The pope grumbled, but Napoleon had more cannon.
The winners in this reshuffling in theory passed into the French sphere of influence, securing his frontier with new allies. Yet I wondered if the political unification of the industrious Germans was the wisest course for France or Europe. As princelings they were robber barons charging tariffs for passage on the Rhine; as French satellites they were mercenary generals muttering about German nationhood. Princes who are elevated become ambitious, inevitably resenting the master who did the elevating because he didn’t promote enough. I wondered if these states would someday turn on Napoleon.
That was in the future. For the present, we fugitives fled down the river from Basel without undue interference because customs and tolling stations were in chaos from political change. We slid along the broad current under sail, sweeps, and rudder, admiring old castles that clung to gorge walls in picturesque ruin. At the Batavian Republic we took ship with the Dutch across the Channel and arrived in London in early May, just two weeks before the Peace of Amiens ended and war resumed between Britain and France.
London was a city of a million people, larger than Paris and even muddier and more chaotic. Here England’s naval power was apparent. The masts on the Thames formed a forest thick as Sherwood. Lighters crawled between larger vessels like water bugs, casks rolled on quays with constant thunder, and press gangs swept up sailors for His Majesty’s navy with the brutal efficiency of slavers. The crush of street traffic made it impossible to get anywhere, banks were grander than churches, and the extremes of wealth and poverty were more grotesque than in revolutionary France. Winding alleys were jammed with beggars, thieves, whores, and drunkards. My instinct was to hunt for a card game and brothel, but then remembered I was married and long since reformed.
London was also glorious, its steeples and domes catching the spring sun now that wind had blown away the worst of the winter’s coal and wood smoke. If the rims of carriage wheels were brown with shit and splatter, the hubs shone under the constant polishing of legions of footmen. If gutters were full of trash, windows gleamed like diamonds after polishing by indentured Irish girls. If the piers stank of tide, fish, and sewage, theaters and hotels were scented with perfume, flowers, and tobacco. The counting houses were a babble of languages, and there was money from the markets of empire, colonies counted like chips in a game. Britain could wage war forever.
Napoleon, I thought, should have kept the peace.
We met Sir Sidney Smith at Somerset House, the new government ministry built on the shore of the Thames. Its grandeur was a symbolic choice, a union between water and land, and the building was so intimate with the tide that arches gave entry to boats beneath its stone promenade. You could walk to its chambers or row to them; we walked from the rooming house we’d taken after being rowed ashore from our Dutch ship.
The edifice reflected the growth of the British bureaucracy under the pressure of war and empire, both in ambition and its half finish. Recent combat had robbed the taxes needed to complete this architectural elephant. Smith, however, had secured for our meeting a recently finished room overlooking the Thames, still smelling of paint and lacquer, warmed by a low coal fire, and lit by spring sunlight that played peekaboo through clouds to the south. Cradled in one corner was a globe a meter in diameter to keep track of world domination. There were crossed claymore swords, tea sets from China, otter pelts from the Northwest Coast, and wooden war clubs from Pacific isles. We entered exhausted from escape and travel and at the same time impatient to set out after our son.
“Ethan Gage! At last we are allies again!” The newly appointed lord had the smile of a Cairo rug salesman. “And the lovely Astiza is your bride? Who said endings can’t be happy? You look radiant, my dear.”
Well, that was friendlier than Napoleon. Smith and I had been doughty comrades in arms at the siege of Acre, and he remembered my wife’s courage.
“I’m flushed with worry over the fate of my son,” she coolly replied. “My husband attracts the worst kind of people.” It was clear from her tone that she wasn’t exempting Smith from this assessment. Frankly, our lives had been at a boil since meeting him in Palestine, and while we needed British help, she feared Sir Sidney would only add to the heat.
“And if we were truly at a happy end I’d be a retired country gentleman in America,” I added grumpily. “I’ve had quite enough adventuring and planned to settle down, Sir Sidney, but it never seems to happen.”
“But that’s because of Napoleon and Leon Martel, no?” Smith was never one to be rattled by discontent. “I’m trying to save you from them.” He was still fit and handsome, the kind of swashbuckling adventurer who’d built the British empire. Books about his exploits have made women swoon and men jealous, and now he could call himself a lord. I can’t say I envied his having to sit through debates in Parliament, but I did think, my emerald gone, that too many of the men I meet seem to do better than me. In a better mood I might have asked for friendly advice, but instead I wanted to puncture his good cheer.
“Fort de Joux was a fiasco,” I said.
“I’d say your escape was a credit to British pluck and engineering, thanks to the genius of George Cayley and Joseph Priestly. And you never give yourself enough credit for your own success, Ethan. It’s not every father who would leap off a castle for his son.” The man chugged ahead like a machine. “That scoundrel Martel is a skunk of a schemer, but you’re with the right side now. And you were saved, by my own Charles Frotte. It should be in the papers, but for the moment we need secrecy.”
“Saved to play a role in English intrigue and skullduggery?”
“Skullduggery!” He laughed. “Ethan, I am in Parliament! We statesmen are not even supposed to have knowledge of that word. No, no, not skullduggery. Alliance against the worst Bonapartist tyranny and intimidation. The man has not kept a single precept of the Treaty of Amiens.”
“Nor has England.” Thanks to my role as go-between, I got to hear the same complaints from both sides. Being a statesman can be as tiresome as refereeing quarreling children.
“Napoleon has betrayed every revolutionary ideal, set himself up as military dictator, aspires to dominate Germany and Italy, and plots invasion against your own nation’s Mother Country. He’s attempting to reinstitute slavery in Saint-Domingue against every precept of his own nation’s declaration of rights, and steal an ancient treasure he has no rights to that could leave us defenseless. No one should see through his hypocrisy better than you. Ours is a noble league, you and I. A league against brutal Caesar, just as at Acre! We’re a bulwark against tyranny.”
I first met Smith when he helped defend the Ottoman city of Acre against Napoleon in 1799. The English captain was handsome, dashing, energetic, brave, ambitious, vain, and more intelligent than almost any officer he encountered, which meant he was thoroughly detested by most of his naval peers. His knighthood had come from service to the king of Sweden, and his escape from a Parisian prison, with the aid of women he’d wooed, had all the elements to make him celebrated. Bonaparte had railed at his success. The English, meanwhile, were never quite certain if he was a genius or merely odd, and so stuck him in Parliament, where he’d be at home in either event.