Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  Corbeau’s eyes were of such a dark blue that the colored part of them seemed to consist solely of pupil, and they appeared to look through things as much as at them.

  “An escutcheon paleways of thirteen pieces, argent and gules; a chief, azure,” he said.

  “Come again?”

  He smiled as if remembering a sad secret. “Heraldry is a foolish and unrevolutionary art. As you may see for yourself, it merely means thirteen red and white stripes with a blue band across the top. The arcane becomes simple when it is examined, no?” His eyes followed the line of the Columbia’s bulwarks as we pulled away from her. “How many guns has she?”

  It weren’t a secret how many guns she had, or what she displaced, or how high her masts were, but I would’ve guessed him to figure all that out for himself.

  “Thirty long 24s and twenty-two 12-pounder carronades,” I said. “Didn’t you look around while I left you on deck?”

  “No, monsieur, of course not. She is a 52, then?”

  “I’ll say she ain’t.” The British were all the time grousing about how the United States and her sisters were really ships-of-the-line, as they were bigger, faster, and more heavily gunned than the Royal Navy’s frigates. But Corbeau had said it mild, as if he really was ignorant of the difference between a ship’s rate and the number of artillery pieces she actually carried. I lightened my tone, the way you do with the softheaded.

  “She’s rated as a 44,” I said, “but she’s only got thirty carriage guns. They’re down on her gun deck, of course. Twenty-four-pounders, like I said. The short twelves on her fo’c’s’le and quarterdeck are carronades, y’see. But you’re a navy man. You know all this.”

  He tossed his head. “I am from the artillery. I know not these carronades. We do not have them, monsieur.”

  “They got a short barrel, mounted on a traversing slide instead of a carriage. They fire a larger ball with a smaller charge than a long gun. Lousy range, though.”

  “Then I do not care for them.” He looked forward toward the Breeze. “This one is a lively little thing, hein?”

  “Yes, we took her from some picaroons a few months ago over in the Bight of Léogâne.”

  “Picaroon?”

  That boy didn’t know his head from a turnip. “French-speaking pirates,” I said. “Leastwise we guessed they was French. We had to—it was kind of hard to tell . . .” I swallowed a sudden squirt of saliva. “Well, anyway, she was La Brise at the time. We caught her unawares, otherwise she’d’ve had the heels of us.”

  “Fast, is she?”

  “Like lightning. I warn you, though, she’s tarnal cramped.”

  “Oh, you have sailed in her?”

  “Sure, I was her first officer before I made acting lieutenant. But she don’t rate two commission officers, and Peter and I both went into the Rattle-Snake when—when command of her came open.”

  “Peter?”

  “Peter Wickett—the lieutenant who brought me that fool cat.”

  “You say she is cramped?”

  “Crowded ain’t in it. She only got but the one cabin, which is for the captain’s use. We’ll be slinging our hammocks in the bread room and counting ourselves lucky, I guess.”

  A seaman looked over the rail at us as we approached the Breeze and said something to someone I couldn’t see. A moment later a petty officer showed himself.

  “Ahoy the boat!” he called.

  “Aye aye,” replied the midshipman who was steering us, as a warning that he had an officer aboard, and held up two fingers to indicate my rank. We hove alongside and hooked on.

  Corbeau tipped his hat and said, “Après vous, monsieur,” but I had little faith in his naval etiquette and was already climbing up the sloop’s side. She only had about five feet of freeboard anyway, and I swung aboard before Corbeau even had time to put his hat back on.

  A pair of ratty-looking side boys greeted me while the petty officer tweedled on a silver pipe. By the pipe I took him to be the bosun, and I took in his unshaven face and dirty shirt with surprise before doffing my hat to the colors and to the quarterdeck. Peter stood there, in the space cleared between the mast and the tiller, as remote and severe as when I’d first met him in the Rattle-Snake last winter. He turned away before I could salute him.

  The handsome blond officer next to him, however, called me by name and stepped forward with his hand out.

  “Shipmates again, by God,” he said. “We’ll be six to a bed, just like old times, hey?”

  “Dick Towson! I thought you was third in the Croatoan.”

  “And so I was, but it seems someone in the Navy Department wants a word with me.”

  I dropped my voice. “Yes, me too.” Then louder I said, “Dick, allow me to make you acquainted with Lieutenant Corbeau of the French navy. Monsieur Corbeau, j’ai l’honneur de vous presenter le lieutenant Richard Towson de la frégate Croatoan.”

  “Enchanté de faire votre connaissance, cher monsieur,” said Dick. He didn’t have a lick of French, but he knew enough polite phrases to fill a boot.

  Corbeau murmured something back at him and tipped his hat in return. It was an un-French gesture, but it exactly mirrored the extent of Dick’s politeness, as if to return less than the same would be shameful and to give more would be like handing over the keys to the store.

  But Dick was an old hand at that sort of thing. “Perhaps you’d like to go below, sir,” he said. “We’ll be getting underway shortly.”

  “A fair wind,” said Corbeau, nodding his head. Much he knew. The long commission pendant writhed like a snake overhead as the breeze kicked up, and the telltales in the shrouds showed the breeze to be steady in the northeast—about as inconvenient a wind for getting out of the harbor at Le Cap as you could wish for. “I should like to observe the working of the boat,” he added.

  “She’s no boat. She’s a sloop,” said Dick. “But not a ship-sloop or a brig-sloop or any of that nonsense. Just a regular old sloop.” He waved his hat toward the forward hatch. “Now, sir—”

  “A sloop!” said Corbeau. “How it fascinates. If you would indulge me—”

  “Here’s the pilot,” I said, as a tidy black man in a French colonial uniform came over the rail. “The captain’ll want everybody off the deck that ain’t necessary to work her.”

  “Which, Mr. Graves, includes you and Mr. Towson,” said Peter, stepping past me. “I trust you will not give me cause for complaint.”

  I’d only been funning Corbeau about having to sling our hammocks in the bread room, but I weren’t too far wrong. There was exactly three feet ten inches of headroom in the Breeze’s ’tween-decks, and even so we slept in two tiers by night or day, swaying from side to side in the stenchy gloom. We could have had a canvas screen rigged to shield our delicate sensibilities from the eyes of the foremast jacks, but the air was solid enough down there without impeding its flow, and we passed on it.

  By day we tried our best to keep out of the way on deck, which weren’t easy, what with the sloop’s thirty-five men swarming over her like lice in a bird’s nest. Peter wouldn’t let me and Dick so much as touch a rope, neither, much less stand a watch, insisting that we were passengers and not to be employed on any account. That might’ve been well and good for a fellow that likes to be idle, but I weren’t one of them. Neither was Dick, though there’d been times in the past when I thought he was about as good at doing nothing as ever a mortal man could be and still draw breath.

  We’d barely cleared the Straits of Florida before boredom of the crushingest sort come down on our heads, and us with still a thousand miles and more to sail. Peter compounded it by refusing to engage me and Dick in conversation while he was on deck, and refusing our visits when he wasn’t, and spending a good deal of time with Corbeau to spite us. Even the smallest events became of great interest to us, because we had nothing else to do but watch and pass judgment.

  One brisk afternoon about thirty leagues southeast of Cape Canaveral, Peter called up to the looko
ut to keep a keen eye out for Memory Rock. The lookout called down that he could see it about two miles off our larboard bow. The air seemed kind of empty afterward because the lookout hadn’t said “sir,” which was pretty familiar even in an American man-o’-war.

  Dick and Corbeau and I were gathered around a pile of greasy cards in our cubbyhole right aft on the starboard side of the lower deck. Plenty of air came in through the open hatchway, along with just enough spray to keep us comfortable. We were playing a three-handed version of Juker, an Alsatian game that Corbeau had taught us. He and Dick found it appealing. Me, I disliked gambling in general and cards in particular, but I was tired of being tromped on every time I so much as showed a leg on deck.

  After what seemed an eternity without Peter rebuking the lookout, I said low so only my companions could hear, “What the hell has gotten into that man?”

  “He’s been worse than usual ever since we fetched Great Inagua,” said Dick. He dealt out four hands of five cards each and set the remaining four cards on the deck between us. He turned the top one over, revealing the jack of spades. “I suppose he’s remembering how you sunk the Rattle-Snake. Your bid.”

  “I sank her? How you talk. Pass.” I had nines and tens, which were miserably low, and nary a spade to match the one that Dick had turned over. I did have the other black jack, though, the “larboard anchor,” which I remembered too late would count as a trump if spades were called. I glanced at Corbeau over my cards. “The Rattle-Snake took on a corvette and a frigate armed en flute a couple months back. The corvette had sixteen 9-pounders and the frigate still had ten 8-pounders in her, not to mention about two hundred infantrymen all popping away at us with their muskets.”

  “Pick him up, if you please, Monsieur Towson,” said Corbeau, motioning at the jack on top of the pack of cards. “But what is this Rattle-Snake of which you speak?”

  Dick took a card from his hand and slipped it facedown under the pack. “Schooner, fourteen sixes,” he said. “Our former home.” He picked up the jack, making spades trumps.

  “Against the nine-pounders corvette? Zut alors,” said Corbeau. He picked up the dummy hand and sorted through it.

  “‘Zut alors’?” says I. “No one says zut alors.”

  “I do,” said Corbeau. He smiled, showing his dimples. “It is the one thing I take with me from my childhood. It is your lead, is it not?”

  I threw down my lone trump, the jack of clubs. Corbeau followed with a dirty look and the queen of spades, and Dick took the trick with the jack of spades and led the ace. I threw off a red nine, and Corbeau coughed up the king. We were well on the way to taking every trick—or Dick was, anyway—when the youngest ship’s boy, little Freddy Billings, who was flat-nosed and wide-mouthed and curly-headed, like a lampoon of a miniature Irishman, came down the hatch with a note in his hand.

  Dick glanced at it. “Goodness,” he said. “We’ve hardly got time to dress.”

  Peter’s cook started us off with steamed flyingfish on top of cornmeal mush and okra. The sailor who brought it to the table had tar on his hands and needed a shave, and from the smell of him he hadn’t changed his linen for several weeks. Dick’s slave, Jubal, a mountain of a man who considered his master his personal domain, near about snatched the platter from the sailor’s hands and give him a look that like to have killed a normal fellow. I might not have noticed, except it was Peter’s table. It wasn’t like him to overlook slovenliness. But overlook it he did, in the person of Ben Crouch, the bosun that I’d remarked the day I come aboard. Crouch was dirtier than the man that Jubal had shooed away, and he was at our table, and he was drunk. He was hunched over his plate, and bits of fish and okra fell from his mouth as he ate.

  “You seem nonplussed about something, Mr. Graves,” said Peter. His tattered old calico cat, Gypsy, crouched in his lap, her eyes half-closed as he scratched her.

  “Not I, sir.” I watched Jubal, scrunched up against the bulkhead to make room for himself, offering Dick a choice of wine. Madeira, port, hock, and claret were all the wines I knew or cared about, but Jubal seemed to think it went further than that. I looked back at Peter. “What’s nonplussed?”

  “Confused.”

  He toyed with his wine glass, and although he hadn’t drunk much his eyes wandered as if he weren’t entirely inside his own head. There was headroom in the cabin, so long as we stayed seated, but the room was so close that I had to keep my right knee tucked in to avoid touching his.

  “Puzzled,” he added. “Perplexed. Are you perplexed, Mr. Graves? At a loss for words?”

  “I don’t guess I am, sir.” I poked at the fish with my knife. I could smell Crouch blowing on his food at the foot of the table.

  “What an odd look you have on your face,” said Peter. “Do you find the food objectionable?”

  “No, it eats as good as anything. I guess I just never knowed Doc could actual cook.” I looked at Corbeau. “A navy cook is always called Doc—don’t ask me why. It just is so. Our Doc only got one eye and one leg, which is kind of usual, too, now that I think of it, but he’s a terror against boarders. He was with us in the Rattle-Snake when we took on that corvette I told you about. Some Frenchmen got into his galley, and he pasted ’em with a skillet and his peg-leg both.”

  Corbeau smiled obscurely. “Certainly one must be wary of strange Frenchmen in one’s galley.”

  “I doubt Mr. Corbeau understands what you mean by ‘pasted,’ or even what a skillet is,” said Peter. Gypsy had been purring on his knee, but she broke off to look at me. “Yet you make an interesting point, Mr. Graves, which is that many people can do things about which one might not previously be aware. Some men, for instance, are even capable of performing their assigned tasks without sinking the ship out from under their feet.”

  “I guess sinking your own ship would be a pretty lonely feeling, Captain,” says I, looking him straight on. “I can only guess at it, as I ain’t never done it.”

  Captain because he was the skipper of the little sloop, and sir because he was senior to me, but that was just front-parlor stuff. He was still a lieutenant and didn’t outrank me; and he’d said himself that losing the Rattle-Snake weren’t my fault. I looked back at Corbeau.

  “I misspoke earlier. It weren’t the corvette we took, but the Faucon, the frigate that was with her. The Croatoan got credit for taking L’Heureuse Rencontre. That was the name of the corvette. Ain’t that right, sir,” I said to Peter. “Didn’t Block come up in the Croatoan an hour after the shooting stopped and took possession of the corvette?”

  Dick got a pained look. “We’d lost our fore and main-topmasts,” he said. “There’s shoals all around there. It was the Bahama Bank in the middle of the night, for goodness sake. We came up to you as quick as we could.”

  Corbeau glanced at Peter on his left and Dick on his right. “I see.”

  “Ye don’t see nothin’,” said Crouch.

  “That was a shocking dinner, Mr. Corbeau. I hope you will forgive it,” said Dick. The three of us had found a perch in the starboard chains where we could savor the breeze without its being flavored by the stink of the hold, nor Ben Crouch, neither, and where we were relatively safe from being trampled. “Americans pride ourselves on honesty, but sometimes I think we’re just tactless.”

  “It is as nothing,” said Corbeau, with a hint of contemptuous amusement in his eye. “Even la belle Paris suffered from perhaps an excess of enthusiasm when the odious constraints of authority were lifted. Sometimes even today, even in the high seats of government, the rod and fist are wanted when civility fails.” He clutched the shrouds even though there weren’t much of a sea. “Are we the macaronis, that we would scruple over the well-deserved thrashing of an upstart?”

  “I’m no macaroni,” said Dick. “My father was one, though. He met Lafayette once.”

  “Corbeau’s having you on,” I said.

  It was a gorgeous afternoon, all racing clouds and spindrift, and the breeze already noticeably cooler as w
e left the tropics astern. My head hardly hurt at all, and I didn’t care a hoot about Peter Wickett and his bosun. If Corbeau wanted to thrash either one of them, I’d hold his coat for him, but that was about as interested as I was in the matter.

  “I don’t care if he is having me on,” said Dick. “I want to know what to do about Crouch.”

  “What makes you think we got to do something about Crouch? This ain’t our sloop.”

  “This man is a churl,” said Corbeau.

  “That’s the word for him,” said Dick.

  “A bit unrevolutionary, ain’t it?” says I. “Calling him a name like that.”

  “Very well, then,” said Corbeau, “let us say he is a boor. But you raise the good point. Aside from his being a boor, what is wrong with having the bosun in to dine? Is he not an officer?”

  “Well, sure, he’s a warrant officer,” I said. “And he’s theoretically equal in rank to any other senior warrant officer. But—”

  “But in point of fact,” said Dick, “your bosuns and carpenters and such are gunroom officers. Bringing them to the captain’s table and expecting them to behave themselves is like squaring the circle—it can’t be done. They’re skilled mechanics, not gentlemen. They’re workingmen.”

  “Ah yes,” said Corbeau, knowingly. “Workingmen. America and France alike fought to rid ourselves of the aristocracy, and yet we are still filled with contempt for the man who does the actual work.”

  “Now hold on there,” Dick shot back. “X-Y-Z, my friend. X-Y-Z.”

  Corbeau looked at me and shrugged. “I know not this X-Y-Z. Is it some form of bourgeoisie?”

  Liar, thinks I. The X-Y-Z Affair was how this whole undeclared war with France got started in the first place. If he wanted a lesson in affairs of state, then by gad I’d give him one.

  “President Adams sent three agents to Paris,” I said, “to talk to their counterparts on your side. They went by the code names of X, Y, and Z. They went to ask you nice to stop taking our ships.”