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.