Sir Sidney enlisted me in an elaborate French royalist conspiracy financed with English gold. That flamboyant officer had been fighting the Corsican since Bonaparte was an artilleryman who drove the British from Toulon and Smith was the English daredevil who burned the French fleet before retreating. The two have been scrapping every since.
I had a belt of francs, Louis, and English sovereigns strapped around my waist and another reserve tucked in my boot. I’d also retained two trinkets from the Caribbean. The first was a pendant with the letter N surrounded by a laurel leaf, which had been a gift from Napoleon. The second was a golden Aztec curio of a man astride a delta-shaped object that might be wings, and thus might represent a flying machine from the ancient past. Either or both might win me access to France’s ruler, so I could finish him off. There was also a pistol in my greatcoat pocket and a tomahawk in my sash, meaning all I lacked was a good Pennsylvania long rifle.
Our strategic situation was building to a climax. I’d met Napoleon when he was a mere ambitious general. He’d since seized power, gone back to war with England, and had one hundred thousand men eager to jump the Channel and reform English cooking. My late enemy Leon Martel had dreamed of vaulting the turbulent moat using Aztec flying machines. There were also schemes for balloons, tunnels, floating windmills, and twenty-mile-long pontoon bridges. Invasion was as daft as it was daring, so maybe a coven of spies could discourage it. That was my job.
My feelings about Napoleon were a mix of envy, admiration, resentment, and knowledge that he was as human as the rest of us. Bonaparte was a fallible idealist, ruthless as a banker. We’d fought together in Egypt, fought against each other at Acre, and I’d been his agent in Italy, America, and Greece in between times that he contemplated shooting me. Our history was a stormy one, the loss of my wife tipping our relationship to disaster.
Now it was time to put a stop to him, or at least his ambitions.
The Breton rebel Georges Cadoudal had already been landed with a million francs to prepare revolt. The assumption in Britain was that the French were restive (the fact I’d seen no evidence of this was met with annoyance) and that eliminating Napoleon was the easiest way to eliminate his army camped around Boulogne. “His imprisonment or death is the road to peace!” exhorted Smith. My job was to utilize my trinkets to get access to the highest circles, find Bonaparte’s weakness, and tell royalists the best time and way to strike.
The comtesse had been trained to be a seductress of an agent, and she’d practiced by letting me flirt with her before setting me straight with her political seriousness. Now she would pose as consort to my role as a self-absorbed, pleasure-seeking, politically harmless opportunist: a slander people disconcertingly accepted as fact. Catherine endured more than welcomed our partnership, worrying it would reflect on her own taste. It was too early to link with another woman and impossible not to think about doing so. In short, I was sailing for France with a ragged mess of feelings, not the least of them gloom, desperation, guilt, and suicidal recklessness. Frankly, I never would have hired me, but the British were eager for anyone lunatic enough to thread through Channel patrols.
Johnstone, who’d been transporting contraband since boyhood, had been freed from Fleet Prison to smuggle us in.
Now the black ocean lightened ahead from breaking surf. “I think I see the reef.”
“Cheat the rocks like you’d cheat at cards, Ethan,” the smuggler instructed as he rammed home a charge. Another French cannonball came our way, skipping like a stone off our stern. “A bluff between the worst pinnacles.” I’d inspired his metaphor not only by boasting of my gambling skills but by proving them by cleaning his crew of every shilling in the first ten miles. Accordingly, Johnstone thought me clever, which always results in too much responsibility.
I eyed the boil of foam ahead. “Maybe we should trade jobs.”
“I’ll give a hand when need be.” He sighted along his little cannon. “I do the gunnery because there’s an art to aim when rolling. And you’re used to risk.”
Our smuggler was a charming free-trade runner so fond of luxury and whores that he was thrown into Fleet for running up £11,000 in London debts, or more than I’d