You remember the admirable Jane Mack, Henry, to whom (as her distant cousin A. B. Cook VI) I introduced you at her husband’s funeral. Some time before his death, when their alcoholic daughter first sought treatment at the Fort Erie sanatorium, I had arranged Mrs. Mack’s introduction to “Baron André Castine,” who subsequently comforted her, in London and elsewhere, through the terminal stages of her husband’s illness, and consoled her for his death. (I was also, for a certain reason, protecting Harrison Mack’s own comforter, the aforementioned Lady Amherst.) Mrs. Mack has taken it into her head to end her days as a baroness: she frankly suspects me of fortune hunting; I her of title hunting. We agree on the legitimacy of both pursuits when they are not cynical, and believe each of us to esteem in the other more than just the title and the fortune. Jane assumes, wrongly, that I want to enrich myself for the usual reasons, and does not disapprove: indeed, next week I shall take delivery in Annapolis of a large trawler yacht, her gift for my 52nd birthday. I have not apprised her of our cause (or the real reason I want that yacht) because — like her son, like most of our young “Baratarians,” like my own parents — she would mistake the Revolution to be still political in its goals, and would of course be as wrongheadedly its foe as Drew Mack is wrongheadedly its friend.
It is my fiancée’s plan to contest her late husband’s will — which leaves the bulk of his estate to his philanthropic foundation — on the grounds of his madness, and to negotiate distribution half to herself, the other half in equal portions to her two children and the Tidewater Foundation. Inasmuch as Jane’s moiety would be to some extent mine even during her lifetime (she is an astute and frugal manager), and Drew Mack’s would be largely applied — by his lights — to our cause, I acceded to this plan, while privately seeing to it that things will turn out somewhat differently.
Suppose, for example — but never mind! Like Jane’s (that excellent businesswoman’s), my plans are intricate but clear, and best not babbled about. True minds, we shall marry in the new year. If you’ve any objections, Henry — or suggestions for dealing with “A. B. Cook VI” when Jane Mack becomes the Baroness Castine! — speak now…
Our ancestor. The postscript to his second “posthumous” letter found him resurrected from his “death” and bound for New Orleans to meet Jean Lafitte, hoping somehow to forestall the British movement on that city. But it was a postscript penned, like the letter it ended, six months after that fateful battle; Andrew wrote it, with but the merest hint of what he is doing there, from the orlop deck of H.M.S. Bellerophon, off Rochefort in France on July 16, 1815, one day after Napoleon Bonaparte’s surrender to the commander of that vessel. Not until this third and central of his lettres posthumes does Andrew’s past overtake his present, and the intricate labor of exposition give way to more immediate drama. The letter (before me) is dated August 6, 1815, and headed, in “Captain Kidd’s code”:
*‡47‡(*))**8008011‡:((82†5849‡;:52
(i.e., NOHPORELLEBFFOYRREBDAEHROTYAB, or Bellerophon, Off Berry Head, Tor Bay: that historic naval anchorage on the east Devon Coast, between the rivers Exe and Dart). He is back aboard that warship, having left it in Rochefort on an errand that fetched him overland through Tours and Rouen to Dieppe, London, and Exeter before the old Bellerophon (no Pegasus) arrived there with its famous passenger. He is about to witness, with relief, a second surrender, of another sort, by that same passenger: Napoleon has at last abandoned all hope of asylum in either America or England and, contrary to his repeated vow, agreed to permit himself and his company to be transferred on the morrow to H.M.S. Northumberland, commanded by our old friend Admiral Sir George Cockburn, “Scourge of the C’s,” for exile to St. Helena. As Andrew writes this letter to Andrée, the ex-emperor, two decks above, is dictating a flurry of memoranda — to Commander Maitland, to Admirals Keith and Cockburn, to History — protesting (falsely) that he has been betrayed: that he was assured sanctuary and has been denied it. It is the first phase of Napoleon’s programmatic self-martyrdom, the living out of a romantic fiction instead of the writing of it. The idea has come to him in part from our ancestor, as shall be seen — for whom, however, the emperor’s exile on St. Helena is itself to be but the first phase of the Second Revolution.
