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Authors: William Dietrich

The Barbary Pirates

BOOK: The Barbary Pirates
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The Barbary Pirates

An Ethan Gage Adventure

William Dietrich

To Mateo and Selena Ziz,
who were just the right age to contribute to this tale!

Contents

Map

 

Part One

Chapter One

After I trapped three scientists in a fire I set…

Chapter Two

Horror we can habituate to. Defeat can be accommodated. It…

Chapter Three

I turned. A swarthy, hawk-nosed man in the getup of…

Chapter Four

Wax tapers went flying as the heavy gold ornament and…

Chapter Five

“Arrest?” I had to think fast. “We were simply trying…

Chapter Six

Bonaparte turned. Again he exhibited that electrical presence, that firmness…

Chapter Seven

We walked fifty paces from the group and stopped by…

Chapter Eight

Napoleon promised we could accomplish our mission in a month…

Chapter Nine

I don’t know why beauty disappoints so regularly, but I…

Chapter Ten

Our gondolier sculled briskly toward the Turkish vessel, anxious to…

Chapter Eleven

Thira, that Greek island that the Venetians call Santorini, rises…

Chapter Twelve

The village of Akrotiri, on the southwestern arm of Thira’s…

Chapter Thirteen

“They made a hole in the door and I had…

Chapter Fourteen

It was a miracle none of us were impaled by…

Chapter Fifteen

Our underground way twisted like a worm. At times the…

Chapter Sixteen

“Smith, buy me time to get this parchment pried loose!”…

Chapter Seventeen

Dragut’s xebec appeared to be anchored in a most unlikely…

 

Part Two

Chapter Eighteen

Aurora Somerset was one of the loveliest women I’d ever…

Chapter Nineteen

I’ve been known to positively scamper to the side of…

Chapter Twenty

From the sea, Tripoli looked inviting as a lion’s mouth.

Chapter Twenty-One

So here I was on a stone quay at the…

Chapter Twenty-Two

If the hold of Dragut’s ship had been claustrophobic, and…

Chapter Twenty-Three

Astiza was as striking as I remembered. She’s a Mediterranean…

Chapter Twenty-Four

I’ve been terrified many times in my life. I’ve been…

Chapter Twenty-Five

I’d half hoped we might run into an American frigate…

Chapter Twenty-Six

Dragut’s appearance saved me from having to continue that disturbing…

Chapter Twenty-Seven

The piazza in front of the Syracuse cathedral is one…

Chapter Twenty-Eight

The crumbled ancient Greek fortress of Euryalus sits at the…

Chapter Twenty-Nine

Once more I was breaking into a church in the…

Chapter Thirty

We sailed south across the Gulf of Noto, apparently having…

Chapter Thirty-One

The moon rose orange over the desolate island, as big…

Chapter Thirty-Two

My would-be bride and her assortment of Satanists and miscreants…

 

Part Three

Chapter Thirty-Three

My admiration for the military discipline of my nation’s small…

Chapter Thirty-Four

I’m not sure what I expected of Fulton’s beloved Nautilus,…

Chapter Thirty-Five

By the time we repaired and loaded the Nautilus on…

Chapter Thirty-Six

We maneuvered to the outermost boat in a line of…

Chapter Thirty-Seven

Aurora stepped into better light, holding my longrifle in a…

Chapter Thirty-Eight

I feared we might have provoked uproar in the tunnels…

Chapter Thirty-Nine

It was almost morning. We told the prisoners to make…

Chapter Forty

We escaped through chaos. The dungeon was empty, gates hanging…

Chapter Forty-One

The pirates had had enough for the day, and did…

 

Historical Note

About the Author

Other Books by William Dietrich

Credits

Copyright

About the Publisher

Map

 

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

After I trapped three scientists in a fire I set in a brothel, enlisted them
in the theft of a stampeding wagon, got them arrested by the French secret police, and then mired them in a mystic mission for Bonaparte, they began to question my judgment.

So allow me to point out that our tumultuous night was as much
their
idea as mine. Tourists come to Paris to be naughty.

Accordingly, I was hardly surprised when a trio of savants—the English rock hound William “Strata” Smith, the French zoologist Georges Cuvier, and the crackpot American inventor Robert Fulton—insisted that I take them to the Palais Royal. Scientific luminaries they may be, but after a hard day of looking at old bones or (in the case of Fulton) marketing impractical schemes to the French navy, what these intellectuals really wanted was a peek at the city’s most notorious parade of prostitutes.

Not to mention supper in a swank Palais café, a game or two of chance, and shopping for souvenir trifles such as French perfume, silver toothpicks, Chinese silks, erotic pamphlets, Egyptian jewelry, or ivory curiosities of an even-more ribald nature. Who can resist the city’s center of sin and sensuality? It was even better, the scientists reasoned, if such entertainment could be attributed to someone as discreet and shameless as me.

“Monsieur Ethan Gage
insisted
on giving us this tour,” Cuvier explained to any acquaintance he met, reddening as he said it. The man was smart as Socrates but still retained his Alsatian provincialism, despite his rise to the summit of France’s scientific establishment. The French Revolution has replaced breeding with ability, and with it traded the weary worldliness of the nobility for the curiosity and embarrassment of the striving. Cuvier was a soldier’s son, Smith from agricultural stock, and Fulton had been sired by a failed farmer who died when he was three. Bonaparte himself was not even French but Corsican, and his generals were tradesmen’s offspring: Ney the son of a cooper, Lefebre a miller, Murat an innkeeper, Lannes an ostler. I, sired by a Philadelphia merchant, fit right in.

“We’re here to investigate revenue sources and public sentiment,” I said to reinforce Cuvier’s dignity. “Napoleon is keeping the Palais open in order to tax it.”

Having resolved after my recent calamitous visit to America to reform myself, I suppose I should have resented the presumption that I was expert at negotiating the notorious Palais. But I
had
, in the spirit of social and architectural inquiry, explored most of its corners during my years in Paris. Now, in June of 1802, it remains the place Paris comes to be seen or—if one’s tastes run to the scandalous or perverse—safely invisible.

Smith—recently fired from his canal-surveying job in England, and frustrated by the lack of recognition for his rock mapping—came to Paris to confer with French geologists and gape. He was a surveyor built like an English bulldog, balding and thick, with a farmer’s tan and the bluff, ruddy heartiness of the ploughman. Given Smith’s humble origins, English intellectuals had paid absolutely no attention to the rock mapping he’d done, and the snobbery rankled. Smith knew he was more intelligent than three-quarters of the men in the Royal Society.

“You’re more creative for not being stuck in their company,” I suggested when Cuvier brought him to me so I could serve as interpreter and guide.

“My career is like the ditches my canal company digs. I’m here because I’m not sure what else to do.”

“As is half of London! The Peace of Amiens let loose a tide of British tourists who haven’t come over since the revolution. Paris has hosted two-thirds of the House of Lords already, including five dukes, three marquesses, and thirty-seven earls. They’re as transfixed by the guillotine as by the trollops.”

“We English are just curious about liberty’s relation to wickedness.”

“And the Palais is the place to study, William. Music floats, lanterns glint, and a man can lose himself amid roving minstrels, angular acrobats, bawdy plays, amusing wagers, brilliant fashion, smart talk, intoxicating spirits, and swank bordellos.” I nodded to encourage him.

“And this is officially tolerated?”

“Winked at. It’s been kept off-limits to the French police since Philip of Orleans, and Philippe Egalité added the commercial arcades just before the revolution. The place has since weathered revolt, war, terror, inflation, and the conservative instincts of Napoleon with hardly a stammer. Three-quarters of Paris’s newspapers have been shuttered by Bonaparte, but the Palais plays on.”

“You seem to have made quite a study.”

“It’s the kind of history that interests me.”

In truth, I was out of date. I’d been away from Paris and back in my homeland of America for more than a year and a half, and my frightful experiences there had made me more determined than ever to swear off women, gambling, drink, and treasure hunting. True, I’d been only partly successful in these resolutions. I’d used a grape-sized glob of gold (my only reward from my Trials of Job on the western frontier) to get a stake in St. Louis card games. There had been the distraction of a frontier barmaid or two, and a hearty sampling of Jefferson’s wines when I finally reported back to the President’s House in Washington. There he heard my carefully edited description of France’s Louisiana Territory and agreed to my idea of playing unofficial American envoy back in Paris, trying to get Napoleon to sell the wasteland to the United States.

BOOK: The Barbary Pirates
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