The War of Knives

by Broos Campbell

  “’Tis but a wee way now, sir,” said Brodie. “Will you be havin’ me run ahead and alert Mr. Horne, there?”

  Bosun’s Mate Horne was about the steadiest enlisted man I’d ever met. I’d had to leave him to see that the boat’s crew didn’t run off and get drunk the minute I turned my back. “Very well. No, wait—” But the little Irishman had already trotted off into the darkness. I cursed myself for a ninny. I was a sailor, not a soldier, but I knew you weren’t supposed to divide your forces.

  I wasn’t what you’d call scared so much as extremely alert as we worked our way along the passage. Any number of hidey-holes lay along the way. Ali Baba and all his forty thieves could lurk in them, and we’d never know it till we woke up dead. I wished I’d brought Horne with me, and hang the boat.

  I stopped to shine the light ahead. “Did you hear something?”

  “No,” said Connor. “Let us keep moving.”

  We passed a place on the left where the wall had fallen down. I shone my lantern into it, revealing a filthy room. A man lay sprawled against the far wall. A chipped enamel basin sat beside him on the muddy floor, and a foul stench hung in the air. I thought he was dead till his eyes gleamed in the lantern light. He raised his hands to show they were empty. “Mwen malad,” he groaned. His hands sank as if they were an unbearable weight. “Pa anmède-m.”

  Franklin poked his head in to have a look. “What does he say?”

  “I think he says he’s sick and not to bother him.”

  Connor recoiled. “Is it fever?” He whipped his kerchief out of his sleeve and held it to his nose.

  That or he’d shit his pants, I thought, but I didn’t say it. I lifted my head and peered down the alley. “Listen: there it is again.”

  “There what is again?”

  “A shout. Samuels, did you hear it?”

  “I didn’t hear nothin’, sir.”

  The close walls forced us to walk single-file. I crept along in the van, nearly on tiptoes as if that might make me invisible, with the shuttered lantern in one hand and my sword in the other. Samuels followed me, and Franklin followed him, with Connor guarding our backs.

  At length the passage opened up into a small square, where water from a shattered fountain burbled across the paving stones and where the charred rafters of the surrounding houses thrust up like bones against the sky. A glow of lamps from a few streets over deepened the shadows in the square, but through an archway down at the far end I could see ships’ lanterns sparkling out on the bay. Home free, I thought. Then my eyes bugged out as Samuels tripped over something in his path.

  “Law!” he said. “Look-a here, sir!”

  I aimed the lantern where he was pointing and saw Brodie sprawled on his back beside a broken stone bench. His arms were folded peacefully across his chest and one of his shoes was missing. I held out the lantern to Samuels and squatted down for a closer look. A welt ran across Brodie’s face from his right eyebrow to the left side of his jaw— a slash, rather, beaded with blood but not too deep except across the bridge of his nose. I felt the back of his head. It was gooey from lying in the ooze, but I could feel a lump there and my hand came away bloody.

  “Does he live?” said Connor.

  I squinted in his direction. He stood away from the narrow beam of light, behind Franklin. In his black cloak he was no more than a shape in the gloom.

  “Dunno, Mr. Connor.” Brodie didn’t seem to have been robbed. His pockets hadn’t been turned out, his pistol was still in his belt, and his cutlass lay nearby. “Looks like we interrupted whoever—”

  “Ho!” said Samuels. A shadow moved among shadows. Metal rasped on metal and a sword blade flashed. The lantern blinked out as it clattered across the square. In the sudden darkness came a thump and a gasp.

  “Assassin!” cried Connor. I heard a click as he cocked his pistol.

  A hooded figure loomed above me in the moonlight. I lashed out with my sword and pierced his cloak. He jabbed down at me backhanded. I threw up my arm. The dagger in his fist slashed through my sleeve and lodged in the thicker material at the cuff. He abandoned the dagger and strode past me, leveling the sword in his right hand. He lunged.

  Franklin took the point of the blade—thock!—smack in the middle of his portable writing desk. He stumbled backward into Connor. The mulatto fired.

  The would-be assassin sprawled gurgling at Connor’s feet. The mulatto kicked him over onto his back. “Clumsy damned—” He stomped the man’s black-masked face till the arms and legs stopped twitching. Then he stomped him again.

  “Great jumping Jehoshaphat, quit that,” I said. “I guess he ain’t getting any deader.”

  Connor turned away.

  “Well anyway, Mr. Connor,” I said, looking at the corpse, “it was a pretty shot.”

  “Who is he? Can you tell?”

  I lifted the mask from the dead man’s face. Even in the moonlight it was too dark to see much, but I could see plenty that I didn’t want to see. “I don’t calculate I’d recognize him even if I knew him, sir. You near about turned his face to jelly.”

  He scraped the sole of his boot against the stone bench. “I beg pardon, Mr. Graves, for my ill temper.” He snapped his fingers. “Franklin, fetch that lantern. Let us strike a light and see what the damage is.”

  The lantern was dented and the mica panes had splintered, but the candle was intact. In its light I could see our man was white and maybe thirty years old; but French, English, American—I couldn’t tell. Connor’s ball had shattered his lower jaw and blown the bones out the back of his neck, and his footwork had knocked in the man’s teeth, nose, and cheekbones.

  “I don’t guess his own mother’d recognize him now, Mr. Connor.”

  “Again, Mr. Graves, I beg pardon. Sometimes it seems I have an entire army trying to do for me. Ain’t that right, Franklin?”

  “So it would seem, Mr. Connor.” Franklin examined his oilskin packet, which he’d dropped in the excitement. Apparently satisfied that the papers had survived undamaged, he pushed his glasses up more firmly on his nose and peered at the body. If he knew him he didn’t say so.

  Samuels raised himself to his hands and knees with a groan. “He gimme a boot right in the cable tier,” he said as Franklin helped him to his feet. “Six inches lower and the old woman wouldn’t be havin’ no more chil’ren.”

  “How’s Brodie?” said I.

  Samuels knelt over him, his hand outstretched. “Dead, by glory!” he said, collapsing astride the little Irishman.

  “A good man ya are, Samuels,” said Brodie, with a muffled air. He pushed Samuels’s knee off his chest. “But have I not been trod upon enough to last me all me days?”

  Four

  MacElroy’s treble whisper floated across the dark water. “Ahoy the boat.”

  “Aye aye,” said Horne. He held up two fingers to indicate my rank.

  “No,” I said, and the big bosun’s mate steered for the larboard side, where I could arrive without the bosun piping me aboard. The last thing I wanted was the attention of every vessel within earshot. I scrambled over the bulwark and nearly tripped over Mr. MacElroy.

  MacElroy was all eyes under his hat as Samuels helped Brodie aboard and led him off to find Mr. Quilty, the surgeon. “Did you have a rumpus with the guard boat, sir?” He peered off into the darkness.

  “How you talk,” I said. “They catch so many crabs with their oars that you can hear ’em half a mile off.”

  “Then how’d he—” His eyes widened at the sight of Connor and Franklin. “Who’s these chaps?”

  “Fellows that know how to mind their own business.” In the light of our battle lanterns I could make out the Marines, still turned out in full kit, and the Rattle-Snakes yarning quietly or napping around the guns. Illumined by the binnacle light, Rogers paced the old-fashioned raised quarterdeck. I doffed my hat to him and the quarterdeck, and he doffed his in return. I looked north toward the Princes. The corvette had dropped her hook there at sundown, presu
mably to wait till we came out again. We hadn’t gone much further in ourselves, not in the dark without a pilot. “Mr. MacElroy,” I said, “is that Johnny Crappo still over yonder?”

  “Yes, sir.” He pointed to starboard of where I’d been looking. “You can see her cabin lights over past them rocks.”

  “Did anyone catch her name yet?”

  “Yes, sir. She’s the Rose-red Cunt.”

  That made me look at him twice. “The what now?”

  As he repeated it, obviously enjoying the sound of it, I could only imagine what he’d been told about the French. He added, “She’s a privateer, ’cause the officers ain’t wearing uniforms. Think they’ll try an’ cut us out tonight, sir?”

  “Not if you keep your ears open and your mouth shut, Mr. MacElroy.”

  “Yes, sir.” He put his head down. “I mean, aye aye, sir. Oh sir, I forgot,” he said, peeking out at me from under his hat brim. “Captain wants to see you immediately you come on board.”

  “Which you should have told me immediately I came on board, you wet-brained ninny,” I said. “Mind your hat.” He grabbed for it, but I was quicker. I set it back on his head and tamped it down over his ears. “Now, Mr. MacElroy,” I continued, “put the gentleman in the purser’s cabin—it’s empty—and his secretary wherever he’ll fit. Perhaps the gunners’ mess has room for him.”

  “Don’t wish to be any trouble, Mr. Graves,” said Connor.

  “No trouble, sir. And Mr. Horne,” I said as I headed for the after hatch, “leave the boat in the water, and present our package to Surgeon Quilty with my compliments.”

  In the cuddy behind the door in the after-cabin, Peter in his shirtsleeves was poring over the chart while his tattered tabby, Gypsy, batted at his pencil. The wooden deadlights had been shipped over the stern windows to thwart curious eyes, and the air was greasy with smoke from the lamps.

  “Ah, Mr. Graves, you return to us,” said Peter, without looking up. He drew a little X on the chart and circled it. To the southeast he had drawn another X within a circle. A pencil line connected the two X’s. He picked up a ruler and drew lines connecting the two X’s with one of the Princes. Then he spread a pair of compasses, measured the gap against the graph on the side of the chart, and walked off the distances between the three points of the triangle. “Light airs from the east, increasing and backing nor’easterly with the coming of the dawn. Though I wish to unmoor before then.” He held the pencil out to Gypsy, who grabbed it with a crazed look and commenced to gnaw the end of it. “That Frenchman lies athwart our best passage out.”

  As we had engaged no pilot and hadn’t asked for pratique, our certification of health, we hadn’t had any official contact with the port authorities—which meant we didn’t have to wait for permission to leave. Somewhere down the line it might save us a reprimand for upping anchor on the sly.

  “Sir, Mr. MacElroy informs me that the Johnny Crappo is called the Rose-red Cunt.”

  “Does he now? No doubt some wag of a sea-daddy told him such. She in fact is called L’Heureuse Rencontre.”

  “The Fortunate Meeting, then. I think I prefer MacElroy’s take on it.”

  His thin lips twisted in a faint smile. “Perhaps we may suggest it to her captain in the morning.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. “But listen, there’s something I have to tell you.”

  “A slight north’ard current of about a quarter of a knot, and a negligible tide,” he muttered, peering at the chart through a loupe. He was a tall, narrow man, and as he bent further over the chart his stern rose in the air. “I am concerned about this reef here, and those rocks under Gypsy’s tail could be tricky . . . What is it you wish to tell me, Mr. Graves?”

  “Blair has foisted a pair of passengers on us, sir.”

  “The cow. You refused, of course?”

  “I couldn’t, sir. He wouldn’t sign my passport without I didn’t, nor give me a chit for a horse. But they’re going to Léogâne anyway, and they’ll arrange for the horses and the guides, and pay for ’em, too.”

  “Very well, then. Put them wherever you wish.”

  “Thank’ee, sir, I’ve put MacElroy on it. But that ain’t all.”

  He looked up at last. “Then pray what is all?”

  “Mr. Connor’s from the War Department, sir.”

  “And what of it?”

  I told him of my meeting with Blair and what had happened in the alley off the waterfront.

  The port-wine stain on his forehead stood out as the skin around it paled. “Mr. Graves,” he said, “you know as well as I that the authorities will not care that he attacked you. They will assume you lie. At the very least they will raise a snit about your being ashore without their permission. I told you to take particular care in that regard.”

  “Yes, sir. That’s why I wrapped him in his cloak and brought him with me.”

  “Did you now?” He grinned. “I shall have to meet this fellow as soon as we are safe at sea. Did you hoist the gig aboard?”

  “No, sir. Figured it’d make too much noise.”

  “Excellent. The moon will not set till after daylight, but the sky is clouding up again.” He tapped the compasses against the chart. “Which should provide sufficient darkness for a bit of mischief I have in mind for you.”

  The voices of L’Heureuse Rencontre’s officers drifted along the water toward us as we rowed slowly across the lie of their anchor cable. They were having themselves a time in the brightly lit after-cabin, and their singing mixed weirdly with the faint shrieking and drumming that came along the offshore breeze flowing down from the hills. The grapnel that we trailed astern was on a heavier line than might be usual, but not remarkably so. And it was a French grapnel, a souvenir from the battle with the picaroons.

  “She catches, sir,” said Horne.

  “Belay,” I whispered. The men sat their oars, letting them drift—a sudden clatter of an oar against the gunwale might bring a storm of grapeshot down on our heads. Horne tensed the line to make sure it was the cable he had caught and not some weed or rock. “Got it, sir,” said he.

  “Give way,” I whispered. “Handsomely, now.”

  We crept toward one of the Princes islets as Horne eased out the line, keeping it taut but not hauling on it.

  “Toss your oars,” I whispered, and the men raised their oars out of the water as the bowman hooked onto the jumble of rocks. I went ashore, bent near double so as not to tumble on the slime and weeds that covered the verge of the islet. I looked back to see Horne easing out the line as he made his way forward. “Keep it taut,” I said.

  “Taut as a virgin, sir.”

  His wild mass of braids swung like ropes’-ends as he stepped out of the boat. We frapped the line around a pair of old barrel staves that we had fished out of the harbor earlier, and lodged them up tight and out of sight among the rocks.

  The stars had faded and the morning twilight had yet to gather beyond the eastern hills. But for the lanterns of the ships in the harbor and a few lamps in the town, all was darkness. Certainly it was dark in the Rattle-Snake, what with all lights extinguished and the galley fire dumped over the side. Rogers had brought us round so the breeze was on our larboard quarter, letting what was left of the tide provide just enough tension to keep our single anchor in the ground. Though I couldn’t see him from my perch on the bowsprit, I knew he was feeling his way with one hand resting on the tiller as he walked the schooner forward. We had muffled the capstan pawls as best we could, but still they clanked horribly as Horne and his crew took in the slack. Rogers’s voice came faintly on the breeze: “She’s there, sir.”

  “Keep her thus,” said Peter.

  “Heave and pawl,” said Horne in an urgent whisper over by the capstan, and the clanking recommenced as the men strained against the capstan bars. “Heave. One more pawl—get all you can.” Water hissed out of the straining cable as it rose from the sea. The boys with their nipper lines trotted back and forth in the gloom, throwing the nippers around
the messenger and the cable as it came aboard, and throwing them off again as the cable slithered down into the cable tier. “Heave her ’round, boys,” said Horne in a soft singsong. “Heave cheer’ly!”

  I looked down. “Anchor’s a-peak,” I said, and the word passed along from man to man till it reached the quarterdeck. I waved my hand: “Anchor’s aweigh.”

  “At the braces there,” came Wickett’s voice. “Haul taut. Brace up.”

  The Rattle-Snake swam slowly forward as her topsails filled.

  “’Vast heaving,” said Horne. “Rig the cat—hook the cat—walk away with her,” and his crew fished the anchor as we gathered speed down the fairway.

  “Heads’ls, there!” called Wickett. There was no need for quiet now that we were moving.

  I jumped down to the fo’c’s’le. “Man the forestays’l halyards! Clear away the downhaul and hoist away! Now haul out that jib boom!”

  The breeze came astern of us and then onto the starboard quarter as we turned our nose toward the French corvette. Beyond her lay the open sea. A halo shone around her stern lantern in the morning damp, making a perfect beacon for us. We’d cross her bow within musket shot—provided she stayed where she was.

  As I returned to the quarterdeck, Rogers grinned at me. “We’ve caught her unawares,” he said. He twirled an imaginary mustache and affected a French accent. “Probablee zay all have ze snootful of claret by now and ayr snow-ring like ze saw-meels, hein?”

  As a gentleman, Connor had been granted the privilege of the quarterdeck. Sipping his coffee—there was presence of mind for you, cadging a cup before the cook had doused the galley fire—and holding a saucer under his cup like he was at a yachting party, he looked coolly over at the corvette. “Surely if he were hostile,” he said, “he’d have attacked us already.”

  “Not in Toussaint’s harbor,” I said, with more assurance than I felt. “They dassn’t touch us for fear they’ll be banned entire.”

  “Might be,” put in Rogers. “And might be not. The Constellation gave the La Vengeance a first-rate thumping a couple weeks ago. It’s the second time the Connie’s tore apart one of their heavy frigates. No, sir, my guess is they’re waitin’ for us to come out and play.”