William Dietrich - The Emerald Storm

Accordingly, I wasn’t surprised when she hesitated in her alarm. An encouraging smile from me, and she bent forward to peer into the blackness at my peculiar situation. Motioning for the damsel to wait, I finished crab-walking to a crenellation and hauled myself over the lip of the wall, muscles shaking. I looked back down. I couldn’t see aeronaut George Cayley or his contraption, but I tied off the rope to the stonework and jerked the line as a signal. It jerked back, like a fish on the end of the line.

Well, first things first. Glancing about for sentries (they were huddled inside as promised, the idlers), I danced lightly to the parapet door of the tower I’d just scaled and rapped. The beauty opened it a crack and looked out cautiously. “Monsieur, why were you hanging like a spider outside my window?” She was ripe, rumpled, and Rubenesque. Lord, it’s hard to be married.

“Not a spider but a butterfly, my wings opened by the fires of love,” I cheerfully lied, a necessity with strange women. I gave her a quick kiss on the cheek, which gave her a start but also a blush of excitement. And yes, I was mindful that my wife was in theory somewhere in the castle below, pretending to be L’Ouverture’s long-lost mistress. What can I say? Ours is a unique marriage, and the fate of nations was at stake, not to mention the rescue of brave little Harry. “Prepare yourself, my love, while I haul up a surprise.”

“Monsieur,” she said, confused but intrigued, “do I know you?”

“If you know longing, if you ache for beauty as I do, if you dream desire, then you know my heart. Please, patience for just minutes more! I will confess all, soon!” And I gently pushed her backward and shut the door. With any luck she was a romantic nitwit who would sleepily confuse me with some other swain who’d given her the eye.

Then I hurried back to the fortress edge and hauled on the rope. Cayley’s flying machine, a twenty-foot-long cylinder of sticks and twine wrapped in canvas, as delicate as a veined leaf, came lurching up toward me. I heaved it over to lie on the parapet and cast the rope back down for the inventor to pull himself up. The plan was he’d assemble his flying machine while I rescued the Negro. Assuming either of us was still alive by then, we’d trust our lives to something that was little more than lattice and oiled cotton.

Well, it would be quicker than waiting for the guillotine.

For days, Cayley had tried to assure me he knew what he was doing. “The wings of Daedalus and Icarus need not be mere myth, Mr. Gage,” he told me as we prepared for our mission. “Not only is man destined to fly, he already has.”

I had peered upward skeptically. “Not that I’ve seen.”

“The Berber Ibn Firnas launched himself from a mountain near Cordoba with artificial wings in about 875. The monk Eilmer flew from a tower at Malmesbury Abbey just before the Norman Conquest. Leonardo da Vinci sketched flying machines, and the Spaniard Diego Aquilera flew from the highest part of the castle of Coruna del Conde just ten years ago.”

“What happened to them all?”

“Oh, they crashed. None died, however. A few broken bones for the early ones and just bruises for Aguilera.”

“I suppose that’s progress.”

“I’ve studied bird wings and learned from my predecessors’ failures, which included the lack of a tail. I believe we can launch from Fort de Joux and glide for miles, far outdistancing any pursuit. All it takes is courage.”

“There’s a fine line between heroism and idiocy.” I’m an expert.

“My test models suggest curved wings provide more lift, just like a bird, and the knack is adjusting the weight. The real problem is stopping. I’ve yet to duplicate the legs and talons of a raptor.”

“So you’re proposing a controlled fall down the side of a mountain and a crash at high speed? Just to be clear what we’re planning.”

“No, I’m proposing that we aim for a lake for our landing.”

“Landing where there is no land? End of winter? Freezing water?”

“Frozen water, perhaps. It will take the French entirely by surprise, won’t it? Ingenuity against elan, Ethan, that’s the English secret. This is just a first step. Someday ordinary men will fly everywhere in luxurious comfort, in enormous padded chairs in floating cabins, attended by beautiful servant girls feeding them courses worthy of a Sunday dinner.”

Obviously the man should be packed off to an asylum, but what stopped me from laughing is that while we had a plan to get into L’Ouverture’s prison, we didn’t have one to get back out. Or, if we did, we could expect the entire angry garrison to hunt us down. The French would spare no effort to recapture the Black Spartacus, and Cayley was the only person with a scheme to give us a head start.

When every other option means imprisonment or execution, lunacy becomes attractive. So I’d signed us on.

Cayley called his artificial bird a glider. “Unfortunately, it can only descend, not ascend,” he said.

“I can do that already, by myself.”

“But not with the gentleness of a feather, right?”

“Frankly, I don’t like falling at all.”

“It will be like sliding down a banister.”

Our strategy was threefold. The glider for escape, I to crack open our prisoner’s cell, and Astiza laying the groundwork with womanly charm. L’Ouverture had a reputation as a prodigious womanizer that left me, frankly, a little envious. He’d had black, white, and brown wives and concubines, and Astiza had approached the French commandant by posing as one of these. She suggested to the French that she might solicit treasure secrets with warmth where cold wouldn’t do, seducing L’Ouverture for his secrets in return for a share of any treasure. She’d fled the war-torn tropic colony and was trying to make her way in cruel France, she explained.

I wasn’t entirely happy at her calm confidence in being able to pull this charade off. The less innocent a man is, the more innocent he hopes his wife will be. But I knew better than anyone just how irresistible Astiza could be when she put her mind to it. I was sending her into the lion’s den and hoping she could persuade L’Ouverture to join our lunatic escape without too many objections. Worse, I knew she’d likely achieve the coup. She’d be seductive and ruthless, persuasive but distant, winsome but steely, with hardly an extra breath. Women are by natural law inferior, Napoleon insists, except that every time I meet one I’m forced to doubt the truth of his maxim.

We had two reasons for this seduction. One was that Astiza as pretend mistress could demand that the viewing port into Toussaint’s cell be closed for conjugal privacy, giving me time to break out L’Ouverture from the roof. The other was to alert the imprisoned general that he was about to be rescued and to prepare him for being hoisted through a hole and catapulted into space. There’d be no time for debate. We’d flee across the castle battlements and use Cayley and his flying machine to meet Frotte and his mix of spies where they waited in a snowy meadow. Then we’d flee to the Swiss border and onward down the Rhine to the North Sea and Britain.

Or such was the plan.

“How many can this flying machine carry?” I’d asked Cayley.

“By my calculations, three,” the inventor had replied.

“I count four.” Gambling gives one familiarity with arithmetic.

“One of you will surely be dead by the time you launch,” Frotte pointed out. “And we don’t have time to invent a bigger flying machine.”

He had a point. The only thing worse than our scheme was doing nothing at all.

The first problem I must overcome was that the only way out of our prisoner’s cell was an overhead skylight, bare of glass but grilled with stout iron bars.