Marcus Sedgwick: The Truth is Dead

The figure moved slowly down the room, passing the five-sticked candelabra in the middle of the table, giving the Emperor a chance to see if he’d been fooled. He made a quick calculation in his head. My God! Had it been twenty years? That would make him…

“Seventy? No! Seventy-one.”

The figure stopped in its slow progress along the length of the room. “Correct.”

His voice was as Napoleon remembered, precise and economic, though you could hear the extra years in it now.

“Please,” Napoleon said, not a word he had much use for, “please, sit down.”

“Thank you, I shall, for I am an old man.”

“You were old when they killed you.”

“Only six years older than you are now. Does that feel old to you?” There was bitterness in the man’s voice; anger at the waste. “I was at my prime. Not physically. But my work, my great work, was just beginning.”

Napoleon felt a shiver travel down his spine. “Lavoisier,” he breathed, “it is truly you.”

“At your service.”

“What did the judge say at your trial? The old fool! Something about ‘We have no need—’”

“‘—of genius.’ Yes, I have heard those words in my mind every day. Every day, for twenty years, Napoleon. But here I am. And in all those twenty years, I never had the chance to thank you. I suppose I should.”

Napoleon felt the remark cut him. “You suppose?” he said. “Most men would be grateful for their lives. Are you not?”

“For my life, yes. Thank you. But what kind of life is worth living? I have spent twenty years on the run; I have lived in sixteen different countries in that time. I have not put one foot in France since the day after my ‘execution’. Your man smuggled me to the coast, to England first. It was clear I could not stay there long. Then to Ireland. My God! What an awful wet place that was. Two years! Then back to the Continent, always moving when the rumours started again, heading into more and more remote regions. And my work! Once, I had three laboratories in Paris. For these twenty years I have dragged my laboratory behind me in horse and cart, through the mud and snows of Europe. What have I done in that time, apart from spend the fortune you sent me away with? Almost nothing! So, my Emperor, you will forgive me if sometimes I wish that I had died under the guillotine that day, instead of that poor stooge you disguised as me.”

He fell silent, the rapid fire of his speech having spent itself, and coughed gently into an old silk handkerchief.

Napoleon sat open-mouthed; he was not used to being spoken to in this way. Even during the retreat from Moscow, not one of his generals would have dared be so bold.

“Did I force you to live?” he asked quietly, fingering the chain of the small black bag at his neck. “I suppose in a way I did, for who can really take their own life? But what could I have done? I was not Emperor then. I was a general with money and some power. It was as much as I could do to save a man whose skills I knew France could not afford to lose. I got you out. I gave you money. And then I never heard from you again. For five years I had my spies hunt for you. I needed you! But you were nowhere. I became Emperor and my dominions covered almost every country in Europe. But even in those… other countries, Britain and Russia, I had my spies. And no one could find you. After ten years I believed you were dead. How could I have helped you then?”

“And excuse me,” he continued, waving a hand at the darkened room, “but as you see, life has been difficult lately. I was betrayed! By fortune and the stupidity of my generals. I chased from one end of Europe to the other, doing what no one could do but me: Egypt, Spain, Italy, Austria, Poland. And then came Russia and the bloody Czar. He needed to be taught a lesson, and by God, I intended to. The largest army ever to walk the earth! Half a million men, Lavoisier, can you imagine? Half a million men walked into Russia and I won. I won. We took Moscow, Alexander scurried around like the idiot he is, and yet it all came to nothing. I was defeated in the end, but not by Russia. By the weather. The winter!

“My God, Lavoisier, you have never seen anything like that. You, the great scientist! In all your wanderings around Europe, you never saw what I saw in Russia in 1812. We captured Moscow, and then? What? I didn’t have the men to hold it, and I… may have hesitated. We pulled out of the city, putting it to the torch, only to find the Czar’s men coming at us from the south. We engaged, it was bloody, and then we began the long walk out of Russia, but the winter beat us to it. And the cold… Holy Christ, the cold. The snows came early, they said, and caught us while we were still halfway to Vilna. The temperature dropped and kept dropping. Forty below zero! For three weeks.

“You have never seen anything like that, Lavoisier, with all your science. You should have been there, to learn what the cold will do to a man who tries to keep walking until he freezes on his feet. There were those who made the mistake of taking their boots off; they would never get them back on again, and frostbite took their toes in days. There were those who lay down in the cold and went to sleep; but the ones who kept walking were worse. Their faces! Their faces were red, flushed with blood, as if their veins had frozen and blocked, but still they walked until their noses and ears bled. I saw tears of blood, Lavoisier – is such a thing possible? Yes, I saw it. And still they would walk until they froze where they stood. And if they made it to the bivouac each evening, still they were not safe. I saw men walk straight into a campfire and lie down, oblivious to the fact they were burning to death. And no one tried to stop them. There was precious little firewood to be had…”

He stopped, the force of his vitriol seeping away among the awful memories.

“And then, just before they sent me to this prison island, one of my spies heard an interesting story about a scientist in England who had a trace of a French accent…”

Lavoisier inclined his head slightly. He didn’t mind the Emperor’s rantings. He knew him of old, and he had of course heard of his developments.

“ Et voilà! Your servant, ready to do your bidding.”

“At a price.”

“Naturally.”

Napoleon thumped the table. “Dammit! This is France we’re talking about.”

“No, it isn’t,” Lavoisier said. “It’s you we’re talking about.”

Napoleon stood. “We’ll talk more tomorrow. I am going to bed. A room has been prepared for you. Eat something if you will.”

Lavoisier stood. “Thank you, no. I am not hungry.”

Over breakfast two days later, the two men met again. Lavoisier had spent his time supervising the transportation of what passed for his laboratory from the docks up to the house. Napoleon had turned over an unused kitchen to the stranger, with the strictest instructions that no one was to enter the room or disturb him in any way.

“What is it that you want?” Lavoisier asked, though he had more than a rough idea.

Napoleon regarded the face opposite him. Now impossibly wrinkled, its characteristic almond shape, long nose and wide eyes were still the same as ever, though there was a touch of death in those eyes that had not been there before. Lavoisier, for his part, was studying the eyes of the Emperor, thinking that even when he smiled, there was always the look of death about him.

“When I knew you first,” Napoleon said, “I was a student at the École. You were ending your time at the Royal Gunpowder Administration. Was it 1787? The accident?”

“It was 1788,” Lavoisier said testily.

“What happened? I heard you were experimenting with some new explosives.”