me, a married man. I was entirely too civilized to simply bludgeon the girl insensible, and even if I’d wanted to be unfaithful, I didn’t have the time. What to do? While Cayley climbed, I tapped on the maiden’s door again.
Astiza, I was fairly certain, was meanwhile waiting impatiently in L’Ouverture’s cell below.
The lovely answered, wrapped in a cloak artfully opened just enough to suggest there was nothing underneath. Since I had turned my back, she’d built up a little fire in her chamber hearth and pinched her cheeks to give them color. She grasped and pulled on me. “Come inside before you wither.”
No chance of that. “I’m glad you keep a careful watch.”
“It’s Papa who watches
me
. You’re so clever to come up the wall.”
Was she the commandant’s daughter? And did her lack of astonishment mean suitors were reliably persistent? Well, to look at her I could see why. She enjoyed the attention, too, the minx.
“It’s Papa I worry about,” I whispered. “I saw a shadow on a distant parapet and worry it might be a soldier gone to alert your father.”
Her eyes grew wide with alarm.
“The safest thing to do is pretend you’re fast asleep while I wait and watch. It’s imperative that you don’t stir an inch, no matter what noises you hear. Now, when all is quiet—if no alarm is sounded—I will come to you later. Let’s give it an hour, to be safe. Will you wait for me, my pretty?”
She nodded, excited at the promise of sexual skullduggery. Thank God this wasn’t my daughter, and thank God I so far had no daughters to police, since girls sound like a positive plague to raise and govern. I wouldn’t let a man like me within five hundred yards of a daughter. “Wait for me in bed. Not a sound, now!”
“How gallant you are!” The cloak slipped from one shoulder as she closed her tower door. I peeked as far as I could, glimpsing a swell of a breast, and then congratulated myself on my own rectitude for not following instinct and wrecking our mission. As a husband, I am a model of restraint.
Yes. Onward to Astiza and L’Ouverture, waiting in his cell.
W
e live in an age of science, modernity, change, and odd invention. It’s hard even to keep up. I was assaulting a castle because French and British lunatics thought it might be possible to flap around like birds, upending military strategy and everyday experience. Dangerous missions are often inspired by impossible ideas instead of sensible ones, and the revolutionary fervor that gave rise to notions such as equality have also uncorked the dreams of every tinkerer in Europe and America. Britain leads the world in discovery and experimentation, and I was told the English had come up with scientific sorcery that would make quick work of the iron grill above L’Ouverture’s cell.
“It’s carbon dioxide squeezed at 870 pounds per square inch,” Frotté explained as we prepared for the mission to break the prisoner out.
“Carbon what?”
“It’s a component of air,” said Cayley, the thirty-year-old lunatic who dreamed of flying. He looked the part of inventor, with high forehead, long nose, lip pursed in contemplation, and inquisitive eyes. He seemed as puzzled by my presence as I was by his. “The chemist Priestley published a paper before we were born on how dripping oil of vitriol on chalk can produce the gas in pure form.”
“I think I missed that one.”
“If you condense the resulting carbon dioxide tight enough, it liquefies. Expose it to air again and the liquid flashes into gas. Evaporation turns the carbon dioxide into a snow with a temperature more than a hundred degrees below zero.”
“I can scarcely conceive of more useless information.” Who cares what air is made of?
“We’re going to give you a canister of it to release on the bars,” Frotté explained. “The iron will go brittle from the cold, and a sharp blow with a chisel should snap it like an icicle. You’ll punch through to L’Ouverture in seconds.”
“See what science is for?” Cayley added.
“I’m something of an expert on electricity myself. I’ve used it to fry my enemies, find ancient hiding places, and make the nipples of ladies hard during private demonstrations.”
They ignored this. “The only drawback is that you’ll be carrying a carbon dioxide bomb of such extreme pressure that it could explode, ripping apart your torso and instantly freezing your guts,” cautioned Frotté. “The result would be startling and painful.”
“Not to mention fatal.”
“Which means it’s best to be careful,” added Cayley unnecessarily.
“Why doesn’t one of
you
carry it?”
“Because you’ve the incentive to rescue your wife, while George here will be busy with his flying machine,” said Frotté. “There’s no room for me, so I’ll organize the horses. Thanks to your emerald, fate has provided us with the hero of Acre and Tripoli for a most truly dangerous part.” He hoped flattery would give me spine.
“It
was
my emerald. Now that damned French policeman has it.”
“Once you know all of L’Ouverture’s secrets, imagine what you can bargain for!”
With those words in my ear, I scuttled across the castle roof. There was a flat parapet following the walls, towers poking up here and there. The center of the castle was a series of barrel-arched stone vaults over the cells. I’d been briefed on the location of L’Ouverture, and faint light emanated from a hole in the center of his vault. Across the hole were iron bars, and down it, I hoped, were the people I was to break from prison.