you see. As courier or go-between, you can make history.”
“So long as it safeguards my family.”
“Your family will safeguard itself. I’ll pay your new French stipend while you and your family attend Napoleon at the army camps on the Channel coast.” He turned to Astiza. “It was to be five hundred francs a month, but for your cooperation, let’s make it six.”
“You can simply pay the money to my wife here in Paris,” I said.
“But Napoleon wants her, too, along with the boy and the comtesse.”
I was surprised. “For what?”
“He’ll tell you in due time.”
The oath was to both France and emperor, the roars of Vive l’empereur shook the church, and at last we were released, long lines of men lining up at temporary privies to pee.
As the mob slowly carried us outside, I put a question to Talleyrand. “To a realist does such ceremony matter? I mean, a trinket and a ribbon? It’s like trade goods to the Indians, isn’t it?”
“Napoleon heard the same doubt in his Council of State. To which he replied, ‘By such toys are men led.’”
CHAPTER 10
Napoleon watched England from a gray wooden gallery with glassed oval ends, nesting on a bluff above Boulogne. The pavilion was built near the legendary site of Caligula’s Lighthouse, erected when that mad Roman emperor dreamed of conquering Britain and fired catapults at the water when storms dashed his chances. Soldiers called the one-hundred-foot-long aerie “the Big Box.” When Channel squalls blew, the pavilion was a cozy refuge. On clearer days, a telescope gave a view of the white cliffs of Dover and the British navy between. A long table inside was strewn with maps of England and its shoaling shores.
There was only one chair. Attending generals were required to stand in order to keep meetings short. When Napoleon launched into monologues, they leaned on the hilts of their sheathed swords to give their legs relief.
The emperor’s panorama was like that of a giant child with an unlimited supply of toy soldiers. The Channel shore had been dubbed the Iron Coast for its menacing artillery batteries. On the sloping meadows around the French seaport was a vast military city of eighty thousand men, living in mud-and-wattle barracks with thatched roofs and smoking chimneys. It was no secret that there were thirty-five thousand more drilling in Saint-Omer, fourteen thousand at Dunkirk, twenty thousand at Ostend, and ten thousand at Bruges, along with ten thousand horses and hundreds of field guns. All of this I had duly put in coded messages with sympathetic ink and passed to Sir Sidney Smith, as Réal cheerfully suggested.
Waiting to take this army across the Channel were thirteen hundred boats classed as prame, chaloupe, bateau, or péniche, with another thousand under construction.
The quest was hung with history. Napoleon had displayed the famed Bayeux Tapestry in Paris the previous winter, reminding the French of their success with the Norman conquest of England in 1066. And William the Conqueror had led a platoon compared to this lot.
But patrolling offshore, like sentry dogs, were scores of English ships.
Elephant and whale, indeed.
My family and Catherine rode in a coach from Paris to Boulogne on the swift stage roads we’d avoided before, us chattering and our escort Pasques as mute as a mummy. Since the royalists had been crushed and I was supposedly working for both sides, I didn’t understand the need for a watchful policeman, but at least the giant was useful in getting men to slide out of the way at an inn table. He tended to get faster service and hotter food, too, with less need to check the arithmetic of the bill. I like large companions.
It didn’t require a spy to know we were approaching military encampments. Even in summer the roads were churned to wallows from a constant stream of supply wagons. The outskirts of Boulogne had a new tent city of sutlers, prostitutes, moneylenders, horse traders, food wagons, and casinos. As we rode past we were offered pigs, chickens, pastries, bare breasts, campaign equipment, loans, and gypsy fortunes, Harry taking in more of life’s realities than I would have preferred. He was most mesmerized by the uniforms and guns. Cannons thudded in practice drills. Muskets crackled on the firing range. Newly purchased mares were commanded and spurred next to a deliberate cacophony of cannon blast, bugle call, gunshot, drum, and practiced screams from a chorus of village women hired expressly for the purpose, to mimic the cries of combat.