The Emerald Storm (40 page)

Authors: William Dietrich

BOOK: The Emerald Storm

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“Where are we?” Jubal asked.

I looked inland. A huge mountain rose in the haze, its top smoking. “Perhaps Montserrat. I think we should walk the coast, looking for a settlement or a boat. Antigua is not far, and from there we can get passage home.”

“I found some plantain and coconut. You hungry, boy?”

Harry’s gaze was a million miles away, but not his appetite. “Yes.”

So that was it. I’d been married and apparently widowed in less than a year, and as stripped to my core as it was possible to be. My survival was the worst punishment I could imagine. I would see her, suspended in that last green swell, the rest of my life. And yet her spirit still inhabited us.

Why did I feel nagging hope?

I looked down at Harry. How, what, when would I tell him?

Yet I was surprised by his expression. He looked more determined than devastated. “Let’s look for Mama while we walk.” Did he share my instinct?

I swallowed. “Yes.” And not find her lifeless body, I prayed.

We started trudging down the beach. I told Jubal how he could decide whether to come back for the treasure. “Astiza said it was cursed, but maybe only for some of us.”

“I’ll ask Cecile Fatiman. She’ll decide what to do.”

“Be careful. I think Ezili misled me.”

“She’s a jealous goddess.”

“What will you do next, Jubal?”

“Try to rebuild my country. And you, Ethan?”

I was silent, looking east at the watery horizon as we hiked. “Martel said he was sent to betray me by the leader of the French. I was an errand boy manipulated into a fatal quest.”

“So you must flee to America?”

“I thought that, at first. But Britain, I think, to establish my boy in a good school. I need to make him a future. It’s the one country that has the resources to stand up to the French. The English have flooded the Continent with gold and spies to undermine Bonaparte’s dictatorship. Which suggests, Jubal, my real task.”

“Which is?”

“Revenge. It’s the only meaning I can think of. I’m going back to France.”

“Harry needs a father, Ethan.”

“He’ll have one. But first there’s one task I owe the world.”

“You must forget the world.”

“No. I’m going to hunt down and kill Napoleon Bonaparte.”

Historical Note

A
s with other Ethan Gage novels, the primary historical events in this novel are true. Haiti’s expulsion of the French in 1803 concluded the first successful slave revolt in world history, and (although France did not recognize the country’s independence until 1825) represented creation of the world’s first black republic. The revolt’s success haunted slave-owning aristocracies for decades, including the South before the American Civil War.

The war that Gage experiences was but a chapter in a long series of Haitian invasions, revolutions, coups, foreign interventions, embargoes, and economic upheavals that, combined with natural disasters such as earthquakes and hurricanes, have conspired to keep Haiti the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. France demanded 90 million gold francs in compensation for lost property in return for recognizing Haitian independence, saddling the young nation with crippling loans it did not finish paying until 1947. While the American and French revolutions left the infrastructure of those nations relatively intact, Haiti was burdened by utter devastation at a time the Caribbean sugar economy was already in decline. Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared himself emperor in 1804, oversaw the massacre of more than three thousand surviving whites, and then was assassinated himself by black rivals in 1806. The nation temporarily split, rejoined, and has struggled to establish a stable political and economic system for much of its subsequent history. While a place of beauty and promise, it remains burdened with overpopulation, erosion, and disease.

The revolution’s culminating battle of Vertières outside what was then Cap-François, and today is known as Cap-Haïtien, took place generally as described. Ethan’s hydraulic diversion is fiction, however. The actual black assault was so valiant that French soldiers at one point actually did stop fighting to applaud their enemy’s courage, a very Gallic thing to do. The French still lost, and evacuated.

Toussaint L’Ouverture, the “Black Spartacus” or “Haiti’s George Washington,” preceded Dessalines as the revolt’s primary general. After negotiating with the French and retiring to his plantation, he was betrayed, seized in May of 1802, and imprisoned in the alpine Fortress de Joux near the French-Swiss border, a bleak and beautiful place visited by tourists today. There’s no record of an escape attempt engineered by a renegade American and his Greek Egyptian wife, aided by an early glider flight, so we’ll have to take Ethan’s word for that. Conventional history records that L’Ouverture died of illness on April 7, 1803.

Yellow fever played a decisive role in the slave war, and not only helped free Haiti but was instrumental in doubling the size of the United States. The havoc that mosquitoes wrought on Napoleon’s armies in Saint-Domingue left him with no troops to hold New Orleans and its vast Louisiana Territory, thus giving him the incentive to sell property extending from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains.

Many of the characters in this novel were real people, including aeronaut George Cayley, the spy Charles Frotté, Sir Sidney Smith, Antigua’s Lord Lovington, the French commander Rochambeau, General Dessalines, and
mambo
Cecile Fatiman. Many of the opinions ascribed to Napoleon are taken from statements recorded in history. The pessimistic appraisal of the Haitian revolution written by doomed General Charles Leclerc is quoted as he wrote it. The Palace of Saint-Cloud was as described, but was destroyed in 1870 during the Franco-Prussian war. Its site is now a park.

The treasure of Montezuma is a real legend, and treasure hunters have sought the lost wealth of Tenochtitlán for generations. Some speculate the Aztec hoard was lost at sea, while others contend it was carried north by refugee Indians and hidden in what is today the American Southwest. Among surviving Aztec relics are objects oddly resembling airplanes, with pilots, explaining the aerial passion of Leon Martel and inspiring modern speculation about what such figurines represented, or copied. Ancient astronauts? Or a delta design that has nothing to do with flying at all?

Certainly when Napoleon threatened invasion of Britain the English imagined attack by all kinds of weird contraptions, including an armada of balloons and a tunnel dug under the English Channel.

Diamond Rock, or
Le Diamant
, is real and has an underwater cave popular with experienced scuba divers. None have reported finding emeralds inside. The volcanic monolith was seized by the British early in 1804 and christened HMS
Diamond Rock
, shooting cannon at passing French ships and infuriating Napoleon. The British held out against numerous French counterattacks until June 3, 1805. Floating rum kegs were indeed used to “soften” the garrison.

Voodoo is a serious religious mix of African and Christian beliefs—not just witchcraft—and I have attempted some accuracy when recounting its spirits and ceremonies. The zombi belief is real.

A midwinter hurricane of the kind I describe would be seasonally unusual but not impossible: hurricanes have been recorded in every month in the Caribbean.

The bomb ketch was a common kind of warship; the “bombs bursting in air” of the American national anthem refers to mortars fired from British ships in the War of 1812. The “rockets red glare” refers to Congreve rockets that will play a role in an upcoming Ethan Gage adventure.

Acknowledgments

F
or the commissioning of this book I must thank former HarperCollins editor Rakesh Satyal. This book’s perceptive editors are Maya Ziv and publisher Jonathan Burnham. Agent Andrew Stuart has nurtured the birth and continuation of this entire series; this is the fifth Ethan Gage adventure. As always, my appreciation to the entire hardworking Harper team, including publicist Heather Drucker, production editor David Koral, and foreign rights marketer Carolyn Bodkin. Once again my wife, Holly, served as muse, travel companion, and first reader for wayward Ethan. She’s still trying to straighten him, and me, out.

About the Author

WILLIAM DIETRICH
is the author of eleven novels, including four previous Ethan Gage titles—
Napoleon’s Pyramids, The Rosetta Key, The Dakota Cipher,
and
The Barbary Pirates
. Dietrich is also a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, historian, and naturalist. A winner of the PNBA Award for Nonfiction, he lives in Washington State.

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www.AuthorTracker.com
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Also by William Dietrich

Fiction

Blood of the Reich

The Barbary Pirates

The Dakota Cipher

The Rosetta Key

Napoleon’s Pyramids

The Scourge of God

Hadrian’s Wall

Dark Winter

Getting Back

Ice Reich

Nonfiction

Green Fire

On Puget Sound

Natural Grace

Northwest Passage

The Final Forest

Credits

Cover design by Richard Ljoenes. Ethan Gage portrait by Seb Jarnot. Background paintings © Bettmann/Corbis (left), © The Art Archive / Biblioteca Nacional Mexico/Gianni Dagli Orti (right). Maps by Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

This book is a work of fiction. The characters, incidents, and dialogue are drawn from the author’s imagination and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

THE EMERALD STORM
. Copyright © 2012 by William Dietrich. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Epub Edition MAY 2012 ISBN: 9780062097132

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