The Captain's Vengeance Read online

  Also by Dewey Lambdin

  The King’s Coat

  The French Admiral

  The King’s Commission

  The King’s Privateer

  The Gun Ketch

  HMS Cockerel

  A King’s Commander

  Jester’s Fortune

  King’s Captain

  Sea of Grey

  Havoc’s Sword

  The Captain’s

  Vengeance

  Dewey Lambdin

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS

  ST. MARTIN’S PRESS

  NEW YORK

  THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.

  An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.

  THE CAPTAIN’S VENGEANCE. Copyright © 2004 by Dewey Lambdin. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

  www.stmartins.com

  Title page art by Wilhelm Melbye

  ISBN 0-312-31547-3

  EAN 978-0312-31547-4

  First Edition: November 2004

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  To all my hard-working, common-sense East Tennessee kinfolk who went before, who lived in the shadows of McCloud Mountain and McLean’s Rock in the Powell Valley time out of mind, just a “Hoot and Holler” from the Cumberland Gap. If they did try to pound some “down home” verities into me, I’m sorry that they didn’t all take, and wish I’d paid more attention to the old tales, the centuries-old lore that was warp and woof of their “Bright, Sunny South,” in those wondrous summer twilights when the kids and the dogs lay “plumb tuckered out” ‘neath my Mamaw and Papaw Ellison’s sheltering oak, and the “lightning bugs” swam above the lawn as thick as schools of minnows. It may be belated, but God bless you all for my “raisin’.”

  And, to my ex-wives… don’t bother, I’m still too broke to pay attention.

  Full-Rigged Ship: Starboard (right) side view

  1. Mizen Topgallant 11. Main Topmast Staysail

  2. Mizen Topsail 12. Fore Royal

  3. Spanker 13. Fore Topgallant

  4. Main Royal 14. Fore Topsail

  5. Main Topgallant 15. Fore Course

  6. Mizen T’gallant Staysail 16. Fore Topmast Staysail

  7. Main Topsail 17. Inner Jib

  8. Main Course 18. Outer Flying Jib

  9. Main T’gallant Staysail 19. Spritsail

  10. Middle Staysail

  A. Taffrail & Lanterns L. Waist

  B. Stem & Quarter-galleries M. Gripe & Cutwater

  C. Poop Deck/Great Cabins Under N. Figurehead & Beakhead Rails

  D. Rudder & Transom Post O. Bow Sprit

  E. Quarterdeck P. Jib Boom

  F. Mizen Chains & Stays Q. Foc’s’le & Anchor Cat-heads

  G. Main Chains & Stays R. Cro’jack Yard (no sail fitted)

  H. Boarding Battens/Entry Port S. Top Platforms

  I. Cargo Loading Skids T. Cross-Trees

  J. Shrouds & Ratlines U. Spanker Gaff

  K. Fore Chains & Stays

  Praenda vago iussit geminare pericula ponto,

  bellica cum dubiis rostra dedit retibus.

  Praedator cupit immensos obsidere campos

  ut multa innumera igera pascat ove.

  Booty bade men double the perils of the surging deep when it fitted the beaks of war to the rocking ships.

  ’Tis the freebooter who longs to seize upon the measureless plains that on many an acre he may graze his countless sheep.

  -NEMESIS III, 39-42 ALBIUS TIBULLUS

  PROLOGUE

  Gonzalo: Now would I give a thousand furlongs Of sea for an acre of barren ground—long heath, Brown furze, anything. The wills above be done But I would fain die a dry death.

  —THE TEMPEST, ACT I, SCENE 1

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  The Dry Tortugas 24°37’N, 82°45’ W

  Two ships tossed, rocked, and heaved on a fretful sea, fetched-to and immobile, within easy rowing distance of the dry, low-lying, rocky islet—too small to be called an island, too large to be termed a cay. Bastard, barren places were these islets, neither Caribbean soft and beguiling nor American mainland coastal-marshily bleak. These islets did not belong to the Caribbean, but to the Gulf of Mexico, and lay far west of southernmost Spanish Florida, an afterthought of a distracted Creator, who had flung them like excess ochre droplets off a cosmic putty knife, once the last of the Florida Keys had been shaped.

  Except for a small sand beach on the north side, off which the two ships lay, the islet’s shore was rocky, gravelled and steep-to, with waves breaking vertically, strewn with broken shells, fragments of driftwood, bird skeletons, and russet humps of pine needles and palm furze.

  The seas were lively and heaved four or five feet or more in a confused chop; deep-ocean blue-grey, changing to teal, aqua, or lapis near the shore—all under an achingly empty cerulean blue sky that was brushed by mares’ tails, with only the rare stiff-winged albatross, frigate bird, or gull to show a single sign of life.

  The two ships fetched-to off the northern beach were clattered, clanged, and slatted by those confused seas, rising and dropping, pitching at bows and sterns, and rocking in uneven, unpredictable fits and jerks. One of the fetched-to vessels was a typical bluff-bowed, three-masted merchantman, a tad high at poop and forecastle, wide and beamy and deeply laded. She gleamed with linseed oil ’twixt her black-tarred gunwale and her jaunty blue upper-works and bulwarks, with a hint of a wealthy trader’s gilt round her bulging quarter-galleries, entry ports, and figurehead. Her motion, because of her greater tonnage and weight of cargo, was a bit easier and more predictable than the other ship’s. A Tricolour flag of Republican France flew from the leach of her large spanker, which was still sheeted in to keep drive on her, and her bows pinched up to the winds, while her courses and topgallants were bag-reefed, her tops’ls flatted aback, and her jibs knife-edged full of wind. That linseeded gleaming wood was as pretty as a spanking-new, beeswaxed tabletop.

  The second fetched-to vessel rode much more lively, for she was a schooner, much narrower in beam. Gaff-hung sails on her foremast and main fought a losing fight to drive her forward, whilst her two standing jibs, hauled taut on the opposing tack, kept her motionless—in respect to the islet, at least. Riding her decks, keeping one’s feet as she slatted, was a feat worthy of gainful employment with a touring Gypsy circus. Her hired captain, and her crewmembers, were managing it well. So were their employers.

  The schooner showed the world a lovely face, too; black-hulled with a dockyard-fresh coat of the glossiest paint, not tar. That hull, so long, lean, and so sweetly sheer-lined, was boot-topped on the waterline and striped along the upperwork bulwarks with wide bands of a deep scarlet. Her masts, gaffs, and booms, jib boom and bowsprit, her coachtop ‘tween foremast and mainmast, and her two small upper yards, were painted a hazy light blue—grey, and her sails… instead of new-from-the-chandlery écru, or well-worn and used parchment-like tan, had been dyed horizon-grey, as well.

  La Réunion, she was called, as so she was named in the scroll-board on her stern and in her ship’s papers that declared her a yacht, a nautical plaything for her idle-rich planter owners, and, registered as she was as homeported in a Spanish possession, she usually sported a gilt-tan flag with the two horizontal red stripes equidistant from top and bottom of a Spanish merchantman or private vessel.

  For this occasion, though, in keeping with her secret name and her other papers, the purchased Letter of Marque and Reprisal declaring her to be a French privateer by name of Le Revenant—that is to say, “Th
e Ghost”—that despised shit-brintle “rag” had been hanked on below a French Tricolour atop her mains’1’s leach, a flag brighter and larger, as if she were the prize, not the three-master.

  No matter how desolate or bleak the islet, La Réunion’s owners were in happy takings, eyes alight with the novelty of it all, sipping champagne and snickering as they watched the crew aboard the merchantman struggle to sway out and lower her largest launch. The sailors manning the check or snub lines were having a rough go of it as the prize ship juddered about.

  “I thought you said Capitaine Balfa was a salty man,” one young man demanded, “a bold, experienced freebooter! But he goes about that like a clumsy, drunken … Bayou Barataria coon-ass, ha ha!”

  The hired captain of La Réunion (or Le Revenant), standing aloof of them, clamped his lips together to bite off what harsh response that petulant plaint merited, eyes slit in frustration. Jérôme Lanxade and Boudreaux Balfa went back a long time together, and a slur on Boudreaux might as well have been a slur on his own competence.

  Dammit to hell, neither he nor Balfa owned this lithe schooner, only shares in the “enterprise”! It wasn’t like the old days, back in the last war, when they’d commanded five ships at once, when the names Jérôme Lanxade—Le Féroce, for he had been called “The Ferocious”—and Boudreaux Balf—L’Affamé, or “The Hungry”—had commanded respect and awe in every Caribbean or Gulf port. Then they could recruit an entire crew overnight at the snap of their fingers and fill every man’s pockets with prize money or plunder. Under the old white-and-gold fleur de lis of Royal France, the heraldic red-gold of Spain… even the dreaded Jolly Roger or Black Flag, a time or two … their orders or slightest whims could have made fish bait of callow, capering lubbers like them!

  Jérôme Lanxade turned to face his employers, hands clasped in the small of his back, a black-visaged glower of warning on his dark-tanned face. Just for a moment, he fantasised, again, of murdering every last one of them, of just taking this splendid little ship for his own and continuing the business for his own profit. Kill all the young men, not the girl, though. Oh no, not for a long time ….

  He let his face soften and crease into a knowing smile.

  “The seas are up, the prize ship’s motion,” Lanxade told them with what might have seemed to be infinite patience. “Nothing goes as quickly or smoothly as you wish aboard ship, messieurs, mademoiselle.”

  Poseurs! he silently accused, though the girl was most fetching—even if she was the most bloody-minded of the entire bunch!

  His employers dressed the part: jackboots and baggy sailors’ slop trousers, colourful shirts under long-tailed and gaudy old-style waist-coats that they wore open; waist sashes crammed with pistols or daggers under the waist-coats; broad satin or velvet baldrics bearing costly short swords or swept-hilt rapiers; wide-brimmed hats adrip with egret plumes…. As if they’d tricked themselves out in fanciful garb and beauty spots and face powders for a pre-Revolution costume ball!

  “One would wish, though, M’sieur le Capitaine Lanxade, that it goes competently, n’est-ce pas?” the young woman sweet-archly replied with an elegant lift of one brow, a leering smile at one corner of her sweetly kissable mouth, and a mocking salute with her wineglass.

  Arrogant, wanton slut! Lanxade thought, unable to keep his eyes from caressing her curves, her slim legs on display for all the world to see in over-snug breeches and silk knee stockings, her décolletage made prominent by a tight and waist-hugging buttoned waist-coat, just long enough to flare over the tops of her hips like a corset. Worst-named cunt in all Creation … Charité … Angelette … de Guilleri!

  Mlle Charité de Guilleri lowered her lashes and smirked over the rim of her crystal champagne glass, secretly delighted by their hired man’s not-so-secret lust, and her heady power to deny.

  “I still say we should just shoot them, make them to ‘walk the plank,’ or something,” her cousin, Jean-Marie Rancour, spat.

  “Oui, Jean … dead men tell no tales, after all,” another of their party said. Unlike the rest, he was dark-haired and brown-eyed, was Don Rubio Monaster, while Charité, her brothers Hippolyte and Helio, and their cousin were the typical long-settled Creoles, with chesnut hair and blue eyes. “Just kill them and be done,” Don Rubio asserted with what he was certain was an aggressive, decisive, and manly lift of his chin… for Charité’s benefit and, hopefully, at some future time of bliss with her, his own.

  “We’ve done that,” the eldest brother, Helio de Guillieri, responded in a lazy drawl. “That Havana slaver’s crew, remember, Rubio? We made them walk the plank, Jean.”

  “But we haven’t done marooning yet,” middle brother Hippolyte snickered. “Just about the only thing we haven’t done.”

  “Kill or maroon?” Helio, as “leader,” posed. “The old buccaneers practiced égalité and fraternité, they voted on things. Let’s vote.”

  “Shoot!” Don Rubio Monaster quickly replied, but he was shouted down by those in favour of marooning their captives. Only Jean sided with him, and that not with a whole heart.

  Mon Dieu, what a pack of …. Capt. Lanxade thought. “Marooned men tell no tales. No one ever comes here. They give these isles a wide berth for fear of shoals and reefs. Only piles of bleached bones will be found … if ever,” he gruffly told them.

  “I cannot shoot even one?” Don Rubio plaintively asked.

  “Rubio, don’t be greedy,” Mlle Charité coaxed, sashaying to his side to drape an arm round his shoulders and lay her head next to his, as if cajoling her papa for a new gown. “We have seen how well you shoot. Those runaway slaves… pim-pim-pim, and all your doing, n’est-ce pas? If we run across another prize on the way home, we will leave things to you … won’t we, Helio… Hippolyte?”

  The other stalwart young fellows had no problem with that.

  “If not, quel dommage,” Charité continued, “and you must quell your eagerness ’til the next voyage. Remember, Rubio, hastening the day of rejoining La Belle France, and throwing off the Spanish tyrrany, comes first, last, and always. Before our petty amusements.”

  She blew teasingly at his ear, swept off his overly ornate hat, and tousled his romantically long, dark locks, then gave the embarrassed young fellow a quick and “sisterly” peck on the cheek… with a tiny flick of her tongue tip to tantalise before almost skipping away from him. “Ah, regardez … the boat, at last!”

  Don Rubio Monaster bashfully grinned, though following her every movement with downcast but lustful eyes; unsure, again, whether he’d been gulled by her … or slyly encouraged.

  But for their mutual scheme, Don Rubio might have been shunned by her family. His father had been a grandee Spaniard sent to administrate the territory. Though a true Castilian of noble hidalgo blood never tainted by Moor or Marrano, whose sires had held titles since the Reconquista in the 1400s, his father had been so impoverished that a wilderness post’s salary had been welcomed. Spanish overlord or not, his father had managed to wed a proud and exalted French Creole lady, heir to vast acreages upriver from the city, and had seen to it that the old French deeds of her family, the Bergrands, had become legitimate Spanish land grants.

  Not so smart, though, to avoid taking the field against a Chickasaw uprising up near Natchez, where his noble father had been slain. Since then, the Bergrands had moulded him into more of a Creole than a Don, more a Jacobin than a Royalist after the French Revolution, too.

  Spain was old, tired, and bankrupt, with nothing to offer but a corrupt and neglectful governance. The new United States encroaching on their borders were even worse, just too common, venal, grasping, and backwoods crude! Without a powerful protector, they would be swamped in buckskin, awash in the vile juices of “chaw-baccy”! Non, only a rising of their own—and a remonstrance of their fait accompli to the Republican Directory in Paris could save them. Everyone was so sure of that, but so few really ever did anything about it, other than talk and talk in the cabarets! Only Hippolyte and Helio seemed capab
le of action, and he’d gladly become a part of their scheme. For the future, for …!

  Bewitching Charité’s costly Parisian scent lingered on Rubio’s shirt collar, and he took a cautious sniff, even as he stood to watch the launch from the prize ship finally be rowed over to the schooner; feet wide-spread to balance, spring-kneed to ride the pitching of the deck as masterfully as he rode the most spirited stallion, with hands in the small of his back in unconscious imitation of their hired man, the daunting, dashing Capt. Lanxade. Chin up and alert, firm-jawed in spite of the swooping jerks and snubs, he would be dizzy and sick if he let himself. He would not be sick … he would be dashing.

  Though Maman was delighted that her son had entrée with a family as distinguished and rich as the de Guilleris, one even richer and of longer habitation than her own, though he was coyly urged to lay suit to one of the older sisters, Iphegénie or Marguerite… though he was sure that either would be a pleasingly suitable and presentable match, and either would be amenable, yet … there was Charité, that coquette!

  Oh, if only he could tell her what agony, and what ecstacy, her too-brief caress and kiss could cause him! How like the Golden Fleece he thought her long chestnut hair, how lambent he deemed her turquoise eyes, how generous her lips and mouth, how bountiful her breasts!

  God above, not lambent! Don Rubio chid himself. He’d sound lame and prissy as a dancing master! No true gentleman wasted time on such limp tripe!. Like a born Creole grandee, he had no time for poetry or books, though girls did put a deal of stock in such—

  A series of thuds alongside brought Rubio back from his fancies as the launch butted the schooner’s hull below the entry-port and was hooked onto the chains. A moment later, Capitaine Boudreaux Balfa was clambering up the battens on his large and gnarly bare feet.