Astiza and I landed on the southern coast of France on October 11, 1799, two days after Napoleon Bonaparte and Alessandro Silano did the same. For both parties it had been a long voyage. Bonaparte, after patting mistress Pauline Foures on her fanny and leaving a note to Kléber informing him that he was now in command (he preferred not to face the general in person), had taken Monge, Berthollet, and a few other savants like Silano and hugged the frequently windless African coast to avoid the British navy. The route turned a routine sea voyage into a tedious forty-two days. Even as he crept homeward, French politics became more chaotic as plot and counterplot simmered in Paris. It was the perfect atmosphere for an ambitious general, and the bulletin announcing Napoleon’s smashing victory at Abukir arrived in Paris three days before the general did. His way north was marked by cheering crowds.
Our voyage was also slow, but for a different reason. With Smith’s encouragement, we boarded a British frigate a week after Bonaparte had left Egypt and sailed directly for France to intercept. His slowness saved him. We were off Corsica and Toulon two weeks before Napoleon arrived and, learning there was no word of him, darted back the way we’d come. Even from a masthead, however, a lookout surveys only a few square miles of sea, and the Mediterranean is big. How close we came I don’t know. Finally a picket boat brought word that he’d landed first in his native Corsica and then France, and by the time we followed he was well ahead of us.
If Silano hadn’t been along, I’d have been content to let him go. It’s not my duty to dog ambitious generals. But we had a score to settle with the count, and the book was dangerous in his hands and potentially useful in ours. How much did he already know? How much could we read, with Astiza’s key?
If our hunt at sea was anxious and discouraging, the time it took was not. Astiza and I had rarely had time to take a breath together. It had always been campaigns, treasure hunts, and perilous escapes. Now we shared a lieutenant’s cabin—our intimacy an issue of some jealousy among the lonely officers and crew—and had time to know each other at leisure, like a man and wife. Time enough, in other words, to scare any man wary of intimacy.
Except I liked it. We had certainly been partners in adventure, and lovers. Now we were friends. Her body ripened with rest and food, her skin recovered its blossom, and her hair its sheen. I loved to simply look at her, reading in our cabin or watching the bright sea by the rail, and loved how clothes draped her, how her hair floated in the breeze. Even better, of course, was slowly taking those clothes off. But our ordeals had saddened her, and her beauty seemed bittersweet. And when we came together in our cramped quarters, sometimes urgently and at other times with gentle care, trying to be quiet in the thin-walled ship, I was transported. I marveled that I, the wayward American opportunist, and she, the Egyptian mystic, got on at all. And yet it turned out we did complement and complete each other, anticipating each other. I began thinking of a normal life ahead.
I wished we could sail forever, and not find Napoleon at all.
But sometimes she was lost to me with a troubled look, seeing dark things in the past or future. That’s when I feared I would lose her again. Destiny claimed her as much as I did.
“Think about it, Ethan. Bonaparte with the power of Moses? France, with the secret knowledge of the Knight Templars? Silano, living forever, every year mastering more arcane formulae, gathering more followers? Our task isn’t done until we get that book back.”
So we landed in France. Of course we couldn’t dock in Toulon. Astiza conferred with our English captain, studied the charts, and insistently directed us to an obscure cove surrounded by steep hillsides, uninhabited except by a goatherd or two. How did she know the coast of France? We were rowed ashore at night to a pebble beach and left alone in the moonless dark. Finally there was a whistle and Astiza lit a candle, shielded by her cape.
“So the fool has returned,” a familiar voice said from the brush.
“He who found the Fool, father of all thought, originator of civilization, blessing and curse of kings.” Men materialized, swarthy and in boots and broad hats, bright sashes at their waists that held silver knives. Their leader bowed.
“Welcome back to the Rom,” said Stefan the gypsy.
I was pleasantly astounded by this reunion. I’d met these gypsies, or “gyptians,” as some in Europe called them—wanderers supposedly descended from the ancients—the year before when my friend Talma and I had fled Paris to join Napoleon’s expedition. After Najac and his gutter scoundrels had ambushed us on the Toulon stage, I’d escaped into the woods and found refuge with Stefan’s band. There I had first met Sidney Smith and, more agreeably, the beautiful Sarylla who had told my fortune, told me I was the fool to seek the Fool (another name for Thoth) and instructed me in lovemaking techniques of the ancients. It had been a pleasant way to complete my journey to Toulon, encapsulated in a gypsy wagon and safe from those pursuing my sacred medallion. Now, like a rabbit popping from a hole, my gypsy saviors were here again.
“What in the tarot are you doing here?” I asked.
“But waiting for you, of course.”
“I sent word ahead to them on an English cutter,” Astiza said.
Ah. Hadn’t these same gypsies sent word ahead to her, of the medallion and my coming? Which almost led to my head being blown off by Astiza’s former master, not the easiest of introductions.
“Bonaparte is ahead of you, and word of his latest victories just ahead of him,” Stefan said. “His journey to Paris has become a triumph. Men hope the conqueror of Egypt may be the savior of France. With only a little help from Alessandro Silano, he may achieve everything he desires, and desire is dangerous. You must separate Bonaparte from the book, and safekeep it. The Templar hiding place lasted nearly five centuries. Yours, hopefully, will last five millennia, or more.”
“We have to catch him first.”
“Yes, we must hurry. Great things are about to happen.”
“Stefan, I’m delighted and amazed to see you, but hurrying is the last thing I thought gypsies capable of. We ambled to Toulon about as fast as a grazing cow, if I remember, and your little ponies can’t pull your wagons much faster.”
“True. But the Rom have a knack for borrowing things. We’re going to find a coach and a fast team, my friend, and drive you—a member of the Council of Five Hundred, let us pretend—at breakneck pace to Paris. I shall be a captain of police, say, and André here your driver. Carlo as your footman, the lady as your lady…”
“The first thing we’re going to do back in France is steal a coach and four?”
“If you act as if you deserve it, it doesn’t look like stealing.”
“We’re not even legally in France. And I’m still charged with murdering a prostitute. My enemies could use it against me.”
“Won’t they kill you regardless?”
“Well, yes.”
“Then what is your worry? But come. We’ll ask Sarylla what to do.”
The gypsy fortune-teller who taught me more than my fortune—lord, I fondly remembered the yelps she made—was as beautiful as I remembered, dark and mysterious, rings glittering on her fingers and hoop earrings catching the firelight. I was not entirely glad to bump into a former paramour with Astiza in tow, and the two women bristled silently in that way they have, like wary cats. Yet Astiza sat quietly at my shoulder while the gypsy woman plied the cards of the tarot.
“Fortune speeds you on your way,” Sarylla intoned, as her turn of cards revealed the chariot. “We will have no problem liberating a carriage for our purposes.”
“See?” Stefan said with satisfaction.
I like the tarot. It can tell you anything you want to hear.
Sarylla turned more cards. “But you will meet a woman in hurried circumstances. Your route will become circuitous.”
Another woman? “But will we be successful?”
She turned more cards. I saw the tower, the magician, the fool, and the emperor. “It will be a near-fought thing.”
Another card. The lovers. She looked at us. “You must work together.”
Astiza took my hand and smiled.
And she turned again. Death.
“I do not know who this is for. The magician, the fool, the emperor, or the lover? Your way is perilous.”
“But possible?” Death for Silano, certainly. And perhaps I should assassinate Bonaparte too.
Another card. The wheel of fortune. “You are a gambler, no?”
“When I have to be.”
Another card. The world. “You have no choice.” She looked at us with her great, dark eyes. “You will have strange allies and strange enemies.”
I grimaced. “Everything’s normal then.”
She shook her head, mystified. “Wait to see which is which.” She looked hard at the cards and then at Astiza. “There is danger for your new woman, Ethan Gage. Great danger, and something even deeper than that, I think. Sorrow.”
Here it was, that rivalry. “What do you mean?”
“What the cards say. Nothing more.”
I was disturbed. If Sarylla’s original fortune hadn’t come true, I’d have brushed this off. I am, after all, a Franklin man, a savant. But however I might mock the tarot, there was something eerie about its power. I was frightened for the woman beside me.
“There may be fighting,” I said to Astiza. “You can wait for me on the English ship. It’s not too late to signal them.”
Astiza considered the cards and the gypsy for some time, and then shook her head. “I have my own magic and we’ve come this far,” she said, pulling her cloak around her against the unaccustomed European chill of October, already reaching south. “Our real danger is time. We must hurry.”
Sarylla looked sympathetic and gave her the tarot card for the star. “Keep this. It is for meditation and enlightenment. May faith be with you, lady.”
Astiza looked surprised, and touched. “And you.”
So we crept to a magistrate’s house, “borrowed” his coach and team, and were on our way to Paris. I was awed by the lush green-gold of the countryside after Egypt and Syria. The last grapes hung round and fat. The fields were pregnant with yellow haystacks. Lingering fruit gave the air a ripe, fermented scent. Wagons groaning with autumn produce pulled aside as Stefan’s men cried commands and cracked the whip as if we were really republican deputies of importance. Even the farm girls looked succulent, seeming half-dressed after the robes of the desert, their breasts like melons, their hips a merry bushel, their calves stained with wine juice. Their lips were red and full from sucking on plums.
“Isn’t it beautiful, Astiza?”
She was more troubled by the cloudy skies, the turning leaves, and trees that formed unruly arbors over the highways.
“I can’t see,” she replied.
Several times we passed through towns with sagging decorations of tricolor bunting, dried flower petals on the roads, and wine bottles discarded in ditches. Each was evidence of Napoleon’s passing.
“The little general?” an innkeeper remembered. “A rooster of a man!”
“Handsome as the devil,” his wife added. “Black lock of hair, fierce gray eyes. They say he conquered half of Asia!”
“The treasure of the ancients is coming right after him, they say!”
“And his brave men!”
We drove well into the night and rose before dawn, but Paris is a multiday journey. As we went north; the sky grew grayer and the season advanced. Our coach blew the highway’s carpet of leaves into a rooster tail. Our horses steamed when we stopped for water. And so we were clattering onward in the dusk of the fourth day, Paris just hours ahead, when suddenly another fine team and coach burst out of a lane to our left and swerved right in front of us. Horses screamed and crashed, the teams dragging each other down. Our own coach tilted, balanced on two wheels, and then slid into a ditch and slowly went over. Astiza and I tumbled to one side in the coach. The gypsies leapt clear.
“Imbeciles!” a woman shouted. “My husband could have you shot!”
We shakily climbed out of the wreck. Our coach’s front axel was broken, as were the legs of two of our screaming horses. Cavalry who were escorting whomever we’d collided with had dismounted and were moving forward with pistols to dispatch the injured horses and disentangle the others. Shouting at us from the window of her own coach was an impressively fashionable woman—her clothes would beggar a banker—with a frantic look. She had the hauteur of a Parisian, but I didn’t immediately recognize her. I was an American, illegally back in France, still wanted for murder as far as I knew, who had not even obeyed the forty-day quarantine imposed on those traveling from the East. (Neither had Bonaparte.) Now there were soldiers and questions, even though her coach was in the wrong. I had a feeling being in the right wouldn’t matter much here.
“My business is of paramount importance for the state!” the woman shouted in panic. “Get your animals away from mine!”
“You pulled out in front of us!” Astiza replied, her accent plain.
“You are as rude as you are incompetent!”
“Wait,” I cautioned. “She has soldiers.”
Too late. “And you are as impertinent as you are clumsy!” the woman shrieked. “Do you know who I am? I could have you arrested!”
I went forward to head off a cat fight by making a bogus offer of later payment, just to get the harridan on her way. Our gypsies had wisely melted into the trees. Two pistol shots rang out, silencing the worst screams of the horses, and then the cavalrymen turned to us, hands on the hilts of their swords.
“Please, madame, it was just a simple accident,” I said, smiling with my usual affable charm. “A moment more and you’ll be on your way. And you’re heading to?”
“My husband, if I can find him! Oh, this is disaster! We took the wrong turn and I missed him on the highway, and now his brothers will get to him first and tell their lies about me. If you’ve delayed me too much, you’ll answer for it!”
I thought the guillotine had thinned out this kind of arrogance, but apparently it hadn’t gotten them all. “But Paris is that way,” I pointed.
“I wanted to meet him! But he’s got past us and we were taking this lane to swing back. Now he’ll already be home, and I not being there will confirm the worst!”
“What worst?”
“That I’m unfaithful!” And she burst into tears.
It was then that I recognized her features, somewhat famous in the Parisian social circles at whose fringes I’d moved. This was none other than Josephine, Napoleon’s wife! What the devil was she doing on a dark road with night falling? And of course tears brought sympathy. I am nothing if not gallant, and weeping will disarm any gentleman.
“It’s Bonaparte’s wife,” I whispered to Astiza. “When he heard she was an adulteress, on the eve of the Battle of the Pyramids, he nearly went insane.”
“Is that why she’s frightened?”
“We know how mercurial he is. He might put her in front of a firing squad.”
Astiza considered, then moved swiftly to the coach door. “Lady, we know your husband.”
“What?” She was a small woman, I now assessed, slim and finely dressed, neither homely nor particularly beautiful, her skin warm, her nose straight, her lips full, her eyes attractively wide and dark and, even in their desperation, intelligent. She had dark hair and finely sculpted ears, but her complexion was blotchy from crying. “How could you know him?”
“We served with Bonaparte in Egypt. We’re hurrying ourselves, to warn him of terrible danger.”
“You do know him! What danger? An assassination?”
“That a companion, Alessandro Silano, plans to betray him.”
“Count Silano? He’s coming with my husband, I heard. He’s supposed to be a confidant and adviser.”
“He’s bewitched Napoleon, and has tried to turn him against you. But we can help. You’re attempting to reconcile?”
She bowed her head, eyes wet. “It’s been such a surprise. We had no warning he was coming. I rushed from my dearest friend to meet him. But these idiots took a wrong turn.” She leaned out the carriage window and gripped Astiza’s arms. “You must tell him that despite everything, I still love him! If he divorces me, I lose everything! My children will be penniless! Is it my fault he goes away for months and years?”
“Then the gods have arranged this accident, don’t you think?” Astiza said.
“The gods?”
I drew my companion back. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“Here is our key to Bonaparte!” Astiza whispered. “He’ll be surrounded by soldiers. How else are we going to get to him save through his wife? She’s not faithful to him or anything else, which means she’ll ally with anyone who suits her purpose. That means we have to enlist Josephine on our side. She can find out where the scroll is when she beds him, when men lose what little wits they have. Then we steal it back!”
“What are you whispering about?” Josephine called.
Astiza smiled. “Please, lady, our own carriage is ruined but it’s imperative we reach your husband. I think we can help each other. If you’d let us ride with you we can help you reconcile.”
“How?”
“My companion is a wise Freemason. We know the key to a sacred book that could give Napoleon great power.”
“Freemason?” She squinted at me. “Abbot Barruel in his famed book said they were behind the revolution. The Jacobins were all a Masonic plot. But the Journal of Free Men says the Masons are actually Royalists, plotting to bring back the king. Which are you?”
“I see the future in your husband, lady,” I lied.
Josephine looked intrigued, and calculating. “Sacred book?”
“From Egypt,” Astiza said. “If we ride we can be in Paris by dawn.”
Somewhat surprisingly, she assented. She was so rattled by Napoleon’s reappearance and his undoubted fury at her adulterous ways that she was eager for any help, no matter how improbable. So we left our own stolen coach a wreck, half its horses shot, our gypsies hiding, and took hers to Paris.
“Now. You must tell me what you know or I will throw you out,” she warned.
We had to gamble. “I found a book that conveys great powers,” I began.
“What kind of powers?”
“The power to persuade. To enchant. To live unnaturally long, perhaps forever. To manipulate objects.”
Her eyes were wide and greedy.
“Count Silano has stolen this book and fastened onto Bonaparte like a leech, draining his mind. But the book hasn’t been translated. Only we can do so. If his wife was to offer the key, on the understanding that Silano must be displaced, then you’d get your marriage back. I’m proposing an alliance. With our secret, you can get into your husband’s bedchamber. With your influence, we can get back our book, dispose of Silano, and help Napoleon.”
She was wary. “What key?”
“To a strange, ancient language, long lost.” Astiza turned on Josephine’s coach seat and I gently unlaced the back of her dress. The fabric parted, revealing the intricate alphabet in henna.
The Frenchwoman gasped. “It looks like Satan’s writing!”
“Or God’s.”
Josephine considered. “Who cares whose it is, if we win?”
Was Thoth finally smiling on us? We raced toward Bonaparte’s house on the newly renamed Rue de la Victoire, a tribute to his victories in Italy. And, with no plan, no confederates, and no weapons, we drew this ambitious social climber into our confidence.
What did I know about Josephine? The kind of gossip Paris thrived on. She grew up on the island of Martinique, was half a dozen years older than Napoleon, two inches shorter, and a tenacious survivor. She’d married a rich young army officer, Alexandre de Beauharnais, but he was so embarrassed by her provincial manners that he refused to present her to the court of Marie Antoinette. She separated from him, returned to the Caribbean, fled a slave revolt there to return to Paris at the height of the revolution, lost her husband to the guillotine in 1794, and then was imprisoned herself. Only the coup that ended the Terror saved her head. When a young army officer named Bonaparte called to compliment her on the conduct of her son Eugene, who had asked for help in retrieving the sword of his executed father, she seduced him. In desperation she gambled on this rising Corsican and married him, but then slept with everyone in sight while he was in Italy and Egypt. Some whispered she was a nymphomaniac. She’d been living with a former officer named Hippolyte Charles, now a businessman, when the alarming news arrived of her husband’s return. With the revolution having allowed divorce, she was now in danger of losing everything at the very moment Bonaparte was seeking ultimate power. At thirty-six, with discoloring teeth, she might not have another chance.
Her eyes widened at Astiza’s explanation of supernatural powers. A child of the Sugar Isles, tales of magic weren’t alien to her.
“This book can destroy men who possess it,” Astiza said, “and wreck nations in which it is unleashed. The ancients knew this and hid it away, but Count Silano has tempted fate by stealing it. He’s bewitched your husband with dreams of unlimited power. It could drive Napoleon mad. You must help us get it back.”
“But how?”
“We’ll safeguard the book if you give it to us. Your knowledge of it will give you tremendous influence over him.”
“But who are you?”
“My name is Astiza and this is Ethan Gage, an American.”
“Gage? The electrician? Franklin’s man?”
“Madame, I am honored to make your acquaintance and flattered that you have heard of me.” I took her hand. “I hope we can be allies.”
She snatched it away. “But you are a murderer!” She looked at me doubtfully. “Of a cheap adventuress! Aren’t you?”
“A perfect example of Silano’s lies, the kind that can entrap your husband and ruin his dreams. I was the victim of an unjust accusation. Let us help get this kind of poison away from your husband, and your married bliss will return to normal.”
“Yes. It is Silano’s fault, not mine. This book contains terrible power, you say?”
“The kind that can enslave souls.”
She thought carefully. Finally she sat back and smiled. “You’re right. God is looking out for me.”
The Bonaparte house, bought by Josephine before they were married, was in the fashionable part of Paris known as Chaussée d’Antin, a once-marshy area where the rich had built charming homes called “follies” over the past century. It was a modest two-story abode with a rose garden at the end of its bloom and a terrace that Josephine had covered with a wooden roof and hung with flags and tapestries: a respectable home for striving, midlevel functionaries. Her carriage pulled into a gravel drive under linden trees and she got out, nervous and flustered, plucking at her cheeks. “How do I look?”
“Like a woman with a secret,” Astiza assured her. “In control.”
Josephine smiled wanly and took a breath. Then we entered.
The rooms were a curious mix of feminine and masculine, with rich wallpaper and lacy curtains but hung with maps and plans of cities. There were the mistress’s flowers, and the master’s books, heaps of them, some just unpacked from Egypt. Her neatness was apparent, even as his boots were discarded in the dining room and his greatcoat thrown over one chair. A staircase led upward.
“He is in his bedchamber,” she whispered.
“Go to him.”
“His brothers will have told him everything. He will hate me! I am a wicked, unfaithful woman. I can’t help it. I love love so. I thought he would be killed!”
“You are human, as is he,” I soothed. “He’s not a saint either, trust me. Go, ask forgiveness, and tell him you’ve been busy recruiting allies. Explain how you’ve persuaded us to help him, that his future depends on the three of us.”
I didn’t trust Josephine, but what other weapon did we have? I was worried that Silano might be lurking about. Summoning her courage, she mounted the twenty steps to the floor above, tapping on his door. “My sweet general?”
It was quiet for a while, and then we heard pounding, and then weeping, and then sob-wracked pleas for forgiveness. Bonaparte, it seemed, had locked the door. He was determined for divorce. We could hear his wife pleading through the wood. Then the shouting quieted and there was quieter talk, and once I thought I heard the click of a lock being turned. Then, silence. I took the stairs down to the basement kitchen and a maid found us some cheese and bread to eat. The staff clustered like mice, awaiting the outcome of the storm above. We dozed, in our weariness.
Near dawn, a maid roused us. “My mistress wants to see you,” she whispered.
We were led upstairs. The maid tapped and Josephine’s voice replied “Come in” with a lightness I hadn’t heard before.
We entered, and there the victor of Abukir and his newly faithful wife lay side by side in bed, covers to their chin, both looking as satisfied as cats with cream.
“Good God, Gage,” Napoleon greeted. “You’re still not dead? If my soldiers could survive like you, I could conquer the world.”
“We’re only trying to save it, General.”
“Silano said he left you buried! And my wife has been telling your stories.”
“We only want to do what is best for you and France, General.”
“You want the book. Everyone does. Yet no one can read it.”
“We can.”
“So she says, with a record of what you helped destroy. I admire your cleverness. Well, rest assured one thing good has come from your long night. You’ve helped reconcile me to Josephine, and for that I am in a generous mood.”
I brightened. Maybe this would work. I began glancing around for the book.
Then there were heavy steps behind and I turned. A troop of gendarmes was mounting the stairs. When I looked back, Napoleon was holding a pistol.
“She’s convinced me that instead of simply shooting you, I should lock you in Temple Prison. Your execution can wait until you stand trial for that whore’s murder.” He smiled. “I must say, my Josephine has been tireless on your behalf.” He pointed to Astiza. “As for you, you will disrobe in my wife’s dressing room with her and my maids watching. I’ve summoned secretaries to copy your secret.”