The Trojan Icon (Ethan Gage Adventures Book 8) (11 page)

“You leave Louis so readily?” I asked. “Without your pay?”

“Well, payday was two days ago. I borrowed a little more from a guard strongbox, and have another patron in France who promises to pay still more. I’m as mercenary as you, brother, and keep track of accounts. The real reason I’m volunteering is that I was never really employed by Louis XVIII.”

“What do you mean? You were his sergeant-of-arms.”

“While working, in secret, for Napoleon Bonaparte.”

CHAPTER 14

Astiza

I’
d married a man, not his family. Ethan had spoken very little about his relations. Now his brother had materialized in the unlikeliest of places and saved us in the timeliest of ways. I was intrigued. I was charmed. I was wary.

Caleb had been a sailor, and like a ship navigating at sea he used a compass to steer us a southern course from Jelgava toward Czartoryski’s ancestral home at Pulawy, between Warsaw and Lublin. This was a journey of nearly four hundred miles as the crow flies, crossing several rivers. It seemed immensely longer as we wound through woods, wintry fields, and frozen lakes. A modern coach or sleigh can race as fast as nine miles each hour. We were lucky at first to manage one.

Fearful of pursuit, we didn’t seek a cabin the first few evenings lest a peasant betray us to Louis or Von Bonin. The initial night we napped briefly in a shallow cave, and the next I lay with Harry in a hollow log. The men took turns standing sentry. It was too cold to sleep soundly and our rest was ragged.

During the day we struggled to ski. Initially Caleb tied Horus onto his back alongside his musket, but this was exhausting and our son was eager to learn. In short order he was skiing better than his parents. Caleb betrayed the impatience of the amateur teacher as Ethan and I labored to master the unwieldy planks of wood, but he won me over by being encouraging to Horus. “Right, lad, we won’t leave you behind. Here, a slope to slip down! That’s my boy! The grace of a Gage, eh, Ethan?”

Yet the harder Caleb worked to win our trust, the more cautious Ethan seemed. We still weren’t certain who our friends and enemies were. All we could do was run.

The first week of travel took us less than a sixth of the way to Pulawy. Yet we slowly gained skill, and exertion shoved aside worry. In time, skiing was fun. Any dip let us glide as if getting a push from angels. We ascended hills by crisscrossing their slope. The quiet of our swish through barren woods made us as furtive as deer. There was peace in schussing far away from schemers. Each mile away from Russians and Prussians lifted my heart. Each evening campfire promised hope.

Winter was also slowly loosening its grip, the sun climbing noticeably higher and the snow softening. We complained good-naturedly about its increasing stickiness.

So why did I feel so apprehensive? The long nights still squeezed. More importantly my foresight came unbidden, a premonition that our trials were just beginning. The brothers had some kind of history. We’d once more escaped, but to what?

“Did Napoleon order you to adopt us, Caleb?” I asked.

“He predicted that you’d adopt me, Madame.”

“But how did he know we’d meet?”

“Because the French work with Czartoryski.”

“Who is on who’s side?”

“It is a contra dance, with multiple partners.”

Caleb is nearly as tall as Ethan and thicker, with broad shoulders and sturdy arms, his torso hard as a saddle and his hands callused. He moves without wasted motion, and seems as inexhaustible as a dray horse. Pirates would pick him as captain. Women would be intrigued. Ethan had more drawing room charm, but Caleb has the rugged cheer of a mercenary. He skied off periodically to hunt game and “liberate” provisions from rich manor houses, his cocky manner that of a merry robber. In fact, my new brother-in-law was so hearty that he left us wondering how much of his manner was natural and how much was acted.

By the time we consumed the week’s provisions that Caleb had brought, our guide judged us far enough from Jelgava for him to risk buying provisions from strangers. He also used his money to pay for us to stay in cabins. The peasants were wary of his musket but accepted vague explanations that we were peddlers returning from a trade mission to Riga. They prudently bit our French coins before accepting them.

After two weeks with no sign of pursuit we purchased a farmer’s mule and wood sledge, the four of us barely squeezing onto the small sleigh. We paid for the vehicle with all but one pair of our skis, Caleb keeping his pair for hunting or emergencies. When even these proved awkward, he left them propped in the crook of a tree “for whoever can use them.”

It would only be much later that I realized the ski tips came together to form an arrow, in the direction we were taking.

With the sledge we made better time, traveling south along the eastern bank of the Nieman before finally crossing the river into Podlesia. Then the spring thaw truly hit and the sleigh grounded like a ship on a lowering tide. The world became a pinto pattern of white and brown, the mud as wet as a mouth. Brush swelled so red that it looked as if blood beat within every twig. We traded the sledge for more food and trudged by foot, Harry riding the mule. I joined him at times, taking a break from muck that added a pound to each of our ankles. Then I’d slide down and slog with the men to give the beast a rest.

As the world continued to warm, the soil dried and hardened. We crossed the Narew and then came to the Bug River, and there sold the mule and took a proper stagecoach into what had once been Poland. The vehicle still bogged down a dozen times, requiring the passengers to help push, but we felt we were flying.

“We’ve escaped our enemies,” Caleb announced.

“And are nearing friends,” Ethan promised.

Poland is mostly flat, each log village an island in a lake of fields. The crops in turn are surrounded by forest. Suddenly every field was being plowed, and every tree was gauzy green. Spring had come in a moment.

Wealth was the neighbor to poverty in this landscape. The grand estates were archipelagos of self-contained prosperity, each with barns, orchards, grain silos, cattle, bakeries, breweries, pigsties, and chicken coops. The peasant towns next door had rude cabins along a single muddy street, a wooden church or synagogue anchoring each hamlet.

“I learned in Jelgava that most of Europe’s Jews live in Poland,” Caleb informed us as we rode along. “King Casimir granted the Golden Freedoms in return for Jews taking the most despised work, which was banking and tax collection. They make up a tenth of the population, and pay double taxes for their faith.”

“Some freedom,” I said. “Golden fetters, it sounds like to me.”

“Aristocrats and burghers are another tenth. The Christian peasants who make up the remainder are a mix from a hundred invasions: Avars, Bulgars, Huns. You’ll still find Tartars from the Mongol empire. Poland is a crossroads of the world, like Constantinople.”

Ethan nodded. “Yet it has identity and soul, Czartoryski said. Roots. Being.”

“Yes. Stubborn as Scots, proud as Gascons, persistent as the Irish, and as independent as the Swiss. Each conquest and partition simply makes Poles long all the more for their own country. Which is why Napoleon sent me here. Sent
you
here, Ethan. We’re part of his plan.”

“Not me, brother. I’ve escaped the Corsican’s clutches and am working for Czartoryski now. Or rather,
with
Czartoryski. I’m my own man.”

“And who is Czartoryski working for? Tsar Alexander, yes, but he also has feelers to Napoleon, to Kosciusko in Paris, to Jefferson, to Talleyrand, and to the Pope in Rome. We’re ants on their maps.”

“I want to get off their maps entirely,” I told the men. “Deliver the swords, accept whatever fee Czartoryski’s mother deigns to grant, and leave the continent. To Egypt. America. The South Sea isles.”

“And give up our title?” Ethan quipped, but the question was not really a light one.

“Yes,” I said firmly. “It would come with a catch like those Golden Freedoms.”

“We have to satisfy Napoleon to get off his map,” Caleb said. “Once we do that, we don’t have to go far. Spain, perhaps. Good wine. Better women.”

“Neither of which entice this female, brother-in-law. And doesn’t Bonaparte have his fingers into Spain, as well?”

“We’ll follow opportunity, then. Circumstance. Serendipity, Astiza. Wherever the wind blows, or your fortune-telling takes us.”

“Does serendipity explain the remarkable coincidence that brought two long-lost brothers together?”

“That wasn’t coincidence at all. I was smuggling from Sweden to Britain and caught by a French frigate. After two months in prison I was brought to a minister named Dacre who said the emperor, who notices everything, had taken note of my last name. The French determined that I was related to a rather more infamous brother who’d disappeared in Bohemia and resurfaced in St. Petersburg. A mischief-maker but useful, they said of Ethan Gage, with a lovely wife and a precocious child. I was offered my freedom in exchange for arranging to meet this gypsy family in Jelgava and offering them help. To do so, I posed as Caleb Ruston and hired on with the exiled Louis.”

“Quite a gamble,” Ethan said. “Jelgava is four hundred miles from St. Petersburg. How could you or Napoleon know we’d fetch up there?”

“Because you’d be sent by Adam Czartoryski, who bets on France to reconstitute Poland. Bonaparte knows all about the swords. So Napoleon allied with the Russian foreign minister to enlist wayward treasure hunter Ethan Gage to retrieve patriotic relics and take them to Czartoryski’s ancestral home. With my help, of course, for the mere price of half of any reward you receive.”

“That suggests he knew my theft would be discovered.”

“Ask your foreign minister friend about that.”

“And why would the infamous Ethan Gage need his long-lost brother’s help?” I asked Caleb. “Adam told us we’d get Louis’s help at Jelgava.”

“Czartoryski misled you.”

“Lied, you mean,” I said, glancing at Ethan.

“Perhaps I should say that Czartoryski actually led you,” Caleb corrected. “He always planned that you would go to Pulawy, knew Jelgava was halfway to that goal, and knew that Louis trusts no one, and has no interest in Poland or any cause but his own. So Czartoryski sent you to meet me.”

“Couldn’t he have said so? Couldn’t you, when we met on the palace lawn?”

“Of course not. First, my men would recognize me as a fraud and traitor, a Bonapartist in the home of the royalist heir. Second, Ethan wouldn’t necessarily trust my help, given past estrangement. Third, I wasn’t certain that Ethan was truly Ethan, not after nearly a quarter century. You could have been a trap. When Lothar Von Bonin alerted Louis that refugee Americans might have valuable relics, it was I who suggested your imprisonment, giving me the opportunity to make sure your husband was really Ethan Gage. Now, if I help deliver your contraband to Pulawy and report to Paris on the weaknesses of Louis, I confirm my freedom and win reward. Instead of French prison, I make my fortune!”

“You’re as ludicrously optimistic as I am,” Ethan said.

“Both of us have half-luck, brother. Combined, we might become fully lucky. Fortune will finally shine on the Gage brothers!” He grinned, as raffish and handsome as my husband.

Caleb’s rationale didn’t fully convince me. Czartoryski’s scheme had worked, but just barely. There was another move in this chess game, a hidden strategy, and it might put us in peril. Why had Caleb vanished from Ethan’s life? What did he really want now?

So I waited until Ethan and I were alone, Caleb playing with Horus, and broached the past that my husband was so reluctant to talk about.

“First we find your brother in the unlikeliest of places and then he performs like our protector,” I said. “A man who announces he’s also Napoleon’s spy, secretly allied with your mentor Czartoryski. A minister who neglected to mention Caleb at all.”

“Convenient on all counts,” Ethan agreed.

“You share my misgivings, husband?”

“Only that we’re guided, lovely wife, by a privateer who demands half our reward. Which means he’s as mercenary as I am.”

“Neither of you is really a mercenary. Opportunists, perhaps.”

“Yes. Independent contractors.”

“After a palace that recedes like a rainbow.”

“I’m sorry, Astiza. I thought us so close to triumph in St. Petersburg and here we are on the road again, risking all, with a brother who indeed seems suspiciously convenient. It’s Caleb all right, but I hope this ends at Pulawy.”

“He’s gotten us this far. He’s good with Harry.”

“Yes, the favorite uncle.” We could see that Caleb had picked out stones for a little game of marbles with our son. “I’ll admit he’s more competent than I remember, but then he was just nineteen when he ran away to join a privateer during the American Revolution. We all grow up, even me, and Caleb is a man’s man. Perhaps blood truly is thicker than water.”

“Perhaps?”

He sighed. “A brother whom I thought would never tolerate me again, let alone rescue.”

“Never?”

“Caleb and I have a history, Astiza. My fault, not his.”

“You didn’t get along?”

“We got along very well, until we didn’t. That made the falling out more painful. Then he disappeared before I could apologize and he could forgive. And now he’s back but not talking about it. Which is why I feel as uneasy as you do.”

“Gracious, Ethan, what did you do?”

“Broke his heart. You’ll note he has no wife, and no home.”

“His life is tumultuous.”

“My doing.”

Clearly there was more going on here than treasure hunting. “I think you’d better confide in me, husband. What’s our new fellowship really about?”

My husband looked at Caleb chasing Horus with a hearty laugh, pretending to be a bull. “Many years ago Caleb fell in love with a beautiful Philadelphia girl a few years younger than him, and thus very close to my own age. Everyone noticed her joyous personality. Every lad was smitten. And when our father came back wounded from the Battle of Princeton and announced it was time to put his affairs in order, he decreed that Caleb would inherit the business, thus giving the eldest son the means to ask for Lizzie Gaswick’s hand. Papa’s condition was that Caleb not join the revolutionary army, lest he be killed. The implication to me was that I and my younger brother, Erasmus, were more acceptable cannon fodder.”

“Ethan, no. Your father was simply being prudent.”