"Damme!" Lewrie marvelled at their pirates' daring. "They're not fleeing, Mister Pollock… they're off to try to take it!"
"Henri Maurepas," Pollock shrewdly mused. "Is he bound up with the conspiracy, he must have been the one that told them about it."
"All the more reason for haste, sir," Lewrie exclaimed. "Catch them in the act, nab ' em red-handed. Your boat, sir… instanter!"
"With the bloody treasure ship alongside, arrah?" Liam Desmond muttered in awe of the possibilities. "Jaysus, Joseph, an' Mary!"
God A'mighty! Lewrie frenziedly speculated; A million Spanish dollars'd be a quarter million pounds. Captain 's share is two-eighths so… sixty-two thousand, five hund… JESUS CHRIST!
"Right, lads, we're off!" Lewrie cried, banging his hands together in urgency. "There's nought we may do to the local villains, this Maurepas or Bistineau, Mister Pollock. No time to scrag 'em, but… did someone put a flea in the Spanish authorities' ears once the money is taken, hmmm? Let those idle bastards in the Cabildo do our work?"
"I do imagine something could be, ah… arranged," Mr. Pollock decided with one brow slyly, contemplatively cocked.
"And look to the safety of your emporium hulk as we sail, sir," Lewrie further said, gathering up his discarded things. "Bistineau's store… is it nearby to anything you value?"
"I don't…"
"We came t'get our prize ship back, but that ain't in the cards, Mister Pollock," Lewrie quickly explained. "Her cargo's lost to us as well, safely cached in that bastard's store and warehouse. We can't have either, I mean to make sure no one profits from her. Just before we set off, I intend to set 'em all afire and burn 'em to the ground… and the waterline!"
BOOK FIVE
Prospero: Now does my project gather to a head.
My charms crack not, my spirits obey, and time
Goes upright with his carriage. How's the day?
– The Tempest, Act V, Scene 1
William Shakespeare
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Boudreaux Balfa squatted on the lip of the canvas-covered cargo hatch, horny bare feet and stout, suntanned shins splayed either side of a smallish wooden keg, a prosaic bulge-sided 5-gallon barrico that one could find anywhere liquid goods were sold… though this one had neither tap nor bung. The lid, which had been hatcheted open, had the King of Spain's royal crest burned into it, so one might have mistaken the barrico for one containing only the costliest, smoothest, brandy for aristocratic tables, but…
Capitaine Boudreaux Balfa, L'Affame, dipped his hands into that 5-gallon barrico and ran his fingers through silver, not spirits. If the Mexico City mint workers hadn't cheated their masters, a 5-gallon wooden barrico should contain 1,000 pieces of silver, 1,000 Spanish dollars. Less the tare weight of the keg, Balfa knew from his previous lootings, the mint simply shovelled loose coins into a barrico 'til the heavy scales balanced at 55 pounds, about as much as a government dock worker or slave employed at public works could lift by himself. If a mint employee pocketed a few on the sly, well… it was almost expected. Balfa rather doubted that the count would come out exact, but then… who the Devil cared?
"Ahh-yeee!" Balfa cried in a high, thin two-note howl of victory. "By Gar!" he shouted, drumming his heels on the deck and tossing a double handful of coins high aloft, without a care where they landed.
A pistol shot drew his attention. That whippet-lean boy, Jean-Marie Rancour, was flinging silver dollars over the side so his friend Don Rubio could shoot them like ducks on the wing. Most shots went wide of the mark, but again… who the Devil cared when there was so much money for the taking? A quick pair of shots below-decks sounded, muffled but distinct, followed by the scream of a mortally wounded man and the keening howl of a survivor of the ship's crew whose hiding place had been found, as he was dragged from the side of his slain comrade and hauled up from below for the further amusement of the triumphant pirates.
Balfa squinted with concern when he saw that one of the sailors who fetched the survivor up was his own son, Fusilier; he was a bit relieved, though, to note how his son hung back from actually manhandling the poor, doomed bastard. No, it was those two brothers, Pierre and Jean, who held the man by his upper arms and lugged him onto the deck, laughing and taunting the fellow, crying out to their fellow buccaneers that a fresh victim had been discovered.
Fusilier trailed behind their victim's scrabbling bare feet, an ashen cast to his features, eyes flicking right and left as if in some fever, his cheeks red, and gulping in trepidation.
Boudreaux Balfa did not want his son to follow in his bloodied footsteps; he'd adamantly decreed, for his poor, dead wife's sake, that L'Affame would be the last pirate of their clan, that he would make an honest living on the land that piracy had bought them, that Boudreaux would make sure that Fusilier and Evangeline would grow up respectable and in the fear of the Lord, if he had to kill them to do it. He would leave them property six arpents wide and fifty arpents deep, from their good dock on Bayou Barataria to far back into the cypress swamps, with channels and sloughs for rice fields, enough solid land for cotton and sugarcane, enough cleared land where thirty or fourty head of cattle could graze, on his vacherie, twice the herd any neighbour could boast.
Three hundred arpents, over 250 British acres, enough to support generations of Balfas in comfort and self-sufficiency-if it wasn't in debt now and then in bad years with bankers and crop factors in the city. His old "trade" could provide a hedge against its loss.
So when the de Guilleri brats and their cohorts had come ghosting up to his landing the night that Boudreaux had invited friends and neighbours over for his monthly rustique, to sing the old French homeland tunes and those of long-lost Acadia, to dance barefooted on hard-packed dirt or softer grass, to drink and feast and court and carry on, well… Even if they'd come "dressed down" like the old feudal landlords or aristos of the Court at Versailles did when playing peasant among their lessers, once they'd gotten him aside and had imparted their fabulous news, the temptation had simply been too great. His son, Fusilier, had begged and pleaded for just one adventure by his side, and Fusilier had been too hot-blooded and eager to be denied, despite his promises to his dead wife.
"Madre de Dios, por favor, senores, no!" the fresh victim cried in a squeaky child's despairing voice, crawling on his knees with tears streaking his face, searching for just one with mercy in his heart.
Instead, he was hauled to his feet, held pinioned from either side as a burly but sweet-faced crewman strode up to him, laid a hand on his shoulder as if to reassure him, then jabbed a wide dagger into his belly..: once, twice, and a third time, roaring with laughter as he did so. With a feral shout, half a dozen buccaneers hoisted him up and flung him overboard, cheered their own boldness, then broke up to hunt down any other lurking survivors.
Boudreaux nodded with sad pleasure to see Fusilier blanch and dash to the opposite bulwarks to puke up his meagre breakfast. At his side was the teenaged boy who'd fetched up the latest victim. He was heaving because he had no stomach for seafaring, and even a moderate chop turned him grass-green, quite unlike his older brother, Pierre.
Fusilier had no stomach for this, bon! Balfa thought. And this would be the last voyage for both of them. There was so much silver stowed below, their shares could support their lands for the next hundred years if they were frugal. No buccaneering scum as friends…
Pierre and the seasick younger Jean, those itinerant La Fitte brothers, had come up the bayou between cruises, looking for land and opportunities, they'd claimed. They had idled on his hospitality, did the least possible to repay it, and spent most of their time spooning his lovely but naive daughter, Evangeline, and turning Fusilier's head with tales of loot and plunder. Balfa had trusted neither one out of his sight, sure they were sniffing round for his hidden wealth! He'd been ready to run them off when the de Guilleris turned up, and once this adventure was done, he'd be glad to see the backs of the La Fittes.
"We did it, Boudreaux, mon vie
ux! We did it after all!" Jerome Lanxade cheered, capering and performing a creaky horn-pipe, coming up to embrace him, buss him French fashion on both cheeks, then pound him on the back. "So easy, it was nothing! Spaniards… pah! What a pack of toothless monkeys!"
Yes, it had been easy, so incredibly easy. The intelligence in the letter to banker Maurepas had been like all vaunting Spanish self-delusions, but an empty sham. That so-called company of stalwart soldiers had been thirty-odd idle, seasick Mestizos in shabby uniforms with poorly kept weapons, half-Aztec riffraff led by a fat sergeant, a brace of equally low-down corporals, and a pair of down-at-the-heels officers, one of whom, the senior capitano, had offered to surrender if he could join their merry marauding band for a share of the money!
The cannon were good, but their powder was poorly milled, damp with age and indifferent storage, and the "well-drilled" naval gunners-one per piece as gun-captains-outnumbered by spiritless, cowardly, and clumsy gutter-sweepings. Only the schooner's capitano and his naval officers had put up much of a fight once their vessel had stalked up to cannon-range, and those hellish, quick-firing air-rifles had put him and his quarterdeck party and helmsmen down in the first minutes, leaving the rest of the crew leader-less and adrift. Le Revenant had more swivel-guns-in the old days, they'd not been termed "murderers" for nothing!-and they'd had those air-rifles in the capable and deadly accurate hands of the de Guilleris, so the gun-captains, loaders, and rammers, along with the frightened, swaying infantrymen, were blasted off their feet faster than any troops could bear, with half the soldiers shot in a single, brutal minute! After that, no one could resist their howling, shrieking, sword-waving boarders, and the thing was done.
"Too bad we can't keep this schooner of theirs," Jerome Lanxade went on. "Might salvage her guns if we had the time, but…"
"No disguising her," Balfa spat. "She gotta go down, wit' all de evidence, by Gar."
"Give her a good cleaning, Boudreaux, a clean sweep down fore and aft, she could serve as our second raider," Lanxade posed, sweeping at his thin and rakish mustachios, "like scrubbin' up a whore over in Havana before you board her, hah? We'll get you a suitable ship, never fear."
"Won't need one, Jerome," Balfa said in a covert growl, telling truth if only to his longtime compatriot, perhaps the only man aboard whom he could trust. "So much silver, come to hand so easy… like I gets de shivers dat another prize push our luck. My luck, hein? By damn, I see all dat silver, I feels de rabbits runnin'. We get all o' dis ashore and split up, I callin' it quits."
"Damn the bastards!" Helio de Guilleri was raging as he came stamping heavy boot-heels up the companionway ladder from below. "Bedamned to all lying Spanish bastards! Cochons, salauds!"
"What is the matter, m'sieur?" Lanxade broke away to ask him.
"I've counted kegs, Capitaine Lanxade, counted them twice, and there aren't enough to make six million dollars!" de Guilleri seethed, lowering his voice at Lanxade's urgent hand gestures so their sailors wouldn't hear that they'd been denied a single sou. "There is not one ten-gallon barrico aboard, just five-gallon kegs. A thousand dollars each, none of the ones that hold two thousand!"
"Putain, mon Dieu!" Lanxade spat, blanching beneath his swarthy lifetime sea tan. "Mon cul!" he gravelled, teeth grinding.
"My ass!" Balfa groaned, too. "Dey didn' hide some down among d'eir water butts an' salt-meat kegs? How many barricos you find?"
"Only two thousand, Capitaine," Helio de Guilleri told him in a grim mutter, nigh snarling as if it was he who'd been robbed. "That only makes fifty-five tons of silver, no gold. Here!" he spat, making them look at a small ledger book. "Hippolyte found this aft, in their capitaine's cabins, in the mint official's bags. It says they carried only a third of the total shipment!"
"By damn, d'ose Spaniards get clever after all!" Balfa hooted with inexplicable laughter after a moment of thought. "Sent one ship close inshore to Texas Province, like lubbers feelin' d'eir way scared o' open water. But, dey done put de rest in two more fast schooners! Figure dey lose one, but de rest sail far out at sea… Might now be off Fort Balise, safe as lambs! But, mes amis," he slyly pointed out, "we still got two millions of it!"
"Lads won't be happy, though, cher, " Lanxade griped, plucking at his finery most fretfully. "They think we're fools, they've been cheated somehow… bad thing to do, to fail in our trade."
"Ah, mais oui, " Balfa uneasily agreed, grimacing over the tales of what had happened to even the greatest pirates who'd lost the trust of their crews… who'd seemed to lose their magic "touch."
"For now, there is rum, wine, food, and loot," Lanxade supposed, peering about the schooner's decks to see his crew busy with newly captured muskets and pistols, new cutlasses and infantry hangers hung by new baldrics over their shoulders. Dead men's hats were being quarreled over and gambled for, as were coats, waist-coats, shoes, and the few pairs of salvaged boots. "Rest of her cargo, the butts of Mexicano wine, and that peasant-brewed pulque and arrack… that can keep them satisfied for a while. Quiet, fuddled, and too drunk for a proper counting. Proper thinking."
"Enough silver for each hand t'get two, three keg apiece, right away," Balfa cannily speculated. "Delay de reckonin', n'est-ce pas? Set aside dead men's shares, in plain sight?"
Poor and poltroonish as the Spanish resistance had been, they still had managed to slay or mortally wound at least seven of their buccaneers before going under. Wives, children, and lovers were due a lost man's "lay." Or what Balfa and Lanxade could later swear was a proper share, after… deductions. Those wounded, but not mortally, were owed bonuses, too, depending on whether they'd lost something off their bodies; an eye, hand, digit, or foot, a leg… a "pension" paid in one lump sum if their seagoing life was curtailed by disabilities.
"You fear your own men?" Helio de Guilleri asked with a gasp of surprise. But then, he was used to absolute obedience and deference from house slaves and street negres, those below his social class. It never occurred to him, would never occur to any of his cohorts, that the piratical trade was the freest sort of democracy.
"They discover the sum we took is off, yes," Lanxade whispered, wondering if old Boudreaux might not be quitting the trade at the best time, after all… and might it not be in his interest to do so, too.
"Well, this schooner is worth a lot, too, so couldn't they wait until it, and that British prize, were sold, and we-" Helio asked.
"Non, mon cher!" Lanxade hastily objected. "This schooner must disappear, and quickly, before the Spanish begin a search for her. If they lose a guarda costa lugger, a few local merchant ships, that they could abide. Blame the Anglais. But a royal vessel, with two million dollars aboard? Even they would be stirred to action."
"Well, take her back to Grand Terre, unload her, and strip her of anything useful," Helio pressed, sounding almost whiny to them.
"Tow her back outta Barataria Bay, den sink her in deep water," Balfa cagily suggested, "so nobody ever see her again, by damn."
"Sink her?" Helio gawped, louder than he'd meant to. "Why can't she be sold… to some stupid Yankees, perhaps?" he plaintively posed as if ruing the loss of a single ecu of her worth.
"Sink her?" his sister Charite demanded, stalking up from astern to join them, her dainty left hand fisted about the hilt of her smallsword in sudden dismay, and her knee-high boots drumming on the decks. "Sink her, will you, messieurs!' She's the equal of Le Revenant, with better guns aboard her. We need her to begin building our own fleet! Helio, tell them! Carriages could be built, the artillery could then be used ashore… for our Creole army, for our coming revolution!"
"We were just discussing that, Charite, ma soeur, uh… " he lamely stammered, blushing under his sister's indignant glare.
"Capitaine Balfa has been promised a ship of his own," Charite continued, her colour high over any less-than-zealous enthusiasm for their cherished cause. "Et voila, here she is. When word gets out, hundreds of men will come forward to crew her. Capitaine Balfa then can choose only the best. The
others can enlist in your regiment, mon frere. They will come like… that!" she exulted with a boyish snap of the fingers of her free right hand.
"Tiens, there is a difficulty, Charite," Helio muttered, gazing away, unable to meet her eyes. "We will speak of it later, if… "
"Let us speak of it now, Helio," she countered. "Or is it too complicated a matter for a mere woman to understand, hein?"
" Quel dommage. We're out of targets, alas," Don Rubio Monaster pretended to mourn as he and her cousin Jean-Marie casually sauntered up to join the leaders of the expedition, which was to their minds a natural right. They were still smirking over the "hunter's bag" they had shot or skewered while there yet had been survivors from the Spanish vessel's crew or armed guard. "Eh, something is amiss? Why all the long faces? We did just win a great victory, did we not?"
"They insist that we must sink this ship after looting her," Charite informed him with the slightest plaintive sound, as if looking for a supportive voice to champion her argument.
"Well, I suppose we should," Rubio said with a simper. "When a blind Spaniard could recognise her a mile off, ha ha! A pity surely. But, we can salvage her artillery and such."
"Hidden far up Barataria Bay, she'd be safe enough, as safe as Le Revenant has been," Charite hotly pointed out. "Cher Capitaine Balfa to command her, with two ships to prey on the Spanish cochons."
"I quittin', me," Balfa baldly told her.
"What?" Charite spat, aghast at that news. "But, you cannot!"
"Losin' dis ship, de Spaniards git too stirred up," Balfa laid out in a calm voice. "My share be more'n enough t'get by a long time. Got a bad feelin', mademoiselle. A longtime sailor's 'sight,' " he added with a shiver.
"But!" Charite spluttered for a moment, then turned icy cold. "Tres bien, m'sieur, " she said, distancing her demeanour. "If you have a… foreboding, then… we could promote a promising mate for command of this schooner. And honour you for your contributions."
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