Three Emperors (9780062194138) Read Online Free PDF Page B

deities are but a hundred shades of the One Truth. I believe I exist to seek, but which revelation? Ambition, vanity, and curiosity are the curses visited upon our family, and lost secrets are fuel to our fire. Wisdom, wisdom! How I wish I could truly achieve it.
    A monster I nearly loved has imprisoned us in a mine of Bohemia: punishment for my desires. I’ve sought foreknowledge and dangerous companionship, and now I pay the price.
    Because I’ve promised my captors alchemical magic to spare my son, I have magic books in abundance. In the margins of the Picatrix , the Lemegeton , the Key of Solomon , and the Dragon Rouge , I retain my sanity by writing this account of how I came to be here. In remembering my husband, perhaps I can conjure him like the necromancer I’m supposed to be. He strides to save us, knight in armor! This is my fantasy. The reality is that he may be oceans away, or have no idea where we are, or have been seduced. He’s a good man, but imperfect. Like me.
    I’m convinced Ethan lives. I’d know in my heart if he died. But I no longer know if he seeks us. I shouldn’t doubt him, but he has an eye for other women. I think about this because I’ve strayed with my soul.
    What really torments us is our own conscience.
    Ethan and I were separated when my son and I fled the treachery of the Comtesse Catherine Marceau, who had shared our apartment in Paris. My husband had just promised us not to part, but then Talleyrand wanted consultation, and Catherine promised Ethan would quickly return, and the brute policeman Pasques towered like Goliath. Instead of trusting my instincts, I was foolish enough to agree. Time dragged on. Harry and I were pulled deeper into the shadows of the cathedral. More police materialized. As the crowd murmured like a heaving sea at the appearance of Napoleon and Joséphine, I realized we’d been betrayed and my husband was about to be arrested. I decided to flee east, which French authorities would least expect, and count on Ethan to make his own escape.
    We’d learned that the scholar Albertus Magnus had built a mechanical man, or “android,” in the thirteenth century to foretell the future. In desperation I decided I’d find this machine by myself and use its power to protect my family. Or at least use its value to bargain! Hubris.
    I remember the smoke of censers rising in the winter sunbeams in Notre Dame, and the thud of celebratory cannon, when I finally realized that while we thought Catherine was an English spy, she was actually a French one. She had fooled us from the beginning, helping to betray royalist conspiracies to Napoleon, and wanting my husband for herself. Ethan, and the Brazen Head.
    So while Catherine moved forward to watch Ethan’s arrest, I silently took Harry’s hand and backed into the alcove chapel of St. Michael at Notre Dame, having learned in my studies that a secret spiral stair behind its altar led to a crypt below. There’s no exit from this room of tombs, but our disappearance caused momentary confusion. When men scattered to find us, we managed to creep up, battle past Pasques, slip out a rearward door, climb the wall of the archbishop’s garden, cross the pont, dash to the eastern end of the Île Saint-Louis, and drop unseen onto a barge laboring up the Seine. At midnight, using light snow as a cloak, we slipped ashore at Neuilly-sur-Marne and hid, shivering, in a convent graveyard.
    For the next three days Harry and I walked east, watchful for patrols. We finally had the opportunity to join a traveling circus of acrobats and clowns, a migratory example of the ring shows that Philip Astley had organized across Europe. We could hide amid its peculiar circle of characters and animals. I told its leaders that I was a sorceress who could cast fortunes, and because I was pretty, starving, and Egyptian—since Napoleon’s expedition, the world is mad for all things