The Invasion Year Read online

  Raised from the cradle to hate the French like the very Devil, as all good Englishmen should, with anger and grief over Caroline’s murder to stoke his hatred white-hot, still … Lewrie could not make war on helpless civilians, on women or children. He’d had a moment, admittedly, when ordering a broadside had been so tempting, but he had not. He could have taken them all back to Jamaica with the navy crews of the other prizes, but … had they not suffered enough? They were innocent of Caroline’s death, and New Orleans had been so close by.

  Which camp’s Loring in, I wonder? Lewrie thought as the oarsmen set a powerful stroke seaward; Am I saint or sinner, to him?

  * * *

  “Ah, Captain Lewrie, welcome, sir,” Commodore Loring said, with all evident delight as Lewrie entered the great-cabins. “A glass, will you, sir?”

  “Aye, that’d be fine, sir,” Lewrie replied, looking about at the gathering of officers. A steward came with a glass of cool Rhenish for him, and Lewrie took a tentative sip.

  “Captain John Bligh, of Theseus,” Loring went on, doing the introductions, “Captain Barré … Captain Lewrie of Reliant. Pardons, for my brevity, but, French pride, and their touchy sense of honour, force me to be brief. I am sending a delegation to General Rochambeau once more, his last warning. Does he not sail out and strike his colours, I will leave him to the doubtful mercies of the rebel Blacks. At the same time, I am despatching another delegation ashore to speak with this so-called General Dessalines, and his cohorts. Bligh and Barré are to speak for me, Lewrie, but, given your long experience with the colony of Saint Domingue, I thought it useful to send you along with them, Lewrie … to supply these gentlemen with your insights.”

  What? Lewrie thought, gawping. His mouth dropped agape at the idea, his eyes went wide. What bloody experience? What insights?

  “Beg pardon, sir?” Lewrie said, once he’d got his breath back. “In a previous commission, I came t’know the coasts main-well, but as for what passes ashore…”

  “Did you not enter Mole Saint Nicholas?” Loring snapped, peering at him owlishly. “Spend some time ashore at Port-Au-Prince, when our army was here?”

  One night … in a whore-house, Lewrie recalled.

  “We were close ashore at Mole Saint Nicholas, sir, providing indirect fire for our troops,” Lewrie explained. “I did go ashore for a day, to visit a friend at his regiment, and dined ashore that night, in Port-Au-Prince … the night the city was invested by L’Ouverture and his army, and we began the evacuation, sir.”

  Those damned drums! He remembered how they’d thudded like bloody beating hearts, ripped from the chests of the massacred. They scared the piss outta me, for certain, and put my “high-yellow” girl into pluperfect shits, t’boot. Don’t see how that’s useful.

  “No fluency in their Creole lingo?” Captain Barré asked, a brow up in doubt. “No background information?”

  “I doubt anyone speaks their private patois, sir,” Lewrie told him, “but, they deal with the outside world in French, don’t they? As for background information, well … I did pick up on who-hates-who and how much, the various massacres and betrayals, but…”

  “Know much of Dessalines, do you?” Captain Barré pressed, now with a faint sneer of disappointment. “Christophe, Petion, and Clairveaux?”

  “All four of ’em have been betrayed, betrayed each other, even turned on L’Ouverture, more times than I’ve had hot suppers, Captain Barré,” Lewrie replied. He had no wish to go ashore and deal with the rebel generals, no wish to put himself at that much risk, but the way Barré spoke to him rankled. “None of ’em have a shred o’ trust for any Europeans, at this point,” he added, after a sip of his cool-ish wine.

  “And with good reason,” Commodore Loring interjected. “After what the late, un-lamented, General LeClerc, and this chap Rochambeau, did to them. They came with a plan for complete extermination of any Blacks living on the island, and thought to re-populate it with fresh slaves, unaffected by thoughts of independence, or liberty. That is the only way that Saint Domingue could be returned to profitability,” Loring said with a shrug. “Their principal exports depend upon slave labour. Rochambeau deliberately rounded up Blacks and Mulattoes, and drowned them by the umpteen-thousands, right here in Le Cap Bay, not a year past.”

  “They’ll burn the ships, and the survivors, to Hell,” Captain John Bligh said with a sigh. “With very good cause. Unless we arrange for the French departure.”

  “I will offer Rochambeau and his naval officers rescue from that fate,” Loring told them. “But, only if they sail out by the deadline he has agreed to with Dessalines, tomorrow. I will allow them to fire broadsides, as honourable tokens, before striking their colours. But, that is all I will allow. For the sake of humanity, I wish the rebel generals to accede to that arrangement. You gentlemen will deliver to Dessalines the full meaning of my terms to Rochambeau, and extract from him an agreement that he will not fire upon the French ships,”

  “If they obey you, sir, and leave harbour,” Lewrie pointed out. “If Rochambeau does not? Fort Picolet’s forges are already kindled.”

  “Then, let us pray that General Rochambeau has seen that, too, and will be convinced that departing Cap François is in his best interests, hmm?” Commodore Loring replied.

  “All of us, sir?” Captain Barré, ever a skeptic, enquired with a cutty-eyed glance at Lewrie.

  “Aye … all of you,” Loring told the man with a shrug, cocking his head to one side as if thinking that three was more impressive than two; or, that, seeing as how they were already up and dressed…?

  “Well, then … let’s be about it, hey?” Lewrie said, tossing off his wine and plastering a confident smile on his phyz, no matter the gurgly qualms in his nether regions that threatened to make themselves known to one and all.

  Aye, I’ll go, he told himself; if only to rankle Barré!

  CHAPTER THREE

  They landed at the quays in Commodore Loring’s barge, a rather more impressive conveyance than any of their captains’ gigs, with her oarsmen tricked out in snowy white slop-trousers, shirts and stockings, flat tarred hats with fluttering long ribbons painted with the name of Loring’s flagship, in fresh-blacked shoes with silver-plated buckles, and dark-blue short jackets with polished brass buttons.

  And, just in case, with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols stowed out of sight under water-proof tarred tarpaulins in the boat’s sole!

  They, and their white flag of truce, were met by a guard of honour, and a fellow who introduced himself as a Colonel who spoke fluent, almost Parisian, French, and heavily accented English. The soldiers of the guard, warm though it was, were accoutred as well as any soldiers that Lewrie had seen in Paris during the Peace of Amiens, from their brass-trimmed shakoes to their trousers, with dark blue tail-coats and white waist-coats, white-leather crossbelts with brass plates shining. None wore stockings or shoes, though.

  The Colonel, by name of Mirabois, wore a fore-and-aft bicorne hat with an egret plume and lots of gold lace, a snug double-breasted uniform coat with lavish gilt acanthus leaves embroidered on pocket flaps, his sleeve cuffs, and the stiff standing collars of the coat.

  Sweat himself t’death, in all that wool, Lewrie thought.

  “Bonjour, messieurs! Vous ’ave come to surrender to us, oui?

  “Er, ehm … what?” Captain Bligh gawped, taken by surprise.

  “Ze tout petite plaisanterie, ha ha? Ze wee jest?”

  “Oh. Ha ha. I see, ehm,” Bligh flummoxed. “Commodore Loring, ehm … our Commodore in command of His Britannic Majesty’s squadron now lying off Cap François, has directed us to deliver a proposal to your General Dessalines, and a request to speak with him, should that be possible,” Bligh explained in halting schoolboy French.

  As nigh-illiterate as me, Lewrie thought, noting how Captain Barré, their resident critic, pursed his lips and almost grimaced to hear it. Bligh was surely senior to him, else Barré would have been the one to conduct the negotiations. And was c
ertain that he would’ve been more effective at it. He was frowning like an irate tutor at his student’s lack of fluency!

  Bligh introduced them all, then waited, his document held out in expectation that it would be accepted, and whisked off to Dessalines, instanter. In the short period of their landing and introductions, a substantial crowd of the curious had gathered; poor field slaves still in the cheap nankeen short trousers and loose smocks of slavery, their women in shapeless longer smocks, and the children in barely any garments at all. Many of them had cane-cutter knives or machetes shoved into rough rope belts … or in their hands. Ominously, some of the better-garbed looters in incongruous finery, and better-armed with captured muskets or pistols, joined them, muttering and scowling.

  French, English … bloody Russians, Lewrie thought with a bit of rising dread; We’re White … their blood enemies. This could get very ugly!

  “Messieurs, I leave ze guard pour vôtre boat, oui? Et, I will escort vous au Le Tigre, ’is own face,” Colonel Mirabois offered, then turned and barked orders to his men. A round dozen of his soldiers formed a protective line to protect the barge, its wide-eyed Midshipman, Coxswain, and oarsmen, at the head of the quay, and another dozen formed to either side of their party.

  Like prisoners, off t’the guillotine or firin’ squad, Lewrie imagined, with (it must be admitted) a bit of a chill shudder.

  A Black sergeant gleefully called a fast “heep-heep” pace as they were marched off to see “Le Tigre,” Dessalines, face-to-face.

  “Think they’d’ve laid on some horses,” Captain Bligh whispered from the side of his mouth, panting a bit at the pace.

  “Already ate ’em, most-like,” Lewrie whispered back, unable to quell his sense of humour, no matter the risk they faced. “And, how come there’s still so many Whites ashore, I wonder?” he pointed out.

  It was uncanny; it was downright eerie, that long march through the littered streets. Now they were under official escort, the Blacks and lighter Mulattoes stood and scowled at the strange officers, with no sound; no jeering or hooting as they’d heard at the quays. Around the edges of the crowds stood White French colonists, men, women, and children; Lewrie could pick out the ones he imagined had been wealthy planters and slave owners, rich traders and exporters, by the finery of their clothing. The grands blancs, Lewrie recalled their being called. The others, though … the ones in humbler suits or working-men’s garb, with their women in simpler, drabber gowns, and the children in the same sort of hand-me-down “shabby” one could see in poorer neighbourhoods in England, were the artificers, the shopkeepers, the greengrocers, fruiterers, and skilled labourers, the petits blancs who might never have been able to aspire to owning slaves.

  What had Jemmy Peel told him, when in the West Indies on Foreign Office Secret Branch doings in the ’90s and sniffing about how to undermine the French, the slave rebellion, or both?

  Saint Domingue, or Hayti, was a bubbling cauldron of rebellion; poor Whites versus their betters; Mulattoes versus darker, illiterate field hands; house servants siding with masters in some cases, murdering them in others. Petits blancs then siding with Mulattoes like General Rigaud down south round Jacmel to fight L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and the others … and all wrenched from time to time by siding with the French if they’d seemed to have the upper hand, with the British when their own army had landed, even looking for shelter and security by allying themselves with the Spanish in the other half of Hispaniola, if that looked better!

  “Uhm … Colonel Mirabois,” Lewrie asked, at last, his curiosity aroused, “I note a fair number of … blancs still in the city. Were they not able to find space aboard the ships?”

  “Mais oui, M’sieur Capitaine … Le … pardon, seulement, vôtre name I cannot say, ees très difficile, n’est-ce pas?” Mirabois laughed rather drolly as he explained. “Zey refuse place in ze ships, m’sieur! ’Ave been born here…’ave property et business interests, comprend? Hayti ees open to ze trade, so zey make … accommodation. Wis ze ozzer blancs ’oo go away, Hayti ’ave need of zem, so…,” he said, shrugging in very Gallic fashion.

  “Incredible,” was all that Lewrie could think to say.

  “Ze blancs ’oo stay, zey know z’ings we pauvre Noirs do not,” Mirabois said further. “ ’Ave ze education, ze dealing wis ze outside world,” he admitted, with another of those pearly-white smiles, then sobered quickly to look almost feral. “Until we learn zese z’ings, z’en…’oo knows. Moi, I desire blanc servants. Ha ha ha! I make ze pauvre plaisanterie, again, n’est-ce pas? Aw ha ha ha!”

  * * *

  Their escorts led them from the looted, charred shabbiness of the harbour front to wide streets leading inland to a mansion district of substantial houses, what Lewrie took for banks, and perhaps government buildings, all smoothly stuccoed and painted, once, in white and gay tropical pastels; all with even more substantial double doors and impressive sets of iron bars on the tall windows.

  Most were shut tight against the victorious slave armies, their window shutters double-barred. Some had been nailed shut perhaps years before as their prosperous owners fled the colony. Some of those were now in the process of being torn open with crow-levers, or smashed open with heavy mauls, though it seemed an orderly process, not a looting by a jeering mob; the deeds were done by work-gangs or companies of Black troops, supervised by their officers.

  Their escort halted in front of a pale yellow–painted government office building with blue doors and shutters, and Spanish-looking roof tiles. Soldiers in neat, clean uniforms stood guard over the entrance, though they made no moves to stop the stream of officers, runners, and idling gawkers, both military and civilian, who wandered in with pipes or cigaros fuming, chatting and pointing at their former masters’ splendours as gay as mag-pies.

  Colonel Mirabois left them for a long time, standing in direct sunlight and steamy heat, before returning and gesturing them inside; across the high and spacious lobby, and up a long, curving flight of stairs to the upper floor, then into a receiving room large enough to accommodate a good-sized hunt ball of two hundred or more very energetic couples at a contre-dance.

  “Messieurs, mon Générals…,” Colonel Mirabois loftily began as he introduced the British delegation, then made introductions for the splendidly uniformed men who stood behind a massive oak-and-marble desk.

  “General Dessalines…!” Mirabois said as that worthy glared at them, a big, tough, brutal-looking man.

  “Illiterate, I heard,” Lewrie whispered to Bligh and Barré.

  “General Christophe…!”

  “Once a British slave, brought here. Hotel waiter here in Cap François,” Lewrie further whispered. “Speaks English.” Christophe was not as big as the rest, and didn’t look quite as threatening.

  “General Clairveaux…!” Mirabois said of a solid Mulatto man.

  “Betrayal’s his meat an’ drink,” Lewrie related. “Play any side ’gainst the other.”

  Captain Barré turned his head slightly to look at Lewrie, with an eyebrow up; the sort of look one gave to a talking dog.

  Damme! Lewrie thought; I must’ve picked up more than I thought I had, from the last time I was here. Useful insights … gossip!

  After that, Lewrie stood aside, having no role to play as Bligh presented his formal written proposal from Commodore Loring. Colonel Mirabois took it and handed it to General Dessalines, which was fruitless, since he was illiterate, a former field slave. Grudgingly, that worthy had to pass it to either Christophe or the better-educated General Clairveaux, glowering even darker and fiercer, first at the British delegation which had put him in that embarrassment, then at his two “compatriots,” who, most-likely, were scheming to become the supreme leader of their new nation.

  “Clairveaux’s a schemer?” Barré muttered from the corner of his mouth, barely moving his lips.

  “Supposedly loyal to France and Sonthonax when he was here, then Rigaud and his Mulattoes down south, then L’Ouverture, and the Spanish? Slip
pery as an eel,” Lewrie whispered back. “Might’ve backed LeClerc, ’fore he died of Yellow Jack.”

  “You puny, lying White bastards!” General Christophe barked angrily after he’d read the letter and heard Bligh out. “Go back to Europe, the rest of the Indies, and slaughter each other! But do not dare to dabble in Hayti’s affairs any longer. Damn all you British, but if not for your presence, the French would already be gone!”

  That was shouted in English; Christophe turned to his compatriots, Dessalines and Clairveaux, and repeated himself in rapid, slurred French, wind-milling his arms and going so far as to spit on the floor, and pound a fist on the marble table top so hard that he made it jump, massive and heavy as it was; about the size of a jolly-boat, to Lewrie’s lights.

  General Dessalines rumbled out an equal flood of bile in a deep basso, glaring at the trio of British officers and gripping the hilt of his elegant sword so hard that his dark fingers changed colour. Clairveaux, not to be outdone, barked out his own flood of threats.

  Not exactly Nelson’s “band o’ brothers,” are they? Lewrie told himself. He found it amusing … until the roars for “slaughter” and “blood bath” reached the ears of the many revolutionaries beyond those double doors, and Lewrie heard a blood-chilling chant he hadn’t heard in years.

  Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!

  Canga bafio té! Canga mouné de lé!

  Canga do ki la! Canga li!

  “Sound in good spirits,” Captain Barré commented, turning about to cock an ear, with a confident smile (false, most-like given their hosts’ attitude).

  “It means ‘We swear to destroy all the Whites and all that they possess; let us die rather than fail to keep this vow,’ ” Lewrie nervously translated in a low mutter. “This is gettin’ serious, sir.”