“An’ that he is, sorry t’say, sor,” Desmond commiserated. “A grand feller Furfy is, a fast friend, but… nary th’ sort o’ man t’even sham clever.”
“You’ll look out for him special, Desmond,” Lewrie charged him. “Furfy is a good sailor, aye, and I’d hate to lose him or let him get in trouble if liquor frees his tongue, or ties it.”
“Oi’ll see to it, sor, swear it,” Desmond soberly vowed, though how “sober” he’d be himself within the hour was doubtful. Let sailors get at drink, and they’d be senseless, roaring drunk in a turn-about of your head! Faster than you could say “Luff”!
“I knew I could count on you, Desmond,” Lewrie had replied, not quite relieved, but close. “You might keep the lads together, keep an eye and ear cocked to their doin’s, too, and not a word about Proteus or our mission. “Just enjoy the first day, and we’ll probe, later.”
“Ye kin count on me, sor,” Desmond had assured him, though all but dancing in place from one foot to t’other to be away and ashore in search of pleasures and deviltry.
Now, Lewrie was on his own. Pollock had quickly steered him to this pension, a place he’d obviously stayed before, for he was on good terms with the proprietor and his wife, then had nearly jog-trotted to his own lodgings—a much nicer place, Pollock smugly and thoughtlessly informed him, located in the middle of Rue Royale, ’twixt Ste. Anne and Rue Dumaine. Pollock said that they should breakfast together next morning at eight, that Lewrie (Willoughby, rather!) should not spread himself too widely on his own spree among the Creoles, and should keep a clear head. A caution (more than one!) to not go off half-cocked should he encounter Lanxade or Balfa straightaway; merely on their descriptions, he just might end up accosting the wrong man, do one of them in too publicly, even should he slit the throat of the right’un, and end up arrested; at which juncture, there’d be nothing Pollock or Panton, Leslie & Company could do for him but deny they’d ever heard of him, and wasn’t it such a shame for a new-minted American who’d come aboard their ship to go Lunatick and kill somebody, the damned rank stranger!
“Rest assured, Mister Willoughby,” Mr. Pollock confided, close to him and “chummy” enough for the passersby to witness, smiling wide as anything. But his cautions were muttered from the side of his mouth (and an unattractive sight that was for “Mr. Willoughby,” in truth!) so no passersby could actually eavesdrop. “I shall begin my own probes in the morning. Subtle, casual… nought that draws attention,” he said, as if despairing that Lewrie/Willoughby could do the same.
“New Orleans can be a delightful port of call,” Pollock said, practically dancing, like Liam Desmond, to be on his way. “There’s a cabaret not too far off, the Pigeon Coop? Many locals are regulars there. You may casually pick up an earful. Just don’t gamble with ’em! The games are all ‘crook.’ See you in the morning, ta!”
And with that, Lewrie was abandoned on his own. He re-entered his pension and clumped up the stairs to unpack. Once there, utterly alone, he wandered about the confines of his set of rooms, intently studied the wallpaper for a few minutes, and took a refreshing sundown, river-wind turn on his wrought-iron upper balcony. Oil or candle lanthorns were being lit in front of the many residences, even as those outside shops were being extinguished. Folk were strolling below him, softly speaking and chuckling at their ease in a rather pure Parisian French or in a mangled local patois that he suspected was Acadian. There now and then was even a snatch of lispy, high-born Castilian Spanish, along with another garbled version spoken by the poorer-dressed. Pollock had told him that the bulk of the Spanish in New Orleans were humbler peasant-raised Catalans. Some Portuguese, some German small-hold farmers from above New Orleans on the Côte des Allemands, even some Spanish Canary Islanders had settled in Louisiana, undoubtedly very desperate for land or a new beginning; or perhaps the Spanish authorities were desperate for settlers of any kind!
Dammit, I’m stuck in this dump! Lewrie groused to himself as he leaned on the railings, which gave out an ominous creaking. I’m famished, I’m badly in need o’ wine, and Pollock just up and leaves me t’rot, the hideous “ahemmin” bastard! What self-respectin’ spy’d leave me free t’blunder about without a minder or something? A bear-leader?
Looking back on his previous fumbling attempts at masquerading civilian and innocent, Lewrie ruefully realised that he’d been the sort who needed minding. Why, one could almost imagine that Pollock trusted him to acquit himself well on his own! Aye, did one have an optimistic bent and a very creative imagination! Perhaps it wasn’t neglect at all, but grudging respect that he’d survived those previous missions and had implicit faith that Lewrie could be circumspect enough to survive ’til morning! Had Mr. James Peel had a private word with Mr. Pollock and “buffed up” Lewrie’s dubious credentials to convince him to take him along?
Or, Lewrie glumly suspected, Pollock was simply too eager for a rencontre with his “shore wife”! The Captain and First Mate, on their passage to New Orleans, had discretely hinted that, no matter how prim and upright Mr. Pollock publicly presented himself, he was a mere mortal after all and had found himself a luscious “Bright” Free Black to warm his bed when in New Orleans; kept her in some style year-round at his permanent lodgings. Mr. Caldecott had even winked and alluded that Pollock might’ve succumbed to blind lust for an Octoroon female slave and had bought her for thousands, his usual parsimony bedamned!
Damme, am I scared t’go out on my own? Lewrie asked the new-lit stars above the streets; Mine arse on a band-box if I am! After all, I’m better armed than most Press gangs!
A succulent meal, even a Froggish “kickshaw,” a “made” dish in savoury, but suspect, foreign sauces, a bottle of wine or three, even an idle hour or two at the cabaret both Pollock and Ellison had named… then, as Benjamin Franklin had advised, “Early to bed, early to rise.” Hah!
How much trouble could I get into in that short o’time? Lewrie asked himself as he went back inside for his hat, coat, and cane.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Le Pigeonnier held another whole new set of scents that would’ve entranced Toulon and Chalky for a day or more. The acrid smell of hot tobacco leaf and the head-high pall of smoke from it; the wet reek of chewing tobacco and ejecta in the metal spit-kids along the long bar and spaced conveniently round the club’s stygian interior. More hot smells from candles with badly trimmed wicks, beeswax, cheap tallow, or frontier rush dips. There was the faint aroma of bad breath and wine-breath combined, of elegant clothing too long unwashed, bodies that suffered from the same benign neglect, the slightest tinge from a hastily rejected supper spewed up somewhere in the cabaret and slovenly swabbed at; the reek that arose from the back of the club and wafted through the opened rear doors from the outdoor toilets. Hungary Water and cologne, mostly sweet and flowery, tried to mask human stink, but they could only do so much.
And there was the enticing odour of drink: the musk-sweetness of wine, the sweet tang of rum, the even more noticeable but mellower scent of aged brandy, or corn whisky down from the hinterlands. The ice-pinchy smell of juniper berry gin, the yeasty sourness of a variety of beers or ales… though it was a long way from English porters, stouts, and malts, and Lewrie had never heard a good word said for Spanish or French brews.
Here and there, in pools of somewhat honest light, dice rattled in leather cups and clattered on tabletops. In others, men, even a few bawdily gowned women, hunched over cards. “Van John” to the English, or Vingt-et-Un to the Frogs, was being played. Some jostled and perspired round a Pharoah table or a numbered wheel Lewrie supposed was a roulette game. He caught a few words here and there, enough to inform him that most cardplayers played Piquet, a popular local game called Bouré, or an American game of incomprehensible nature; it sounded like it was called Poke Her.
“M’sieur?” a bartender asked from the other side of a long oak counter.
“Ah… let me have a whisky,” Lewrie decided, having grown more than fond of the American decoction. “
The aged corn whisky, not that watery-lookin’ poison.” He’d been warned off that last year!
“L’Américain,” the servitor said with a faint sneer as he got up a stone gallon crock, removed the stopper, and poured a small glass half full, stating its price as twenty pesetas, in a tone that accused Lewrie of having no palate, no class, and no business in a real Creole establishment. Even tossing the man a silver British crown made no impression on the publican’s hauteur.
The custom of the house was to elbow up along the counter, rest a foot on a wood rail, and drink standing up. Were one sitting, then one was mostly gambling; Lewrie only saw a few seated patrons risking the house cuisine. At some tables, mostly far in back, Lewrie could espy people hunched over their glasses and muttering conspiratorily with each other. To his mind it looked as if they were conspiring… greasy leers, rubbed “money” fingers, Gallic shrugs, and stony glares.
Christ, they all look like well-paid pirates! Lewrie goggled.
At some tables, though, it was men and women draped upon each other in the dim candlelight. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the gloom, Lewrie took note of scantily clad young women in morning gowns and sheer dressing robes traipsing up the stairs to the upper storey on the arms of jaunty, eager men, whilst others clumped downwards almost alone, trailed by jaded and spent patrons who barely held hands with them, the women’s hard eyes already prowling for the next client.
It took Lewrie a long minute or so to unmoor his gaze from the whores; it had been rather a long while since he’d had a free moment for “doing the needful,” and some of them were more than handsome. He all but shook himself from the idea; there was work to do! He scanned the vast, dim room’s expanse, recalling his crewmen’s—and Mr. Pollock’s—descriptions of Lanxade or Balfa. But after ten minutes he had to admit to himself that those cut-throats weren’t present. He looked the room over again to see if there was a single soul he knew. But none of his hands were in the Pigeon Coop, nor could he spot sailors off Pollock’s ship; obviously, this cabaret was too high-toned for the common tars.
He did think he saw one of the Azucena del Oeste’s mates trotting up the stairs past the music gallery on a whore’s arm, but he wasn’t so sure he’d wager on it.
A fetchin’ whore, he has, Lewrie decided to himself, noting that his glass was empty, of a sudden, and turning belly-first to the bar to whistle up the serving man for a refill. In the private screen of his coat-tails, he felt a tightening in his groin, a pinching from the fork of his tight trousers’ crutch as his lubricious nature awakened.
Glass topped up, Lewrie turned back to face the room just as a nigh nakedly “dressed” Mulatto demimonde came slithering by, her arm brushing men’s fundaments or thighs, “all quite by accident.” He gawped, gulped, looking at the size and springy rounded shape of her “poonts,” exchanged a brief, red-faced smile… before a patron down the counter looped an arm round her waist, drew her to him, and gnawed at her bare neck like a long-lost lover. Off they went up the stairs.
“Lubricious Nature” began to whisper, which awoke his old companion, “Amatory Fever,” who began to gibber, leer, and cajole…
Damme, I’m tryin’ t’spy here! Lewrie pointed out to his groin.
It was a forlorn hope, though, any continued “spying.” On both sides of him, it was all elbows and shoulders, troops of foreigners in full cry in alien tongues, and the local French patois was so nasally “hawn-hawn” and rapid he could barely make out one word in four, those mostly harmless and plebeian. He was being jostled at the bar, just a whisker short of intentional insult for an English gentleman, who held a larger personal space than most. Even the music played by a string trio from the old-style gallery irritated him, a jiggery-pokery of gay but jangly airs … when not some mournful dirges, half-Spanish, half-Moorishly minor keyed.
He thought of crying off and heading home to bed, but surely! His first night ashore in untold months, out of uniform and anonymous, in a port town as sinful as Old Port Royal on Jamaica. How dull it’d be to wash out his stockings and underdrawers alone, yet…
The press at the counter got to him. He scooped up his change, wafer-thin foreign “tin,” felt to see if he still had his coin-purse, then began to wander the main room.
“Mon Dieu, Jean!” Hippolyte whispered maliciously. “Where did he get such a tawdry ensemble? That fellow there in the wide hat?”
“Why is he walking so oddly… all hunched over?” Helio asked.
“An Américain clown,” Jean-Marie Rancour dismissed. “Back to what we are discussing… We know M’sieur Bistineau cheats us. Why does he get five percent off the top, when I’ve heard that criminals who deal in stolen goods pay the thieves first to get them. Lanxade said it’s his normal cost of doing business,” Jean insisted in a hot mutter, both elbows on the table round a wineglass, “And how do we know we can trust Henri Maurepas, either, if he misreports on—”
“Papa trusts him implicitly, Jean,” Helio declared. “Not once has he ever doubted him. He manages all our affairs. Papa knows …”
“Papa knows how to spend, cher brother,” Charité impatiently countered. “He has no real head for the intricacies of business. It is beneath true gentlemen. Of course, M’sieur Bistineau is cheating us, and there is little we, or old Henri Maurepas, can do about it… so long as Bistineau is the only trader who’ll accept our goods, dare to have them in his store. Later on, well…”
“Later on, perhaps we’ll confront Monsieur Bistineau with steel,” Helio, as the eldest, announced. “His son Claude will inherit. Isn’t Claude one of us, the one who presented the scheme to his father, out of patriotism? Perhaps we should talk to Claude…”
“He is the only outlet,” Hippolyte grumbled, turning his glass round and round. “If not the Bistineaus, I can’t think of another of French blood who’d be bold enough. All the rest who could handle our goods are Americans these days, anyway,” he glumly stated.
“Mon Dieu, business, business, business!” Charité exasperatedly complained. “We are here to celebrate, n’est-ce pas? Our cause gains cash, it advances… We have hurt and frightened our Spanish masters. And… we have money to spend… like sailors.” She twinkled to buck them up. “Like buccaneers of the grand old days. A votre santé!” she gaily proposed, raising her champagne glass.
Charité de Guilleri had enjoyed the freedom of movement that a buccaneering costume had given her on their first raiding cruise, and even before that she’d found it extremely droll to go out at night in the company of her brothers, or other sporting young males of her set, disguised as a man who could witness the games, pleasures, and amusing places that men could enjoy, whilst “proper” young ladies were forced to sit at home… to hear the curses and uproariously funny and lewd stories and jests that a staid husband would never bring home to a genteelly sheltered wife after a night out with his contemporaries.
Tonight, Charité wore a silk shirt with a stylish broad cravat, a snugly tailored waist-coat over that, and a man’s wide-lapeled, nip-waisted coat, unbuttoned and loose enough to disguise her breasts. A pair of fawn-coloured trousers, snug as a second skin, and riding boots, covered her legs. Her long chestnut hair was pinned up high and concealed beneath a tapered-crown tall hat that was forced to ride far back on her forehead, as if cocked in a saucy, devil-may-care manner. And, like her brothers, or any New Orleans “gentleman,” Charité bore a small pocket pistol in her coat, a pencil-thin dagger in a hidden sheath up her left sleeve, and a gilt-handled sword-cane behind her chair.
To help her disguise along, she had fashioned a narrow mustachio from gauze and her own hair clippings, attached to her upper lip by paste. Admittedly, it required a lot of fiddling to assure her that it wasn’t coming loose, and it didn’t take well to wine or brandy, but the surprise she elicited with it had been amusing.
Should Papa or Maman, any of her respectable family, ever learn that she went out without a female chaperone or body slave… that she went out after dark, and to such l
ow dives as the Pigeon Coop, dressed as a man especially, well! Charité would end up on one of their isolated, dreary swamp plantations, and it could be a year or longer être dans la merde—”Up Shit’s Creek”—before they relented!
Nor would it help for them to learn that Charité long ago had become “tarnished treasure”; that she had surrendered the particular commodity that fetched a high bride price. Charité wasn’t sure which would shame her family more: to be caught in her disguise as a “false, de-sexed” carouser, to have squandered her precious virginity, or to be tried and executed by the Spaniards as a dangerous revolutionary pirate!
Each, though, all of it together, made Life so piquantly exciting. “Down with your tired old conventions and morals!” was, in her mind, as revolutionary a slogan as “Down with Tyrants and Aristos” in the Place de Bastille.
It was thrilling to be, to act, so Modern!
“Look!” Helio said of a sudden as the tawdrily garbed stranger wandered over to a nearby gaming table. “Your gaudy fellow, Hippolyte… See that scar on his cheek? Our slave Aristotle said the man who leads the bruisers off the Panton, Leslie ship, the one he heard them calling ‘Capitaine,’ has such a scar. He is fairer-haired than that Américain, that El… El-isson. I think it’s the same man!”
“Why is he walking that way?” Charité wondered, snickering.
“Too-tight trousers,” Helio sneered. “Cheap, ready-made.”
“A stiff-leg sailor.” Hippolyte tittered.
“Ah, but which leg, mes amis?” Cousin Jean-Marie giggled. “Is he a sailor, he’s one en rut, hee hee!”
“Zut, Jean!” Helio chid him. “Our sister is present!”
“Your sister is not here, tonight, mes frères,” Charité pointed out. “I am Armand, comprende?” She leaned back in her chair, one arm slung over its back in studiedly “male” fashion, appraising their potentially worrisome stranger over the rim of her champagne glass with her eyes half-lidded. “Mmmm… the scar makes him look… dashing. Very intriguing. Almost handsome,” she cooed, half to herself. Then she abandoned her male pose to whirl and chirp girlishly at her tablemates. “We must talk to him, one of us! Get him to drink with us… tell him some jokes or something. Get him drunk and sound him out to see who, and what, he is … see if he is trouble.”
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