Read Chapter 30: Crossroads at Noon

The smoke from the burning camp rolled across the road like a tide, and through it, Moreau saw the grey coats. Prussian skirmishers, maybe a dozen of them, spreading loose across the track ahead of the wagon. They had not yet seen the gold—their eyes were fixed westward, toward the thunder of the guns that had begun to roll in earnest from the ridge.

Bastien grabbed Moreau’s arm. “The mill is three miles east. We go around.”

“Around is through the woods,” Moreau said, tasting blood in his mouth. His side burned where Duval’s blade had gone in. The bandage was soaked through. “The wagon will never make it through the undergrowth.”

“Then we leave the wagon.”

“And the gold?”

Bastien’s eyes flicked to the canvas cover, then back to the road. The Prussians were moving now, angled toward the sound of the French guns. They were scouts, not a raiding party. They had not come for the gold. They did not even know it was here.

Moreau made the calculation in the space of a heartbeat. Quartermaster’s arithmetic. The gold was useless here. The battle was beginning without Napoleon’s knowledge of the conspiracy, without the proof in his hands, and the mutiny was one wrong word away from igniting. The gold could stop it—if it reached the army before the first regiments broke.

“We take the wagon through,” Moreau said.

“Through them?”

“They’re looking at the ridge. They won’t see us until we’re past.”

Bastien stared at him. “You’re bleeding half to death and you want to charge a Prussian screen with a wagon full of gold.”

“I want to save the army,” Moreau said. “The wagon is how we do it.”

He swung up onto the driver’s bench, gritting his teeth as the wound tore. The horse stamped, nervous from the gunfire. Bastien hesitated a moment, then climbed up beside him, knife out.

“If we die,” Bastien said, “I’m going to be very angry.”

Moreau snapped the reins. The wagon lurched forward.

The Prussians heard them before they saw them—the iron-rimmed wheels screaming over the rutted track. A shout went up in German. Moreau saw the nearest skirmisher raise his musket, saw Brancy’s men piled in the wagon bed return fire with the two rifles they had left among them. One shot cracked. A Prussian went down.

Then they were past the screen’s leading edge, and the road opened before them, empty and straight toward the French lines. Moreau laughed—a short, ragged sound that cost him blood. The horse was running now, terrified, dragging the heavy wagon at a dangerous pace. Behind them the Prussians were mounting, shouting.

“They’ll catch us before the ridge,” Bastien said, looking back.

“Then we don’t go to the ridge,” Moreau said.

He cut the wagon hard left, off the road, across a field of young wheat that whipped against the wheels. The ground was soft but not yet mud. The horse labored but held. Behind them the Prussians were momentarily thrown—they had expected the wagon to run for the French main body, not to cut across the open country toward the sound of the guns.

Ahead, through the smoke and the growing roar of battle, Moreau saw them. French cavalry. Cuirassiers, steel breastplates flashing in the high noon sun, forming up for a charge toward the ridge. Hundreds of horses. A wave of steel about to break against the British squares.

“They’ll never see us in time,” Bastien said.

“They’ll see the wagon.”

“They’ll ride through us.”

Moreau made the choice. He pulled the horse up short, the wagon skidding to a halt in the wheat. The Prussians were closing, two hundred yards and gaining. The cuirassiers were beginning to move, a slow walk breaking into a trot.

“Help me with the canvas,” Moreau said.

“What are you doing?”

“If the gold stays here, it falls to the Prussians. If we ride with it into the charge, we die and it falls to no one. But if the army sees it—if the men who were told the gold was stolen watch us ride in with it, the mutiny dies in their throats.”

Bastien looked at him for a long moment. “You want to ride into a cavalry charge with a wagon of gold.”

“I want to end this,” Moreau said.

Bastien laughed. It was not a pleasant sound. “You’re mad, Captain.”

“That’s quartermaster, to you.”

They hauled the canvas off the back. The gold caught the sun—not the dull gleam of coin but the brighter flash of bars and plate, church plate melted down and recast in the camp forges. Two hundred thousand francs’ worth of the army’s future, sitting in the back of a stolen supply wagon.

The Prussians were fifty yards out now. Moreau heard the snap of a carbine, felt the ball whistle past his ear. The cuirassiers had broken into a gallop, a river of steel and horseflesh moving toward the British guns.

Moreau took the reins again.

“Hold tight,” he said.

He snapped the reins. The horse lunged forward, straight toward the line of Prussian skirmishers. He saw their faces—young men, startled at the sight of a wagon charging them—and then they broke, scattering to the sides rather than face a wagon team at full gallop. One man fired from the hip. The ball punched through the wagon’s side, splintering wood.

Then they were through, and the ground ahead was clear, and the cuirassiers were a storm of hooves and screaming horses bearing down.

Moreau saw the officer at the head of the charge. Young, sabre raised, mouth open in a shout that was swallowed by the thunder. The officer saw him too. Saw the wagon. Saw the gold.

For a moment, Moreau thought he would ride them down. The charge was everything—momentum, steel, fury. The officer could not stop.

But he could veer.

The cuirassiers split around the wagon like water around a stone, a magnificent, terrifying wave that broke and reformed on the other side. Moreau felt the wind of their passage, smelled the sweat of their horses, heard the clash as their sabres met Prussian steel somewhere ahead.

And then they were through, and the road to the French lines opened, and Moreau saw the red and blue of the infantry battalions ahead, saw the artillery limbers and the tents of the command post beyond.

He looked down at his side. The bandage was black with blood. His hands were shaking on the reins.

“We made it,” Bastien said, wonder in his voice.

Moreau did not answer. He saw the gunsmoke parting, saw a cluster of staff officers on the rise ahead, saw the grey coat and the little hat among them.

Napoleon.

He had time for one breath of relief before the ground erupted.

The Prussian horse had circled, faster than he had believed possible—a squadron of uhlans that had been waiting in the dead ground to the east, unseen, patient. They came out of the smoke like wolves, lances low, and there were too many and the wagon was too slow and Moreau had no sword and Bastien had only a knife.

The first lance took the horse. The animal screamed and fell, and the wagon pitched, and Moreau hit the ground hard, felt his wound tear open, felt the world go white with pain.

When his vision cleared, he was looking up at a Prussian face. A young man with a scar across his cheek, pointing a carbine at his chest.

Behind him, the cuirassiers charged on. The battle did not stop. It would not stop for him.

He heard Bastien swear, heard the scuffle of capture. And then he heard the Prussian officer’s voice, speaking French with a thick accent.

“You carry gold,” the officer said. “The maps have been accurate.”

Moreau closed his eyes. He had ridden into the jaws of death and found the one thing he had not prepared for.

The enemy had known he was coming.