I trotted back across the Seine and followed the Louvre downstream, out of sight of coronation audiences, coming to where the palace museum gives way to the carousel. It’s a varied neighborhood with a house facing the Tuileries Palace that is entirely occupied by prostitutes. There were none in the windows to spy me because they were all working the crowds.
Floating faithfully on the river was Robert Fulton’s steamboat. It was a curious craft. Jutting from its center was a cylinder two feet in diameter that rose to about the height of a man and held a piston. A box and boiler beneath made steam, a stack spewed smoke, and the piston cranked the paddlewheels with pumping arms.
Astiza and Harry weren’t at this planned rendezvous.
With the gates of Paris certain to be closed against us, I’d planned another means of escape. A steamboat could chug down the open river to avoid the city walls and might even get us all the way to England.
At the very least, I bet that Fulton’s contraption was so odd that it would be the last conveyance anyone thought to check.
The day before, I’d hidden rifle, firewood, and food in preparation for escape after we sabotaged the coronation. I opened the little door of its stove, started a wood blaze, and fed it coal. It would take at least half an hour to work up steam, but hopefully my enemies wouldn’t connect me with one more plume of smoke among the thousands in Paris this wintry day. The coronation route on rue Saint-Honoré was on the other side of the Louvre.
Where was Astiza? Pasques’s surly comment made me hopeful that she was alive and at large after striking him; the oaf was clearly having a bad day with the Ethan Gage family. Yet with authorities in pursuit I knew my bride had the kind of defiant courage to head the opposite direction to draw them off. Were we separated once more, Napoleon triumphant and I bereft? I’d also probably forsaken my ten thousand francs by stealing the coronation robe of the grand chamberlain. I needed a more lucrative career.
Best to focus on the task at hand. The fire in the boiler provided welcome heat while I studied again the instructions Fulton had left. The tedium of waiting for a fire makes steamboating an exercise in patience, but then wind doesn’t always blow, either. I read which lever to thumb to check the pressure. Finally, the boiler whistled like a kettle.
Astiza, Astiza! We needed to escape, I’d been on board nearly an hour, dusk approached, and my wife and son had yet to appear at this planned rendezvous. What to do? Pulling a pin and releasing a lever would mean abandoning my family.
So I’d wait.
But then there was a shout, a stampede of soldiers on the river quay, and approaching bayonets danced up and down. A huge figure in black was leading their charge.
Pasques looked in no better mood than when I’d left him. Time to go after all. So long as I remained free there was a chance for rescue and reunification. I threw off the lines, hauled in the gangplank, swung the tiller, and let the current drift Fulton’s invention out onto the Seine. More shouts as people saw the novelty move.
With pulled levers and cranked valves, the vertical rod at the top of Fulton’s huge piston began pumping up and down. Smoke puffed. A crank turned gears, and the wooden blades of the paddlewheels bit water.
I looked shoreward. Pasques was running parallel to my progress, a mix of soldiers and gendarmes jogging after him. A couple of them stopped to shoot at me, one bullet hitting the hull and another kicking up a spout of water.
“No! To the bridge!” Pasques redoubled his speed to cut me off.
Ahead was the Pont Royal. If he and his men could line up before I passed, their volley would sweep the boat.
I picked up my Jaeger rifle. I had one shot for twenty men.
The bridge was only a quarter mile from where the boat had been docked, and even a battered Pasques managed to beat the slow steamboat to its span. I wouldn’t have guessed such a big man to be so sprightly, but anger can do wonders. His soldiers were still running on the bank in a long string behind when he stood up on the stone balustrade of the bridge to pose astride my path like the Colossus of Rhodes, a red-stained neckerchief tied around