by ruthless enemies. Employ you, yes. Extort you through the theft of your son? Mon Dieu! I’ve no time for kidnapping children. I truly have no idea what you’re babbling about. Come, we’re old campaigners. Remember the Alps?”
I was sweating from making accusations to a powerful man. “I know what I heard. He made you a monster. I called him a liar, and he called me naive.”
“Did he, while wearing my tattoo?” He wasn’t in a rage at my accusation, so he wanted something. “And do you have the golden pendant I gave you?” He knew the answer, of course, since I’d already shown it to Réal.
I brought the trinket out. There was the N, for Napoleon, circled by a wreath. “It’s proved useful at times,” I admitted. “I saved it through a hurricane.”
I didn’t tell him I’d ripped it from my wife’s throat to cast aside in the ocean, and that it had floated unbidden back into my pocket.
“Saved a monster’s pendant? Perhaps you weren’t sure this renegade policeman was telling the truth. Perhaps, Gage, I don’t have time to make plots with henchmen I’ve never heard of. I thought you were helping me make the bargain for Louisiana. The next thing I know, you’re missing for months and then reported hiding in Paris as a British spy. It makes no sense.”
Should I believe his denial? Maybe he really didn’t know of Martel’s manipulation of my family. Maybe he did but hadn’t played a direct role. Maybe Martel had exaggerated events in order to torment me, and divert blame from himself. Or maybe, like so many things in our histories, the entire scheme was one more misfire on all sides. In payback I’d broken into a prison, helped win a slave revolt that robbed France of its richest colony, and sent Martel to hell, so by that measure accounts were settled. Napoleon was ambitious, I was an adventurer, and our relationship was a complicated mess of debts, appreciations, and slights.
“Neither did it make sense to save you from drowning,” I said, “but I did so, even after your order forcing my family to come here. An order that makes no sense, either. You’re emperor. Why do you need us in Boulogne?”
“I need every soldier you can see from these windows. And I invited you here to explain our cause and get you and Astiza to help. France is going to win, Ethan, and when it does the world will be a better place, unshackled from moribund royals and medieval prejudices. Parliaments and Congresses don’t work. You can’t get two ambitious rascals to agree, let alone two hundred. But a single great man of ability, not birth, can accomplish something! I mean to allow trade between all nations, instill public instruction, open Jewish ghettos, reform the courts, and build canals and bridges. Does that sound like a monster to you?”
I have cheek I learned from him. “Accomplished at the point of a bayonet.”
He barked a laugh. “What an idealist you’ve become, gambler and scamp! You know as well as I that it’s only by bayonet that anything gets done. But my bayonets are propelled by ideas. I worry about newspapers, philosophers, politicians, and, yes, spies, but only because they influence opinion. And I worry about opinion only because I need it to accomplish my task on earth, which is to turn slogan into law and mobs into armies. So: I could have you shot in an instant for treachery, but instead, I invite you here to consult, observe, and, if you wish, pass on the truth to the British. I’m a general, yes, but a man of peace forced into war.”
“With a hundred thousand men,” I persisted.
“Two hundred thousand by next year, and the boats to carry them. All to end, once and for all, a contest that has dragged on for centuries. The British have tried to assassinate me a dozen times, Gage. They’re implacable and conspiratorial, a cabal of cowardly plotters who buy Austrians and Russians to do their fighting for them. England is a wretched nation of shopkeepers, a global bully, and the world will be better when France scrubs their grubby island clean as the Normans did in 1066. Tell me, what’s the name of that water out there?” He pointed out the window.
I was puzzled by the question. “The English Channel.”
“No, Ethan. La Manche, the Sleeve, the name given by France, and yet the world sees it as the property of the English. Soon that