The Captain's Vengeance

by Dewey Lambdin

  Ghastly! Charité thought, shivering for real.

  “… not too far from Paris, really, to the west, I think.”

  Paris? Yes, Paris, too! She would finally see Paris!

  “… people of the strictest morals and rectitude…”

  Boring! Charité almost giggled aloud. She’d find a way to free herself!

  “… a sober example that might, in time, restore you to proper behaviour, near to one of Docteur ‘Robicheaux’s colleagues who will…”

  Doubt it! Charité almost whooped in wicked glee; not with the fabulous city of Paris but a hop, skip, and a jump away.

  “… do not mend your ways, Robicheaux’s colleague will indeed commit you, Charité…” Papa sternly warned her.

  “If you upset the Lemerciers in any way, you willful girl!” her mother threatened, and Charité’s galloping imaginings came to a hoof-skidding halt, making her cringe for real, and gulp. If she did anything to displease her dull-sounding relations, they’d have leave to sling her into the mad-house? Eu, merde!

  “We will, of course, provide you with a small remittance,” her calmer Papa explained. “A letter goes to them, explaining how you’ve been, ah… bereft and driven witless. That we wish them to spend no more on you, and kerb your former extravagance, too. Once assured that your mind is clearer, they might go so far as to introduce you to some local lads of modest but upright nature or, that failing, settle you in some genteel circumstances, as a housekeeper, or …”

  “We only wish the best for you, chérie,” Maman insincerely and over-sweetly assured her, ready to tear up over her youngest girl’s departure, her potentially lifelong absence.

  Marry a village dullard? A cobbler? Charité bleakly thought, cringing with revulsion; Be a housemaid, a matron’s… servant? Burp her infants and empty night-jars? Ugh!

  “I beg you, Maman,” Charité pleaded. “Must I really end…”

  “It is settled,” Papa snapped. “It is the only solution,” he concluded, once again badly mistaking her dread of dullity for dread of parting, her grimace of disgust at paid servitude or worse for the loss of her family’s love!

  Who are these people? Charité had to ask herself; Did I really ever know them? Paris, though!

  Once in France, did she dissemble well and play up humble, she could make her way to Paris, get her well-meaning relatives to show her the famous sights where the Revolution had taken place! Once there, she could ditch them long enough to seek out men in the Assembly or the Senate, even an august member of the powerful Directory! Press for Louisiana’s liberation, tell them what she’d done, had suffered, in the cause of Revolution and its worldwide spread. Some powerful man would sponsor her, surely, free her from the threat of commitment and the certain dullness of her rustic relatives! Who knew better than a Creole girl how to cajole, flirt, and beguile, after all? Choose well, and she might end up touted as a heroine of France herself, her story a cause célèbre, invited to the best salons!

  She would obey her parents… for a time. She would mind her behaviour aboard ship, and convince her docteur-minder that she was as sane as he, cruelly and unjustly exiled. She would convince her relations of it, too, force herself to be helpful, meekly obedient to their strictures, and sunnily sweet; once her grief had waned of course. Or would a lingering wan-ness suit better? No matter!

  She would win her freedom and get to Paris, where anything was possible; win support for her cause, for her upkeep. Even marry, if a powerful and clever man wished it. She would still give anything for Louisiana… and for France!

  Mrs. Tobias Hosier, Mrs. Toby Jugg, toiled her stony sugarcane field in the hot Barbadan sun, despairing that their poor plot seemed to produce more stones and weeds than cane stalks this season.

  Her hips and lower back ached from her hoeing and chopping, and perspiration soaked her entire body, her shabby work-gown. So it was with weary relief, as well as curiosity, that she observed the arrival of a rider at her tumbledown gate. He called her name and waved a letter in the air.

  She shambled back to the house and the yard-gate, fetching Tess from watching the baby on the shabby quilt, swabbing her face and arms on her apron as she accepted the rare letter with a surge of hope that Toby might have included a quarterly draught on his Navy pay, for they might not be able to settle their rent and store bills by Quarter Day, and the next Assizes.

  She dipped the post-rider a grateful curtsy, then went back to the porch gallery, out of the unmerciful sun, to sit down and read it.

  “Lord above, wot’ve ye done this time, lad?” she whispered as she saw that it was addressed from “Patrick Warder,” from someplace in Spanish Louisiana!

  Deerest Bess

  I hev run from the Navy pet & not intire my idee I sware. I run with much Monie tho & hev got us 1,200 akers in Lueeziana up the Missippi river neer Batton Rooj with plentie left for fine house slaves stock & seed & itt is rich fine land will gro anything ha ha.

  Itt is wild cuntry beginning but ful of Promiss We will hev vary few Spanyerds butt manie Americans for neybors English-spekers tho few good Catholics. We all start with nuthing but will be grand as lords & landed gentry sumday, sware it.

  Bess sell all & keep little wot you traysure & take Yankee ship too New Orlins & I will mete you & dres you fine as a title ladie. Ask of me & call self Mrst. Patrick Warder. Kiss the babes for me & say we will see eech other soon & be happy evermore in Americay. A kiss from me to you & git here soon. P.S. Be shur to fetch along my gud luck Toby Jug. Your luving husbund, ritten at Warderlands Plantayshun.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  Ow!” Capt. Alan Lewrie carped as Surgeon’s Mate Maurice Durant cinched his bindings tighter. “So snug I can’t draw a decent breath!”

  “So they will be, Captain,” his French-born former physician told him with a sad chuckle as Aspinall helped Lewrie don a new shirt. “Ze bruised ribs and breast-bone knit slowly, so you must expect pain, and think yourself fragile for at least anozzer month before I may say wiz confidence zat you are completely healed, n’est-ce pas, sir?”

  “Mean t’say I’m to dodder like a Greenwich Pensioner, on light duties like one of our herniated brace-tenders?”

  “I fear zat is the apt comparison, sir,” Durant said with a sly twinkle in his eyes as he closed up his portable kit-box.

  “Not serious enough to put a replacement captain aboard, is it?” Lewrie fretted as he gazed at Admiralty House on the Palisades of Kingston Harbour. After being battered about by higher authorities in the last few months, he was “oft-bitten, damned shy!” of meddlers, or those who’d reward their favourites with a posting into a frigate, the finest sort of command the Royal Navy could offer an aspiring young officer.

  “Oh no, Captain, no fear of zat,” Durant assured him. “You mus’ be lazy for a time, but zat is not cause for displacing you.”

  “Oh, good,” Lewrie cheerly said, perked up considerably. “Lazy I b’lieve I can manage main-well, thankee!”

  “Much’s you done for ’em, sir,” Aspinall commented as he shoved Lewrie into his waist-coat, “I’d expect ’em t’keep you an’ Proteus as one forever. Much’s you earned ’em, sir.”

  They’d sailed back to Jamaica with their pirate schooner flying British colours atop its French Tricolour trailing astern of them and had created quite the stir of excitement once their reports, Lewrie’s and Nicely’s, had been read, and the amount of coined silver aboard her had been tallied. The Admiralty Court had leapt to condemn the prize, Admiral Parker had bought her in as a fast armed tender for £4,000, to be seconded to a larger, slower cruising ship so he could garner even more loot at sea. And, for his signal service in their recent expedition, Lt. Darling, Capt. Nicely’s protégé, had been appointed into her as commanding officer.

  Capt. Nicely had finally struck his broad-pendant and departed for a new command of his own, since Admiral Parker realised that he would be much more useful at sea, leading a real squadron, than ever he was as Staff Captain.

>   “Damme, Lewrie, but you’ve saved me!” Nicely had grandly stated at his departure ceremony, pumping Lewrie’s hand so happily. “Got me a proper broad-pendant at last, and made me rich into the bargain!”

  They had only salvaged eight hundred kegs of coined dollars off the prize, the rest of the rumoured six million in silver was scattered over a mile of bay-bottom mud or swampy forest when the Spanish prize exploded. Or, as their few surviving prisoners suggested, there never had been that much, and the rest might have made it to New Orleans on another ship. Pollock could bear them the facts when he returned.

  Still, eight hundred thousand Spanish dollars was £200,000, and that was nothing to sneeze at. Admiral Parker got an eighth, and Captain Nicely got an eighth, as senior admiral and “squadron commander,” respectively. But that still left Lewrie his traditional two-eighths as captain of the successful warship, and that resulting £37,500 was his ticket to a life of incomparable wealth!

  He could buy his farm from Uncle Phineas Chiswick, who resisted the odds with his typical stubborn meanness and absolutely refused to die—if he couldn’t take all his own wealth with him, Lewrie suspected. There could be a decent townhouse in London, too, and still leave them £30,000 to place in the safe and solid Bank of England’s Three Percents and that would yield £1,000 per annum, before the bloody taxes due, of course. A family his size could live as grand as an earl on a sum like that. Why, he could even spare an hundred… well, fifty would suit, he idly supposed… to dower his penniless ward, Sophie de Maubeuge, buy things to improve her paraphernalia to help attract a suitable man with decent breeding and fair prospects of his own. Sewallis and Hugh, his daughter Charlotte (those offspring it was safe to claim!) would be assured the very best educations, and a leg up for their entry into adulthood. His wife, Caroline, well… hmm.

  Sudden wealth might mollify her, he could hope, might soften her heart enough to forgive his overseas amours at last. It wasn’t as if any of them had been anything more than temporary foreign “diversions,” conveniences, really. And weren’t a couple of them mounted under the orders of superiors, “topped” in the name of grim Duty? That Claudia Mastandrea with the bountiful “poonts” in the Italies, and Charité his most recent?

  It felt callous to think that Caroline could be swayed by a pot of guineas, that she could possibly be that flinty-eyed and mercenary. Yet… Riches, as good as absence, might make the heart grow fonder! Too busy to remember despising him whilst spending, getting, feathering her nest, hmm?

  Dressed proper at last, Lewrie took his hat in hand and walked to the forrud door, or tried to. Toulon and Chalky had developed a new game with which to plague him. Whether genuinely glad to have him back aboard as their main delight, their security, or their chiefest playmate in “their” great-cabins, or whether this was a holdover from the time that Capt. Nicely had usurped that space, a devious mischief they dreamt up to harass him (when they weren’t spraying and marking everything in sight, and thank God they’d stopped doing that!), their sole waking delight, whenever he rose from his bed, desk, or settee, was to dash ahead of him, looking back impishly, fling themselves down in his path with their paws aloft and bellies exposed, and God help him if he didn’t stoop or kneel to pet them and make fusses over them, else his ankles and stockings were in for “heavy weather.”

  “Aye, damn yer eyes,” Lewrie relented with a put-upon sigh, all but stumbling over their writhing, tail-whicking eagerness. With much “oofing” and groaning, he knelt to placate them, but it hurt some, and was a slow process, too. “God’s sake, don’t try this after dark, will ye, Toulon? I can almost see Chalky, but you, ye menace, you’re black as a boot! Yes, big baby. Wubby feel good? Oh, you too, Chalky lad.”

  “Mister Gamble… Sah!” the Marine sentry outside his doorway bawled, slamming his musket butt on the deck and stamping his boots to announce the presence of their newest “gift” Midshipman, Darcy Gamble, who came well recommended by both Admiral Sir Hyde Parker and Nicely.

  “Oh, hell,” Lewrie groaned, caught kneeling, and a cat’s belly under each hand. “Come, dammit! Christ!” he added under his breath.

  “The First Officer, Mister Langlie’s duty, sir, and—” Mister Gamble began to say, stepping briskly into the great-cabins, hat under his right arm, chin high in the proud execution of his duties. He widened his eyes, though, and could not help laughing at the sight of his captain on his knees.

  “Yess, Mister Gamble?” Lewrie drawled, embarrassed, but determined not to let it faze him. He sat back on his haunches and continued petting the cats, careful for his fingers should they get too happy.

  “My pardons, sir, but the, ah… mongoose problem the ship had a few months ago, sir?” Gamble stated, eyes on the stern windows, and all but biting the lining of his mouth to stay sober.

  “Oh, the Marines’ rat-killin’ Trinidad mongoose?” Lewrie asked, as if it was trifling. “Our pagan Hindoo mongoose? Aye?” Lewrie secretly savoured the look of perplexity on young Gamble’s phyz, wondering if the lad feared he’d landed a berth in Bedlam, not a crack frigate.

  “The First Officer, Mister Langlie, is of the opinion that it, ah… was a she, Captain, sir,” Gamble reported, lips quivering as the lunacy of what he was saying struck him. “A pregnant she, in point of fact. There are simultaneous sightings of … mon-geese, one must assume… everywhere, now, sir!”

  Lewrie shut his eyes and let a bemused smile spread on his face. “Mine arse on a band-box. Yet the rats are kept in check, hey? Next match, Mister Gamble… put me down for a shilling. On the mongoose.”

  I’m rich enough now, Lewrie supposed to himself as he slowly got to his feet; I can afford aflutter!

  AFTER WORD

  Ah, N’awlins, the “Big Easy”… the city where I once had four Hurricanes and closed Pat O’Brien’s at dawn, then thought that I was Jean La Fitte, after an LSU-Ole Miss football game at Baton Rouge! I’d driven down with a couple of “Good Ol’Girls” from Ole Miss whom I had met in Memphis. Ole Miss lost 66–6, Archie Manning was quarterback and playing in a cast on his arm, so they took the defeat, and their cry of “Hoddy-Toddy, Christ A’mighty,” much like Dionysius’s Greek followers took “Evoe!”, a reason for serious boozing.

  Thanks to Louisiana State University Press for The Founding of New Acadia by Carl Brasseaux and Africans in Colonial Louisiana by Gwendolyn Midlo Hall; and to Pelican Publishing of Gretna, Louisiana, for reprinting George W. Cable’s 1884 book, The Creoles of Louisiana for the description of the city and its citizens’ character, or lack of it. He did know them best!

  Creole and Cajun character names were chosen blind from the indexes in these books, and others, so if anyone whose family name is mentioned may wish to take umbrage, consider this…

  I am well armed, and know how to use them.

  Boudreaux Balfa’s name was inspired by one of my Bluegrass-Americana CDs, where I found several Cajun-Zydeco cuts done by Dewey Balfa (are we kinfolk?) and his family band, though I recall that his family reside on Bayou La Fourche, not Barataria, so as Dewey Balfa said in the liner notes, Toujours Balfa! and more power to ’em, ‘cause they’re great! I’m trolling for a free CD, Dewey!

  For my rendition of Cajun diction, blame that famous Cajun comic, Justin Wilson, with whom I spent a day doing a couple of TV commercials in Memphis in the ’80’s, when I was a producer-director at WMC-TV.

  For the Tennesseans, I borrowed a few of my own kin from my old stomping grounds round Campbell, Claiborne, and Knox Counties, Tennessee. My maternal grandmother, Mary Susan Bowman Ellison, spoke of a cousin of her youth, Jim Hawk McLean, in the Powell Valley, which is halfway between La Follette, Tennessee, and the Cumberland Gap. Every spring, or when a wild hair hit him, Jim Hawk and his cronies would build a flatboat and head downriver to the Mississippi, then raft down to Vicksburg or Natchez, sell their produce and the boat, then buy horses and good breeding stock and come home up the Natchez Trace to Nashville, the Cumberland Trail to Knoxville, all for a lark. Th
ey’d sell all but the best mounts in Knoxville, then return to the Powell Valley (originally Powell’s!) with half their cash money for the year, so I couldn’t resist working a Jim Hawk Ellison into the tale!

  Yes, there was a Panton, Leslie & Company, a British firm that traded with Indians, Spanish, and frontier settlements. It’s mentioned in both The South In The Revolution, Volume Three of A History of the South by John Richard Alden (LSU Press) and The Southern Frontier, 1670 to 1732 by Vernor W. Crane (W. W. Norton & Co.). Both provide “dirt” on the many plots and schemers who wished to expand westward along the entire length of the Mississippi, the United States plans, the British scenarios, and the individual states’ activities. And, yes, by 1799, President Adams and Congress did wrangle over the costs of a military expedition to boot the weak Spanish out of the Old Southwest! It was up to President Thomas Jefferson to buy it in 1803.

  General James Wilkinson was a paid Spanish agent, since 1787. No one could figure out how he was paid, ’til someone noticed, in the wake of the Aaron Burr filibustering conspiracy of 1803-04, that it was odd for barrels of flour and meal to go upriver from New Orleans. The barrels were too heavy and when finally opened were found to hold sacks or small barricos of silver coins! Wilkinson planned to seize Kentucky, Tennessee, or both, as his personal kingdom, at the same time he commanded all U.S. Army troops in both states or territories.

  Thanks again to Bob Enrione at CBS in New York for research on Spanish money, its contemporary value, and how it was shipped. All of the New World was short of solid specie, and Spanish dollars were good just about everywhere. There was a shipload of six million, Bob said, so I got “inspired.” Not only is Bob a great source for fun facts, but he also once owned enough brass muzzle-loading naval guns to fit out a brig o’ war, and he and his wife are multiple cat “adoptees,” hence in the good folks’ column.