Letters (122 page)

Mrs. Harrison Mack now proposes to become Mrs. André Castine on September 30. (She specified “the end of the month,” leaving the precise date to me. Still amused by the Anniversary View of History, I considered the equinox, when at 9 A.M. in 4004 B.C. the world is said to have begun; but I chose at last the 30th, anniversary of our ancestor Ebenezer Cooke’s inadvertent loss of his Maryland estate in 1694 and, rather earlier, of the legendary loss of another prime piece of real estate: Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden.) For convenience’ sake, I have in mind to kill off “Andrew Cook VI” by some accident before that date. I am, you know, under that name, also in some second-cousinly relation to my fiancée: I propose therefore—
unless as prime beneficiary you appear within 30 days of the date of your father’s death
—to bequeath to Jane Mack my properties on Bloodsworth Island and Chautaugua Road. I shall cause obituary notices to be published promptly in the leading Quebec and Ontario newspapers as well as those of Maryland and the District of Columbia: the next move will be yours. “André Castine” looks forward to welcoming you (either here or at “Barataria”) as his own son!

On the other hand—for reasons that I shan’t set forth in writing but will be relieved to share with you at last in person, as they pertain to you intimately indeed—my coming forth publicly as André Castine to marry Jane raises problems of its own concerning that historian I’ve mentioned before: Professor Germaine Pitt, Lady Amherst, who was to have edited, annotated, and published this series of letters. It will scarcely be enough to see to her reappointment to the post about to be vacated by Andrew Cook’s death; something further is called for. We must discuss it!

And
Baratarian,
that fleet and sturdy fellow, who when I fetch him from the Annapolis yard this weekend will have tankage enough to run from Bloodsworth Island to Yucatan with but one pit stop, and enough secret stowage in his teak and holly joinery to fetch back a high-profit cargo along with the marlin and wahoo we are officially after. One trip, at current prices, will come near to financing us for half a year, and not even the crew need know (indeed ought not, for it is paid informants, not adroit law officers, who precipitate arrests in this line of work). But I cannot navigate both
Baratarian
and Barataria, or manage to our cause both Jane and Mary Jane. Come, son, and let us to Isla Mujeres, the Isle of Women!

There Jean Lafitte—alias “Jean Lafflin” or “Laffin”—is reported to have come in November 1821 to
la fin du chemin,
ambushed by Mexican soldiers not impossibly informed of his coming by Andrew Cook IV. So at least speculated my grandfather, Andrew V, on what grounds he did not say. It is by no means established beyond doubt that Lafitte died then and there; other legends extend his pseudonymous life to 1854. What is known is that in latter 1821, pressed by the U.S. Revenue Marine, he boarded his schooner
Pride
(possibly the
Jean Blanque
under alias of its own), abandoned “Galvez-Town,” and disappeared. Moreover, that his connection with Andrew IV, once so brotherly, had long since deteriorated into mutual suspicion and distrust.

What a falling off, between that P.S. to the first of these letters (where his fondest wish is to unite his “darling wife” with his “true brother”) and the opening of this last!

—whether by Lafitte, Joseph Bonaparte, Betsy Patterson Bonaparte, the U.S. Secret Service, or some combination thereof, he is uncertain. He cannot say for sure even that he is in fact a prisoner in “Beverly,” the King mansion on the Manokin River not far from Bloodsworth Island; perhaps all is going well, but unaccountably slowly! Yet it is August 20, 1821, insufferably hot, damp, and buggy in the Eastern Shore marshes; he has been there above six weeks, since his 45th birthday, under anonymous guard “for his own security”; the owners of Beverly, at the urging of their friend Mme B., are off on an extended visit to Europe, as is Betsy herself; Lafitte has delivered him and is long gone: possibly back to St. Helena to rescue “André Castine” per plan, more likely back to privateering in the Gulf of Mexico.
Everything points
etc.

It is not, he acknowledges now, the beginning of his mistrust. Their official plan, upon setting out the year before to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena, had been that upon the emperor’s safe and secret installation at Beverly, Lafitte would send word posthaste to New Orleans for Dominique You to sail in the
Séraphine
to rescue Andrew, under pretext of executing Mayor Girod’s scheme to rescue Napoleon. Such was also their “backup” plan in case things went awry: the
Séraphine
would sail on August 15, 1821, if nothing had been heard by then from the
Jean Blanque.
Moreover—in view of those rumors that Napoleon was being poisoned by the Bourbons, by the English, by the Fesch/Kleinmüller/Metternich conspiracy, even by disaffected members of his own entourage; and other rumors that he was dying of the stomach cancer common in his family; and yet others that he was already dead or elsewhere sequestered and replaced by an impostor—Cook and Lafitte had agreed on a contingency plan: if the man they rescue is either an impostor or a dying Napoleon, Lafitte will bury him quietly at sea and then retrieve his surrogate to lead the Louisiana Project.

But the fact is (Andrew now declares to “my dear, my darling wife”) our ancestor has had for several years no intention of rescuing Napoleon in the first place! They have all been a blind, those elaborate schemes and counterschemes! Andrew has not forgotten Joel Barlow’s
Advice to a Raven in Russia:
the Corsican is a beast, an opportunistic megalomaniac whose newly invented “Bonapartism” is but the sentimental rationalization, after the fact, of a grandiose military dictatorship. Andrew has never truly imagined that his Louisiana Project would appeal to the man who sold that vast territory to Jefferson in part from lack of interest in it; in any case he would not want the butcher of Europe at the head of his (and Andrée’s) liberal free state!

And there is, in the second place, that aforementioned lapse of faith that Jean Lafitte or Dominique You will actually risk returning for him. It would be so easy not to, their main object once attained, and so perilous and expensive to do it! Jean endlessly complains of the Revenue Marine’s harassment of his New Barataria; might not the secret service offer to end or mitigate this harassment in return for his cooperation in foiling all rescue schemes, including Andrew’s?
We were still to all appearances brothers,
he writes;
but some Gascon intuition warn’d me to trust this Gascon no longer. And warn’d me further, that that Gascon entertain’d a like suspicion of me.

What he had for some while been privately planning, therefore, he now confides: a multiple or serial imposture. He would go ashore at St. Helena and by some means arrange to have
himself
doped and smuggled out as Napoleon, and Napoleon left behind as himself (whose rescue he would then, as Napoleon, forestall, forbid, or thwart). Deceiving even Jean Lafitte, he would continue to counterfeit the aging, ailing emperor long enough to mobilize the French Creoles, the free Negroes, and the “Five Civilized Tribes” of Southern Indians for the Louisiana Project. Moreover, as Napoleon Bonaparte he will
(“forgive me, dear dear Andrée! I had a hundred times rather it had been you, that have rightly forsaken your forsaker…”) marry Elizabeth Patterson Bonaparte,
and turn her family’s fortune to his purpose! If he divines that Betsy might not disapprove, he will perhaps then reveal his true identity to her, “die” again as Napoleon, and carry on the 2nd Revolution as André Castine, Bonaparte’s successor to the Louisiana Project and to herself. Otherwise, he will do the same things without ever revealing the imposture. For it is not Mme B. herself he desires—vivacious, handsome, wealthy, and managerially gifted as she is—only her fortune, until he can salvage Bonaparte’s or make his own. He is not blind to her obsessiveness
(“as profound as mine, but private: her son was her 2nd Revolution”),
or to the sexless miser inside the Belle of Baltimore.

Concerning whom, as
Jean Blanque
stands out of the gulf in August 1820, there remains a tantalizing mystery. When he last queried her in Baltimore concerning the source of her information about the Roman Bonapartes, Betsy had teased him with sight of a letter from Rome written in the Pattersons’ own family cipher. Knowing him to be “a clever hand at such things,” she scarcely more than flashed the letter; even so, she underestimated Andrew’s capacity. The forger’s trained eye and memory caught only the salutation and the close, but those he retained as if transcribed, and in fact transcribed them at his first opportunity:
Vs Dryejri D.,
it began, and ended
Nyy vs Yejr, G.
Like most ciphers, it was written letter by letter, not cursively; yet the handwriting seemed half-familiar.
I could almost have believed it yours!
he exclaims to Andrée.

En route from Baltimore to New Orleans, New Orleans to “Galvez-Town,” he studies his transcription, but is unable either to recognize or to decipher it. Throughout the long voyage to St. Helena—normally a two-month sail, but extended to five by privateering excursions at Isla Mujeres and Curaçao, and by hurricane damage off Tobago—he studies the cipher while perfecting two separate impostures of Napoleon: a public, “false” one on deck for the benefit of Lafitte and the Baratarian crew, based on popular portraits by Isabey and Ducis (short-cropped hair, bemused mouth, right hand tucked between waistcoat buttons); and in his cabin a private, “true” one based on his last sight of the fallen emperor aboard
Bellerophon
—paunchy, jowly, slower of gait and speech—which he means to use to deceive his rescuers when the time comes.

Vs Dryejri D… Nyy vs Yejr, G.
It looks vaguely Slavic, Croatian, Finnish. He remembers pondering the hieroglyphics in the British Museum in 1811, en route to his rendezvous with John Henry: the stone discovered at the village of Rosetta on the Nile by Napoleon’s soldiers in 1799 and taken by the British, with those soldiers, in 1801. The recollection reminds him of Napoleon’s Egyptian affair with Mme Fourès, the French counterpart of “Mrs. Mullens,” and of his own amorous North African escapade in 1797… Suddenly (it is September 14, seventh anniversary of his “death” at Fort McHenry; in Paris the “father of Egyptology,” Champollion, is deciphering those hieroglyphics with that stone) he has the key to Betsy Bonaparte’s cipher, and to both her “Swiss secret” and her “secret Swiss.”

The actual words he works out, within reasonable limits, later. Most conspicuous are the repeated sequences
vs
and
yejr;
given that
y
is the only character to appear four times, he anticipates Edgar Poe and calls it
e,
but can make nothing likely in either French or English of the result: _ _  _ _
e_ _ _ _  _. . . . _ee  _ _ 
 e _ _ _,  _. The character r, which appears three times (no other appears more than twice, but in a text so short the table of frequencies is unreliable) makes a more promising
e (_ _ _e_ _ _e_ _. . . . ._ _ _  _ _  _ _ _e,  _)
, especially given the conventions of epistolary salutation and close. Assuming the final character in each phrase to be the first or last initial respectively of addressee and author, and remembering Mme B.‘s first and last to be the same, we have:
_ _Be_ _ _e_B. . . ._ _ _  _ _  _ _ _e,  _.)
, the repeated yejr is then surely love (
_ _ Belove_ B. . . _ _ _ _ _ Love, _.)
; which gives us
_ _ Belove_ B. . . . _ ll _ _ Love, _.;
which is surely
My Beloved B. . . All my Love, _.
Only the mysterious terminal blank (G in the cipher) remains to be filled.

But the real key is not Andrew’s sorting of frequencies and correspondences, which leads after all but to that crucial lacuna. It is in the calligraphy of that very
G,
as it were an aborted or miscarried flourish from its final serif: the first thing that struck him as familiar, but which he cannot be certain he has accurately duplicated. From Galveston to Yucatan, Yucatan to Tobago, he does his Napoleonic homework and covers every available scrap of paper with uppercase G’s; a fortuitous stroke on the aforementioned anniversary—
Jean Blanque
is pitching terrifically in the storm that will carry off her foremast and half a dozen Baratarians with her square-sail yards—delivers him the key.

And show’d me at once,
he writes,
that my errand was very likely a wild-goose chase. That were it not for the necessity of deceiving Jean Lafitte, I should spare myself that endless voyage & elaborate imposture, and make straight for Rome, for the Palazzo Rinuccini, & for the clairvoyant “Mme Kleinmüller”…
But there is no help for it: key in hand, he is obliged to postpone for nearly three-quarters of a year its urgent application to the lock—unimaginably protracted suspense!—while he sails thousands of miles down the map, from Tobago to the Rocks of Saint Peter and Paul, to Ascension Island, to St. Helena. And (it must be) in order to give Andrée some sense of his massive frustration, the impatience which no doubt contributes to Jean Lafitte’s suspicions of him, he withholds this key for many a ciphered page to come (I myself skipped ahead at once to Rome and the answer, Henry; you may do likewise), until he meets—on May 5, 1821: the day, as it happens, of Napoleon’s death—the writer of that coded letter.

In mid-January they raise St. Helena, looming sheer and volcanic from the southern ocean; they lie to for several days just below the western horizon, out of sight of the telegraphs, and seize the first small fishing smack that wanders into reach. Its crew are regaled, handsomely bribed for the imposition, promised more if all goes well, and threatened with death, pirate-style, if all does not. Two of their number are comfortably detained as hostages, obliged to switch clothes with Cook and Lafitte, and closely interrogated. They agree that despite the Admiralty’s semaphore telegraphs and strengthened fortification of the island’s four landing places, fishermen come and go as usual from footpaths down the cliffs, which rise in places twelve hundred feet straight out of the sea. Aside from vertigo, there should be no problem in getting ashore. They even know a concealed vantage point from which to survey Longwood, a favorite leisure pastime among them. But on the question whether their celebrated new resident is the former emperor of the French, there is no consensus: one vows he is, though “much changed” by captivity and systematic poisoning; another swears he was replaced a year ago; a third that he was never on the island.