“A love letter from a doomed man to his beloved wife. My only interest in it was to see it delivered into the poor widow’s hands.”
“It’s a list of conspirators.”
“Don’t be foolish. Why would anyone set down the names in writing?”
“Maybe you only knew one or two names each, and it was a way to keep track of everyone. Or you could sell it to the White Hands. I’m sure they’d like a list like that.”
“Even if this is true, there’s no connection to me.”
“It mentions a steersman. A steersman conns a ship. You know, a conner, Mr. Connor? That letter was meant to be read by someone who also spoke English.”
“An odd coincidence, nothing more.”
“And I don’t believe you’re a mulatto, neither. Hell, you’re lighter than I am.”
“There is that, yes. Ah, but—” He held up a finger. “If I’m with the White Hands, why would I shoot one of them down in the streets of Port Républicain?”
“You meant to shoot Franklin in the back of the head. A terrible accident. Things like that happen in a close fight, only he stumbled into you and messed up your aim. You shot your own man. That’s why you stomped his face in after he was dead. You figured Franklin might recognize him.”
He put his hand on his hip and laughed, sharp as old cheese. “No, you’re wrong about that. It was sheer petulance on my part. I swear I’m not in league with the White Hand.”
“It don’t signify either way. You caused a power of trouble, and I aim to see you pay for it.”
“Continuez a le faire parler—keep him talking,” said Juge, lounging in the doorway with his arms folded. “Perhaps he will get a sore throat and die of the pneumonia.”
“I’ll deal with you in a minute, nigger,” said Connor. His eyes darted back to mine. “Franklin was nothing but a trained monkey. He learned how to write down what was told to him, but he had no thoughts of his own.”
“That’s where you’re wrong,” I said. “Without him, we’d have never caught you.”
A flicker of uncertainty crossed his face. “He lives?”
“He’s in the Croatoan. She’ll be up with us before too long. In fact, I ought to just shut you up in here until she arrives. I’d like to see you pissing yourself at the end of a rope.”
“I’ll not hang like a common thief.”
“Then put steel in your hand, or I’ll stick you like a pig.”
“You disappoint me, Mr. Graves.” He nodded at Juge in the doorway. “Two against one?”
“He won’t interfere. Vous pouvez faire confiance à son honnêté.”
“Est-ce vrai, nègre?” said Connor, staring down his nose at Juge. “Is it so, nigger? Can I have confidence in your honesty?”
“Bon sang, but of course you can. See? I put my sword away.”
A smile played across Connor’s lips. “Yes, and you could draw it again, too.”
There was still a great to-do going on in the rest of the ship. I could hear cries of anger and anguish in English and in French. Pistols aplenty were popping someplace below decks, and the timbers of the frigate vibrated in sympathy as men stomped and struggled in the dark.
“Juge,” I said, not taking my eyes off Connor. “It sounds like they could use some help down on the gun deck. It’ll be the next one below this one.”
“This is an affair of honor between gentlemen,” said Connor. “Surely even a nigger can understand that.” “Juge,” I said before he could speak. “I need to absolve myself. Let me fight this battle.”
“C’est bien, mon ami. I do this for you.”
“And shut the door on your way out, nigger,” said Connor.
Juge mimicked Connor’s smile. “I will not be so selfish, Monsieur Connor, as to pray that God lets you live long enough to see me again.” The door shut softly behind him as he left.
“I thought he’d never leave, didn’t you?” said Connor, flexing his sword arm. “But hold—shouldn’t you like to put some breeches on? I’ve never killed a naked man before.”
“A shirt’s comfortable enough to fight in. I like it. It’s airy.”
“I shall endeavor to ventilate you further, regardless. Well then. Let’s have at it.” He dropped the pistol and drew his sword, jiggling it in his hand till he was satisfied with his grip. Then he put his left fist on his hip and brought up his sword, feeling with the tip of it for mine across the desk. Our blades touched. He tried a simple feint and thrust. I tapped his blade away. He riposted like lightning, whirling his blade around in a tight circle, catching mine and forcing it down.
I snatched my blade out from under his and ducked out of reach. He sidled around the desk. I scooted around the opposite way.
“Won’t you come out and fight, Mr. Graves?”
“You’ve got the reach on me. I like the desk just where it is.”
“But you’ve left the way open for me.” He jerked his thumb at the door behind him. “What’s to stop me from leaving?”
“A noose. If you stay, you’ll at least get a chance to kill me first.”
“I take your point. In a manner of speaking.” He reassumed his stance, left hand balled on his hip and his blade feeling for mine. “En garde, as they say.”
We circled around the desk again, our blades skittering and brushing against each other, till we were back where we’d started. Beyond him I saw the Croatoan standing toward us from the south.
“Your glass is running out, Connor.”
“Yes. And since you will not come out—” He lunged.
I parried across my body. He withdrew and lunged again, his blade piercing my shirt and the hot steel sliding across my naked skin as I rolled across the desk and kicked at his head. He grabbed my leg and I clutched his sword arm beneath my left elbow. And there we hung, locked in a terrified embrace, neither of us willing to withdraw from inside the other’s guard. He scrabbled at his waistband for the knife that wasn’t there. I chopped at his head, my sword clanging again and again on that damn hanging lamp till he grabbed my wrist and twisted it away from my body. It felt like he was turning my arm inside out.
I felt his breath on my face. He’d had onions for dinner. “Drop your sword!” he hissed.
“I won’t!”
“I’ll break your arm in about a minute.” He twisted harder.
I felt the muscle in my shoulder start to give. My fingers began to open. He jiggled my hand, trying to shake my sword loose. With the sweet inspiration that often accompanies a confrontation with imminent death, I let go of his sword arm and smacked the lamp backhanded across his face. The glass windows shattered.
He jerked back, still twisting my wrist in a fearsome grip—but let ’im, thinks I, snatching the death’s-head dagger from my belt with my left hand and giving him a wild thrust. I caught him between the bone and muscle of his sword arm, right above the elbow on the inside. It was pure luck, but a thing of beauty all the same, and I gazed upon its splendor with great joy. Him, he just stared. I yanked down through the tendon, and his blade clattered to the deck. Then, with the tip of my sword at his throat, I backed him out onto the gallery till the rail stopped him.
“Touché,” he said, forcing a smile. “This is just getting interesting. Perhaps you’ll bind my handkerchee around my arm and allow me to continue left-handed?”
“No. You must hang.”
“I shan’t.”
“What’s to prevent it?”
He answered by lunging forward onto my blade. He looked at me wide-eyed over it, neither of us moving. Then he ever so carefully grasped it with his left hand and eased it out of his throat. He tried to speak, but his windpipe was pierced and all that came out was a strangled squeak.
“Shit and perdition, Mr. Connor.” I reached out to catch him, but he turned on his heel and threw himself over the rail. He looked up at me from under the surface, a stream of ruby bubbles shining at his throat, and then the sharks were on him.
Twenty
The sunligh
t seemed to pierce my skull when I stepped out onto the Faucon’s spar deck. The noises of battle below had stopped, but there was a great to-do along the starboard rail.
The Rattle-Snake rode lower than I remembered. I went over to the rail and stood looking down at her. Her maindeck was awash. The sea boiled on the far side, where the sharks were having themselves a time with the bodies and bits of wreckage floating there. Rattle-Snakes and a few dazed-looking mulattoes paddled around in the boats, hauling men aboard like so much mackerel. Mr. Quilty waded across the deck with a wounded man clutched under each arm and Treadwell bringing up the rear, dragging his splinted leg behind him. Men leaned over the frigate’s rail, helping their shipmates aboard or tossing out ropes to them as the schooner settled in the sea. And here came Ambrose, the wardroom steward, a-galloping through the wash with my coat in one hand and a shark skittering across the deck at his heels.
On the Rattle-Snake’s quarterdeck, Peter scooped up Gypsy and flung her across. She hit the Faucon’s deck running and lit out for the after hatch. He had Greybar by the scruff in his other hand, and he threw him across, too. Greybar sailed spraddle-legged toward me—and if you want my advice, when someone throws you a wet cat, don’t catch it. He wrapped his forepaws around my hand, sank his teeth into my thumb, and tried his best to disembowel my wrist with his hind claws before tearing off after Gypsy.
Peter climbed over the Faucon’s rail as the Rattle-Snake sank with a groan behind him. He had a bloody gash in his forehead where his birthmark had been, and his scabbard hung empty at his side.
“Congratulations on your victory, Peter.” I held out my hand.
He ignored it. “Victory? It is a disaster.”
“You’ve captured a frigate and beaten a sixteen-gun corvette into submission.” The L’Heureuse Rencontre still wallowed down to leeward, and showed no signs that she was trying to make any repairs. The Croatoan would be alongside her in a few minutes. “Two to one, Peter, and both of ’em larger. You’ll be promoted, sure.” And so would I be, I thought; it was considered a compliment to the captain to promote the first officer after such a fight. My commission was as good as signed.
He looked at the Rattle-Snake’s mainmast, still riding above the waves but slowly sinking. “You have sank my command.”
“You were outnumbered and outgunned, Peter. You’ll be a hero!”
“I’ll be a goat,” he said. “Both of ’em privateers. One only gets promoted for beating national ships.”
“You’re ungrateful, is what you are.”
His face flushed, and his lips drew back in a gimace. “And you are unbreeched, sir! Where are your clothes?”
“On their way to Davy Jones.” I looked down at myself. Connor had managed to slice my shirttails away entire, and I was starkers from the waist down.
Rogers stepped up from the waist and saluted. “Got ’em all nailed down in the hold, sir. About a hundred soldiers, most of ’em still with their equipment. They’ll be trouble once they remember they got us outnumbered.”
“Put a pair of guns at the quarterdeck rail and train them on the hatches,” said Peter. “Do you the same on the fo’c’s’le. Corporal Haversham is below?”
“Yes, sir. Him and most of the Marines came through the fight. They’re making things hot for the coloreds at the moment.”
“Good. Let them keep it up,” said Peter. “Secure the magazine. I want all the powder and shot there is. Make that your primary concern. I would not put it past these fellows to blow us all up, if they can. Go now.” Then he turned back to me. “I don’t believe I gave you permission to return to duty, Mr. Graves. Leave me.”
“But you’re shorthanded, Peter—”
“Do not presume to use my first name, Mr. Graves. Go find some dark corner to lurk in, and bother me no further.”
I found Juge down on the gun deck, sprawled on his back with a half-circle of dead soldiers scattered around him. He still clutched his sword in his bloody hand. He opened his eyes when I knelt beside him and touched his cheek. “Connor,” he said. “You have killed him?”
“Would I suffer him to live, after the way he spoke to you?”
“The shooting has stopped,” he said. “Have we prevailed, mon ami?”
“Mais oui.” I put my arm around him and sat him up. “Come, I carry you to the surgeon.”
But he wouldn’t rise. “They are destroyed, hein? And this we did without the infamous Captain Block and his frigate.”
“The Croatoan comes up from the south. Allez-y, mon ami. You can see her from the deck.”
“No, I cannot.” He let go of his sword and tried to raise his right hand. I took it in my own and touched his fingers to his brow, his breast and his shoulders in turn. “Bon sang!” he said, closing his eyes. “The glory is ours alone.”
I sat for a while with his body in my arms. I didn’t see what was so damn glorious about it.
Twenty-One
Commodore Cyrus Gaswell squared the pages of my report on his big mahogany table and set it on top of one of his neat stacks of papers. He wore the exact same clothes as he’d worn the last time I’d seen him, or near enough as made no difference—baggy trousers of white nankeen and a seaman’s blue checked shirt, open at the neck and sweated through under the arms. He rubbed one bare foot over the other under the table and contemplated me.
Franklin’s report, neatly done up in red tape, lay next to mine. It wasn’t his entire report, of course; that was for the eyes of the president, and out of my reach—and out of Gaswell’s too, for that matter. The writing of my own report had been an interesting exercise in confession and horn-tooting. I’d had the devil of a time deciding what to put in it and what to leave out. Franklin had been no help at all, but then I hadn’t expected him to be. He had a pucker in his linen about having missed Connor’s aim entire.
“Don’t think I sent ye on a fool’s mission,” said Gaswell. “Pétion’s been dislodged and his army routed. Swallowed up whole, just about. I don’t guess one man in a hundred has been able to join up with Rigaud. It’s a hell of a victory for Toussaint.”
“Victory ain’t in it, sir. It was a slaughter.”
“Yes, well, that ain’t your doing. It may feel like it is, but ye musn’t give yourself so much credit. Ye followed orders and ought to be content. And ye showed a hell of an initiative in taking the Faucon. Paul Jones would’ve been proud. I’m recommending ye for a permanent commission, and I dare say you’ll get it. I’d put Wickett in for promotion too, if I could.”
“You mean you can’t, sir?”
He tugged at his ear. “I doubt the Congress will promote him to master commandant for losing a fourteen-gun schooner to a ten-gun transport.”
“But the Faucon was full of soldiers, and he clobbered L’Heureuse Rencontre. She was twice our weight in metal.”
He ran his pale blue eyes over me. It was like being looked at by God and your favorite uncle both at once. “The L’Heureuse Rencontre never surrendered till Block come alongside. Plus she weren’t even a privateer, much less a national ship. Nothing but pirates, legally speaking, and ye’ll have to take the gun money and be glad of it. She’ll be returned to her owners, providing they can be found and will admit to ownership. And if Captain Block had been more vigorous, the Rattle-Snake might be floating today. Not that I question Block’s conduct, mind ye, but pressing for Wickett’s promotion will give Congress the opportunity to ask some questions that ain’t none of their business.”
“But, sir! That ain’t fair to Peter.”
“Captain Wickett weren’t on deck when you took the Faucon. I’m sensible that it weren’t of his own volition, but he’s entirely recovered already, from what I hear. Recovered well enough to rerig her and the corvette and take ’em up to Charleston, anyway. You may not credit it, but that don’t look so good for him.” He held up his hand as I opened my mouth. “I don’t expect anyone ever told ye life was fair. And considering how your old man brought you up, I don’t see how ye
could expect it.”
“You must tell me about my father sometime, sir.” I looked out the stern windows at the Croatoan rolling along in line abaft. She hadn’t a mark on her, and Block had long since run up new topmasts. I studied the hills of Tortuga beyond her. I didn’t care what Columbus thought— that island didn’t look like a turtle any more than I did.
“I don’t think you grasp the delicacy of the situation, Mr. Graves. Personal considerations don’t enter into it, you hear me. It don’t matter a lick what you or me or Wickett wants. We’re in serious negotiations with the French, and I ain’t about to let a minor action that no one will ever hear about bugger it up.”
If no one ever heard about it, it would be because no one told them about it. I looked at my report on top of the neat stack of papers on Gaswell’s desk, and at Franklin’s report all done up tidy in red tape. They were both bound to get lost somewhere along the line, I’d bet on it.
“Someone’ll hear about it,” I said. “You can’t keep the Rattle-Snakes from talking.”
He wagged his head, more amused than angry. “I hope that ain’t a threat, Mr. Graves.”
“No, sir. Just an observation.”
He took off his spectacles and rubbed them with his shirttail. “Sure, they’ll talk. The whole Navy will know about it, and admire ye for your stoic attention to duty. It’ll pay off handsome, eventually, don’t ye worry about that. The Navy takes care of its own.” He stuck his specs back on his nose. “More important to you, I take care of my own. Don’t you never forget that.”
“No, sir. I won’t. But I was thinking.”
He grunted. “An admirable thing, in moderation.”
I looked at his uniform hanging beside his chair, at the beautifully brushed blue broadcloth and the shining gold lace and epaulets. If I had a uniform like that, I’d wear it every day, no matter how hot and steamy the weather. Ambrose had saved my second-best coat and my epaulet, and had made me a decent pair of slop trousers, but the rest of my uniform was a motley assortment that I’d begged and borrowed from the Columbia’s other lieutenants. Everything was oversized, third-best, unwanted, threadbare. “I was wondering about my mother.”
The War of Knives Page 31