The Captain's Vengeance Read online

  L’Affamé … more hungry for hog meat than booty! Rubio thought.

  Boudreaux Balfa was typical of the shoddy, run-of-the-mill Louisiana Acadian, dressed in a homegrown rough cotton écru shirt, homemade and indigo-dyed knee breeches of the same cotonnade material. Shoes, or stockings, well… if nagged, rustics such as Balfa might don cowhide moccasins to attend church, knee-high moccasins to wade after his lost pigs in the swamps. Shoes and stockings Balfa might possess, for weddings or funerals … if at all! And, like most Acadians, the man was so abstemious that he wore his clothes until they were halfway between mauvaises and usées; meaning “tattered” or “threadbare.” Atop his crown, Balfa wore a plaited palmetto-frond tricorne hat so old its wide brims sagged down nearly to horizontal … and looked as if rats had been at it.

  “Ohé, Lanxade,” Balfa gravelled in glum greeting to his old-time partner, sweeping off that shabby tricorne to bare a fierce and wiry thicket of unruly iron-grey hair, and studiously ignoring his employers. “See dat sky, dis choppy water? Feel dat wind? It’ll be a good half a gale by sundown, by Gar. Let’s get dis over wit’, cher.”

  In his younger years, Capitaine Boudreaux Balfa had been a doughty figure of a buccaneer and privateersman, but time and shore living on a hard-scrabble plot of land had not been kind. He had thickened and grown a trencherman’s gut, a shad belly, though not an ounce of him was yet soft. Balfa was as thick as a fierce boar hog.

  “Ah oui, Boudreaux mon cher,” Lanxade agreed. “We don’t make a ceremony out of it, we can be fifteen lieues alee by sundown. In deep water, and scudding Large. Bosun, fetch them up!”

  He took Balfa by the arm and together they walked back to the rails, away from the swaggering, tipsy revellers. Time had been somewhat kinder to Lanxade; he was still tall, lean, and flat-bellied, unbowed after the toils of peaceful employment on trading company shalopes upriver to Manchac, Natchez, St. Louis, and the old Illinois settlements, and back. But Boudreaux did imagine he heard a suspicious creak from somewhere near Lanxade’s middle, which put him in mind of a well-hidden corset. And Balfa allowed himself a secret smile to note that his old compatriot’s grey roots were showing, along with the telltale splotch of greenish walnut-husk oil on his ears that betrayed his use of hair dye to remain so dark and virile-looking!

  Sure enough, a playful poke at Lanxade’s boudins met well-stayed canvas and whalebone resistance. “Hawn hawn hawn!” He softly, nasally chortled at such vanity.

  “Oh, shut up, you old bougre,” Lanxade hissed back, stiffening to maintain his dignity. And his secrets.

  “So, we kill dem, or we maroon dem?” Balfa asked off-handedly.

  “Maroon,” Lanxade told him, “for the novelty of it.”

  “Dem babies not tired o’ killin’ yet?” Balfa wondered aloud.

  “Bored with it, more likely,” Lanxade said in a harsh mutter. “I could say queasy of the consequences, but with this lot, I wouldn’t count on it. Sated for now, but a few weeks ashore, and they’ll wish to be back at it. Piracy’s addictive… as we both know, cher. Pissing God and the Devil in the eye.”

  “By damn, dey wanna see real piracy, Jérôme, what say we jus’ take dis damn’ goélette for our own?” Balfa softly cackled. “Mak dem walk de plank, jus’ like de ol’ days, maroon dem, ‘long wit’ dem poor salauds down below, hein?”

  “They’re too rich and important to go missing, Boudreaux, and we’d swing for it,” Lanxade countered, though not without a long pause to ponder it.

  “But we won’t for dat Dago guarda costa lugger? Merde!”

  The Spanish government lugger, outbound from Havana, returning rebel slaves for execution at Mobile—along with a profitable load of other nègres and smuggled goods that her unscrupulous captain had meant to land on the sly—was their latest capture. The small crew of Spaniards had gone overside, as had the convicted rebels, though they’d kept the untainted nègres for sale to the caboteurs, the itinerant backcountry slave dealers. After the Pointe Coupee slave insurrection four years earlier, though, even a blind planter would have spurned such lash-or manacle-scarred slaves as cutthroat troublemakers, not with brigands such as St. John or St. Malo leading vengeful runaway slave bands in the swamps of Louisiana.

  Those captives had held no value, except for sport. With their hands free, but with leg shackles linked and weighted with shot, their struggle to stay afloat had been très drôle, the strong futilely trying to buoy up the weaker after they’d been forced over the side, once the lugger had been stripped of everything useful, then sunk. The Spaniards had had it kinder; they’d walked the plank with only their arms roped, free to kick-swim to stay afloat, and alive, ’til the game had palled, and the youngsters had honed their marksmanship skills on them.

  Now, there would be more fun.

  Hoots and curses erupted from the schooner’s crew, more wine was poured by their youthful employers, as the six remaining prisoners off the prize ship were fetched up the narrow and steep companionway ladder from the schooner’s foetid orlop. Stumbling and sickly reeling, their eyes blindfolded and their arms bound, they were unable to help themselves.

  “Time to die, bastards!” Helio de Guilleri taunted in English, though his intent was spoiled by tittering at his own wit and putting stress on the second syllable of “bastards.”

  “Go game, lads! Go game!” one of the older captives urged his mates.

  “They’re nought but prinkin’ Frogs an’ Dons! Buck up, young sir!” he added as the youngest began to mewl and gasp in dread.

  “Fack th’ bloody lot o’ ye!” another doughtier prisoner cried, head swivelling as if trying to see. “And th’ Shee’s undyin’ cess be on yair black damn’ souls.”

  “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not… Britons never never never shall be…!” others wavered.

  “Shut the Devil… up!” Capitaine Lanxade bellowed, drawing a longbarrelled pistol from his waistband and firing into the air. “Christ, you damned noisy sons of dogs! Once we leave, you can scream all you wish. Stuff your faces with bird shit, drink your own piss… drink the sea and go even madder, for all we care. Loose their hands, men.”

  “But, Capitaine,” one of the de Guilleris objected.

  “They cannot climb down into the boat, else,” Lanxade snapped back. “Their blindfolds, aussi … take them off. Let them see what a fine estate we give them, ha ha!”

  A mutual gasp of bleak realisation wheezed from the doomed men as they beheld the islet, providing even more amusement for the captors.

  And with much eager poking, prodding, and shoving, the prisoners were forced to the entry-port, to lower themselves into the centre of the launch, where extra hands with pistols and daggers waited to receive them. Balfa and his oarsmen got down into the boat with them and steered towards the shore.

  “Stroke, stroke,” Balfa chearily directed, tapping the time on the tiller-bar. “A little song, mes enfants!” he urged.

  “Ah! Suzette, Suzette, to veux pas chère?

  “Ah, Suzette, Chère amie, to pas l’aimin moin.

  M’alle dans montagne, zamie,

  M’alle coupé canne, chère amie,

  M’alle fait l’argent, mo trésor,

  Pour porter donné toi!”

  “Bastards!” the oldest prisoner spat back. “Kindest to kill us now and have done, ye gotch-gut shit!”

  “Dat can be arranged, cher,” Balfa chuckled back.

  “Don’t!” the youngest pleaded, so agitated he looked as if he would fling himself over the side from fretting, with tears of relief in his eyes that their death was not to be immediate. “Like our vicar always said, Hope springs eternal, and—”

  “Hope?” Balfa scoffed. “Dis de Dry Tortugas. Comprendre dry? Never know … might catch turtle. He blood you drink, he meat, and eggs you eat. Kill seabirds, aussi … same. Ah! Up oars! Bow men!”

  The launch staggered through the last froth of surf and ground her bows into the raspy, pebbled grit of the beach. Bow men sprang to either si
de, thigh-deep in white-water spume, to steady the bows as a fresh wave lifted the boat a foot more ashore.

  “Go over de bow, don’t even get your feet wet, you. Out, vite! Hope … you like you’ new home!” Balfa snickered as his oarsmen laid their blades in the bilges and waved their weapons at the captors to speed their departure. “You damn’ Anglais! Dis pay you back for all I suffer. Prisoner, me. Kidnap, me, on your ships! Round us all up an’ take us away from Acadia, an’ don’ let us take nozzing wit’ us! Gaol us in England, firs’. We don’ starve quick enough, us, don’ get sick an’ die, you damn Anglais ship us to Maryland! See how you like it dis time, by Gar! Damn’ English!”

  The prisoners were goaded at gun-or swordpoint at least twenty yards inland, past the overwash barrow full of wiregrass and deep, loose sand littered with feathers and shells.

  “Oim Oirish!” one of the captives plaintively declared.

  “All same, aussi,” Balfa told him with almost a sympathetic air. “Dem bébés on de schooner, dey’d leave you nozzing, dem, ‘cause dey all jus’ crazy mean, but me, Boudreaux Balfa, I a sailor like you, I never let it be said I’m heartless, comprendre? So I give you a slim chance, me. Fetch it out de boat, men. You live, you remember, hein?”

  Two crewmen trundled up a ten-gallon wooden barrico. Another slung a worn leather bag across the sand to land at their feet.

  “Bonne chance, chers!” Balfa wished them all with a wide smile and a hearty laugh. “You stand where you are, now, ’til we get beyond de surf,” he cautioned, wagging a finger in warning, “or we jus’ have t’shoot, us. Adieu. Allez, vite!”

  As the pirates scrambled to shove off and leap into their boat, one of the captives dared kneel by the leather sack and peer inside it. He wonderingly drew out a rusting old kitchen knife, paper, and…

  “Crikey, ’tis a quizzin’ glass, and a tinder-box, too. We can light a fire, does a ship ever pass!” he whispered in surprise.

  “Sweet merciful Jaysus in Heaven!” the Irish captive cried in sudden glee as he swiped his fingers over a damp spot on the barrico and sniffed at it. “’Tis rum, by God! Ten bloody gallon o’ rum!”

  “What the Devil?” the oldest sailor puzzled, scratching at his grizzled scalp. He almost felt a twinge of hope, of gratitude to that…

  The shot was inaudible over the loud swashing and raling of the surf, the wind that flapped their clothing, and the mewing cries of the seabirds that nested on the islet, flushed a’wing by their presence.

  “Oh,” the youngest lad said, as if he’d pricked his finger on a thorn, and clapped a hand to the inside of his right thigh. “Oh!” he reiterated, as if a wasp or bee had stung him, as he looked down at the blood on his white breeches. “Ah. Oh Lord!” as realisation came, as he fell to his knees and went as pale as the wave spume.

  The other captives could see the tiniest wisp of spent powder smoke that blew westward from the schooner’s small quarterdeck, ragging past the taffrails like the spirit of a hag that had ridden her mortal too long and must flee the coming of dawn.

  “Oh, you bloody bastards! You goddamn’ Frog sonsabitches!” the doughty older captive howled, shaking both fists at their tormentors. “We’ll get ye, yet! We’ll find ye, and cut yer damn’ balls off, hear me? Ye’ll all dance th’ Tyburn Hornpipe ‘fore we’re done wi’ ye!”

  “Oh, poo,” Don Rubio groaned, grimacing at his poor aim with a slim and expensive Jaeger rifle. “This boat’s pitching, though.” His compatriots cheered his expertise, even though he hadn’t struck his mark in mid-chest.

  “You said you wished to shoot just one, Rubio!” Hippolyte said in commiseration. “He’ll die of that, right below his organes! What a bother he’ll be for them, before he does. Ha ha!”

  “Perhaps they’ll eat him!” Helio quipped, eyes merrily alight.

  Dé tit zozos-yé té assis,

  Dé tit zozos si la barrier,

  Dé tit zozos, qui zabotté,

  Qui ça yé di mo pas conné!

  They sang as well, hooting and capering, even assaying a nautical, buccaneer’s hornpipe, though they hadn’t heard a word that their captives had yelled from shore.

  Monzeur-poulet vini simin,

  Croupé si yé et croqué yé,

  Personn pli tend yé zabotté,

  Dé tit zozos si la barrier!

  A Creole song, a slave song, one they’d all learned as children.

  Two little birds were sitting,

  Two little birds were sitting on the fence,

  Two little birds were chattering,

  What they were saying I do not know.

  A chicken hawk came along the road,

  Pounced on them and ate them up.

  No one hears the chattering anymore,

  The two little birds on the fence!

  BOOK ONE

  Gonzalo: I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his Complexion is perfect gallows. Stand fast, good Fate, to his hanging! Make the rope of his destiny Our cable, for our own doth little advantage.

  If he be not born to be hanged, our case Is miserable.

  THE TEMPEST, ACT I, SCENE 1

  WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE

  CHAPTER ONE

  Hoy, the boat!” Mr. Midshipman Larkin cried his challenge to the approaching civilian cutter, though he had known who its passengers were as soon as they had stepped down into it on the distant quay ten minutes earlier; had been awaiting those passengers’ return for at least the last two hours past.

  “Proteus!” the Mulatto bow man shouted back, seated on the very tip of the cutter’s bows, legs dangling to either side with a brass-fitted gaff staff across his lap with which to hook onto the chains. He shot one hand in the air for a moment, showing four fingers, proving that a captain was aboard.

  “Come alongside, aye!” Mr. Larkin shouted back, then paced over to join the others of the side-party assembled to salute that officer’s arrival back aboard. Larkin was a thatch-haired, ill-featured lout of a lad, all out at elbows and knees in his secondhand uniform, and that didn’t even take into consideration the growing he’d done since signing ship’s articles over a year before. Though it was a useless endeavour, he twitched and tugged his coat, waist-coat, and neck-stock into better order, shifted the hang of his shoddy dirk, and took a second to remove his battered, cocked hat and swipe his unruly hair with a “Welsh comb,” that is to say, with his fingers.

  Marine Lieutenant Devereux fiddled with his own immaculate neckstock, harumphed to clear his throat, and cocked a brow as he regarded his short line of Marines under arms, in a last-instant inspection.

  Though ships’ officers did not usually stand harbour watches, the First Officer, Mr. Anthony Langlie, was present, as was the Second Officer, the ever-cynical and recently wakened and yawning Lieutenant Catterall. The younger and cleverer Scot, Lt. Adair, also “toed the line” of a tar-paid seam in the starboard gangway planking, his sword loose and ready to present. Mr. Winwood, the Sailing Master, and Mr. Grace, the ship’s other midshipman, also stood nearby, stiff-backed and chin-up with curiosity.

  Thud! went the shabby cutter against the hull; a clatter of untidily “boated” oars. More, softer thuds as the cutter shouldered the proper captain’s gig, and a grunt or two, some mumbles, as money changed hands for the short passage. Midshipman Larkin dared a peek outboard and downwards from his position at the opening of the entry-port, nodded to the neat-uniformed sailors in the side-party, and stiffened.

  The Bosun, Mr. Pendarves, began his long, elaborate call as the dog’s vane of the arriving officer’s gilt-laced cocked hat peeked over the top step. At a whispered word, officers’ swords were drawn, then presented before their faces; well-blacked Marine boots stamped on the creamy-pale, fresh-sanded planking; hands slapped glossy-oiled walnut musket buttstocks and fore-ends. At a word of command from Lt. Langlie, all hands present on deck stood erect and doffed their hats.

  The arriving officer leaned back a little, gripping the tautly
strung man-ropes for the last step of his ascent up the shelflike boarding battens that began level, and a bit aft, of the main chains. A visitor, unused to such ceremony, might have deemed the officer nonplussed to stillness by the elaborateness of his welcome. But it was simply his way … to seize the man-ropes just below their terminations set below the cap-rail of the entry-port’s bulwarks, and jerk himself into the last step, instead of groping and fumbling the cap-rails like some stout “trullibubs” or senior dodderer more in need of hoisting aboard in a bosun’s chair. He had barely turned his thirty-sixth year, this January of 1799, and was still almost boyishly spry.

  That jerk was accompanied by a nearly playful hop or skip from the last batten to the snowy planks of the starboard gangway. When the officer doffed his hat, though, he did so with solemn gravity, so an uninitiated observer might have doubted his first, playful theory.

  Said new-come “lubber” would have seen a slim man in his early thirties, who stood three inches shy of six feet tall, one who might weigh twelve or thirteen stone; still wider in the shoulders than the waist, a man whose snow-white breeches and waist-coat lay trimly flat, still.

  He wore a good, hard-finished blue wool shoregoing coat, laced with butter-yellow gilt trim on the lapels, the stand-up blue collar, the side-pocket flaps, and cuffs, with nine real gilt buttons on each wide turn-back blue lapel. A fringed gilt-lace epaulet sat upon the officer’s right shoulder, too, denoting him a Post-Captain, though one of less than three years’ seniority.

  Under that expensive coat lay a white leather baldric on which to hang his sword. A discerning observer would have appreciated that sword, a twenty-four-inch hanger, though he would have been puzzled by the scabbard, for it was of dark blue leather, not black, and both throat and drag were of plain brass, not gilded. The hilt, though, was gilded and most ornate; the typical lion’s-head pommel that swallowed the back handguard, but the front guard that swelled to protect the user’s fist was pierced-steel, like a scallop shell, with a smaller second shell at the hilt’s forefront.