his wounded throat. He was shouting like a madman and gesturing angrily downward as if I could somehow stop. Seeing me headed straight toward him, the giant put his arms out and crouched, prepared to spring. The idiot was twenty feet above the river. If he leaped into my steamboat, he’d go straight through and sink us both.
Maybe that was his plan.
So when I was thirty seconds from the bridge, paddlewheels churning, I fired at his foot.
The rifle was blessedly accurate, chipping the bridge at the toe of his boot. Instinctively, he jerked his leg up, giving me that disbelieving stare of affront that victims must give to murderers, and then lost balance and toppled into the river with a gigantic splash.
Pasques came up with the grace of a pregnant hippopotamus. I steered for a gap between the bridge piers, quickly lashed the tiller in position, and leaped over the gearing to grab the buffalo before he was hit with the churning paddles. “Stop kicking!” Getting him aboard was like handling a whale, but I needed him for protection. I hauled him in as we passed under the bridge and trussed him with a mooring line, soldiers shouting in confusion above us. Then I slid under his squirming, cursing bulk.
We chugged out on the downstream side. A score of muskets pointed from the bridge balustrade, but if the soldiers shot they’d kill their policeman. A captain shouted to hold their fire.
“We’re both lucky they care for you,” I told Pasques.
Slowly, we drew out of range. Fulton had written that his engine boasted the energy of eight horses, but I couldn’t see it, given the plodding of the paddles. On the other hand, the engine never slackened. Maybe there’s something to steamboats after all.
The soldiers on the bridge ran left and right, presumably scattering for horses to chase us.
I pushed out from under Pasques, reloaded the Jaeger, and manned the tiller. We slipped past the Champ de Mars, the city walls, and then as the day grew truly dim, Napoleon’s suburban palace at Saint-Cloud. People stared, but nobody shot, thank goodness, since word of my escape had yet to spread. I began leafing through the papers I’d lifted from Talleyrand’s coat.
Eureka! There was French strategy there, a naval plan I’d not heard before. Perhaps my luck was not entirely abominable. I’d stolen a ticket back to my spymasters in Britain.
“Don’t think I won’t have my revenge, Gage!” Pasques shouted from where he was trussed in the bow, on the other side of the steam engine in the boat’s center. “They’ll be sharpening the guillotine!”
“I saved your life,” I called over the racket of the machine. “You can thank me by shutting up.”
“Saved it after kicking my privates, damaging my legs, and toppling me into the freezing river! The blade is too swift for you!”
Sighing, I lashed the tiller again, grabbed my rifle, stepped over the churning gearing, and came up to him. Villains can be slow in realizing when advantage has turned. “If you’re so insistent at threatening me, perhaps I should drop you back in the Seine,” I said quietly. “Or simply shoot you for your foul temper and terrible manners.”
“You offended God, tried to sabotage the coronation, pummeled me, disrobed the grand chamberlain, and clouted Catherine Marceau.”
“It was you who assaulted me in Notre Dame. Have you no respect for a church, Inspector? And where have you put my wife and child? A simple expatriate family tries to enjoy French ceremony, and suddenly you’re kidnapping, grabbing, and shooting. Guillotine, indeed.”
“It was you who shot at me!”
“So you wouldn’t plunge through my steamboat. No one is more peace loving than me, Ethan Gage.”
He scowled, face swollen, throat red, clothes dripping. “Why do you even talk? Nothing useful comes out of that hole in your face.”
“If we’d remained friends you’d be dry and happy right now.” I shook my head. “Your judgment, Pasques, needs work.”
He writhed in his bonds. “They’ll send cavalry, Gage. The Seine winds like a serpent, and this smoking monster is slow as a nag. Your capture is inevitable.”
He had a point. Far from traveling in a straight line toward the sea, we were making long, looping twists through French farmland, issuing a plume of smoke to pinpoint our position. Despite my earlier optimism, I revised my opinion again and decided Fulton’s steamboat was a bad idea, at least for escaping spies. “True. So listen, Pasques: I’ve nothing to lose by murdering you. I’ll let you live only