The Emerald Storm

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My intention was to retire.

After learning in 1802 that I had fathered a family, then rescuing mother and son from a tyrant in Tripoli, and finally escaping in a submarine invented by crackpot American inventor Robert Fulton, I was more than ready to trade heroism for domesticity. My preference is lover, not fighter. No one tries harder to escape adventure than me, Ethan Gage.

So why, in April of 1803, was I clinging to the side of a frozen fortress in France’s Jura Mountains, sleet in my eyes, a bomb on my back, and hemp rope heavy as a hangman’s noose slung round my neck?

Despite my best efforts to settle down, my new family was in peril again, and scaling Napoleon Bonaparte’s impregnable prison had become a necessary step toward domestic bliss.

I was grumpy at this predicament. As one matures (a slow process in my case) the unpredictability of life becomes less exciting and more annoying. French police and British spies claimed the fault was mine, for trying to pawn a stolen emerald, but I felt the jewel was small compensation for my battles with the Barbary pirates. Now there was a far bigger treasure at stake, strange aerial conspiracies, brewing war between France and England, and the need to retrieve my own nearly three-year-old son, whom I kept losing like a button. So here I was on the French frontier, boots scrabbling on an icy wall.

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