The Barbed Crown

by William Dietrich

  The Napoleon I’d met six years before might have yielded at that point. He’d learned from a hasty and stormy landing at Alexandria. But power gave him omnipotence at a time he felt threatened by conspiracies and coups. “Sir, I gave my orders. Again, I ask, why do you not obey them? Their consequence is my affair, and mine only. Obey at once!”

  “Sire, I cannot obey.”

  The rest of us had frozen. Watching a quarrel is never pleasant. Napoleon had rank and temper, but Bruix had experience and pride. The emperor stepped toward the admiral and raised his riding crop.

  Bruix stepped back and put his hand on his sword hilt. “Sire, take care!”

  Their eyes locked, Bruix firm, Bonaparte volcanic, and then at last the emperor realized the embarrassment a fight would cause and turned away, hurling his crop to the ground. Bruix turned his back, too, trembling, while Napoleon was rigid and fuming. Then Napoleon wheeled and snapped an order to Admiral Charles René Magon de Médine, who jumped at the crack of his voice. “Magon, get the review of boats under way!”

  This junior admiral had neither the rank of Bruix nor his respect. He glanced at his naval superior, but the senior wouldn’t look at him. Magon had no choice but to obey. “At once, Your Majesty.”

  Bruix stalked away, shaking with anger.

  Signal guns fired. Bugles called. Flags ran up, shuddering in the rising wind. Drums rolled. With shouts, cheers, and soldierly curses, the French invasion boats and barges lumbered away from quay and mooring and began to maneuver claustrophobically between the shore and the line of protective French ships at the harbor mouth, like a nautical ballet in a bathtub. Then with a hard pull of their oars, a line of boats crawled into the Channel proper, like rodents poking out of their hole.

  The wind grew chill, and people slipped on cloaks and coats, their hems dancing. The black clouds mounded higher, a dark awning pulled across the sky. Napoleon ignored the approaching gale as if he could will it away by not looking. The sea turned choppy, the blockading British ships were lost in haze, and the rising gusts pushed patterns of gray and silver across the water like spilled paint.

  “Ethan, this is madness,” Astiza whispered. “How can he be so obstinate?”

  “The less sure you are of your authority, the more you try to exercise it. He’s emperor now but remembers, even when everyone else forgets, that he was too poor to buy a new uniform little more than a decade ago. In 1792 he pawned his watch to the broker Fauvelet.”

  “So he proves triumph with idiocy?”

  “It isn’t the first time great men have done so. When the Persian emperor Xerxes was thwarted by a storm when crossing the Dardanelles, he lashed the waves with whips.”

  For one last moment the review played out as intended. Boat flags stuttered spritely in the wind. Oars dipped with synchronized precision, the splashes confirming months of practice. Troops sat with muskets erect, fixed bayonets shining. A hundred cannons fired blank salutes.

  Then the gale fully struck.

  We snatched at our hats. The wind hit like a wall, buffeting the high command, and dust and leaves whirled. There was a boom of cacophonous thunder and lightning blazed overhead, lifting strands of hair from Astiza’s and Catherine’s necks. Bonaparte cursed like a corporal. Then rain shot sideways, and the harbor was lost to view.

  We could faintly hear shouts and cries of alarm over the roar of wind and rain. Most of the army generals ran for nearby houses, but the admirals and captains dashed toward the water to help. Napoleon, to his credit, ran with them.

  “Take Harry to our rooms,” I told the women. “I’m going to lend a hand.”

  The harbor had turned white with foam. Scores of invasion boats scudded before the wind with infantrymen shouting in terror. The furthermost were pushed parallel to the Channel beaches. Napoleon ran along the shore after them, his aides and bodyguards strung behind. I ran, too, matching the bodyguard Roustan pace for pace, and both of us caught up with France’s ruler at the same time. We’d passed the quays and were on a sand and shale beach where surf boiled, the men at sea pulling frantically for land.

  As the boats reached the breakers the invasion craft began to flip, spilling hundreds of men into cold water.

  Other sailors were dragging down skiffs that could be used as lifeboats. Napoleon ran for one. Was he mad?

  Roustan, turban soaked and mustache streaming, tried to restrain the emperor, who shook him off. “We must get them out of that!” With surprising agility he leaped into a lifeboat like a hurdler clearing a fence, stunning the sailors with his sudden appearance and famous hat. “Row, row, to rescue those soldiers!” I leaped aboard, too, not thinking of anything but to try to save lives. I’m a better swimmer than most. Roustan stood helplessly on shore. He couldn’t swim at all.

  We made perhaps twenty yards before a huge comber crashed down on our lifeboat, filling it with water. We foundered. The water was just as freezing as when Catherine and I landed near Biville, and I felt the familiar sting of salt in my nostrils as our craft went under. As we sank we were buffeted by surf. I reached to grab Bonaparte’s coat collar.

  I could have had revenge in that instant. Hold Napoleon under the sea, punch his gut to make him suck in water, and an emperor’s death would be blamed on his own folly and obstinacy, with no risk to my family or me. I might even wrangle a medal by pretending I’d attempted a rescue instead.

  Yet I couldn’t bring myself to do it, which suggests I would make a poor assassin. Murder wasn’t my style. When lightning turned the sea surface into a golden mirror and showed which way was up, I hauled the ruler of France with me. Napoleon had the swimming skills of a Corsican boy. We broke for air, gasping.

  “The damned coat,” he choked. We sank with its weight. I helped pull his arms free of the sleeves and it fell away. Then I seized his uniform jacket and kicked upward again, breaking to the surface. The surf, fortunately, pounded us toward land.

  One moment we were alone, struggling against drowning, and the next twenty pairs of arms reached to drag Napoleon onto shore. I was left to my own devices, which was just as well since the rescuers were half trampling their emperor in their zeal to save him. I staggered out of the water and numbly fell upon the beach to spit and gasp. Hundreds of other capsized men were also crawling from the waves, while scores of drowned bodies floated like driftwood logs.

  It was the disastrous landing at Alexandria all over again.

  For several minutes Napoleon stood bent, with his hands on his knees, sucking great shuddering breaths as chaos continued around him. A blanket was thrown across his shoulders. Someone handed him a flask of brandy. He took a swig, coughed, and straightened. His hat had disappeared, the sea pasting his thinning hair to his forehead. He looked out at the Channel with grim fury. Then he snapped an order. “Fires for the survivors.”

  Any normal ruler would have retreated to his bedroom at that point. Bonaparte did not. He began striding up and down the sand, shouting commands, and erected order in his wake. A more systematic rescue was organized. Some of the hundreds of dead, their faces bleached of color and eyes wide from the drowning, were dragged out of sight. Beach fires flared and shivering survivors huddled around them. As night fell the bonfires helped orient the helmsmen, and most of the boats eventually made it back to shore intact. Twenty did not, however. The waves pounded them to fragments.

  Bonaparte spotted me, gave a nod of acknowledgment, and offered me his flask. The brandy was welcome heat.

  “Go to your wife, American. You’ve witnessed enough catastrophe for one evening.”

  “And Your Majesty?”

  “A soaking for my body. A worse pounding for my pride. Go.”

  So I did, but then he called after me.

  “Gage? Thank you for saving my life. The ledger of accounts between us is getting complicated, is it not?”

  “More than you know.”

&nbs
p; “And more to come. We’ll talk soon.”

  I learned later that Napoleon didn’t leave the beach until dawn, his clothes crusted with sand, salt, and bonfire smoke. Sunrise revealed horror. The smashed remains of the capsized boats and drowned corpses marked the high-tide line.

  By official French count, fifty men needlessly drowned. Duhèsme told me privately the toll was actually two hundred, and the British would publish accounts claiming twice that. And this had been a summer storm in a harbor! What would happen to these elite legions when they tried to row across the entire Channel?

  Two final things washed ashore.

  One was a half-frozen drummer boy, kept afloat by his drum. He lived.

  Another was Napoleon’s bicorn hat.

  Every soldier in Boulogne applauded the emperor’s courage. And every soldier muttered that the disaster was a bad omen for an invasion.

  For me, the event had a different outcome. “It is even more imperative that I see you and your wife,” Napoleon wrote two days later. “My pavilion, at ten o’clock tomorrow, very precisely.”

  I decided not to be late.

  CHAPTER 12

  The Big Box had a floor of black enamel, silver wallpaper, and an azure ceiling painted with a golden eagle hurling thunderbolts at England. No wonder the French were interested in flying machines; Napoleon could be inspired by the idea every time he tilted his head. There was also a large oval conference table covered by felt cloth like a green England. A huge map of the Channel hung on one wall, and there was an inkstand with sheets of paper and quill pens cut ready for use, should Bonaparte need to dictate an order.

  Pasques pushed Astiza and me through the pavilion door and took up sentry duty outside with the bodyguard Roustan. We’d been searched for weapons.

  The new emperor was standing at a window, feet planted, hands clasped behind his back, to stare into the Atlantic haze toward Britain. His uniform coat was his favorite chasseur green again this day, boots bright as obsidian, and vest buttoned tight across his stomach. The foul weather had at least temporarily scrubbed away the habitual yellow pallor that new acquaintances commented on, giving him a ruddy flush of health. He turned and smiled, reminding me how capable he was of mercurial charm. “Ethan, my savior! And your lovely wife. Welcome.”

  We’d left Harry with Catherine, the two planning to stroll the port boatyard. My son liked to watch the men hammer and saw, and the comtesse enjoyed the glances and catcalls of brawny carpenters.

  “I’m honored, sire.” I suppose an American should have sought a democratic alternative to such honorifics as “sire” and “majesty,” but I no longer knew what else to call my old friend and enemy. Since I well remembered the crunch of the guillotine blade, I’d call him anything he liked, until either he was dead or I was a safe ocean away.

  “The honor is mine. You saved me from the surf.” He addressed my wife. “I made a fool of myself, I know.”

  The confession had the intended effect of thawing her. “You cannot fight heaven,” Astiza said.

  “It’s stubbornness I must master. From my will comes success, but it also tempts danger.” He turned to me. “I find it very odd, Gage, how you circulate in and out of my life to cause trouble and then rescue. I’m inclined to suspect you’re a Little Red Man yourself.”

  Napoleon had a firm belief that a peculiar French gnome unpredictably appeared in the night to make murky forecasts of his future. He was as superstitious as the black rebels of Saint-Domingue, scoffing at religion one moment and crossing himself the next.

  “Just an American trying to make my way with my family.”

  “And a spy.” He said it matter-of-factly.

  “For both sides.” I shrugged as though this were the normal state of affairs, even though my heart hammered.

  “Yes, the perfidious British. Why are you working for that devil Sidney Smith again?” He sounded genuinely puzzled.

  Since Napoleon was in my debt for saving him from the surf, there was no better time for the truth. “I feared I’d lost Astiza in a hurricane. A renegade French policeman with your secret tattoo blamed you for the circumstances that put us all there. I wanted revenge, and the British offered a way to achieve it. Except that it turns out my wife miraculously survived.”

  “Blamed me?” He struck a pose of injured innocence but also seemed amused, as if the suggestion that he could influence anything was absurd. This from a man who had cut down a Paris mob with grapeshot, abandoned an army in Egypt, and tried to reinstate slavery in his colonies.

  So why not make the accusation and hear his defense, since I seemed to have little aptitude as an assassin? “The former policeman Leon Martel said it was your idea to steal my son and hold him for ransom. He said you knew about an emerald I’d found, and used it and my boy to manipulate me to search for an Aztec secret of flight.”

  Bonaparte looked genuinely puzzled. “Ethan, I’m trying to govern a large, intractable nation surrounded by ruthless enemies. Employ you, yes. Extort you through the theft of your son? Mon Dieu! I’ve no time for kidnapping children. I truly have no idea what you’re babbling about. Come, we’re old campaigners. Remember the Alps?”

  I was sweating from making accusations to a powerful man. “I know what I heard. He made you a monster. I called him a liar, and he called me naive.”

  “Did he, while wearing my tattoo?” He wasn’t in a rage at my accusation, so he wanted something. “And do you have the golden pendant I gave you?” He knew the answer, of course, since I’d already shown it to Réal.

  I brought the trinket out. There was the N, for Napoleon, circled by a wreath. “It’s proved useful at times,” I admitted. “I saved it through a hurricane.”

  I didn’t tell him I’d ripped it from my wife’s throat to cast aside in the ocean, and that it had floated unbidden back into my pocket.

  “Saved a monster’s pendant? Perhaps you weren’t sure this renegade policeman was telling the truth. Perhaps, Gage, I don’t have time to make plots with henchmen I’ve never heard of. I thought you were helping me make the bargain for Louisiana. The next thing I know, you’re missing for months and then reported hiding in Paris as a British spy. It makes no sense.”

  Should I believe his denial? Maybe he really didn’t know of Martel’s manipulation of my family. Maybe he did but hadn’t played a direct role. Maybe Martel had exaggerated events in order to torment me, and divert blame from himself. Or maybe, like so many things in our histories, the entire scheme was one more misfire on all sides. In payback I’d broken into a prison, helped win a slave revolt that robbed France of its richest colony, and sent Martel to hell, so by that measure accounts were settled. Napoleon was ambitious, I was an adventurer, and our relationship was a complicated mess of debts, appreciations, and slights.

  “Neither did it make sense to save you from drowning,” I said, “but I did so, even after your order forcing my family to come here. An order that makes no sense, either. You’re emperor. Why do you need us in Boulogne?”

  “I need every soldier you can see from these windows. And I invited you here to explain our cause and get you and Astiza to help. France is going to win, Ethan, and when it does the world will be a better place, unshackled from moribund royals and medieval prejudices. Parliaments and Congresses don’t work. You can’t get two ambitious rascals to agree, let alone two hundred. But a single great man of ability, not birth, can accomplish something! I mean to allow trade between all nations, instill public instruction, open Jewish ghettos, reform the courts, and build canals and bridges. Does that sound like a monster to you?”

  I have cheek I learned from him. “Accomplished at the point of a bayonet.”

  He barked a laugh. “What an idealist you’ve become, gambler and scamp! You know as well as I that it’s only by bayonet that anything gets done. But my bayonets are propelled by ideas. I worry about newspapers, philosophers, po
liticians, and, yes, spies, but only because they influence opinion. And I worry about opinion only because I need it to accomplish my task on earth, which is to turn slogan into law and mobs into armies. So: I could have you shot in an instant for treachery, but instead, I invite you here to consult, observe, and, if you wish, pass on the truth to the British. I’m a general, yes, but a man of peace forced into war.”

  “With a hundred thousand men,” I persisted.

  “Two hundred thousand by next year, and the boats to carry them. All to end, once and for all, a contest that has dragged on for centuries. The British have tried to assassinate me a dozen times, Gage. They’re implacable and conspiratorial, a cabal of cowardly plotters who buy Austrians and Russians to do their fighting for them. England is a wretched nation of shopkeepers, a global bully, and the world will be better when France scrubs their grubby island clean as the Normans did in 1066. Tell me, what’s the name of that water out there?” He pointed out the window.

  I was puzzled by the question. “The English Channel.”

  “No, Ethan. La Manche, the Sleeve, the name given by France, and yet the world sees it as the property of the English. Soon that will change. My own generals are skeptics, but the reason I’m emperor and they are not is that I have the vision to imagine a better world, while they have the perspective of pygmies.”

  “You do understand that Sidney Smith has a different view.” My tone was dry. Every nation edits history, and no one likes to be called a pygmy.

  “I understand that as a neutral you see both sides, which only confuses you.” He moved to look at the map. “And I understand that in your adventures with this Martel, who has completely disappeared”—he cast a glance in my direction—“you did find an Aztec artifact that looks like some kind of mechanical bird.”

  “I don’t think it’s of practical use.”

  “Show it.”

  So I took the curious object out. A helmeted man on a delta-shaped machine, but with no detail on how it might work. The solid gold was heavy and smooth. I handed it over. Good men had died to retrieve it.