“We’re too few to attack that.” Capt, Nicely sighed. “If it is manned, our villains are alerted. Might there be a way around?”
“No time for that, sir,” Lt. Devereux said with a hitch to his voice and a fatalistic shrug. He began to strip off his red coat and bright brass gorget, unwind his scarlet officer’s sash, and discard his sword baldric with its rectangular brass plate, removing his sword from the frog and holding it scabbarded in his left hand. “You gentlemen will excuse me for a few minutes, sirs?”
Devereux crouched down and warily sneaked from one large tree to the next ’til he’d reached the scrub, his spotless white shirt and breeches melding into the mists, hoping that he was mostly invisible, briefly praying that no marksman or sentinel behind the forbidding wall had already taken aim at him.
“Sweet Jesus,” Devereux whispered as he steeled himself, then rose to a half crouch and sprinted to the cover of a clump of bushes. Halfway there! Dry-mouthed, panting, fear-sweat popping on his skin, he scanned the wall for danger. It was one thing for him to stand by his men and order volleys. He stood the same odds as a private facing enemy fire then, but this!
There was more sand than grass near the foot of the irregular, rough-surfaced impediment… as if a lane had been cleared. Nearer-to, it didn’t exactly look intentional, its forward slope too gentle to impede a determined infantryman. So what…? Sprint again!
He crunched to the base of the wall, gasping like a hound, fears gibbering at his brain, his nerves twanging like harpsichord strings, chest upon its lumpy, irregular roughness as he tried to quiet the bellow’s roar that came from his own frankly scared breathing, wanting to shush noises that his slightest movement made, the hollow tinkling and gravelly—
What the bloody Hell?
His left hand came up from his sword hilt to take up a palm full of loose, broken, sharp-edged but weathered shells! Clam and mussel, larger sun-bleached oyster shells. The smaller shells he rolled in his hand like dice before very quietly putting them back in place. Fighting to contain his giggles, he crept to his left under one of the high heaps ’til he reached a low saddle between mounds, peeked cautiously over it, and felt another giggling fit swell up, which he quickly stifled, then got to the business of reconnaissance, wishing he’d thought to fetch away pencil and paper.
It wasn’t a wall at all! Lt. Devereux silently exulted; just a garbage midden! The sleeping pirates’ camp was just the other side of it, stretching perhaps fifty or sixty yards along the far shore, under the looming bulk of a series of odd flat-topped earth mounds, and them sloped so gently that he could almost mistake them for natural rises. The shoreline wasn’t an hundred yards further north, with boats drawn up on the beach. Two schooners could almost be made out in the mists, anchored perhaps two hundred yards from the beach in deeper water, a black-hulled, red-striped schooner and another. Lt. Devereux despaired that he’d left his short pocket telescope in his coat. After a long few minutes of observation, he crept back beneath the cover of a high point in the mounds, steeled himself once more for the unseen sentry’s musket, then dashed back to rejoin his fellow officers.
“Well, damn my eyes!” Capt. Nicely gasped when told the nature of that forbidding “fort.”
“Allow me to suggest, sir, that we bring our men up to the foot of the shell heaps,” Lt. Devereux said as he donned his uniform again. “Load muskets and pistols, my men to fix bayonets as well, then wait for our ships’ arrival. Once the camp’s well stirred to confront that threat, would be the ideal time to strike right to the beach, cut right through their camp and take possession of the earthen mounds, so our musketry has the only high ground, forcing the pirates to clamber up in the face of our cutlasses, bayonets, and muzzles, sir.”
“Damme, I like it, Lieutenant Devereux!” Capt. Nicely chirped, suddenly reinfused with pep and vinegar. “Like it, indeed, hah hah! And two schooners, did ye say, sir? A prize they’ve taken, or …”
“One flies what looks to be a French Tricolour, sir. T’other has no flag aloft,” Devereux replied as he hung his rank gorget about his neck once more and clapped on his cocked hat, taking time to set it in the regulation manner. “Though the wind is limp, sir.”
“Harbour Watch aboard ’em?” Nicely pressed.
“Couldn’t tell, sir,” Devereux said with a wry grin as he took his telescope from a side pocket of his coat. “I quite forgot to put this in my waistband, so…”
“Then let’s be up against your heaps, sir, and I’ll squint at ’em myself!” Capt. Nicely cheerfully, eagerly declared.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Capitaine Jérôme Lanxade has slept aboard the pirate schooner, avoiding his soon-to-be-disappointed and angry sailors as long as he could, savouring the safe privacy of her master’s quarters. Lanxade had slept alone too. None of the churlish drabs who had flocked to their camp had caught his eye. Besides, with so much loot soon to be his, he could afford to be picky. In New Orleans, where he would soon close out his accounts and pack up his valuables, there were at least a round dozen young courtesans, or bored and “sporting” wives of his acquaintance, some “obliging” young unmarried girls who’d be glad to give him a rousing send-off on his “honourable retirement” across the sea to “parts unknown.” The sorts who didn’t laugh when he took off his finery and revealed his taut-laced corset!
A shambling steward fetched him a silver pot of hot café noir, and he sipped from an ornate Meissen china cup and saucer as he shaved himself–never trust unruly pirates with razors to do it!—and combed in fresh hair dye, then pomade, through his thinning locks, daubing new wax on his pointy mustachios and twirling them stiffly horizontal.
He then shucked his silk dressing gown and donned his constricting “appliance.” Jérôme Lanxade never let a steward or body slave do it for him; that felt demeaning, making “Le Féroce” an object of fun, not fear! He laced it as tight as it could go, going almost purple in the face before he drew on his snug breeches and buttoned them up.
Capt. Lanxade heaved a worrisome sigh, then, fully dressed at last, went out on deck for a welcome breath of fresh but moist, mist-laden air, the dawn’s first cigaro alit in one hand and a fresh cup of bracingly strong coffee in the other. He scowled at the beach, at the sleeping camp, and was satisfied that most of their henchmen would be weeping with hangovers, too fuddled to think straight when he and Boudreaux Balfa broke their sad news. Most of the scows and pirogues were gone. The honest backcountry folk had packed up and left once they’d sold their last goods. In the wee hours of a pirates’ celebration, it was dangerous to linger too long among the red-eyed murderous!
Lanxade looked over at their prize schooner. There stood old Boudreaux himself, just arisen and yawning like a shambling swamp bear, stretching to get the kinks out, scratching his hide and even grating his back against the schooner’s main-mast!
Lanxade rehearsed his plan for betraying the youngsters in his mind once more, once the hands were hot and outraged, as he would make them. Bind them all first, then do the reduced share-out, then offer the ships to the un-likeliest, most despised mate among them, setting them to fighting among themselves whilst he and Boudreaux made their getaway cross the bay and into the bayous—without getting savaged like sick sharks by the rest of the pack and torn to bloody gobbets! What happened to the de Guilleri men, their whey-faced cousin, or that arrogant peacock half-dago afterward was of no matter to him, though, he doubted the men would kill Charité to ensure her silence. She was too well liked. They might turn her loose eventually, Lanxade imagined, send her back to New Orleans after they sailed under their new leader, and there’d be nothing she could do about it—long after he had departed for safer climes, that was certain!
Oh, she might get “used,” of course, protected, then raped, by the strongest to emerge as capitaine. Jérôme even wished he could stay to rape her himself. After all her empty flirtations with him, Charité deserved a come-uppance, the “servicing” of a real man who knew …
“Eh!” a sailor up forward by the fuming galley funnel cried. He pointed over the bows, eastward towards the main channel. “A ship!”
“What?” Lanxade responded in a shocked screech, blanching with alarm. A drunken sailor roused himself in Lanxade’s way as he strode forward, got shoved to the rails, where he began to puke over-side.
“Strange ship!” the sailor up forrud added. “Guns run out!”
“To arms!” Lanxade bellowed, seizing the lanyard on the ship’s bell by the forecastle and clanging away with it. “All hands on deck! Dammit, dammit, wake up, you bastards! Up, and man the guns!”
He glowered at Boudreaux aboard the prize, was pleased to see him capering an alarm of his own among his few crewmen who had slept aboard her. The camp, though! Lanxade leaped to a swivel-gun by the starboard bow, jerked the tompion from its muzzle but found that no goose-quill fuse was handy, no slow-match burning, no tinder-box. He swung the light gun’s barrel skyward, stepped back, puffed on his cigaro to a red-hot tip, then stuck it against the touch-hole, hoping that a pricked cartridge bag had been left loaded.
Bang! A faint howl of musket or pistol balls shot into the air, and that stern, startling noise was enough to rouse the campsite, roust out the last pig-drunk heavy sleepers aboard Le Revenant.
“Nom d’un chien,” Lanxade angrily hissed as he saw to his own personal weapons. The strange vessel—a good-sized shalope—advanced on him, bows-on. “You Spanish dogs have bitten off more than you can swallow this time. We’ll show you what a real fight is!”
But, what was this? A stronger whiff of wind abeam the shalope flirted out her flag, and it wasn’t the crowned red-gold-red of Spain but the red, white, and blue crosses of …”The Anglais? The hellish Anglais?” Lanxade yelped in stupefaction, realising that that distant prize they’d taken off Dominica might have spelled their ruin! Vengeance had come upon them, with lit fuses and bared steel!
Small ship, though, Lanxade thought, imagining a small crew to put up against his cut-throat desperados. He might win after all!
Off the same American smuggling brig that had yielded Toby Jugg as a reluctant “volunteer” a year or so before, HMS Proteus had also garnered a dozen or so deadly-accurate Yankee-made Pennsylvania rifles, bound for rebel general Toussaint L’Ouverture and his officers on St. Domingue. Those that hadn’t ended up in the hands of Capt. Lewrie or the ship’s officers, Marine Lieutenant Blase Devereux had appropriated for his keenest marksmen when posted aloft in the fighting-tops. Picking off enemy officers might be deemed by some to be ungentlemanly or dishonourable, but Lt. Devereux was one, as was Captain Lewrie, who ascribed more to “All’s Fair in Love and War,” that Fair Fighting was for dim-witted fools.
“I believe they’re sufficiently stirred up and misdirected,” Lt. Devereux muttered, once he’d taken another peek over the top of a low spot in the shell midden, noting how those pirates able to rouse themselves and stand erect after their night’s excesses were all peering and gesticulating at the shalope’s approach from out of the mists. “Do you think, sir, that we should take advantage of their astonished condition… even if the Captain has yet to close with them?”
“I do believe we should, sir!” Captain Nicely was quick to say “Aye,” drawing his work-a-day smallsword from its plain black scabbard. “Up and at ’em, Mister Devereux… and God uphold the right!”
“Marines… shun!” Devereux bellowed. “Marksmen to the tops of the mounds! Rest… form line! Marines… level!”
Muskets came up to shoulders, the fixed bayonets wanly glittering in the misty dawn.
“Cock yer locks! Take careful aim… fire!” Devereux howled.
Barely thirty yards away, stunned, hungover pirates stumbled to their feet, not understanding the orders in English but knowing that danger was present. They came slithering out of their lean-tos, fighting bleariness and their encumbering blankets. Some saw the invaders, whose red coats, rarely worn aboard ship but for ceremonial duties and Harbour Watch, blossomed atop or behind the bleached shell hillocks as red as poppies… or blood. The buccaneers barely had time to blink or rub their disbelieving eyes, to shout a quick warning before those muskets barked and spat great spouts of powder smoke, before some much sharper cracks from rifles stunned their ears.
“Reload!” Devereux yelled. “Marksmen, look for ralliers!”
“Proteuses, up!” Lt. Catterall shouted in an irate steer’s roar, the leather-lunged sort of cry that could carry from the quarterdeck to the bowsprit in a full gale of wind. “Level! Take aim… fire!”
Catterall’s sailors, who far outnumbered the Marine complement, popped up from behind the shell mounds on either flank of the Marines, dressed in their usual slop-trousers, loose shirts, and tarred hats or head rags. Less used to musketry, or the rigid weapons drill of their compatriots, they were; but there were more of them, their targets were within a long pistol shot, and “Brown Bess” would not be denied.
Reeling, scurrying buccaneers were scythed down, at least ten by the Marines’ initial volley, perhaps another half dozen claimed by Proteus’s less-skillful sailors. A few cooks or vendors were killed or wounded, people who’d stayed to sleep off the night’s revels, The gape-mouthed nearly innocent who stood still too long, in the wrong place at the wrong time, fell howling beside the panicked bloody-handed guilty, while others spurred into witless flight amid scared buccaneers. A raddled and terrified whore or two, rushing from their borrowed beds, were gunned down as well. Massed volleys of musketry were as uncaring as clouds of grapeshot.
“Recover and reload!” Lt. Catterall roared, over his frights in the eerie forests and never happier than when challenged to mindless combat. He cocked his pistol’s lock, took a huntsman’s lead on a running pirate with a musket in his hands, fired, and whooped with joy to see him tumble over and sprawl, instantly lifeless.
“Pick your targets… make ’em count, lads! Take aim, and… fire!” Lt. Devereux commanded, sweeping his sword blade chopping down.
“Merde!” Boudreaux Balfa gawped at the first shots, eyes fixed on the approaching shalope with her gunports open. “Oh, merde! We be up ‘shit’s creek.’ Fusilier? Viens ici, son, come here, quick.”
“He’s not aboard,” Pierre La Fitte told him as he scrambled up from below-decks. “He and Jean went ashore… after you went to sleep.”
“What? I told him…!”
“They went to see the girls, get, ah …” Pierre confessed.
“Damn you! Damn your little brother, too! Fusilier get poxed, by damn I kill you both!” Balfa vowed. “We gonna lose de prize, maybe lose Le Revenant, we don’t act quick. Get de men together, take dem to Lanxade, so he can man de guns! I cut de cables, an’ let dis bitch go on de tide. Move, man! Vite, vite, allons!”
“I get my little brother,” Pierre objected. “The Spanish have us for certain. All we can do is run for it, And I won’t let those salauds hang him. I’m taking a boat for shore, then…” Pierre backed his decision with a hand about the hilt of a large dagger. “You can do what you like.”
“Mutinous dog!” Balfa sneered, spitting at the man’s feet. “Go, den! Run wit’ your tail ‘tween your legs, faithless son of a whore!”
Pierre was overside in a twinkling, paddling like mad in one of the hollow-log pirogues. Balfa shouted for his remaining sailors to go to Le Revenant and man the guns; he’d take care of their prize and all their silver. He’d be with them in a twinkling. Or… not.
That damned Pierre was right, things were all up with them, and it was time to obey the old maxim of sauve quie peut; run like hell and save what one could! Balfa ran forward and plucked a heavy boarding axe from the foremast arms chest. He stood, straddling the nine-inch anchor cable a moment later, and began to hack at it. It took only a few powerful strokes to part it, then leap out of the way as the last strands exploded apart, the inner end snapping inboard, and the bitter end slithering into the murky depths of the bay.
The Spanish schooner began to sidle sternwa
rd, driven by an incoming tide, began to make a slight leeway, even under bare poles, to the faint land breeze. Balfa ran aft and quickly did the same to the stern kedge-anchor cable, but realised that the prize would drift ’til she took the ground on Grand Terre, perhaps no more than two miles to the west. He’d have to burn her.
Bare feet thundering on the mid-ships companionway, Boudreaux Balfa dashed below and snatched a lit lanthorn from a hook set in one of the overhead deck beams. And, dire as things looked, he started to grin a sly little grin.
He and his Acadian friends and neighbours had gotten a bit more than carried away shifting coin kegs during the night, like they would when snacking on the peanuts their slaves insisted on growing. Greedy arms and hands had loaded hundreds of silver-filled barricos aboard a fleet of pirogues, flatboats, and luggers, leaving only half the 1,200 kegs that had been aboard. Six hundred thousand Spanish dollars!
“Spanish never know where it go,” Balfa mused, starting to titter and wheeze over his little geste. “Dem bébés and Jérôme never know, neither!”
By the light of the lanthorn in his meaty paw, Balfa lumbered all the way forward to the cable-tiers and the Spanish bosun’s stores. He ripped out fresh, resiny spare planking, rigging rope, loose oakum bales, and kegs of paint and linseed oil, and liberally sluiced down the cable-tiers and the decks. Another lanthorn hung overhead, but not for long. It was filled with whale oil, already hot and runny from being lit all night, and at once it made a dandy splash of fire.
Amidships, there were looted sea chests, hammocks and bed linen by the bale, too, and a second lanthorn set them alight quickly. Aft, the mates’ and captain’s quarters were full of papers and trash, with even more lanthorns available. His tortuous straw mattress, torn open and scattered, went up in a twinkling, and serve it right for his itches, by damn!
Balfa went over-side to larboard, what had been the dark, unlit side the night before, where a last little flatboat trailed from its painter at the foot of the main-mast chain platform. With two pistols in his belt, a dagger and cutlass on the boat’s sole, Balfa freed the boat and began to row round the schooner to go save his boy.
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