It is not, he acknowledges now, the beginning of his mistrust. Their official plan, upon setting out the year before to spirit Napoleon from St. Helena, had been that upon the emperor’s safe and secret installation at Beverly, Lafitte would send word posthaste to New Orleans for Dominique You to sail in the Séraphine to rescue Andrew, under pretext of executing Mayor Girod’s scheme to rescue Napoleon. Such was also their “backup” plan in case things went awry: the Séraphine would sail on August 15, 1821, if nothing had been heard by then from the Jean Blanque. Moreover — in view of those rumors that Napoleon was being poisoned by the Bourbons, by the English, by the Fesch/Kleinmüller/Metternich conspiracy, even by disaffected members of his own entourage; and other rumors that he was dying of the stomach cancer common in his family; and yet others that he was already dead or elsewhere sequestered and replaced by an impostor — Cook and Lafitte had agreed on a contingency plan: if the man they rescue is either an impostor or a dying Napoleon, Lafitte will bury him quietly at sea and then retrieve his surrogate to lead the Louisiana Project.

But the fact is (Andrew now declares to “my dear, my darling wife”) our ancestor has had for several years no intention of rescuing Napoleon in the first place! They have all been a blind, those elaborate schemes and counterschemes! Andrew has not forgotten Joel Barlow’s Advice to a Raven in Russia: the Corsican is a beast, an opportunistic megalomaniac whose newly invented “Bonapartism” is but the sentimental rationalization, after the fact, of a grandiose military dictatorship. Andrew has never truly imagined that his Louisiana Project would appeal to the man who sold that vast territory to Jefferson in part from lack of interest in it; in any case he would not want the butcher of Europe at the head of his (and Andrée’s) liberal free state!

And there is, in the second place, that aforementioned lapse of faith that Jean Lafitte or Dominique You will actually risk returning for him. It would be so easy not to, their main object once attained, and so perilous and expensive to do it! Jean endlessly complains of the Revenue Marine’s harassment of his New Barataria; might not the secret service offer to end or mitigate this harassment in return for his cooperation in foiling all rescue schemes, including Andrew’s? We were still to all appearances brothers, he writes; but some Gascon intuition warn’d me to trust this Gascon no longer. And warn’d me further, that that Gascon entertain’d a like suspicion of me.

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.