to gauge our situation. Even the English captain who had brought Astiza to France ahead of me, John Wesley Wright, had been captured off the French coast and imprisoned. Betrayal had followed betrayal. Sir Sidney Smith’s brother Spencer had been forced by French pressure to leave Württemberg in Germany, where he’d served as a spymaster. Another British agent, Francis Drake, had fled Munich. My family was marooned as forgotten agents of a conspiracy in utter collapse. My investments in England were out of reach, and the gold I’d been given as salary had to be carefully nursed because we were supporting Catherine, and communication with Sir Sidney Smith was broken. I calculated we’d just enough to last until the coronation, planned for early December. I could still send messages out to England, using a collaborating priest in the confessional at Saint-Sulpice, but received no word in return.
In short, I’d given up control of my fortune and joined the wrong side at the worst possible time, at frozen wages, with a flirtatious roommate who lost her own money in the Channel, all to avenge a wife who turned out to be alive.
My foresight could be improved.
We also suspected we were being followed. Catherine said men watched her from café tables (a claim I didn’t doubt), and Astiza said clerks made notes of books she examined at the imposing Bibliothèque Nationale on rue de Richelieu. These gatekeepers claimed that the records she most ardently sought either didn’t exist or were restricted. Harry reported seeing a shadowy giant, though this specter melted away every time I turned, and I knew he might be a product of my son’s anxious imagination. He would wake with nightmares. It’s natural for a child to have a nervous imagination, but it was with love and guilt that I’d buy him pastries—or an early orange from the Mediterranean—or tell him monsters aren’t true.
Police were everywhere. Informers rife. Conspirators bleated under torture. And the most powerful army the world had ever seen was being honed like a knife on the Channel, ready to leap on Britain.
In short, it had been an anxious spring.
After emerging from the convent in April, a royalist tip had led us to a Paris landlord who didn’t ask too many questions. Our lodging was a second-floor apartment in the fashionable Saint-Germain neighborhood. The comtesse had insisted upon such an address to avoid complete humiliation, and it was certainly a notch above my earlier hovel amid the furniture workshops in Saint-Antoine. Perhaps I was making progress after all! Our quarter smelled of flower shops instead of tanneries, and we heard church bells instead of hammers and saws.
Status and price were contingent on how many stairs you had to climb, so we, on the second floor, were middle class in a literal way, paying four hundred francs a month. Above us on the third were a coppersmith with his wife and three noisy adolescent children. Tucked under the rafters were four washerwomen, war widows all, who worked on a laundry barge on the Seine. Once a week we gave them a basket of our clothes to clean. If they teased me for being a handsome and dashing rogue, I tipped them.
Bonaparte was restoring order to street addresses, but his committee hadn’t completed its reports yet, and so we were No. 1,043 rue du Bac. We were hardly secret. All the tenants used the same central stair, so we could hear the steady troop and quarrels of neighbors going up and down, just as they could see and hear us. But there was nothing remarkable about our household, much to the comtesse’s distress, and the presence of my son helped deflect suspicion. Spies don’t take rambunctious children along. We lived in obscurity while tracking the fast-changing political situation. My name, if asked, was John Greenwell of Philadelphia. I was in Paris to foster American trade if it could circumvent the British blockade. Since that was unlikely, it was justifiable to my neighbors that I did little during the day.
Catherine, easily bored, was impatient. “Nobody knows who we are. You should announce yourself as the famed electrician and diplomat, back from new adventures in the Americas with a royalist benefactor. Me.”
“Pride that will jeopardize my family.”
“But as Ethan Gage you would have access to high circles,” she persisted. “We could attend salons and balls together. Astiza could look after Harry.”
Before I was beneath her dignity, and now she wanted me on her arm? “I thought I was a colonial