“Perhaps he was a charmer,” she suggested.
“Must have been. After the disaster at Aboukir Bay, he was captured by the British, returned to France and accused of cowardice. And yet, of all people, Napoleon defended him. He called Villeneuve a lucky man. Instead of a court-martial, Villeneuve was promoted to vice admiral.”
Gamay sat back. “A surprising change of fortune.”
“Especially considering he’d all but single-handedly stranded Napoleon in Egypt, which made his defeat inevitable.”
“I wonder if his luck has something to do with this ‘weapon,’” Gamay said. “You know, Aboukir Bay borders the town of Rosetta. I’ve found in D’Campion’s letters several references to artifacts they took from there. Some of them seem to have trilingual inscriptions, like the Rosetta stone itself. One of D’Campion’s first attempts at translation mentions the powers of Osiris to take life and give it back again. What if Villeneuve was promising this weapon to Napoleon from the time of his first release?”
Paul considered that. “Always promising. Getting himself promoted to vice admiral and then leading the fleet into another disaster before coming back to Napoleon once more and claiming he’d made a breakthrough at last?”
“It’s the boy who cried wolf,” Gamay suggested.
“By then, I’m guessing, Napoleon didn’t want to hear it anymore.”
Gamay nodded. “But Villeneuve couldn’t stop himself. His letters talk of destiny and desperation. A chance to rewrite his own personal history. But by the last letter in D’Campion’s file, Villeneuve is talking more fearfully: he thinks that Napoleon no longer believes the claims.”
“When did he send that?”
“The nineteenth of Germinal, XIV,” she said. “According to the computer, that is . . . April ninth, 1806.”
“Less than two weeks before he was killed.”
“Napoleon was known for rash action,” Paul added. “And absolute disdain for anyone or anything that tried to rein him in. When the invasion of England was called off, he decided to march east and invade Russia instead, just to have someone to conquer. Of course, that was nothing less than a disaster. But Villeneuve holding this weapon over his head seems like the kind of thing Napoleon would put up with for only so long.”
She checked her watch. “We’re landing soon. Any idea where we should start?”
Paul sighed. “There’s no library of Villeneuve’s papers, no museum or monument to his memory. About the only things I’ve found are a few newspaper clippings from twenty years ago referencing a woman named Camila Duchene. She tried to sell some papers and artwork she claimed to have discovered in her family home, works allegedly belonging to Villeneuve and some other noble.”
“What happened to them?” Gamay asked.
“Laughed off as fakes,” Paul said. “Villeneuve wasn’t known to be an artist. But, interestingly enough, her ancestors owned the boardinghouse where Villeneuve had been living in the weeks before his death.”
Before anything else was said, the pitch of the engines changed and the aircraft began to descend. The pilot’s voice came over the speakers. “We’re approaching Rennes. We’ll be landing in approximately fifteen minutes.”
“That gives us fifteen minutes to find any trace of Madame Duchene,” Paul suggested.
“My thoughts exactly.”
55
Paul and Gamay were on the ground and in a rental car shortly after the sun came up. Using a database of county records, Gamay found an address for Camila Duchene and acted as navigator while Paul drove streets that seemed half as wide and twice as crooked as necessary.
Following the lane as it bent, twisted and turned back on itself was bad enough; doing so in a car he had to be shoehorned into, while zipping in and out of patches of fog, made it that much more difficult. When a truck passed them going the other way, Paul edged to the shoulder and took out a few badly placed shrubs.
Gamay shot him the look.
“Just doing a little landscaping,” he said.
Finally, they arrived near the center of town. Paul parked in the first lot he could find. “Let’s walk the rest of the way,” he said.
Gamay opened the door. “Good idea. It’ll be safer for everyone. Including the plant life.”
With address in hand, they walked up a wet cobblestone lane toward what looked like a small castle. Two curved towers of stone, connected by a stone wall, blocked the path. An archway in the center of the wall allowed them through.
“Portes mordelaises,” Gamay said, reading the sign on the wall.
They passed under the arch, feeling as if they were entering a medieval city, and, in a way, they were. They’d now reached the oldest section of Rennes and the Portes mordelaises was one of the few remaining sections of the ramparts that had once walled in the city.