“Take aim… fire!”
Atop their earthen mound, the first crackle of musketry snapped the de Guilleris from their rough beds as if a bolt of lightning struck the hillock, all sudden blue-white light, sizzle, and thunder crack! Hippolyte and Helio, sharing a lean-to, both sat up quickly, gasping as if throwing off a shared and terrifying nightmare, cracking heads on the bound-together saplings in a flurry of arms and legs and thrashing blankets, their eyes blared owl-wide in alarm. They were bootless and coatless, their weapons laid handily aside, but for long moments, any thought of dressing or arming themselves was lost in shaky fumblings as they tangled with each other … even as a second harsh volley rattled out, and shouts and screams assailed their ears. Hippolyte crawled to the open end of the lean-to and began to stand with a boot in hand, hopping as he raised his foot to draw it on, but the humming of musket balls past his head, and his older brother’s sweeping arm, threw him flat.
“Keep down!” Helio growled in his ear. Regaining his wits faster than Hippolyte, Helio groped for his boots, writhed on his side to don them, then belly-crawled on his elbows and knees for his weapons.
“Rubio! Jean!” Helio yelled.
“We’re with you!” Don Rubio shouted back, from behind the lean-to he shared with Jean-Marie Rancour. Both had slithered out to hide behind its insubstantial shelter, dragging boots, clothes, and rifled muskets with them. “Charité? Stay down, chérie. We’ll deal with it!”
Don Rubio stomped into his boots and fastened his sword about his waist. He clapped his egret-plumed wide hat on his head, flung up the tarpaulin that had covered the lean-to, and reached between the saplings for his pistols to jam into his waistband, then warily stood up, hands working the complicated mechanism of his Girandoni air-rifle. A fresh air-flask buttstock had to be screwed on, the magazine under the barrel topped off with lead balls.
“Mon Dieu, merde alors!” Jean-Marie quavered as he gathered up his clothes and guns, hands visibly shaking and his white face pinched. “Who is it, Rubio, what’s happening?”
Don Rubio Monaster didn’t answer him. The son of a pure-blooded Spanish hidalgo, a genuine Creole, did not panic, as that weak-kneed Rancour boy did. He was born to command, born to lead lesser people!
His eyes did widen in shock, though, much as Jean-Marie’s did, to witness the camp and its doings. Their bold pirates, the hangers-on, and the whores were dashing about like witless chickens, scrabbling in their bedding for their portable loot or their weapons, crying aloud in chaos, and not knowing which way to stumble! They swarmed as unknowing as bees from a hive that someone had shot from long-distance, wheeling and darting ready for vengeance, but unable to discover where the shooter was.
“There! At the shell mounds!” Don Rubio cried, pleased that he could keep his head, feeling that he was as sanguine as a professional soldier to react so quickly and so well. “Jean, your rifle, quickly. Helio, Hippolyte! The shell mounds! Shoot at them!” Another volley was fired from the shell heaps, the powder smoke almost hiding a ragged double line of men dressed like sailors!
“Garde vous, mes braves!” Rubio bellowed down to their sailors. “There is the enemy, in the oyster piles! To arms, I tell you, and fight them!”
On the next mound east, where some sentries had been posted, he saw from the corner of his eye a buccaneer or two raise their muskets and shoot back, which cheered him greatly. A second later, there was a lone cracking discharge, and one of the sentries screamed as he was struck in the forehead, his skull and brains erupting in a gory spray behind him before he tumbled back on his heels, arms and legs spread as if he was crucified. Don Rubio spotted the shooter atop one of the higher shell heaps, a soldier in a red coat, white cross-belts, white breeches, and knee-high spatterdashes, with a white-laced tall hat upon his head. He wasn’t from any Spanish regiment Don Rubio had ever seen, but he raised his air-rifle, took careful aim, and fired as the soldier laboured to ram a ball down the muzzle of his weapon.
“Damn!” he swore as his shot merely clipped the man’s hat, making him jump back in alarm and slide-tumble down the far slope of the mound. Don Rubio cranked another ball into the firing chamber and recocked his rifle, hearing a faint hiss as he did so, as the demand valve opened. The gun smoke was thinning, as was the mist, and he shot at another red-coated soldier standing behind a waist-high slumped heap of shells. This one he struck, with a feral whoop of joy as he cheered his own skill, though the air-rifle still was shooting high… as it had when he’d tried to kill that damned Anglais, Willoughby, in New Orleans! His target flung a hand to his breast and dropped like a stone!
Don Rubio heard the cracks of other air-rifles firing near him as Helio and Hippolyte finally got into action. By his right side, he heard another crack as Jean-Marie summoned up his nerves and entered the fray, shrilling thinly as he saw one his shots kill a sailor, too!
“Stay down, Charité!” Helio was yelping. “Go down the back of the mound and get to the beach. Get aboard the schooner!”
There came another murdering volley from the red-coat soldiers, scything down a few more witless buccaneers in the camp, forcing those with guns or cutlasses in their hands to duck and slink backwards, in the direction of the beach and the grounded boats. Rubio noted that some of them were starting to form up and return fire.
There was another belated crack, then the mallet thuds of balls striking flesh, and Jean-Marie’s left hand was clawing at the sleeve of his shirt as he sank to his knees with a look of utter astonishment on his face, his mouth opening and closing like a boated fish. A moment later, and there was a flood of bright blood spilling from his mouth, down the front of his fine white shirt!
“Jean! Poor Jean. Oh no!” Charité wailed, standing in the open with her hands to her mouth.
Another of those damned red-coat men atop a shell heap! Rubio saw him lowering his weapon to reload it and knew that this marksman was Jean’s slayer. Aiming at his waist this time, Rubio fired at him and saw the bastard spin around and stumble, dropping his weapon as he pitched forward and slid down the face of the mound in an avalanche of old shells. “Got him, aha! Charité, get down! We men will fight them for you!” he shouted to her, plastering a bold, confident, dangerous smile on his face for her benefit.
“Marines will… advance!” they all heard a powerful voice cry. “Poise muskets, and for-ward… march!”
“Oh, hell!” another, deeper voice was bellowing. “Proteuses… cutlasses and bayonets, and… charge!”
“English!” Helio spat. “They’re Anglais, the ‘Bloodies’!”
“The Anglais?” Hippolyte gawped. “Run, little sister. Run for your life! Get aboard the schooner, now!”
“Up here, you men!” Don Rubio shouted, waving his arms to catch their buccaneers’ attention. “Get on the mounds and we’ll shoot down at them. Hold the mounds! Kill the cochons! “
He had heard somewhere that the high ground was preferable in a real battle. Helio came round him to his right-hand side and looked down at his cousin, Jean-Marie Rancour, but that unfortunate youngster had already died, his lungs and mouth filled with blood, and his eyes already glazing over.
“His rifle,” Rubio Monaster callously snapped between shots as a dauntingly long line of Britishers tramped over the oyster heaps and slithered down the front faces, whilst the Anglais dressed as sailors came swarming more quickly from the flank, cutlasses waving aloft, in full, bloodthirsty cry. “His four pistols, Helio. Use them!”
“Damn you, Rubio, Jean was just a …” Helio de Guilleri swore as he dashed tears from his eyes with his shirt sleeves, but gathered up the pistols and the air-rifle as directed. Hippolyte, still crouching by the lean-to, was already firing his Girandoni, fast as he could aim, pull the trigger, and crank, and Helio could see that his shots were telling, so he knelt and began to shoot as well.
The Anglais quickly took half a dozen casualties, dropped right at their feet. They stumbled as they tried to step over the bodies, and their ragged charge a
ll but skidded to a halt. Pirates were clambering up atop the mounds, walking backwards as they loaded, primed and fired right in the Englishmen’s dirty faces.
Charité had not obeyed them but had snatched up Helio’s rifle, and was inexpertly, clumsily working its action to fire a few rounds of her own, making Helio and Hippolyte shake their heads at each other at her foolishness… sadly proud of her all the same.
“First rank… take aim! Clear them off the mounds! Fire!”
“Those bastards!” a blue-uniformed naval officer was bellowing down below them, waving his sword in the air and pointing with a pistol in his other hand. “Shoot those bastards, lads! Kill ’em dead!”
The volleys stuttered out, loud and deep-toned, and buccaneers on the forward slopes went tumbling in heaps. Their hands on the east mound were completely scythed away, and another young man with a sword in a blue coat shrilly led an impromptu charge to its top. Their few men who had rallied below the centre mound, where the de Guilleris and Don Rubio fought, were shot down, or broke and ran round its edges for the beach.
“Run, Charité, run!” Helio ordered her again, even as musket balls whined about them like deadly bumblebees.
“Second rank… the centre mound! Take aim… fire!”
Stunned by the suddenness of the deaths below her, Charité at last came to her senses. She went as pale as milk, might have fainted if she’d waited a second longer to flee, but managed to turn round as quick as a spider and scramble on her hands and knees to the back of their mound and slide down the far side on the seat of her breeches, a hand still gripped white-knuckled on the barrel of her air-rifle. Her pinned-up long hair had come undone, and she instinctively reached up to let it spill, praying a silent prayer for poor Jean-Marie; praying, too, that the “Bloodies” wouldn’t shoot a woman, a girl so pretty!
She felt her lips begin to tremble, her teeth chatter uncontrollably, and tears stung her eyes. Sobs arose from the wrenching tautness in her chest. She got to her feet at the foot of the mound, her legs feeling juddery and weak, her feet oddly disembodied as she tried to run to find a boat.
“Mademoiselle!” Boudreaux Balfa’s son, Fusilier, dashed up, in company with another young lad off Le Revenant. Both were armed, and Charité was glad for their company.
“Damn you all! Come back here!” the other youngster yelled at the few boats still in sight, Those who could had scrambled into any slight hull that would float and were fleeing northward, dangerously overloaded in most cases. There wasn’t a single pirogue left, as far as they could see along the shore! “A boat! Where’s a boat?”
“We must swim out, mademoiselle!” Fusilier said, trying to be calm and brave but almost shivering with fear. “Get aboard our ship and sail out of here.”
“No, we won’t,” Jean, the other lad, dispiritedly growled, and pointed to the large shalope not a quarter-mile off from Le Revenant and their prize and stalking up slowly but remorselessly, a British Navy ensign atop her main-mast.
“We must swim, or die,” Charité determined. “Somewhere we’ll find someone to pick us up.”
“Papa will come for us,” Fusilier added, perked up considerably. “He must!”
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
Half a point more to windward, Jugg,” Lewrie snapped, his eyes fixed upon the black-hulled schooner. As they neared her, she turned from a dark smear in the fog to a substantial and detailed fact. He could hear firing off the larboard bows, coming almost abeam now; distinguishable pops of single muskets, the sharper crack of his Marine’s Pennsylvania rifles, now and then the collective Chuff! of a volley fired all at once. They were late, the wind was perverse and fickle, his landing party might be getting knackered, and his shalope was closing too slowly to overwhelm the pirate schooner. He had no need for a telescope to see her crew scurrying to prepare to fight. She had been bows-on when they could first make her out through a thin patch of fog but was now slowly swinging to bare her starboard side, her blood-red gunwale stripe oddly bright and ominous as they let out on her kedge cable and hauled in on the spring-line on her bow cable. Lewrie could see a flamboyantly garbed figure on her quarterdeck, waving his arms and shouting.
“’At ’d be Jérôme Lanxade, sor,” Jugg grimly informed him,” ’at pea-cocky one, yonder. Allus woz a flash bugger.”
Six gun-ports each side, my survivors said, Lewrie speculated; four-pounders or six-pounders, mixed perhaps. Our battery, God, what a joke! They had swivels and boat-guns, so short-ranged they couldn’t use them ’til they were close-aboard, would have to eat one or two of Lanxade’s broadsides before getting that close. He’d try to be stoic, in the best Royal Navy traditions, but the odds didn’t look good!
Steer for her bows, lock bowsprits, and board her up forrud? he feverishly schemed; Haul off and cross her stern might work, too, if there’s depth enough. Mr. Pollock’s borrowed shalope only drew eight feet, slightly less without a cargo. Yet if they ran aground short of the schooner, it would mean the death of them all; if they crossed her stern so slowly that they caromed off her kedge cable, they’d be just as helpless, could end up stranded close to the beach, drifting to ruin, whilst the schooner cut her cables and escaped!
And there was still no sign of Proteus!
“Ship burning beyond her, sir!” Midshipman Larkin cried.
“They did take a prize!” Lewrie exclaimed, finally reaching for his telescope. “Damme, they’ve fired her!”
“With all the silver aboard her, sir?” Young Mr. Larkin yelped.
“Sonsabitches,” Lewrie gravelled, outraged that all this might be for nought, beyond justice, of course… and vengeance.
He lowered his telescope, lips gloomily pursed. That schooner beyond the black-hulled one was ablaze from end to end, wren-or mouse-sized flames scuttling along every inch of her standing or running rigging, and great clouds of smoke beginning to belch from open hatches.
“Mister Larkin,” Lewrie stolidly ordered. “I’ll have all the swivel-guns shifted to starboard, along with the grappling hooks and throwing lines. We’ll board her starboard side to starboard side.”
“Oye oye, s—Aye aye, sir, mean t’say,” Mr. Larkin chirped. Whenever he was excited, which was rather often, the lad easily lapsed into a cottager’s brogue.
“Mister Jugg,” Lewrie said, rounding on him. “Pinch her up to weather, like we’d grapple to her bows. But at the last moment I want you to slew about and go alongside her near side. We’ll give ’em grape and langridge, point-blank, then board her.”
“Aye, sor,” Jugg said with a firm nod of understanding.
“Ah, sah?” Andrews whispered, plucking his attention back. “I think she’s openin’ her ports, sah, ready t’fire.”
“Nothing t’do but grin and bear it, hey?” Lewrie tried to jape.
“Good God A’mighty,” Andrews whispered.
Lewrie turned his attention back to the pirate schooner, just as the first of her guns exploded in a gush of powder smoke, a sharpish slamming noise, with the scream of solid shot coming…! Passing! Warbling off easterly, a clean miss!
“Bear up… bear up!” Lewrie snapped, pointing to the north. “Duck out of their aim, Jugg… thus!”
The schooner blotted herself out of existence as four more guns fired, making a dense, drifting wall of yellow-grey powder smoke along her engaged starboard side, sulfurous and reeking. Shot howled harpy-like, and a cannon ball nipped at their shalope’s larboard stern quarters, another slammed into her midships larboard bulwarks but caromed off after wrenching a large bite of timber from her with the parrot-screech of shattered wood. One screamed low over the deck, its unseen passage trailed by a tunnel of tortured air that shimmered like the uprush from a red-hot forge. The last was another clean miss!
As the spent powder smoke drifted southward, the schooner’s bow swam out of the newest mist; jib-boom and bowsprit, figurehead, beak, rails, and nettings…
“Helm hard up, now!” Lewrie rasped, coughing on the guns’ lees.
> Jugg put the tiller as far over to starboard as it would swing, his weight, and Dempsey’s weight, pressing on the bar, and the shalope began to turn.
“Stand by grapnels, Mister Larkin… stand by swivel-guns, at close range,” Lewrie called out. “Christ!”
There the schooner was, her upper railings just a foot higher than the shalope’s deck, her glossy black hull shining like a fresh-groomed stallion, so close Lewrie could almost call it spitting distance. Their shalope’s thrusting jib-boom looked like it would jam right into the schooner’s main-mast shrouds and pin her there helplessly, but after a long, pent breath, the jib-boom slid past by a cat’s whisker, and they were sidling up to her at an angle.
“Boat-guns, swivels, and muskets… fire as you bear!” Lewrie cried, drawing his hanger and a double-barrelled Manton pistol. His men opened fire, the light 2-pounders barking lap-dog sharp, chewing chunks from the schooner’s side without doing much real damage. The swivels, though, atop the cap-rail stanchions, spewed loads of musket and pistol balls nearly straight across her decks, reaping things… and people!
“Grapnels!” he snapped as their boat’s single mast came level with the schooner’s midships. The hooks flew, scraped, and found purchase, and muscle power on the heaving lines hauled their lighter vessel alongside, checking her way in a groaning instant. Their bow met the schooner, bumping and rasping, the stern began to swing in snugly, and there were more bumps and thuds.
All the while, Lewrie, with nothing physical to do, stared with dread at those gaping gun-ports, just waiting for them to be filled by reloaded cannon, for them to spew grape and langridge and murder every man in his crew, yet…
“Boarders!” he almost screamed at last! “Away, boarders!”
The Captain's Vengeance Page 36