L’Ouverture was the first gentleman I’d encountered in some time.
And no time to argue! She expertly tied a noose (we’d practiced), slipped it under her arms, and I leaned back against the bricks of the barrel roof and heaved her up. Being much lighter than a man, in seconds she was up and beside me, giving me a quick kiss and glancing about as warily as a sparrow. Her eyes were bright, her smile crooked. She was enjoying this, I realized.
No wonder we’d married.
“I’m glad I didn’t have to hear you talk your way in.”
“You simply let men imagine more than they will ever get.”
Women practice that, keeping us constantly befuddled. Now some of those frustrated men were again banging on the door, shouting questions. L’Ouverture limped over to stand beneath the hole. “I am already dying,” he called up. “You are rescuing a corpse.”
“Not before you help freedom with your secrets. For liberty!” I dropped the rope again. With agonizing slowness he stepped into the noose and lifted it to his chest. I yanked to make it tight. The peephole in the cell door opened. Angry cries now, recriminations from an officer, and the squeal of keys. The French guards were unlocking the barricaded door.
Astiza seized the rope, too. “Pull!”
We hoisted. L’Ouverture spun like a top, ascending to heaven, limp with a curious resignation. Did he somehow foresee his end? Then there was a crash, the door butted in, the bed smashed into splinters, and then a volley of gunshots flashed in the gloom. The Haitian hero’s body jerked as it was riddled. Astiza and I looked at each other, horrified.
We dropped the rope in surprise. There was a thud as L’Ouverture’s body hit the floor. Had my hopes of rescuing my son died with him? The smoky room filled with soldiers, some of them glancing up at the hole in the roof. The two of us leaned back so as not to be seen. Their muskets were, for the moment, empty.
“Where’s his mistress?” one asked.
“On the roof somehow. She has an accomplice. Raise the alarm!” A bell began to clang. “Upstairs, you morons!”
“Time to flee.” I grabbed my wife and we sprinted back for the wall where we’d climbed. Cayley had made it up to the parapet there as planned, and had unfolded and assembled his invention behind its crenellation. The glider looked to me a kind of wooden bed frame from which canvas wings jutted, like flaps on the skeleton of a goose. No sturdier than a stack of jackstraws.
He greeted our arrival with relief. “Thank goodness we can go.” He glanced past. “Where’s the general?”
“Shot trying to escape.” I couldn’t keep the despair from my voice.
“Then all this was for nothing?”
“Not entirely,” Astiza murmured.
I didn’t have time to ask her what she meant, because the door opened to the tower room I’d climbed past. My would-be female companion, her hourglass charms on display in a linen shift, stood backlit by revealing candlelight. “Monsieur, what is that bell? Is it time for our rendezvous?”
“No! I told you to wait.”
“Ethan?” My wife’s tone was understandably suspicious.
“I had to tell her something to keep her from crying out.”
“Tell her what? That you were going to cheat on your wife?”
“Wife?” the girl asked, realizing another woman was beside me.
“It’s not what it seems,” I said to both of them.
And now the damsel did scream, screeching for Papa like a fury. Damnation, women are difficult.
Another door from another tower banged open, and more soldiers appeared, their primed muskets tipped with glinting bayonets.
“Time to fly!” Cayley cried. He picked up Astiza, heaved her onto the flimsy frame without apology, and tugged at me. “Lift on the other wing!” We hoisted and climbed up the low crenellated wall at the brink of the castle.
The guards were raising their guns. “They’re after the colonel’s daughter!” one cried.
I held the glider with one arm, pulled a pistol, and fired, my fist bucking, to throw off their aim. One of them actually went down. I threw the empty gun, making them instinctively duck, and then pulled and fired my other pistol.
“Now, now!” Cayley cried.
There was a volley of muskets, bullets tearing toward us.
Or rather, tearing toward where we’d been.
We’d launched into the abyss.
Chapter 12
We hurtled into a black void. There was the sickening sensation of falling, stomach left behind, and then a gust of wind swooped us sideways. Cayley shouted something unintelligible, I clung to the frame, and Astiza was squashed and half smothered between us. Our “goose” felt pregnant with our weight. More shots, the hiss of musket balls, and then we began to glide just above the tips of a downward-sloping comb of mountain pine, jutting like stakes to impale us. I could smell the forest in the wind.
“It works!” Cayley cried.
I waited for his invention to make my son an orphan.
I hate modern times.
Our machine was nothing like the angel wings of an Icarus. Its spine was a pole twenty feet long with a cruciform tail of little wings, like two kites melded at right angles to each other. This appendage, the inventor explained, was to give us balance and direction. The two main canvas wings were more reminiscent of a bat than a bird, thin canvas fabric stretched over a wooden framework like dried skin. Thin cables led from tail and wings to a rectangular framework suspended below the pole. The Englishman had lit a small lamp that hung from the central strut. It would allow our allies (and the French, I thought gloomily) to follow our progress.
Or find our bodies.
The swooping glide was like a sled run; I’d never traveled so fast. Cayley had one cable in his teeth and another in a hand. “Pull your line to the left!” he commanded.
I did so, and the machine leaned, almost spilling us out. Astiza shrieked, sensibly.
Or was that me?
“Not that much!”
I slacked off, groaning. But then he shouted, “Enough!” and we flattened and steadied. We were still descending, but on a long, gentler trajectory. Patches of snow went by beneath us like blurred clouds. The experiment actually worked.
We heard the rip of a cannonball cutting through the air, sounding like tearing fabric, and then the boom of its cannon echoing from the fort. I was impressed they’d gotten even one shot off. We were flying what seemed like fifty times faster than any horse, Fort de Joux’s mountain far behind, and a rent in the clouds lit up a palette of grays that showed fields, woodlots, and the lines of road.
Ahead was a lighter gray, the blob of a pond.
No, a lake. It was rapidly growing as we neared it. By Creation, that was more than enough to die in. I tensed all over again.
“George, the ice will be like pavement if it’s thick, and we’ll drown if it’s thin.”
“I’m going to aim for the water near shore. The ice will bend like a cushion. Frotte will follow, with dry clothing.” His voice was tight, his concentration enormous. The wings of the glider rocked as we flew, gusts bucking us up and then dropping us down. Wind sang in our rigging. I heard gasps and hugged Astiza. Or was that me doing the snuffling?
“It will be like a bird crashing into a window.”
“Thin glass, in April.” English scientists are unrelentingly optimistic. “However the landing, we’ve made history, my friends.”
I gritted my teeth. “I’m sure they’ll put a stone up.”
Now we were skimming over ice, the lake growing ever larger and more menacing. A tracery of snow had been blown into patterns, some of it puffed up as we raced just above. Instinctively, we all cried out and braced. Then before I could take breath we slammed onto the surface of the lake, breaking through crust as fragile as frosting and plowing into freezing water. The glider disintegrated into kindling. Canvas wings caught ice floes and floated off. Meanwhile, we heavy humans plunged into black depths. I clutched Astiza, determined to die with her in my arms. The cold was paralyzing.