The Rosetta Key (35 page)

“In a house here in Acre.”

“In a doctor’s house. A physician in this hospital.” She opened her eyes, looking past me. “A man who found me in tears, confused and self-hating when he came home to finally snatch a few hours of sleep.”

Slowly, I turned. Behind me was the Levantine surgeon, dark, young, handsome, and altogether more reputable-looking, despite his bloodstained hands, than a gambler and wastrel like me. By John Adams, I’d been played the fool once again! When the gypsy Sarylla had given me the Fool tarot card, she’d known what she was about.

“Ethan, meet my new fiancé.”

“Doctor Hiram Zawani at your service, Mr. Gage,” the man said with that kind of educated accent I’ve always envied. It makes them sound three times as smart as you, even if they don’t have the sense of a dobbin. “Haim Farhi said you’re not quite the rascal you seem.”

“Doctor Zawani made an honest woman of me, Ethan. I was lying to myself about what I wanted and needed.”

“He’s the kind of man my sister needs,” Jericho said. “No one should know that better than you. And you brought them together! You’re a confused, shallow human being, Ethan Gage, but for once you did something right.”

They smiled, as I tried to figure out if I’d been complimented or insulted.

“But…” I wanted to say she was in love with me, that surely she must have waited, that I had
two
women vying for my attention and my problem was sorting between them…

In half a day, I’d gone from two to none. The ruby and the gold were gone, too.

Well, hang.

And yet it was liberating. I hadn’t been to a good brothel since fleeing Paris, and yet here it was, the chance to be a free bachelor again. Humiliating? Yes. But a relief? I was surprised how much so. “It’s splendid how these things work out,” Smith had said. Lonely? Sometimes. But less responsibility, too.

I’d take ship home, give the book to the Philadelphia Library to scratch their heads over, and get on with my life. Maybe Astor had need of help in the fur trade. And there was a new capital being built in the swamps of Virginia, out of sight of any honest Americans. It sounded like just the kind of future den of opportunism, fraud, and skullduggery for a man of my talents.

“Congratulations,” I squeaked.

“I
should
still break you in two,” Jericho said. “But given what’s happened, I think I’ll just let you help us hock this.” And he gave Zawani a peek at the gold.

O
ne day later the French, having used up much of their ammunition in a final furious bombardment that left their strategic plight unchanged, began to retreat. Bonaparte depended on momentum. If he couldn’t surge forward and keep his enemies off-balance, he was hopelessly outnumbered. Acre had stopped him. His only alternative was to return to Egypt and claim victory, citing battles he’d won and ignoring those he’d lost.

I watched them skulk off with my glass. Hundreds of men, the sick and wounded who were unable to walk, were on wagons or slumped on horseback. If left behind they were doomed, so I spotted even Bonaparte walking, leading a horse that carried a bandaged soldier. They set fire to the supplies they couldn’t take, great columns of smoke rising into the May air, and blew up the Na’aman and Kishon bridges. The French were so short of adequate animal transport and fodder that two dozen cannon were abandoned. So were crowds of Jews, Christians, and Matuwelli who had sided with the French in hopes of liberation from the Muslims. They were wailing like lost children, because now they could expect only cruel revenge from Djezzar.

The French vindictively began burning farms and villages along the path of their coastal retreat, to slow a pursuit that never came. Our dazed garrison was in no shape to follow. The siege had lasted sixty-two days, from March 19 to May 21. Casualties had been heavy on both sides. The plague that had riddled Napoleon’s army had come inside the walls, and the immediate concern was to clear out the dead. It was hot, and Acre reeked.

I moved with dazed weariness. Astiza was gone again, captive or dead. I put the book in a leather satchel and hid it in the quarters I took at the Merchant’s Inn, Khan a-Shawarda, but I bet I could have left it in the main market and not had it taken, so useless did its strange writing appear. Slowly, reports filtered back of Napoleon’s retreat. He abandoned Jaffa, won at such terrible cost, a week after leaving Acre. The worst French plague cases were given opium and poison to hasten their deaths so they wouldn’t fall into the hands of pursuing Samaritans from Nablus. The defeated soldiers staggered into El-Arish in Egypt on June 2, reinforcing its garrison, and then the bulk of the army went on toward Cairo. A thermometer put on the desert sands recorded a temperature of 133 degrees. When they reached the Nile the march stopped, men resting and refitting: Napoleon couldn’t afford to present a defeated army. He reentered Cairo on June 14 with captured banners, claiming victory, but the claims were bitter. I learned that the one-legged artillery general Caffarelli had an arm shattered by a Turkish cannonball and died of infection outside Acre, that the physicist Etienne Louis Malus had sickened with plague in Jaffa and had to be evacuated, and that both Monge and his chemist friend Berthollet contracted dysentery and were among the sick evacuated by wagon. Napoleon’s adventure was turning into a disaster for everyone I knew.

Smith, meanwhile, was anxious to finish his archenemy off. Turkish reinforcements from Constantinople had not arrived quickly enough to help Acre, but early in July a fleet arrived with nearly twelve thousand Ottoman troops, ready to sail on to Abukir Bay and regain Egypt. The English captain had pledged his own squadron in support of the attack. I had no interest in joining this expedition, which I doubted could defeat the main French army. I still had plans for America. But on July 7 a trade boat delivered to me a missive from Egypt. It was closed with red sealing wax with an image of the beaked god Thoth, and was addressed to me in a feminine hand. My heart beat faster.

When I opened it, however, the script was not by Astiza but in a strong male scrawl. Its message was simple.

I can read it, and she’s waiting.

The key is at Rosetta.

Silano.

I
arrived back in Egypt on July 14, 1799, one year and two weeks after I’d first landed with Napoleon. This time I was with a Turkish army, not a French one. Smith was enthusiastic about this counteroffensive, proclaiming it might finish Boney off. I couldn’t help but notice, however, that he stayed offshore with his squadron. And it is difficult to say who had less confidence in this invasion’s ultimate success: me or its aging, white-bearded commander, Mustafa Pasha, who limited his advance to occupying the tiny peninsula that formed one side of Abukir Bay. His troops landed, seized a French redoubt east of the village of Abukir, massacred its three hundred defenders, compelled the surrender of another French outpost at the end of the peninsula, and halted. Where the peninsula’s neck joined the mainland Mustafa began erecting three lines of fortifications in anticipation of the inevitable French counterattack. Despite the successful defense of Acre, the Ottomans were still wary of meeting Napoleon in open field. After Bonaparte’s ludicrously lopsided victory at the Battle of Mount Tabor, the pashas viewed every initiative on their part as disaster in the making. So they invaded and dug furiously, hoping the French would cooperatively expire in front of their trenches. We could see the first French scouts of Bonaparte’s rapidly assembling blocking force peering at us from the dunes beyond the peninsula.

Without being invited, I politely suggested to Mustafa that he strike south and try to link up with the Mameluke resistance my friend Ashraf had joined, a mobile cavalry under Murad Bey. The rumor was that Murad had dared come to the Great Pyramid itself, climbing to the top and using a mirror to signal his wife kept captive in Cairo. It was the gesture of a dashing commander, and I expected these Turks would fare better under Murad’s wily command than under cautious Mustafa. But the pasha didn’t trust the arrogant Mamelukes, didn’t want to share command, and was terrified of leaving the protection of his earthworks and gunboats. As Bonaparte had been impatient at Acre, the Ottomans had landed too quickly, with too little force, in Egypt.

Yet things were in strategic flux. Yes, Napoleon’s original grand strategic scheme had unraveled. His fleet had been destroyed by Admiral Nelson the year before, his advance in Asia been halted at Acre, and Smith has received a dispatch that the Indian sultan whom Bonaparte hoped ultimately to link up with, Tippoo Sahib, had been killed at the siege of Seringapatam in India by the English general Wellesley. Yet even as Mustafa landed, a combined French-Spanish fleet had sailed into the Mediterranean to contest British naval superiority. The odds were getting complex.

I decided my own best gamble was to do my business with Silano in Rosetta, a port on the mouth of the Nile, as quickly as possible. Then I’d scuttle back to the Turkish enclave before their beachhead dissolved and take a boat going anywhere but here. If I succeeded, Astiza might come with me. And the book?

Bonaparte and Silano were right. I felt ownership, and was as curious as ever to hear what its mysterious writing actually said. Could old Ben himself have resisted? “What makes resisting temptation so difficult for people,” he had written, “is that they don’t want to discourage it completely.” Somehow I had to get Silano’s “key,” once more rescue Astiza, and then decide for myself what to do with the secret. The only thing I was certain of is that if the text promised immortality, I wanted nothing to do with it in this world. Life is hard enough without bearing it forever.

While the Turks entrenched in the summer’s oppressive heat, their tents a carnival of color, I hired a felucca to take me to the western mouth of the Nile and Rosetta. We’d sailed by the place during my first entry to Egypt the year before, but I didn’t recall the town meriting particular attention. Its location gave it some strategic value, but why Silano wanted to meet there was a mystery; its convenience for me would be the last thing on the sorcerer’s mind. The likeliest explanation was that his message was a lie and a trap, but there was just enough bait — the woman and a translation — to make me stick my head in the snare.

Accordingly, I had my new captain, Abdul, heave to midway in order to make an important modification to the sail, a thing he accepted as ample evidence of the balminess of all foreigners. I swore him to secrecy with the aid of a few coins. Then we once more passed from the blue sea to the brown tongue of the great African river.

We were soon intercepted by a French patrol boat, but Silano had sent a pass to give me entry. The lieutenant on the
chebek
recognized my name — my adventures and crisscrossing of sides had given me a certain notoriety, apparently — and invited me on board. I said I preferred to stay in my own craft and follow.

He consulted his paper. “I am then ordered, monsieur, to confiscate your baggage until such time as you meet with Count Alessandro Silano. It says this is necessary for the security of the state.”

“My baggage is what you see on me, given that my exploits have left me penniless and without allies. Surely you don’t wish me to disembark naked?”

“Yet there is a satchel you carry over your shoulder.”

“Indeed. And it is heavy, because it is weighted with a large stone.” I held it over the side of the boat. “Should you try to take this meager belonging, Lieutenant, I will drop it into the Nile. Should that happen I can assure that Count Silano will have you court-martialed at best, or put under a particularly uncomfortable ancient spell at worst. So let us proceed. I’m here of my own volition, a lone American in a French colony.”

“You have a rifle as well,” he objected.

“Which I have no plan to discharge unless somebody tries to take it away. The last man who attempted to do so is dead. Trust me, Silano will approve.”

He grumbled and looked at his paper a few times more, but since I was poised at the rail with rifle in one hand and the other propped over the river, confiscation was impractical. So we sailed on, the
chebek
herding us like a mother hen, and docked in Rosetta. It’s a palm-shaded, well-watered farming town in the Nile Delta, made of brown mud brick except for the limestone mosque and its single minaret. I left instructions with my felucca captain and set off through the winding lanes toward a still unfinished French fort called Julian, the tricolor flapping above its mud walls and a crowd of curious street urchins following in my wake. These were halted at the gate by sentries with black bicorne hats and enormous mustaches. My notoriety was confirmed when these soldiers recognized me with a clear expression of dislike. The harmless electrician had become something between a nuisance and a threat, and they eyed me like a sorcerer. Tales from Acre must have filtered back here.

“You can’t bring that rifle in here.”

“Then I won’t come. I’m here by invitation, not command.”

“We’ll hold it for you.”

“Alas, you French have a habit of borrowing and not giving back.”

“The count will not object,” interrupted a feminine voice. And stepping from an alcove was Astiza, dressed modestly in a full-length gown, a scarf pulled over her head and wrapped around her neck so that her lovely but worried face was like a moon. “He’s come to consult as a savant instead of as a spy.”

Apparently she carried some of Silano’s authority. Reluctantly, the soldiers let me through to the courtyard, and the main gate clicked shut behind me. Brick-and-board buildings lined the inner walls of the square, simple fort.

“I told him you’d come,” she said quietly. The fierce sun beat down on the parade ground and it, and the scent of her — of flowers and spices — made me dizzy.

“And go, with you.”

“Make no mistake, we are both prisoners, Ethan, rifle or not. Once more, we must forge a partnership of convenience with Alessandro.” She gave a nod of her head to the walls and I saw more sentries watching us. “We need to learn if there’s anything to this legend at all, and then make a plan what to do.”