An impassioned correspondence follows. Betsy vows to return with Bo to Europe, and to her “sweetest consolation,” as soon as the boy’s schooling permits, perhaps 1820. Meanwhile she is delighted to learn of her friend’s connections in Rome, so useful to her plans, which she now presumes to call theirs. While pretending to support Joseph Bonaparte’s schemes to retrieve his brother from St. Helena, she has hatched a scheme of her own, which Consuelo can immeasurably abet from her position in the Palazzo Rinuccini. It is Metternich’s policy with a difference: to deter all rescue operations except her own! From past acquaintance Betsy knows Mme Mère to be gullible; Mme Kleinmüller’s imposition on her will be justified by the fact of her son’s rescue. Consuelo accepts another retainer; their correspondence through 1818 and 1819 is an excited mixture of love, plans for their future, and present business. Consuelo is able to serve her American friend without really betraying Mme Kleinmüller, given the partial congruence of their interests. What is more, she believes in the spirit voices, table rapping, and the rest, which her efforts assist Mme K. in conjuring.
It is not until early in 1820 that Betsy mentions by name her “principal American agent” in the St. Helena scheme: a “handsome, worldly, & agreeable fellow” who, if he were but of the gentry and she not done for ever and all with men, she could even imagine as a lover: one Andrew Cook, of Maryland and Canada. Consuelo’s urgent, appalled reply, warning Betsy not to trust of all men that one, comes too late: Andrew has already disappeared, to Betsy and Joseph’s consternation. Mme B. wonders whether he has not been all along an agent of the U.S. Secret Service; whether Metternich might not in fact have arranged for Napoleon’s covert assassination or removal, and his replacement with an impostor. She urges Consuelo to extricate herself from Mme Kleinmüller, and makes hasty preparations to leave Baltimore. For appearances’ sake she will settle with Bo in Geneva; her father’s friend John Jacob Astor is there, and will surely urge her to visit the Roman Bonapartes, with whom he is close. Thus she will discreetly rejoin Consuelo, and they can assess both the St. Helena situation and their own.
The letter arrives just when Pauline Borghese finally persuades Mme Mère that the clairvoyant is a fraud; that Napoleon is ill, perhaps dying, perhaps dead. Mme Kleinmüller vanishes; Consuelo withdraws to her pensione and anxiously awaits her friend, fearing daily she will be done violence to by Pauline’s hirelings, or Metternich’s, or the late unlamented Don Escarpio’s.
She concludes her tale. Her friend “Dona Betsy” has put aside her ambition to rescue and marry Napoleon for her son’s sake; it is Consuelo she now desires, and Consuelo her. She is in Geneva already, and on the advice of Señor Astor will soon come to Rome. In the fall, her son will return to America to enter Harvard, perhaps also to marry Joseph Bonaparte’s daughter; Betsy and Consuelo will retire to Switzerland, officially traveling companions, in fact a couple.
She then implored me, writes Andrew, by whatever love I had once felt for her, not to obstruct this innocent aim. That she cared not whether I kill’d or saved Napoleon, or how I might re-draught the map of the world or the script of History, so I left her & her friend in peace. That the sole grudge she bore me was for having encouraged a talent she never possest, for writing novels. For the rest, she felt only gratitude: for my having more than once helpt her out of a parlous corner, & for what affection we had shared. That whatever my present danger, she wisht me safely out of it, & would aid me any way I ask’d. And that she hoped, once I was free of it, I would beg pardon of the woman I had abused long & sorely, by my absence: yourself, whom she bid me make amends to even if, as might be, I found you to have follow’d in your disappointment her & Betsy Bonaparte’s path, to el safismo!
