The Barbed Crown

Chapter 21





With the help of Rose and Pasques, I returned to England that December of 1805 to save its navy with the secret plans I’d found in Talleyrand’s cloak. I expected to play the prodigal hero, while arranging transport to rescue my family.

Instead, I found myself reduced to jail, government service, penurious pay, and the disappointment of the French policeman. “You seem to be humiliated everywhere you go,” Pasques told me.

My problem was once again my naive trust, this time in financial advisers. In my absence from England my bankers had knotted my fortune with loss and exorbitant management fees. Not only couldn’t I afford passage to Venice, I was told, I must pay the boarding cost of feeding my new French ally during our jailing in a British castle used as a headquarters for spies. Instead of being applauded for changing world history, I found myself discredited and dependent.

I was mad with frustration and helpless to escape. Reuniting with wife and son must wait, I was told, on the outcome of Napoleon’s invasion of England.

“You’re not the only one being asked to make sacrifices,” Sir Sidney Smith told me when I complained. “Lord Nelson hasn’t set foot on land for years.”

As irksome as bad luck is getting no sympathy.

At first our escape from France went well. Pasques and I jumped off the Vulcan at Argenteuil and tied its tiller, sending it steaming downriver until it thrashed its way into a riverbank more than three miles away. The boat drew our pursuers to its column of smoke while I sent a flower to fetch the redheaded spy Rose, whose blue eyes appraised us skeptically before agreeing to help. She and Pasques warily combined their knowledge of French security to smuggle us to the Channel coast.

As we made our way the Frenchman began to warm toward me, as people do, and was intrigued by our comely spy. “Why is every woman you deal with as fair as a flower?” he asked as Rose led us on secret paths.

“Maybe I’m not as charmless as you think, Pasques. It was Rose who elected to deal with me.”

“Every woman I get is uglier than my sisters, and you can imagine, by looking at me, how truly ugly that is.” He glanced at me. “Can you help me do better?”

“You have to prove yourself dashing and exemplary.”

“I’m fleeing my own country in disgrace with a scoundrel.”

“But you’ve been in a steamboat and are after storied treasure. We’ll find you better clothes, too. Catherine always said fashion makes all the difference, and she’s the expert on being a poseur.”

We eventually arranged to signal Tom Johnstone’s smuggling sloop from the Channel coast, ran for England, and tidied ourselves for a hero’s welcome after handing over the French naval plans I’d stolen. I was desperate to go after Astiza and Harry and expected enthusiastic British reward.

Instead, we were jailed adjacent to the soldier’s kitchens in the bowels of Walmer Castle, a Tudor fort not far from Dover. We were being held, it was explained, as possible French saboteurs because of the likelihood I’d sold myself to the enemy due to my desperate poverty.

“What poverty?”

“You’re a ruined man and apparently deserve it,” our jailer said.

I hounded him with protest until I finally got to see Smith.

“We thought you’d thrown in with Boney again, Ethan,” my spymaster told me when Pasques and I were escorted from our dungeon cells. “You disappeared with an English stipend, and instead of Napoleon being assassinated or overthrown, he triumphed at his coronation. In fact, it was such a smashing success that he plans to repeat it in Milan, putting on the crown of Italy. Good heavens, you’ve enabled bloody Julius Caesar. I’m frankly surprised you’d the nerve to return at all after such a fiasco. And with a gigantic Frenchman?” He peered at Pasques. “He’s as expensive to feed as a horse.”

“Then let me go, English.” Pasques looked at me balefully as well, clearly disappointed with my official standing.

“And I’m offended to find myself imprisoned, Sir Sidney,” I tried, deciding it was best not to reveal I’d agreed to be a double agent to save my family. I tend to edit my résumé for each employer and was a little defensive about my ability to bounce from side to side. “Always I’m the victim of misunderstandings. I wove myself into the heart of the French military establishment and reported for months on French politics and arms. My reward for such courage is rude jailing?”

“Reports? Haven’t received a one. Pitt thought you were dead, but I said, No, Gage is a survivor but his alliances are one of convenience. Turncoat, I predicted. American, after all; the whole bloody country is a nest of traitors. So the man has betrayed us and is likely living in luxury in Paris, I said. The prime minister agreed, as we never expect much from foreign agents such as yourself.”

I was confused. “But I risked my life and my family’s life spying for England! I mailed regular as a gazette.”

“Apparently, what the French say and what they do are two different things, Ethan. We haven’t heard a peep from you or Comtesse Marceau since you both crossed the Channel last April.”

“She is a traitor, and not even a comtesse. She’s an imposter as secretive as a mole who betrayed me as well as you, Sir Sidney. Damned good at coronation fashion, however.”

He blinked. “Catherine Marceau is an enemy? I rather enjoyed her.”

“She lived with my family in Paris and broke us apart at the coronation. She’s the one who worked to make Napoleon’s crowning a success. I, meanwhile, told you everything I could learn about the French army.”

“Your reports probably made fine fire starter in the offices of Commissioner Réal after he had a chuckle reading them.” Smith cocked his head. “Unless you’re posing now in the service of Bonaparte and lying about your every action. You can’t be that clever, can you?”

I picked at some lice I’d acquired in our cell. “Certainly not. I just find myself working for everyone because I’m so popular.” I sat straight to feign dignity. “We can test me, can’t we?”

“How? Hot coals?” He looked sourly at Pasques, who looked sourly back.

“I’ve brought you a report I snatched from Talleyrand himself. It details plans to lure the British navy away from the Channel with a complex attack on Senegal, Surinam, and Saint Helena, involving dozens of ships crisscrossing the Atlantic. It’s impossibly ambitious, which means it came from Napoleon instead of his admirals. He thinks you can move sailing ships like chess pieces. The British Admiralty can judge whether it reflects real French movements, and thwart it by responding prudently.”

“Talleyrand? How the devil did you get that?”

“I work for him, too, or would have if Pasques here hadn’t floored him with a punch. I fled Paris on a new American invention called a steamboat, enlisted this heroic if hungry Frenchman here, and avoided pursuing patrols with the aid of a beautiful redheaded spy named Rose. I assume she’s yours?”

Smith blinked, skeptical but always seduced by derring-do. He longed to win wars with cleverness. “This Frenchman is heroic?”

“I struck the grand chamberlain only after I swung at you and missed,” my new companion spoke up, which I had coached him not to do.

“Yes, we make quite a team,” I put in.

Smith drummed his fingers, considering us. “Rose has helped us smuggle countless agents in and out of France, and I instructed her to contact you. An interesting woman with odd beliefs, she’s the follower of the rosy cross, if you’d heard of that bunch. Medieval mystics, mostly, but she thinks there’s something to it.”

I filed this assessment away for my own future use. “It’s not my fault the courier system you instructed me to use in Paris has been compromised.” I looked stern. “Nor that I never received a word of instruction from England. Now my wife and son have fled to central Europe and I need a ship to catch up with them.”

“A ship? You do have gall, Gage.”

“Passage to Venice. From there I’ll ride north to Bohemia. A fast frigate will do,” I demanded with more confidence than I felt.

“We’re going to win a huge fortune from Talleyrand and win the war single-handed,” Pasques put in, with the logic of a lunatic.

Smith looked from one to the other of us. “No one is sailing anywhere until I determine what side everybody is on. We’ll put this purported plan carried by Talleyrand to the test, as you’ve said.”

“Then I must be given leave to buy my own passage. My family is in peril, and time is critical. Let me play the spy in Prague.”

“Buy passage how?”

“With money. I believe that’s the conventional way.”

“But Ethan, you’re a debtor.”

“To the contrary, I’ve invested ambitiously and by now should have doubled my fortune,” I said without any conviction.

“I’m afraid you’d better consult with your financial advisers. Since you were in our employ as a spy, I ordered an audit of your affairs and was alarmed at what we learned. It was the collapse of your fortune that made us think you’d thrown in with Bonaparte.”

“But it can’t have collapsed. Can it?” My voice was strained.

“Your financial advisers can explain it in some detail. You’re a pauper, Gage. Our cell at Walmer here is the only thing that has kept you out of debtor’s prison. The only thing you possess is the hilt of a medieval sword.” He squinted. “You’re a very odd man.”

“I’m a collector of antiquities.”

He looked at me with pity. “I’m going to provide the necessary passes for you to consult with your bankers in London while we study these naval plans, holding the Frenchman here as guarantee of your return. Get a realistic appraisal of your financial situation, and then we’ll see where you stand. If you’re telling the truth, maybe we can salvage a crumb of career.”

A visit to London confirmed the worst. Hiram Tudwell received me in his counting house on Cornwall Street after a two-hour wait, timing it so he could plead office closing if our interview became too difficult. His bald head sprouted like a cabbage from a stiff cravat, his skin was the color of suet, and his suit was dark enough for a mortician.

“I’m afraid your holdings have become inaccessible, Mr. Gage,” the senior partner of Tudwell, Rawlings, and Spence announced. He regarded me like an unwanted relative.

“You mean my money is in a particularly remote and formidable vault?” I seize every opportunity to hear the bright side.

“I mean that your account has not generated the returns expected. It was ambitiously invested as you instructed, but dogged by events. A great deal of it has been captured in the Indian Ocean and auctioned off by the perfidious French.”

“Captured by the French? How could they capture ten thousand pounds from a London bank?” News of my calamity was being given in a high-ceilinged, mahogany-paneled room designed to enforce calm, but it wasn’t working. I’d been offered a cup of lukewarm tea and a stale biscuit, but that didn’t help, either.

“If you’ll recall, you gave our firm permission to invest your holdings in aggressive vehicles to maximize potential profits while you disappeared on the Continent. I believe you said you were comfortable with calibrated risk.”

“Not betting the whole table!”

“In your lengthy absence and complete lack of correspondence we diversified into coal mines, steam engines, a horse-drawn rail-wagon line to Portsmouth, and tea futures. The latter was based on delivery of a cargo on an East Indiaman, following recent victories by General Arthur Wellesley on the Indian subcontinent. We sought investments that were innovative and inclined to quick profit, our aggressiveness being the very model of bold financial stewardship. You had the potential to double your money in months. Astonishing opportunities these days, astonishing.”

“And?”

“The war has caused disruption. The East Indiaman was captured, the steam engines have yet to find a market, the coal works went bankrupt, and the horses all died. It was an excellent strategy, had it worked.” He pushed over a balance sheet to show me where my money went.

I struggled to understand it. “What’s this one thousand, one hundred twenty-seven pounds here, then?”

“Insurance premiums. Policy not payable, alas, for acts of war. A French battleship has been prowling off Africa. Can’t insure against that.”

“And this fifteen hundred pounds?”

“Our management fee.”

“Fifteen percent? That’s usury!”

“Our fee was in the fine print of your contract.”

I couldn’t be bothered to read such tedious documents. “What then is the five hundred thirty-two pounds for?”

“Incidental management expenses. Postage, correspondence, resolving of claims, business meals, refreshments, stationary, and office incidentals.”

“That’s not included in the fifteen hundred pounds?”

“Mr. Gage, our standard fee cannot cover the unanticipated exigencies of a complex and variable portfolio like yours.”

The Tripoli pirates were amateurs compared to this bunch. “And this two hundred seventy-one pounds?”

“Your losses were so severe that nothing remained in your accessible account to cover your final billing. That’s how much you still owe us. You still have a balance of nearly two thousand pounds on credit, but there’s a lien against it from a family called Chiswick, which claims you contracted with them to educate your son and then stole the boy away without paying in full.”

“My wife didn’t steal our own son!”

“They are seeking damages. I must say, your domestic affairs strike me as extremely untidy. Is that an American habit? I hope you’ll settle with your litigants so we can get our money.”

“My God. Are you monumentally incompetent, or simple thieves?”

“Insults will not help your situation. The decline of your portfolio results from political, financial, and competitive circumstances beyond our control. I can understand your disappointment, but I can assure you that, had we succeeded, you would have been a very wealthy man.” His expression was as animated as a corpse.

I instinctively reached for my tomahawk and regretted leaving it at home. “I risked my life and that of my family for that ten thousand pounds! This is the most outrageous financial burglary I’ve ever heard of!”

He winced as if I’d let wind at a recital. “It’s clear you don’t understand the financial-services industry, Mr. Gage. I sympathize that things did not progress as you’d hoped, but I can assure you we tried our very best. Your success would have been ours, too. And should you employ Tudwell, Rawlings, and Spence in the future, we’ll strive to do even better.”

“I’ll ruin you in the newspapers! I’ll bring suit! I’ll fetch my Jaeger rifle!”

Tudwell folded his hands. “Military barbarism may work on the American frontier or a Barbary pirate ship, Mr. Gage, but it has no place in the banks and courts of England. Should you seek bad publicity or legal complaint, you can rest assured of counter-litigation for defamation, late payment, and failure to respond to management inquiries while abroad in France. I could see legal proceedings extending years into the future, at a cost of several thousand pounds to us both. You will wait in a debtor’s cell for final resolution. Nor does it help that you’re a foreign American, with ties to the French, filing suit in England.”

I calculated the odds. “Money slips from me as if oiled.”

“It’s often more difficult to retain a fortune than make it in the first place. Have another biscuit.” His serenity was remarkable, but then he wasn’t the one being robbed. Lesser thieves get carted to Fleet Prison, but the biggest bastards get a peerage. I’d trusted him with my life savings, and it had vanished like smoke.

So why didn’t I throttle him? Because I feared, in my heart of hearts, that the Green Apple of the Sun had indeed been an emerald cursed by the ghost of Montezuma. Hadn’t Pasha Karamanli been cursed by me, Ethan Gage, while he wore it in his turban? Hadn’t Leon Martel died in pursuit of the stone? Hadn’t my own wife been carried away in a storm? Hadn’t it led to the kidnapping of my son? And hadn’t it set in motion a chain of events that now made me spy, turncoat, and a husband who’d once more lost his family?

Why is fate cruel? Because we’re meant never to get the things we think we want so we’ll pursue the things we truly need, like love and responsibility. That’s what I told myself, anyway. I’d always be Sisyphus on quixotic missions, trying to roll boulders uphill that cascaded endlessly down. Eve didn’t sin by eating a tempting apple. She sinned because she moved the fruit out of its rightful place, as I’d moved the emerald. It’s not the bite, it’s the disruption of harmony.

I could escape poverty only when I finished doing whatever it was that I was supposed to do. Which was entirely unclear, of course.

Back on the London streets, I consulted solicitors about suing. They in turn talked with barristers. Was there not some legal stratagem around Fate and God? They charged money I didn’t have to tell me that while I should certainly litigate, such an effort would occupy a good part of my remaining life.

“How much time again?”

“Several years. Before appeals.”

“And our chances?”

“We are optimistic yet realistic, hope leavened by caution.”

I forwarded their billing to Tudwell.

So I was desperate once more. I was a likely outlaw in France, separated from my fugitive wife and child by hundreds of miles, and a suspect debtor in Britain.

Fortunately, the admiralty deduced that the naval plans I’d stumbled on were confirmed by early French fleet movements, and countered accordingly. My captured information frustrated Napoleon’s desire to divert the English navy long enough to stage his invasion, so the stalemate of elephant and whale continued. I’d just saved England, not that anyone gave me credit.

So Sidney Smith came to Walmer Castle to see Pasques and me once more. “Good news. We didn’t take the bait, Ethan, thanks to Talleyrand’s papers.”

“A grateful nation might give me my fortune back.”

“I’ve a better bargain for you and your fat French friend. You’re a man of science, a Franklin protégé, and an electrician. I want you to help us pay back the frogs who outsmarted you with secret weapons.”

“Secret weapons?”

“I believe you know the American inventor Robert Fulton? Like you, he’s on England’s side now. We’re going to have the pair of you earn passage to your family by assaulting Bonaparte’s Army of England and sinking his entire fleet. You’ll win back our confidence by paddling into the teeth of the enemy, pledged to victory or death. You won’t even miss your money when you make yourself a hero.”