Free The Emerald Storm by William Dietrich Page A

time for debate. We’d flee across the castle battlements and use Cayley and his flying machine to meet Frotté and his mix of spies where they waited in a snowy meadow. Then we’d flee to the Swiss border and onward down the Rhine to the North Sea and Britain.
    Or such was the plan.
    “How many can this flying machine carry?” I’d asked Cayley.
    “By my calculations, three,” the inventor had replied.
    “I count four.” Gambling gives one familiarity with arithmetic.
    “One of you will surely be dead by the time you launch,” Frotté pointed out. “And we don’t have time to invent a bigger flying machine.”
    He had a point. The only thing worse than our scheme was doing nothing at all.
    The first problem I must overcome was that the only way out of our prisoner’s cell was an overhead skylight, bare of glass but grilled with stout iron bars.
    “It will take me until Easter to saw through them,” I’d objected. That holiday was four days after our planned assault.
    “English science has the answer, Ethan,” Frotté assured. Why a French-born spy was so enamored of English ingenuity was unclear, though I suspected it had something to do with the payments he received from Sir Sidney Smith. Or perhaps it was my own reputation. I am, after all, a savant of sorts, an electrician, antiquarian, marksman, and expert in plunging boats.
    But first I had to keep the girl in the window quiet. We hadn’t predicted that I’d encounter a sentry of such beauty, a woman as fair and encapsulated as Rapunzel, anxiously awaiting rendezvous with me, a married man. I was entirely too civilized to simply bludgeon the girl insensible, and even if I’d wanted to be unfaithful, I didn’t have the time. What to do? While Cayley climbed, I tapped on the maiden’s door again.
    Astiza, I was fairly certain, was meanwhile waiting impatiently in L’Ouverture’s cell below.
    The lovely answered, wrapped in a cloak artfully opened just enough to suggest there was nothing underneath. Since I had turned my back, she’d built up a little fire in her chamber hearth and pinched her cheeks to give them color. She grasped and pulled on me. “Come inside before you wither.”
    No chance of that. “I’m glad you keep a careful watch.”
    “It’s Papa who watches me . You’re so clever to come up the wall.”
    Was she the commandant’s daughter? And did her lack of astonishment mean suitors were reliably persistent? Well, to look at her I could see why. She enjoyed the attention, too, the minx.
    “It’s Papa I worry about,” I whispered. “I saw a shadow on a distant parapet and worry it might be a soldier gone to alert your father.”
    Her eyes grew wide with alarm.
    “The safest thing to do is pretend you’re fast asleep while I wait and watch. It’s imperative that you don’t stir an inch, no matter what noises you hear. Now, when all is quiet—if no alarm is sounded—I will come to you later. Let’s give it an hour, to be safe. Will you wait for me, my pretty?”
    She nodded, excited at the promise of sexual skullduggery. Thank God this wasn’t my daughter, and thank God I so far had no daughters to police, since girls sound like a positive plague to raise and govern. I wouldn’t let a man like me within five hundred yards of a daughter. “Wait for me in bed. Not a sound, now!”
    “How gallant you are!” The cloak slipped from one shoulder as she closed her tower door. I peeked as far as I could, glimpsing a swell of a breast, and then congratulated myself on my own rectitude for not following instinct and wrecking our mission. As a husband, I am a model of restraint.
    Yes. Onward to Astiza and L’Ouverture, waiting in his cell.

Chapter 11
    W e live in an age of science, modernity, change, and odd invention. It’s hard even to keep up. I was assaulting a castle because French and British lunatics thought it might be possible to flap around like birds, upending military strategy and everyday experience.