gotten a tip? The greater the conspiracy, the easier to find weak members to turn. With thousands scheming for the first consul’s downfall, any number of traitors could have betrayed us between London and Paris.
The cutter was gaining.
“They’re setting a spanker,” I said, sounding more nautical than I really am. “Or maybe it’s a studs’l.” I’ve crossed the ocean several times and acquired some salty vocabulary, but the enemy was actually little more than a gray blur. Our compass gyrated as uselessly as my stomach, I couldn’t see a star, and if I remained the helmsman, then my mission to kill Napoleon seemed likely to end before it properly got started. We were looking for a beach north of Dieppe, but damned if I knew whether we were pointed at the North Pole or Tahiti. I just aimed where Johnstone told me.
“A risk for Lacasse in this wind,” our smuggler said.
“You know our pursuer?”
“I know his boat. Antoine is an able seaman, but not as able as me.” Johnstone aimed his little cannon. It fired a ball too small to sink anything, but big enough to make our pursuers duck. “Maybe I can shoot down some rigging.”
“I hope you agree with the comtesse that it’s Davy’s fate that was bad, not our own.”
Johnstone grunted. He was a strapping six-foot-three, dark-haired, blue-eyed brute, with a big-nosed lump of a face from decades of wind and drink. “That lad never had luck since breech birth killed his ma. Clumsy as a mule, dumb as an ox, and happy as a clam, as the slower sailors usually are. Intelligence is the enemy of contentment, Ethan Gage, and Davy’s luck was accepting his lot and then finding a quicker way out of it than most of us can look forward to.” He cupped his hand to shelter a match near the touchhole, since the gun lacked the newer lanyard. “I’ve seen men hit by cannon fire take three days to die, screaming till their lips cracked.” He lit the charge, there was flare from the touchhole, and it fired. “Now, we Lymington sailors ain’t as neat with our round shot, so we’ll try to give the frogs some splinters to howl about.”
It was too dark to see the cannonball’s effect, but I imagined I heard shouts across the water.
I glanced again toward the comtesse, who’d been eighteen when exiled by the French Revolution and was now a Bourbon beauty of thirty-one, her cloak hooding a mass of golden hair as glossy as smuggled silk. I’d too recently lost my wife to be my typical flirtatious self, but it was still male instinct to want to impress a pretty Frenchwoman. We were introduced by the spymaster Sir Sidney Smith in London, united in wanting to do away with Napoleon, and divided by her haughty high birth. Her motives weren’t entirely clear to me, but I was happy having company in vengeance. My charm having failed to impress her, I decided to grin fiercely instead. “Win through or die,” I growled.
I was rewarded with an evaluating glance of her green eyes.
It was April 3, 1804, and the ashes of my ambition had been rekindled by tragedy and the desire to give payback for my missing wife. A mere year before I’d been hoping for a quiet retirement with my new family, financed by an emerald I’d snatched from the pasha of Tripoli. However, procrastination, greed, and poor vigilance ended up endangering my son and losing Astiza. I chased and lost a fortune in the Caribbean, and because I blamed myself for her drowning, I was anxious to extend the blame to someone else, like Napoleon. Her loss left me the shattered caretaker of little Harry, now approaching his fourth birthday. My enemy in the Caribbean, Leon Martel, had persuaded me that Bonaparte himself was behind this cruel manipulation of my family. So I’d returned with Harry to England, used the sale of the emerald to temporarily establish my boy with a clergy family named Chiswick, and sought the help of Smith to strike back at Napoleon. Much to my liking, he suggested Catherine as a useful partner.
One final quest, and then I’d make Harry and me a home.
A better man might have set aside such self-importance to take care of his son; my sticking him with strangers adding to the guilt I carried like chains. But like so many faulty fathers I let a noble and dangerous mission convince me that the more mundane duty of