The Emerald Storm (33 page)

She kissed me again and leaned against my shoulder. “He said that he had Horus and that the ultimate goal was likely Martinique. If I wanted my son, we must take temporary leave from my dangerous husband. Meanwhile, he tempted me with his own research into the legends. Ethan, I didn’t want to go into the jungle with Dessalines when my son was in Cap-François in the hands of a madman. So I went with Martel in hopes of safeguarding our boy until you found us. And I couldn’t explain. You’d disappeared from the library, and there was no time to find you.”

I’d folded myself into a dumbwaiter. “I thought you’d been taken to Rochambeau. I almost killed the general.”

“So impulsive! And so unnecessary. Why would I be tempted by a lizard like Rochambeau when I already had Adonis as my husband?”

Well, I liked that. Truth be told, I’m a handsome rascal. “When we retire, they’ll want the two of us at the best parties. We’re very stylish.”

She’s also learned when to ignore me. “Martel knew the city was about to fall. He wanted out and knew you’d follow. I didn’t choose Horus or Leon over you. I simply made the only choice I could.”

“I’m going to kill Martel, you know.”

“He knows, too, so he’ll be prepared when you try. It’s what men do, isn’t it? All I want is a chance to get away from him as a family. I don’t care about this treasure or war. Can we please do that, Ethan? Simply get away?”

“Absolutely. But I don’t think we’ll have an opportunity until he’s distracted by treasure. We find it, bargain, fight, and flee.”

“And this treasure is . . . ?”

“Under a rock as massive as the Great Pyramid. Maybe. We’ve found an underwater cave but need a means to get through it, and now the British are sitting on top. That’s where Martel comes in.”

“The treasure is cursed, Ethan. The Aztecs put a spell on it. I saw troubling things in the little temple I made in the
Hecate
when we crossed the Atlantic, and read more here. You mustn’t be tempted. Let the French have it; they’ll regret their discovery. We just need to get away.”

“What did you read?”

“Martel discovered reports of a pirate ship in these waters manned by black Maroons, two centuries before. They circuited Martinique as if looking for a hiding place, perhaps this rock you’ve found. Since they didn’t prey on merchant ships, the speculation was that they were burying treasure instead of seizing it. Planters have dug Martinique’s shores ever since, without success. But that isn’t the odd thing. I found more documents Martel doesn’t know about.”

“Records of what?”

“Weeks later, their pirate vessel was found drifting at sea.”

“And?”

“No one was aboard. All the Maroons had vanished. No bodies, no combat, no clue.”

I felt a chill. “They went ashore and the ship broke anchor, perhaps.”

“Perhaps.” She looked at me steadily. “But here’s my question, Ethan. If they came from Saint-Domingue, did these blacks come here to hide a treasure? Or get rid of it? Were they determined to return for it? Or bury it so deep that no one ever found it again?”

“You think
they
were cursed.”

“Think of all the trouble a single emerald has caused, both to Yussef Karamanli in Tripoli and now us.”

I shook my head. “First of all, I believe in luck but not in curses. Second, I already have the emerald back, and it’s still going to finance our retirement. Third, it’s foolish not to take a king’s ransom, should we find it. So let Martel be cursed. Or let Jubal and the blacks take it and strike a deal between their gods and the Aztec ones. We just need a chance to escape together, but won’t have one until we’re all as rich as Montezuma.” Frankly, I also wanted a peek.

“Your family for the gold. Don’t forget, and don’t be greedy.”

“Agreed. But to win, we must have a plan of revenge. So here’s what we’ll do.”

L
acking a Robert Fulton or a working submarine, the scheme I’d come up with was inspired by Jubal’s overturned canoe. We’d use a diving bell, a device dating back to ancient Greece.

The idea is simple. Invert a cauldron and drop it in the water so that it traps air, just as the canoe did. You can test the idea by putting a bucket upside down in water. Dive, surface within the container, and breathe in the space of the upended vessel. If possible, refresh the pocket of air with a hose.

A diving bell the size normally used to salvage ships, with barges and air pumps, would be unwieldy in the cave under Diamond Rock. Such an apparatus would also attract the attention of the English.

My scheme was less complicated. We’d sheathe a rum barrel with lead to give it the necessary weight and tightness to remain underwater while trapping air. A small window would be fit on its side to look out through, and to navigate by. Foxfire, the phosphorescent luminescence sometimes found in rotting bark, would shed a little light. Without a hose and pumps, we’d refresh our atmosphere from leather bags filled with air. I’d wear this keg on my shoulders with a harness. My torso would be in the Caribbean, but my head would have something to breathe.

We’d attach a rope, as we had to Jubal.

It was cleverness worthy of a savant, except it wasn’t original with me. In fact, we looked at diagrams in a book in Martel’s rented library to help puzzle the thing out. Other tomes showed plans for the kind of warship we’d need.

“If the cave goes nowhere, I give a tug and am hauled back out,” I reassured Astiza when we met with Martel and Jubal in the library. To hold a council of war with a woman and a Negro was extraordinary, but these are modern times. “If there’s treasure, then I ferry out an armful at a time.”

“And the English?”

“We’ll distract them with a naval attack on the side of the rock opposite from where we’re working,” Martel said.

“All in trust.” Her tone was skeptical.

“Of course not, madame. Business partners use contracts and lawyers, not trust. We’ll have you, and your husband will have the hoard. But there’s honor among thieves, is there not, Monsieur Gage? A friendly exchange, and your family free to go. To the United States, I suppose.”

“As far as we can get from you.”

“A third goes to Haiti,” Jubal insisted.

Martel frowned. “I am not accustomed to bargaining with blacks.”

“And a free Haitian is not accustomed to consorting with men who are allied with slave masters,” my massive friend said. “So we do as a slave does.”

“What’s that?”

“Partner with whom we must, and spit afterward.”

Martel laughed. “You’d make a fine criminal in the Paris underworld.”

“And you a fine field hand with a cane bill and straw hat.”

The Frenchman regarded his gigantic new ally uncertainly. “In two weeks we’ll have the dark of the moon,” he finally said. “Best to work when it’s hard for the British to see.”

“And then we’ll be done with each other once and for all,” I said.

Chapter 37

A
s we made preparations I belatedly realized we’d slipped into a new year, 1804, and that I’d entirely missed Christmas. Martel did give three chances to play with my son, the two of us under guard. So Harry and I dug a cave, crept through the shrubbery, and threw rocks at the pond. But I was mostly kept busy in boatyard and workshop. Astiza oversaw the sewing of leather air bags.

As the moon waned, Martinique’s dazzling sunshine also darkened, giving way to sultry haze. Jubal watched the sky for omens. “It’s bad weather coming, more like September than January,” he muttered. “We must hurry.”

“A squall could give us cover,” I reasoned.

“This kind of storm is no cover,” Jubal warned. “It upends the sea. We want to dive before it begins, and be done before it climaxes.”

“A little rain to blind the British. Pray for that.”

“And I’ll pray for the success of your plan to checkmate the French.”

Our scheme was necessarily complicated. We needed daylight to dive. But with England atop the rock, we could approach only under cover of darkness.

Our strategy, then, had three steps. Jubal, Martel, and I would be the treasure divers, and we’d approach Diamond Rock at night. Antoine and the rest of Jubal’s men would join Crow, Vulture, Buzzard, and the rest of Martel’s men on a bomb ketch, a sailing ship designed to fire at the summit of the rock by using a high, arching mortar mounted in the bow. The ketch had two masts astern of the huge gun, with both square-rigged and fore-and-aft sails, and would be skippered by a few seasoned sailors on loan from the governor of Martinique. My wife and son would sail as hostages.

A French bombardment of the captured rock would commence the next day, and we’d use the distraction to begin our dive. Any treasure would be found, removed, and stored on the sea bottom. Then the ketch would return under cover of darkness, and we’d retrieve the loot from the bottom sand before escaping.

In other words, everything had to happen perfectly.

Leon Martel came readily with Jubal and me—he had arrogant courage, so long as my family was pawn—and the three of us rowed toward
Le Diamant
on a moonless night, taking a bearing because the course was ink except for the dazzle of phosphorescence in our wake. I worried that the English might see our sparkle, but then decided our longboat was so small that the danger was remote. We pulled in silence, nothing in the universe except our tail of blue fire. The wind was warm, my mood anxious. There was swell, the kind that heralds a distant storm.

In the middle of our longboat were the converted rum barrel and air skins.

An hour at the oars brought us to within sound of waves slapping against Diamond Rock. Looking up, I could see the glow of British lanterns at the summit. We coasted to a small indention on the cliff that faced Martinique and pulled into a “cove” that was little more than a crevice the width of our longboat. An overhang shielded us from easy view by the garrison. We tied off, arranged the diving bell for quick deployment, and settled down to wait for dawn.

Sleep was elusive.

“So, Ethan, what will you do as a rich man?” Jubal finally asked.

I shifted, uncomfortable and nervous. “As little as possible.”

Martel snorted. “No one would bore more quickly than you, Monsieur Gage. You don’t know your own character.”

“So what would you do, Leon? Whores and horses?”

“Money is power, and power is rule. I want men answering to me instead of my answering to them.”

“Another reason to keep my distance. And you, Jubal?”

“I want to rebuild my homeland. Haiti was the most beautiful country in the world before the war. It could be again.”

“Doesn’t that sound nobler than our motives, Martel?”

“So noble that I want to buy your black friend and put him to work. His race can restore our plantations.”

“No longer, Frenchman.”

“Mark my words, your damned revolution will prove a mistake.”

“It was your own revolution that gave us the idea. Freedom and equality, France preached! And now planters on every island lay awake in the dark of the night, waiting for their throats to be cut for liberty.” He gave our temporary ally a ghostly grin.

“Are you going to cut mine?”

“No, because I’m already a free man and we’re partners, as you say. This is much better than having a slave, is it not, for both you and me? That’s what your race must understand.”

Martel rolled to one side to doze. “All right, then. Ethan, be bored. Jubal, throw your money away on a country that will never appreciate it. I’ll buy status and position in France and rule like a lord.”

“At least you’re candid,” I allowed.

“I’m honest. Everyone is corrupt, but only I admit it.”

The sun came over Martinique, flooding our little crack but also shining into the eyes of any English sentries who happened to look in our direction. Unless they climbed down on some improbable mission, I felt us reasonably invisible. As light came, Jubal quietly slipped over the side with a wooden buoy holding an anchor and line. He swam to a spot directly in front of the submerged cave, dove down to set the anchor, and adjusted the length of the line so that the marker was just underwater. Then he led a rope from the buoy back to our boat. When the time came, we could swiftly pull ourselves to the anchored buoy to deploy the diving bell.

The sun climbed higher, the sea turning from black to blue, and then to aquamarine. I watched Martel lazily watching me. He was waiting for me to try to kill him, while thinking of any number of ways to betray me. Corrupt indeed. Jubal lounged between us like a referee before a prizefight.

Finally we heard shouts from above, and even a trumpet.

“The tide has turned, and they’ve spied your wife’s present,” Martel whispered. “By afternoon, we can act.”

As much as I hated to admit it, Martel and I had things in common. We were both instinctual opportunists and clever improvisers. It wasn’t easy assaulting the English on their rock because their new gun battery was higher than the masthead of any ship, Accordingly, the renegade policeman had used my papers from Rochambeau to enlist the governor of Martinique in an elaborate diversion. We refit an eighty-foot vessel into a bomb ketch christened
Pelee
, copying the habit of naming such weapons after volcanoes. Workers removed its foremast, reinforced the deck with timber cribbing, and installed a massive mortar. The gun was so heavy that the new ketch listed slightly at the bow. In theory, the mortar could lob shells high enough to reach the summit, but
Pelee
was a clumsy sailor, its canvas set too far back to properly balance. Distraction was its real mission.

We told the governor nothing about treasure but assured him that one lucky hit on a British magazine could blow their entire garrison to hell. “We’re using the expertise of the doughty mercenary and sage savant Ethan Gage, hero of the Pyramids,” Martel said, Governor Lambeau entirely missing his ironic sarcasm. The chance of success was enough to persuade the loan of a fortress mortar that weighed more than a ton; victory over this British “ship” on a French rock could lead the governor to promotion back in France.