The letter arrives by boat.
It arrives at night on a small schooner that should not be traveling these waters in the darkness, but the urgency of the situation has been pressed on the captain and he has reluctantly agreed.
The letter arrives in a canvas sack with other mail, for other residents of the island, and is handed ashore by a ten-year-old ship’s boy who knows nothing of the contents. The sack is passed to a shorehand, roused from sleep just a few minutes earlier and still bleary-eyed from the aftereffects of a half bottle of nut liquor. He likewise has no idea that simply by taking the letter, he is striking a flint that will set the world on fire.
Indeed the only person on the island with any idea of the contents of the letter stepped ashore from the schooner just moments earlier. A major of the Imperial Guard, Marc Thibault is a veteran of more than seventy campaigns, with an earring of gold and handsome sideburns. He is armed with a short saber and a flintlock pistol, and is an expert with both.
Few documents would warrant such an escort, and furthermore the major is not alone, but is accompanied by two trustworthy grenadiers, with matching earrings and sideburns, sound of heart, keen of eye, and well hardened in battle.
The ship has brought other provisions, perhaps to disguise the real purpose of its trip, and the three soldiers wait under the lamplights as these are loaded, along with the mail sack, into the back of the goods cart.
A rough-edged sign on the front of the harbormaster’s office declares the name of the town: Cavo. In reality it is little more than a collection of ramshackle huts and trading posts, centered on a series of long wooden jetties. The jetties are old and sagging as if melted by the heat of the island’s summers, although the true culprit is rot and decay. By day, dogs fight over scraps and old fishermen snore under awnings. Even the winter sun is fierce on Elba.
There are bigger, more modern wharves at the island’s capital, Portoferraio, but the arrival of the schooner there, at this time of night, might have attracted the eyes of the king’s men.
Once loaded, the goods cart sets off for the residence of the island’s reluctant ruler. The three soldiers follow on mounts that the harbormaster has scrambled to provide.
The escape of the prisoner of Elba has begun.
The world is about to burst into flames.