Prologue
Ursula Oglethorpe.
Mole, Naples Old Harbor, 15 June, 1794, 9:55pm - On balance, Ursula Oglethorpe thought, at least her situation could not possibly get any worse. She was pursued by a crew of outraged pirates and their captain, who had a reputation of taking no prisoners, and not in a good way. She hoped but could not be certain that she was not also pursued by a certain Monseigneur Henry Bethisy de Mezieres, Bishop of Uzes, who might or might not have seen her pilfer a few things from a Cardinal’s palace in Rome.
Urs did not know the streets of Naples well, and Mount Vesuvius across the bay had been rumbling and spewing clouds of ash much more aggressively than usual. It was an odd sort of tourist attraction on the best days, she felt. Today, the noise and heat had brought many more people out into the streets than might normally have been there. She had slipped on countless noxious substances, created mayhem by diving through the middle of a group of slow-moving nuns, and tipped over a cheese cart. She was sweaty and tired, and the air smelled of smoke and sulphur.
Urs had seen reduced options to evade her pursuers when she hit the harbor, but she had made it worse by darting out onto the pier, or “mole,” which jutted for almost half a mile into the water. She was not a good swimmer. Well, let us admit that she was not a swimmer at all.
Urs was no longer on the mole, at the moment, to be sure, but that was not any better, since she had plunged into a doorway and then sprinted up the stairs of the pier’s lighthouse. She found herself now at the very top, in the lantern, dazzled by the bright light pointed to the west, and with the irate lighthouse keeper shouting angry curses at her from where she had shoved him out of her way on the landing below. She tried to remember how to tie a reef knot in the slippery looking rope she had found hanging on a peg. It was something about around a tree, twice, and into the rabbit hole? She wished she had studied and practiced knot-tying on the many nights she had spent sleeping in barns and under hay stacks in the last three months. She had regrets. More than anything else, Urs was terrified of heights.
The pirates thundered up the stairs, stopping briefly to scuffle with the lighthouse keeper.
Urs gave up on improving her knot any further, hopped over the side of the lantern’s ledge, and, grasping the rope tightly with the cuffs of her oversized jacket, plunged down the outside of the lighthouse, sliding much faster than she had planned. It seemed the rope was starting to unravel, and by the sound and feel of it, the pirates above had discovered her escape, and thought it might be fun to simply untie her and let her drop. Or maybe the knot was giving way? Was it three times around the tree and then in the hole? She wished she would live to find out how to tie a reef knot. She lurched briefly to a halt as her feet scrabbled on a ledge half-way down the wall.
That is when she saw the angry face of Monseigneur Henry Bethisy de Mezieres, Bishop of Uzes, standing directly below her. He was aiming a pistol at her. Were bishops supposed to kill people with pistols? She knew from their previous travels together that this bishop was unconstrained by many of the conventions which had bound him before the French Revolution had stripped him of his parish, congregation, his funds, and his phalanx of attendants, but this was a step too far.
Urs reflected that she was lucky she could only die once, since all her current alternatives seemed equally bad. She pondered whether she would prefer to die right away, or while unconscious from fright. She needed a miracle, or at least a distraction.
This is when, precisely at 10pm, with a sound louder than 100 cannons, the mountain across the bay split open, shooting clouds of ash thirty thousand feet in the air, and pouring a waterfall of dazzling lava half a mile wide down the slope. The world’s hottest and most destructive river obliterated convents and vineyards in its path, and began finally to engulf the small city of Torre del Grecco, which stood at its foot.
The glare from the lava reflected off of the water in the harbor, as the city of Naples paused in all of its activities to squint at the volcano.
Urs allowed herself to slip off the ledge, gripping the disintegrating rope with both hands to slow her descent. She only slightly wrenched her ankle as she landed, which she barely noticed, because she immediately dodged around the dazed Bishop of Uzes, and jogged away from the volcano, back toward the city, at top speed.
Top speed was not particularly fast, unfortunately. Most pedestrians on the Mole who were capable of movement had determined to flee the volcano, with varying effectiveness. Additionally, there seemed to be a new factor increasing the crowd’s overall panic. Urs’s Italian was only slightly better than her swimming and knot-tying, but from what she could make out, people were shouting that the water was rising. So much shouting. Was it rising? She supposed it must be.
“ERRRR!”
“OGGGG!”
How very odd.
“CHARLES EDWARD OGLETHORPE!!!” she heard, directly in her left ear.
She started at this, and turned with dread to confirm that finally if the worst had not happened, she was experiencing a strong second-place contender. Despite all of her evasive maneuvers as she had raced south from Rome in the past week, she had just been successfully cornered by her erstwhile traveling companion, Monseigneur Henry Bethisy de Mezieres, Bishop of Uzes.
“I command you halt in the name of His Majesty, King Henry IX, of England, Scotland, and Wales!” he shouted with surprising composure.
Urs peered over his shoulder up the Mole to see whether any pirates had made it back to the base of the lighthouse yet, and, this confirmed, shrugged and allowed him to grip her arm tightly, and march her off to be interrogated. She was happy to reflect that unless things had changed since they parted ways one week ago, he had not yet gotten around to achieving his life goal of being certified as a Spanish Inquisitor.
