Letters полностью

He will choose, Andrew declares, when he has spoken to Joseph and the movement’s leaders and heard more details. Meanwhile it is surely best to remain incognito, if only officially, even between themselves.

Jean smiles. “I shall call you Baron Castine.”

Andrew smiles the same smile. “That is a name I know. It will quite do.”

Then he takes a great gamble. In a tone he hopes appropriate to whatever might be Lafitte’s understanding of him, he observes that no matter what fate awaits him in America, it is unlikely he will see again the land of his birth or, as it were, the theater of his life’s first cycle (the phrase is Andrew’s). Though he has a brother in America, the rest of his family are elsewhere. He does not expect to see his wife again; as for his son, that is too delicate a matter to venture upon at present. And his brothers and sisters are too various, either in their loyalty or in their good judgment, to place overmuch faith in just now. (Andrew speaks in these epithets rather than in proper names, watching Jean’s face.) But his mother, he declares, while less ill than himself, is old and cannot be expected either to live a great while longer or to undertake a transatlantic voyage. He would therefore like to pay her a call — incognito, if necessary — and bid her a last farewell before commencing his new career.

Lafiite seem’d genuinely astonisht, & without apparent guile demanded, Did I really propose a voyage into European waters under the flag of Cartagena? I took heart & breath, & told him (with just enough smile to cover my tracks), I was sure that a vessel & captain able to spirit Napoleon Bonaparte from St. Helena were able to sail him thro the Pillars of Hercules, pass him within sight of Corsica, whisk him straight up the Tiber, and land him on the steps of the Palazzo Rinuccini. That he could, if he did not trust me, keep me every moment in his view, & impose what conditions and disguises seem’d to him advisable. But that I was resolved to have a last word with my mother ere I was fetcht to my next destiny. He appear’d to consider. I made bold to enquire at once whether he was under someone’s orders to the contrary, or regarded my proposal as too audacious…

The fact is, Lafitte then acknowledges, his men have been at sea for above half a year without shore liberty, and a vessel in the Jean Blanque’s trade never lacks for alternative colors, name boards, and registry papers. But can it be true that “Baron Castine” has nothing in mind beyond bidding his mother adieu?

Not quite, I reply’d, in as level a tone as I could manage: I hoped also to have a word with her confessor. I heard him mutter: Nom de Dieu!

No more is said. Their watering stop in the Cape Verde Islands is noncommittal, a reasonable jumping-off place to either the Caribbean or the Mediterranean. But their course thence, to Andrew’s great joy, is north, not west; before long they raise the Canaries, then Madeira. By April’s end they have traversed the Strait of Bonifacio between Sardinia and Corsica (“I dofft my hat, & look’d toward Ajaccio, & said nothing…”) and are anchored in the marshy mouth of the Tiber, off ancient Ostia. Only then, writes Andrew, I went to Lafitte & thankt him. He responded, as quizzical as ever, I was welcome, for the excursion & for his company. Which latter he trusted I would not object to, as his life depended upon my safe delivery to America. This was the 1st clear acknowledgment that he was not his own man — tho he may have invoked it by way of excusing his close surveillance.