The Rosetta Key

“The first thing we’re going to do back in France is steal a coach and four?”

“If you act as if you deserve it, it doesn’t look like stealing.”

“We’re not even legally in France. And I’m still charged with murdering a prostitute. My enemies could use it against me.”

“Won’t they kill you regardless?”

“Well, yes.”

“Then what is your worry? But come. We’ll ask Sarylla what to do.” The gypsy fortune-teller who taught me more than my fortune—

lord, I fondly remembered the yelps she made—was as beautiful as I remembered, dark and mysterious, rings glittering on her fingers and hoop earrings catching the firelight. I was not entirely glad to bump into a former paramour with Astiza in tow, and the two women 3 0 2

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bristled silently in that way they have, like wary cats. Yet Astiza sat quietly at my shoulder while the gypsy woman plied the cards of the tarot.

“Fortune speeds you on your way,” Sarylla intoned, as her turn of cards revealed the chariot. “We will have no problem liberating a carriage for our purposes.”

“See?” Stefan said with satisfaction.

I like the tarot. It can tell you anything you want to hear.

Sarylla turned more cards. “But you will meet a woman in hurried circumstances. Your route will become circuitous.” Another woman? “But will we be successful?” She turned more cards. I saw the tower, the magician, the fool, and the emperor. “It will be a near-fought thing.” Another card. The lovers. She looked at us. “You must work together.”

Astiza took my hand and smiled.

And she turned again. Death.

“I do not know who this is for. The magician, the fool, the emperor, or the lover? Your way is perilous.”

“But possible?” Death for Silano, certainly. And perhaps I should assassinate Bonaparte too.

Another card. The wheel of fortune. “You are a gambler, no?”

“When I have to be.”

Another card. The world. “You have no choice.” She looked at us with her great, dark eyes. “You will have strange allies and strange enemies.”

I grimaced. “Everything’s normal then.” She shook her head, mystified. “Wait to see which is which.” She looked hard at the cards and then at Astiza. “There is danger for your new woman, Ethan Gage. Great danger, and something even deeper than that, I think. Sorrow.”

Here it was, that rivalry. “What do you mean?”

“What the cards say. Nothing more.”

I was disturbed. If Sarylla’s original fortune hadn’t come true, I’d have brushed this off. I am, after all, a Franklin man, a savant. But t h e

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however I might mock the tarot, there was something eerie about its power. I was frightened for the woman beside me.

“There may be fighting,” I said to Astiza. “You can wait for me on the English ship. It’s not too late to signal them.” Astiza considered the cards and the gypsy for some time, and then shook her head. “I have my own magic and we’ve come this far,” she said, pulling her cloak around her against the unaccustomed European chill of October, already reaching south. “Our real danger is time. We must hurry.”

Sarylla looked sympathetic and gave her the tarot card for the star.

“Keep this. It is for meditation and enlightenment. May faith be with you, lady.”

Astiza looked surprised, and touched. “And you.” So we crept to a magistrate’s house, “borrowed” his coach and team, and were on our way to Paris. I was awed by the lush green-gold of the countryside after Egypt and Syria. The last grapes hung round and fat. The fields were pregnant with yellow haystacks. Lingering fruit gave the air a ripe, fermented scent. Wagons groaning with autumn produce pulled aside as Stefan’s men cried commands and cracked the whip as if we were really republican deputies of importance. Even the farm girls looked succulent, seeming half-dressed after the robes of the desert, their breasts like melons, their hips a merry bushel, their calves stained with wine juice. Their lips were red and full from sucking on plums.

“Isn’t it beautiful, Astiza?”

She was more troubled by the cloudy skies, the turning leaves, and trees that formed unruly arbors over the highways.

“I can’t see,” she replied.

Several times we passed through towns with sagging decorations of tricolor bunting, dried flower petals on the roads, and wine bottles discarded in ditches. Each was evidence of Napoleon’s passing.

“The little general?” an innkeeper remembered. “A rooster of a man!”

“Handsome as the devil,” his wife added. “Black lock of hair, fierce gray eyes. They say he conquered half of Asia!” 3 0 4

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“The treasure of the ancients is coming right after him, they say!”

“And his brave men!”

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