Hillar had shipped his seagoing face again. “I do, sir, and so will you. I’m busier than a three-legged dog with a new set of fleas, and you’re going to help me shepherd this lot to Saint Kitts.”
“No, sir, I’m sorry to say I ain’t,” I said right back at him. “‘Do not delay on any account’ is my orders, and ‘time is of the essence.’ There’s saucy Johnny Crappo waiting for me in the Leeward Isles, and I mean to pull his nose for him.”
Once I was on my own quarterdeck again I waved farewell to John Rogers. He lifted a granite hand in return, looking as indestructible as an oak as he stood by the Pickering’s wheel. I say indestructible, for that is how he appears to me in memory; but even oak and granite will break, and in fact the brig soon after vanished from the face of the sea, and her ninety men and boys were never seen again.
TEN
The view was fine from the quarterdeck of the Columbia frigate. Dick’s old ship, the General Greene, cruised in our wake; the Tomahawk glided along off the starboard quarter; and the mountains above Le Cap Français on the north coast of San Domingo showed as a blue smear of clouds to the southeast. The ships and clouds I saw from around Commodore Cyrus Gaswell’s bulk as he and I fetched the sternmost reach of our stroll. Just shy of the larboard eighteen-pounder stern chaser we both turned inward, so as not to interrupt the conversation, and continued forward till we come abreast of the forward thirty-twopounder quarterdeck carronade, where we turned inward again and retraced our course.
Informing him of the results of Captain Tingey’s examination of me and Dick had took all of five minutes. Our conversation during the other forty or fifty minutes we’d been walking up and down consisted mostly of Gaswell saying, “Hmmm!” and “Well . . . hmmm,” which I couldn’t think of nothing to add to. Sweat streamed from beneath his cocked hat and soaked his neck-cloth, and from the smell of damp wool it weren’t doing his old frock coat much good, neither. I wouldn’t have minded stopping for a second so I could bail out my shoes, but we just kept a-walking and a-turning, walking and turning till finally he fixed me with a stare from his pale blue eyes and said, “How many hands do you need?”
Two had always served me well enough, I thought, but I didn’t guess he was in a mood for foolery. “I could use a cook, sir, a sailmaker, and another dozen foremast jacks. But as I don’t know where I’m bound or what I’m to do when I get there, I can’t say further than that.”
“Where you’re bound, yes,” he said, like it was the great mystery of the age. “Ye’ve put your finger on the problem right there, I allow.” He mopped his face with a bright blue wipe, and then ran it around his jaw and neck. He looked sourly at the sailing master and the Columbia’s dozen midshipmen as they climbed up from the waist, doffing their hats to the quarterdeck and fiddling with their sextants.
The sailing master took off his hat again at Gaswell’s glance and said, “Just come to shoot the sun, sir. It’s nigh on noon.”
“And it’ll be the middle of the first dogwatch,” said Gaswell, “afore that lot of fatheads discovers our whereabouts.”
The master nodded cheerfully. “That be true, sir.”
Gaswell leaned toward me and muttered, “A man that stays sober after noon ain’t no more use than tits on a schoolmarm. Let’s you and me step below and have a snort.”
He called to his steward for calibogus, which he brought us half a dozen bottles of spruce beer and another of rum. “Pull them corks,” said the commodore. “Now then, Mr. Graves, strong or weak?”
“I guess that depends on how strong the spruce beer is, sir.”
“Not too strong, not too weak,” he said, handing me a frothing glass. It smelled like flowers and lemons with just enough rum to give it some heft, and when I poured it in me it tasted of hops and molasses, not piney at all like your inferior spruce beers. I licked the froth off my upper lip and said, “That’s right good, sir.”
“Yes, it is.” He took a long pull and sighed. “Don’t mean to be complacent about it, but the daughter-in-law makes it and I’m partial.”
I realized suddenly that I had never thought of him as having a family. I’d never thought of him as anything but the large fellow who set me to strange tasks.
He drank off his glass and set it on the table. He had never set himself down, which weren’t like him at all, and now he began to pace back and fro in front of the stern windows.
“I’m a-going to let you in on three joys,” he said. “The first is that, yes indeed, you are that lucky commander that’s to be entrusted with the Tomahawk. Bet ye had just a leetle shred of doubt about that, didn’t ye?”
I allowed as how I did, and he held up a blunt hand.
“Don’t thank me yet. Your second joy is that your acting order as lieutenant really did originate in the Navy Department and not with me. Not that I don’t value your services and would’ve been glad to write ye out another, same as before, but the Secretary’s good favor is more useful than my own.”
The third joy was a little longer in coming, as I shall tell in a minute; but regardless of that, I knew full well he’d balance each joy with a corresponding burden. I sat in the hard chair, doodling my finger in the water rings that my glass left on the polished mahogany table and sipping calibogus while he backed and filled and tried to cough up whatever it was that was stuck in his craw.
“You’re to suppress piracy, o’ course,” he said, “and ‘otherwise advocate the free use of the sea lanes by all ships public and private not at war with the United States,’ which I guess ye know is standing orders for every commander. But there’s complications.” He stopped to mix himself another drink. “Won’t you take a drop, Mr. Graves?” he said in the country way, as if I hadn’t had any yet.
“Why, yes sir, I believe I will.”
He talked while he mixed the rum and spruce beer. “Our alliance with the British and Toussaint ain’t anything more’n an informal agreement . . . the British give us copies of their signal books, and hardly ever shoot at us anymore . . . How’s that taste?”
This time I remembered to use my handkerchief to wipe my mouth. “It’s right good, sir.” It was strong, too; I had to throw a round turn over a bollard, so to speak, to keep myself from drifting off in the current. I wasn’t sure yet which way it was headed.
“The alliance, if I can call it that,” he said, “is holding steady for the moment, but the upcoming election might be kinda delicate if the Jeffersonians come to power. New York commenced voting in April, but others won’t vote till October, and things is bound to be a little tense till the votes get counted next February.” He took a deep swig off his brew. “But if Old Tom do get in, ye can be damn sure he’ll cut costs by reducing the navy and making peace with France, which leaves Toussaint in the lurch. Your Yankee merchant don’t give a hoop who’s in charge in the island as long as he can trade for coffee and sugar.”
Merchants be blowed, I thought; a fellow had to think about his employment.
“But that just plain wouldn’t be right,” Gaswell continued. “Imagine what the world would think of us, was we to lead a man on by false promises and then stand by while his life and freedom are snatched away! The planters in Jamaica and the Bahamas don’t cotton to the idea of a sovereign black nation anywhere nearby. It gets ’em in a pucker. But right is right, and I’ll say so, too.”
“I don’t guess they’re any too fond of a black republic in Washington, neither,” I said.
He snubbed up short on his hawser and give me a stare. “You know, I forgot you’re part something or other,” he said. “But don’t you fret, son. We row in the same boat, you and me. Things is delicate, that’s all I’m saying. Delicate.” He recommenced his pacing. “We’re at peace on paper, anyway, us and King George. But there ain’t no love lost between us and the Royal Navy—I’ll say not. They just can’t get their heads around the idea that Yorktown and the Treaty of Paris all went in our favor. Unfortunately for you and me, they got the means to make their unhappiness be
known. So you’re required to assist and cooperate with ’em whenever possible, but you’ll associate with ’em at your peril. That dog bites, y’understand me, son?”
“Yes, sir.”
He was hardly even looking at me anymore, so I scratched at my skeeter bites while he tromped back and forth across the light. How the blame things could find their way across several miles of ocean I didn’t know, but we’d fetched a cloud of them aboard the Tomahawk near about the moment we raised the island. I’d have to try smoking them out with sulfur and gunpowder and anything else that come to hand and was noxious enough. It probably wouldn’t help with the skeeters, and nothing helped with roaches, but it might at least amuse the rats. I finished my calibogus and waited for the commodore to fetch his moorings.
“I am going to tell ye something now that ye must keep under your hat, Mr. Graves,” he said, with a stiffness that was so unlike him that I sat up and gave him both ears. “Say ye’ll keep this under your hat.”
“I’ll keep this under my hat, sir.”
“Well, then . . . All that stuff I was saying, that ain’t my primary concern at all. I mean, it is, but it ain’t to be your primary concern.”
“Yes, sir.”
“Hearken ye well now, for this is the third joy I told ye about, though it may not seem like it at first.” He held up a warning hand. “Asa Malloy has the Constellation now, as I guess you know, and is bucking for commodore. To mollify him more’n anything else, he is to get the Tomahawk as his tender.”
“Him! You’re right it don’t seem like a joy, sir. We near about got a blood feud going.”
“Now, now, now, you just hang on. He ain’t going to get her just yet. That’s just a story me and the Secretary come up with, and we’ll figure how to get ye out of it when the time comes. There’s . . . there’s a little something needs doing, first.”
“Aye aye, sir,” I said, hoping he didn’t hear the query in my voice. Last time he had a little something needed doing, I’d ended up to my neck in a sewer.
“Well, sir,” he continued, “I guess I’ll just have to come at it direct and hang the maneuvers. There’s an American pirate that’s begun to assert himself among the islands.” He waved his hand at the table like he’d just set his magnum opus on it, plain as day, and expected me to pick it up and admire the detail. “There it is out in the open, and no way around it now.” He gave me a significant look.
“Yes, sir?”
“Why, don’t you catch it? It’s like to be a great embarrassment to the United States in general and to the navy in particular if he ain’t caught soon. Do ye know what I mean to say, son?”
“No, sir. Is he anybody in particular?”
“Is he anybody—” He looked at me all squinchy-eyed. “Calls himself Captain Mesh. Pretends to be a French privateer. That’s M-E-C-H-E, by the way. Got one of them little backwards marks over the first E. God knows why he calls himself such a thing.”
If God knew why, then I guessed Gaswell would know it also in the fullness of time; but it was his business if he wanted me to figure it out too. “Mèche is a French word with several meanings, sir. It can mean a lock of hair. It can mean a match fuse, or a candlewick. It can refer to a secret.”
He raised an eyebrow. “Say, that’s not bad. A secret, hey?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, wondering what he was up to. “Éventer la mèche means to discover a secret, and vendre la mèche means to let one out.”
“He’s stole an 8-gun Bermuda sloop, which he calls Suffisant. We want her back.”
“Stole her, sir? You mean he captured a privateer and, what, didn’t have her condemned proper?”
“No, hang it! I mean he absconded with a navy vessel.” He looked around like someone might be listening—which they probably were, knowing what officers’ servants are like, but I didn’t guess his man would talk even if he dared to. “He’s reported to be a very tall chap, with a long nose and a pointed chin. Wears a bandana low on his brow.”
Low on his brow . . . “He calls the sloop Suffisant, you say, sir? As in ‘Breezy’?”
“Ye got the weather gauge on it, son. Now close in and grapple.”
He looked so grim I almost laughed; only I didn’t, because he looked so grim.
“Tell me, sir, are her bulwarks scarred on the starboard side, and does her gaff mains’l bear a patch like a yellow cross?”
“Just so.” He tapped the side of his nose, and then flung up a warning hand as I brought my lips together to form the letter P. “Avast! Don’t say his true name. Don’t. Get that into your head. Ye must never say the name you knew him by, for reasons that will come to ye if they ain’t already. One more thing—and I stress again the need for a tight jaw in this matter, you hear me—he has made himself a loan of eight barrels of Spanish dollars meant for General L’Ouverture’s use.”
“How many dollars, sir?”
“Sixty thousand, give or take. That much coin goes by weight rather than per piece, but you can figure there’s seven or eight thousand to a barrel. New milled dollars, probably all of the same date.”
“What’s ‘milled,’ sir?”
“It’s them ridges along the edge.”
“Yes, sir. And all the same date, which is what?”
“Seventeen seventy-six.”
“Well, sir . . .” I scratched my ear till I realized I was doing it. I put my hand down. “If they’re new, why ain’t they dated eighteen hundred?”
“Because the Dons ain’t too particular about the dates on their American coins, I guess. Dies are expensive. I don’t know. But that don’t signify. All ye need to know is if ye come across a heap of shiny dollars all of that date, minted in Mexico City, with Carlos the Third on the front—and yes, Charles the Fourth has been King of Spain since about twelve years now—you’re probably on the right road. We don’t think Mèche’s people know about the silver, else why would they be pirating instead of spending? He’s lately been in the Virgin Islands, we believe, and was run off by the Dons at Saint John’s in Porto Rico. Ye must ferret him out. Do that, and the president will sign your commission as lieutenant. No more temporary position, but a permanent rank, yours to keep as long as you care to. Fail, and ye will answer for it, et cetera, et cetera, and so on.”
And there was my third joy at last, unfolded like a bad hand at cards and almost entirely marred by its incumbent burden. I didn’t know whether to be elated that Peter was still alive, dismayed at his dishonor, or insulted that Gaswell supposed I would even consider the job of hunting him down.
But of course the old sea dog knew I would take the job. My only concern was how to get it done.
ELEVEN
The beginnings of a hot dry carbine blew from the north. The same “shotgun” had nearly wrecked a French fleet twenty years back, when the Intrépide had caught fire and blown up. If that fleet hadn’t gotten out of the bay and arrived off Yorktown before the British fleet come back from New York, the Battle of the Virginia Capes would never have took place, Cornwallis wouldn’t have surrendered, and the Continentals would probably have lost the war. Not nearly so much depended on my getting Tomahawk out to sea, but it was grinding my bones to be embayed with a blow coming on and the wind veering east of north. It would be coming dead foul if I didn’t get out soon.
I glanced at Horne, but whatever he was thinking, he wasn’t showing it.
“Near as she’ll lie, Gundy,” I said.
“Near as she’ll lie, aye aye, me cabbun.”
He said it a bit short, and I thought about bracing him up, but I put the thought away. He was steering as small as he could, and I needn’t have said anything in the first place.
I leaned back against the weather rail, staring through the heat haze to the east. We were heeled over so far that the rail was near about leaning against me. I stepped down the deck to the binnacle and checked the compass, looking across it at the morro peak of Monte Cristi, where the Spanish territory of Santo Domingo began. I ran aloft with a gla
ss and peered at the sea creaming white over the rocks and reefs around the point. I looked out to sea, and at Cape Français in the west. I checked the apparent wind direction with a glance at the cork-and-feather dog-vanes flapping on the quarters, and checked its true course by noting the paths it made across the surface of the sea. Then I stared hard at the reefs again. Satisfied, I swung back down to the deck.
“We got some room. Let’s see can we weather the point on this tack.”
Columbus had lost the Santa Maria on a reef just a league or two down the coast when the officer of the watch had gone to sleep. I didn’t guess I’d be taking a nap anytime soon, but you never knew when something might carry away. I glanced up at the furled topsails and at the trim of the fore-and-aft sails.
So did Horne. He’d taken off his stocking cap, and his wild braids whipped around his shoulders as he craned his head back. He glanced at me and smiled, and I smiled back, and then his white teeth and pink gums gleamed in his black face as he laughed.
Peebles, though—he paled as Tomahawk swooped over the Atlantic rollers. The boy seemed to have lost his sea legs in the short time we had been playing bo-peep with Gaswell off Le Cap. I tried to gaze imperturbably into the wind as a good captain should, but the day was so glorious I couldn’t help throwing my arms back and hollering.
Half the people stopped and stared at me, only to hop back to business when Horne stepped to the break of the quarterdeck and scowled at them. I’d’ve been scared of him too, was I in their place; his skin was so dark that his face turned all teeth and eyes when he wanted to look ferocious. Some of the hands still snuck looks, though, as soon as he turned away. Simpson and Hawkins—two enormous waisters I’d gotten from the flagship, such powerful men that they might not have needed the winch to get our fore-and-aft sails aloft—turned around to gawp at me, and Yancy, a white-haired, spectacled sailmaker’s mate that the commodore had loaned me, popped his head out of the fore-hatch to see what the excitement was. In fact, every man who looked around for more than a second was wearing a red-checked shirt of the sort favored in the Columbia.
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