Page 121 of The Spy’s Song

Rochefort, three hours before

Louise stared at Napoleon's back as he marched to the Bellerophon. Enormous against the water, the ship seemed too large to contain one man. Her father moved with his shoulders forward as the gangplank rose before him, and then he stopped.

Hands laced behind his back, he wheeled on his heels to face her.

Louise's heart climbed into her throat, and the planks shifted beneath her boots as she raced to him. When she was close enough, she halted. His face was tired—shadows beneath his eyes, gray at his temples, the fine lines no portrait had ever included because portraits did not record the evidence of having lived very hard for a very long time.

It was not fair. She had only just found this father, and now—

"I know what you gave Talleyrand," Napoleon said, studying her. "I know about the prisoner. About La Force." One corner of his mouth moved. "I may be a fallen emperor, Loulou, but nothing happens in Paris that I do not know."

Louise went still, and her breath left her slowly.

"Do you love him?"

Louise opened her mouth, closed it again. He waited with the patience of a man who already knew the answer and was allowing her the dignity of saying it herself.

Her chin trembled. "Right now he is probably on the way to Vienna."

Napoleon put both hands on her shoulders. "Bah. A Bonaparte does not give up."

Her throat closed. She had surrendered his name to Talleyrand. She had watched the paper that proved her birth pass into another man's hands and believed, in some private place, that she had relinquished the right to claim this too.

"Go and find him, Loulou."

The sting behind her eyes sharpened into the exhausted pressure of tears demanding passage.

"Thank you," she whispered.

It was the only phrase large enough to contain everything she could not say.

Napoleon regarded her for another moment, then inclined one cheek toward her with the faintest trace of his old imperiousness. "Now give your father a goodbye kiss."

Louise stepped forward and pressed her lips to his cheek. His skin was rough beneath her mouth, unfamiliar—and she would now be denied the years required to make it familiar.

He placed his hand atop her head, then he drew away.

Louise could not watch him climb the gangplank. She turned away, but the sounds still haunted her—the measured tread on the boards, the faint creak of timber beneath his weight, the pauses between one footfall and the next.

***

Sometime after the ship left the harbor, Louise lowered herself onto the edge of the quay, her boots hanging above the water. The Bellerophon had already shrunk against the horizon, its sails pale against the afternoon sky.

Bellerophon. A mortal who had conquered monsters, mounted Pegasus, and then dared to climb toward Olympus. Zeus had cast him back to earth for reaching too high.

Louise stared after the ship. Had the English chosen the name deliberately? She did not doubt it. The victors would write what came next, and soon twenty years might be compressed into a single lesson about ambition. The Code Civil, the old feudal burdens swept away, the schools and institutions he had built, the order he had dragged from revolution—those things could be made small enough to fit into a footnote. What the world would remember was simpler… Napoleon had reached too high, and at last the gods had struck him down.

She pressed her hand against her sternum. Now that it was all over, she didn't know where to start again.

You are a Bonaparte, her father had said.

Yet Louise Bonaparte did not know which direction Vienna was from Rochefort. She did not know if Rodrick had already gone. She did not know if she could still stand up.

The flag was very small now.

She pressed the back of her hand against her cheek and let the tears continue because stopping them would require energy she did not currently have.

Footsteps sounded on the dock behind her.