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.
Chapter 11
We 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,” Frotte 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,” Frotte 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 Frotte. “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 Frotte. “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.
“Astiza!” I hissed.
“Here, Ethan.”
“Thank goodness. He hasn’t molested you, has he?”
“He’s so old and sick he can barely stand. Please hurry!”
“Was it hard to have them let you in?”
“The French are bored,” she said impatiently. “They found the idea of seducing him for secrets quite amusing. They’re probably listening for sounds of love.”
I pulled out the canister. “Is L’Ouverture ready?”
“Not really. He thinks us quite mad.”
“Well, he hasn’t lost his judgment, then.”
“The guards are suspicious. Stop talking and act.”
“Moan to buy us time.” Women are good at noises.
The bars formed a cross, meaning I had to break the rods in four places to get my wife and the black general out of their hole. I held the cylinder, used my gloved hands to loosen a screw cap the English had devised, and readied the spout over one of the bars. “Stand back while I release this,” I warned.
A lever freed a cork the final way and something-I suppose it was liquefied carbon dioxide-gushed out, flashing into white snow as promised. I dunked what Frotte had called “dried ice” on the point where an iron rod jutted from the masonry. Snow and steam swirled upward. Then I took my chisel and hammer and struck a blow where I’d frozen the iron. The bar snapped with a ring, surprising me with its glasslike fragility. Maybe this would truly work.
It’s clever being a savant, but noisy, too. I glanced about. No sentry yet.
I repeated the operation on the next bar, and the next.
A prison guard, alerted by the noise, pounded on the cell door below. “Mademoiselle?”
“Please, we are busy!” Astiza protested, feigning breathlessness.
“On the fourth blow, the grill will fall inward. Try to catch it,” I reminded. I froze the final bar and got ready to swing, but what I hadn’t counted on was that the fourth rod snapped all on its own from the weight of the grill, and dropped before I could even tap it.
It bonged like a bell on the floor below and I winced.
“What is going on?” the guard demanded.
“Games,” Astiza called, as if impatient at his interruption. “Do you know nothing of love?”
I poked my head down into L’Ouverture’s prison. It was a rather generous thirty by twelve feet, with a fireplace on one wall, a door at one end, and a narrow bed with rude blankets. A coal-dark face looked up from the bed in amazement, the bright white of his eyes the most arresting feature in the gloom. L’Ouverture looked thin, ill, and rather homely, with graying hair, thick lips, sunken cheeks, and thin limbs. This was a notorious womanizer? The fatalism of his gaze was disconcerting. He looked up at my head, framed in the skylight, as if I were some kind of angel, but not of mercy. Rather, the angel of long-wished-for death.
More guards pounded on the cell door. “Mademoiselle? Is he abusing you?”
“How can I finish my interview with all this knocking, you idiots,” my wife snapped. “Go away and give us privacy! We’re playing a game.”
I dropped a rope into the cell. “Astiza, use the bed to block the door. Toussaint, tie this under your arms.”
“Ethan, he’s too sick to move.”
“Then you move him.”
“No man goes before a lady,” the black general said, his voice deep but raw. He coughed, horribly. Damnation, he was feeble! He stood as if arthritic, grabbed his bed, and manfully dragged it to the wooden cell door to barricade it. “Your wife-whom I have not touched, monsieur-goes first.”