Sea of Grey

by Dewey Lambdin

  “And been busy, I see,” Cashman said, eyeing Lewrie’s medals.

  “Tell you all about it over dinner. Is Baltasar’s still open?”

  “The old Frog’s fancy restaurant?” Cashman asked. “He died of Yellow Jack, ages ago. A Free Black feller dared buy it, and kept the name. Frankly, the food’s much better and his prices ain’t so high.”

  “Let’s make it my treat, then,” Lewrie offered. “Feelin’ a tad peckish? Have time for it?”

  “Yes, and yes. Let me collect my new articles, and we’re off!”

  Baltasar’s was much as Lewrie recalled it. There was a curtain-wall with a wrought iron gate in front, with a small brass plaque the only sign that it was a commercial establishment and not a residence. Within, there was a cool and shaded courtyard, with a small fountain that plashed and gurgled beneath a pergola, between trellises hanging heavy with fragrant tropical flowering vines. A second curtain-wall split the entry into two clean white gravel or oyster shell paths, by jardiniers filled with even more flowers.

  Inside was a cool, open room with plaster walls and heavy wood beams, wainscotted to chair-height with gleaming local mahoghany, and the tables covered with clean white cloths. At the rear, there was a slightly raised dining area facing a back wall pierced by large windows and glazed double doors that led out to a back garden overlooking the harbour, where even more wrought iron tables sat under sailcloth awnings for shade, to dine alfresco. The decor was much simpler than what Lewrie remembered, more Caribbean than imitation Versailles or Tuilleries Palace ornate. Most tables were taken, and the intriguing aromas coming from the separate cooking shed told him why.

  A fetching Creole or Mulatto wench came to take their orders, a young woman with whom Cashman joshed as though he was a more than regular diner … or an after-hours lover? Like Lewrie’s Cox’n Andrews, she was light-skinned and her features were finer and handsomer, than brutish.

  “A mere touch o’ the tar-brush,” Cashman explained once she had headed for the kitchen shed and had spoken to the barman.

  “Fair handsome,” Lewrie amiably agreed. “A particular friend?”

  “Almost pass for white, a fair number of ‘em,” Cashman told him, ignoring the query, “but what may one expect, with so many sailors and soldiers runnin’ off and takin’ up with the first decent-lookin’ wench they see? Planters and overseers, married or no, who can’t resist the Cuffie housemaid’s charms? Some free girls who turn to whorin’ and out pops a mulatto git. And their dialect, did ya hear it? Damn’ near an Irish brogue, or a Cockney twang that takes ya back to Bow Bells, with a Creole lilt. Jamaica could be a fine country.”

  “Same as India, or Canton in China, anywhere Europeans go,” Alan said, as their wine arrived, taking Cashman’s evasion as confirmation.

  “Same as Saint Domingue,” Cashman pointed out with a frown. “If you think Jamaica’s a hodgepodge, wait’ll you get ashore, over there.”

  “Wasn’t plannin’ on it, Christopher,” Lewrie scoffed after tasting the hock. “From all I’ve heard, a mile or two safe offshore’ll do me fine. Do they ice this, by God? Marvelous!”

  “Massachusetts ice, packed in straw and wood chips, down in the storm cellars,” Cashman informed him, beaming. “Americans can even turn shite t‘money, s’truth! Whole shiploads of dried manure to dung thin island soils. Saint Domingue, though … you know the French. Put the leg over a monkey did someone shave the face first. Saint Domingue’s a bloody pot-mess when it comes t‘race. Dozens of terms for how black or white a person is … mulatto, quadron, octoroon, griffe, dependin’ on whether the father or mother was black or white, and what shade, if the mother was slave or free, house-servant or field hand, how rich or important the sire. Most confusin’ bloody war ever ya did see, and I doubt if the Blacks over there can sort it out. They’re comin’ to call it the ‘War of The Skin.’ Everybody’s terrified of the real dark Blacks, the half-castes with nothing side with this fella L‘Ouverture, the half-castes with anything t’lose side with Rigaud, or the whites.”

  “The petits blancs side with the grande blancs …” Lewrie added.

  “Someone fill you in, then?”

  “Written advisories,” Lewrie told him, scowling. “But you must know how little those’re worth, and how out of date by now.”

  “We’re going there, soon,” Cashman said. “General Maitland has been run pretty-much ragged, whenever he sends battalions out into the countryside. Lucky he hasn’t been butchered and hung up by his heels, suffered total massacres, so far. Like the Frogs. Poor bastards.”

  “So what is this, the Last Supper?” Lewrie asked. “Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we shall die?”

  “Been there, before. Call it a preventive dose of civilisation, so I don’t go mad quite as quickly,” Cashman snickered.

  “How did you get your own regiment?” Lewrie enquired. “Last we saw of each other back in ’83, you were a brevet-captain in a fusilier regiment.”

  “Ah, well … long story,” Christopher said, winking.

  “We’ll take a long dinner,” Lewrie assured him.

  “Well, once the Revolution ended, what was left of us were sent back to England. Recall, I told you how much I despise cold climates? Damn-all raw and rainy, and damn-all dreary, too … peacetime soldiering. I had picked up a little loot, here and there. Lots of officers in the regiment were selling up their commissions, but I still couldn’t afford t‘be more than a lieutenant, with a fifteen-year-old over me as captain, damn his eyes! Cost of a commission always goes up in peacetime, in regiments that won’t get sent overseas for a long spell. But I found a daddy, needed a place for his slack-jawed young imbecile, so I sold up and resigned. Then turned round and bought a captaincy in a kutch-pultan5 with the bad luck t’be ordered to India. Could’ve bought it for the price of coach fare, with so many young fools worried about their thin, pale skins, of a sudden! And I’d been there before, as ye knew, and it hadn’t killed me yet, so …”

  Cashman sketched a neck-or-nothing career of heat and flies, of bad water and food, nigh-poisonous native “guzzle,” surely poisonous serpents, spiders, and scorpions for bed companions, the sun murderous.

  “To a bloody war, or a sickly season,” Lewrie proposed, raising his glass with one of the Royal Navy’s toasts. “Ah, India, the land of loot and lust! I take it you were fortunate in both, hmm?”

  “Brevet-major in six months, as officers keeled over like nine-pins. Some kerfuffles with a native prince or two, and I’d amassed me enough t’buy a permanent majority,” Cashman boasted, “and laid enough aside t‘come home a chicken-nabob, and then I had me a think. Never in this life would I make lieutenant-colonel, not even in a shoddy battalion such as mine. Home depot in England picks those who suit the Colonel of the Regiment, or Horse Guards, when there’s no war, and they’ve no need of my harum-scarum sort. Things got quiet after a few years, so I sold up and took passage here. Not quite as hot, a tad less dangerous, and a tad less unhealthy. Got into sugar cane, cotton and such, in a small way. Ran up a rather nice house, ran about twenty slaves, my own canemill, press and pans. Down southwest of Spanish Town, on Portland Bight. Milled for neighbours who didn’t get the wind to run their own mills proper … done main-well raisin’ horses and cattle as well. Takes less labour and fewer slaves. Oh, I played ship’s husband for a while, backin’ cargoes on the Triangle Trade, but after a time or two, I got out of that. A drib here, a drab there, and it all added up, somehow.”

  “But your regiment,” Lewrie pressed as their soup arrived, a hot and spicy pepperpot. “Sounds as if you had a fine retirement or second career. But then, you …?”

  “Boredom, Lewrie!” Christopher told him with an outburst of too-bright laughter. “I was bored silly! Like most things, one claws and schemes t’get Life’s treasures, but once in hand, they lose lustre, and you find it was the chase that was the real fun.”

  “I think I see your point,” Lewrie replied, thinking of his own tenant farm in An
glesgreen, the mark of a landed gentleman that should have been satisfaction enough, and the mark of success.

  “And … there’s the slaves,” Cashman admitted, turning sombre. “Recall, do ya, we once had a schemin’ session on a riverbank in Spanish Florida, when we got sent up the Apalachicola t’deal with the Muskogee Indians? How it’d be a great land for crops like cotton, did I fetch in some Bengalis, ‘stead o’ the Indians? Grow it, pick it, and card it, wash it, bale it, and ship. Or spin it and loom it on the spot, usin’ the river for power. Even build a manufactory, and sell made clothin’ all over this part of the world?”

  “Aye, I do recall. How close did you come?” Lewrie smiled.

  “You pay a Hindoo ryot for his work, Lewrie,” Cashman confessed in a much lower voice, one that would not carry to his contemporaries and fellow planters. “You hire him. Aye, he slacks off and acts lazy and ya thrash him, and he’ll take it and shrug it off, then get back to work proper. But the Cuffies, Alan … the Samboes. With them, all we have is the lash. Die off in droves from snake bites, diseases, worked t‘death or starved halfway there—have t’buy more of ‘em, and start all over again. We’ve thirty-thousand whites on Jamaica, but there’re over three hundred thousand slaves, and barely ten thousand Free Black people. And there might be a total turnover every generation, do you see? And ya can’t do anything t’ease the misery. Cosset your slaves, and your neighbours’ll think you’re weak … a ‘Merry Andrew.’ Go too harsh, like most of ‘em do, and you get rebellion. And start fearin’ what yer house slaves serve ya, do they slip poison in your food and drink! That’s no way t‘live, Lewrie, believe me. I thought I knew what I was gettin’ into when I bought land and slaves t’work it. Knew my way round natives, d’ye see … Bengalis, Mahrattas. Muskogee or Cherokee. Hell … Irish?” he added with a grin and a shrug.

  “But it didn’t work that way,” Lewrie said for him, though yet mystified. It was a given, that slaves and acreage were the marks of colonial gentlemen, of success and prosperity! Yet Cashman sounded as if he’d turned his back on everything except honourable soldiering.

  “May’ve been the worst mistake I ever made, Lewrie, to settle out here,” Cashman confessed in a mutter. “I considered America, but even with over-mountain land goin’ for ten pence an acre, it requires slaves t’work it, too, ‘less you settle far north, among those stiff-necked, hymnsingin’ Yankees, with all their ‘shalt nots.’ And it’s a cold damn’ place, to boot! Oh, I plunged in with a will at first, and thought things were goin’ hellish fine, doin’ what everyone else about me did, but … first thing I did was get out of the Triangle Trade.”

  Lewrie knew about that; sugar and molasses, coffee and cotton, dye-woods and indigo to American ports. Sell cargoes and invest some of the profit into rum, tobacco, hemp ropes, tar, pitch and turpentine, resin and naval stores; ship that to England and make another profit, which was partly invested in cheap trade goods, trinkets and gew-gaws, cast-off muskets and cutlasses, bolts of gaudy cloth and such to sell or trade in West Africa, where the Black chieftains and Arab traders would fetch you thousands of their own people, or those captured from other tribes, then ship “Black Ivory” on the Middle Passage to a Caribbean port to be auctioned off. Three legs of trade, three profits in one, and five hundred pounds could end up fetching four thousand!

  “Saw the wretches landed, sold off at the Vendue House,” Cashman said so softly that Lewrie had to lean over his soup to hear him. “I felt … sick. Smelt the stink of a ‘blackbirder,’ have you? Once is enough for a lifetime. Fed me own slaves a touch better after that, I did. Shoes and new slop-clothing more’n once a year. Let ‘em have an hour or two more on their vegetable plots, bought more salt meats and such? Felt I was doin’ right, no matter what the neighbours thought. Salved my conscience a little, but that was all I was doin’. What my overseers did in my name, though … What’s the difference?”

  “So you got more into livestock?” Alan asked.

  “Yes. Less cane, where the real misery lies, the killin’ work.”

  Lewrie studied Christopher Cashman—the “Kit” of his early derringdo—as he returned to spooning up his pepperpot soup before it got cold. He looked much the same as the old Cashman of his remembrance, but for more crinkles ‘round his eyes and mouth, his hair now sprinkled with more salt than pepper. He was still the lean, fit, and hungry-looking rogue from the ’80s, and had not battened as most men would, once success and a semblance of riches got within their grasp. His wardrobe had improved, of a certainty; Lewrie could recall shabby uniforms so faded from red to pink that one could conjure that he had bought his regimentals off a ragpicker’s barrow. Now he was prosperous, tailored as natty as anything, well shod in popular Hessian boots, his sword of good quality and gleaming, his tunic heavy with real gilt lace and embroidery, his breeches, waistcoat, and shirt snowy-white and well cared for, his hair dressed neatly.

  But, Lewrie wondered, where was that “fly,” sardonic rogue from those days, the one with the wry, sarcastic, or flippant comment in the face of danger or disaster?

  “You know about the Second Maroon War, I take it?” Cashman asked of a sudden, as if all that had passed between them moments before had never occurred.

  “Yes. Started in ’91, didn’t it?”

  “Prompted by the slave revolt in Saint Domingue,” Cashman said. “Got beaten back, but broke out again in ‘95. I retook colours then, as a major once more. Nothing near so big or widespread as our Frogs suffer, but bad enough. ’Twas a great slaughter, e‘en so. Eye for an eye, tooth for a tooth, and not a jot o’ mercy. Ambush for ambush, massacre for massacre. Shut ‘em down by ’96, but there’s still many skulkin’ about. Then along comes General Maitland, who asks me to be on his staff at Port-Au-Prince. Spent a year at that, then the people here suggested raisin’ another local regiment. Maitland put in a word for me, and I had the support of my neighbours, who put up the money.”

  “But Kit … whyever agree t’fight rebellious French slaves, if you didn’t care for fightin’ your own?” Lewrie puzzled aloud.

  “In any society, Alan my old,” Cashman said, leaning closer to mutter even softer, with a sardonic gleam in his eyes, “you’re either on the side of the angels or you’re a pariah dog. You have to sing along with the choir, nod and say ‘amen’ in the right places. My good name was on the line. And I didn’t say I don’t like fightin’ slaves. They’d slaughter white folk like so many hogs in November, given the chance. They despise us, d’ye see. They despise me! Act harsh, and they despise you … be soft, and they take advantage. Treat ’em well, gift ‘em on the holidays, and they’ll fawn and slobber on yer boots to yer face, all grateful-like, then roll their eyes and snicker behind yer back, and despise you for your weakness! I’d much rather kill ’em than own ’em … any day.”

  Lewrie’s jaw dropped open in surprise. Is he daft? he queried himself, No, he looks and sounds as sane as … as me!

  “Servile, obsequious cringers, liars, and frauds, all of ‘em,” Cashman rather calmly went on, between sips of his soup and a dabbing at his mouth with a fine linen napkin. “I’ve an overseer runnin’ things for me, for now. Once this war on Saint Domingue’s done, I’ll sell up, lock, stock, and barrel, and get free of this pestilential place. Sham a lingerin’ fever, invent a troublin’ wound … grief? Any excuse to placate my neighbours and peers. I’ll have done my bit by then, and there’ll be no shame in it. Something that took too much outta me … and d’ye know what I’ll do then?”

  Lewrie shook his head in the negative.

  “I’ll sell off my slaves with the greatest of glee,” he said, with a nasty smirk, “to the harshest masters I know, and I know most of ’em, believe you me. Those few I think were straight with me, I’ll manumit and give ‘em a small sum for a fresh start. But the rest … I’ll see ’em all in a livin’ hell. Then I’m shot o’ this place, and off to the East Indies again, where a man with ‘chink’ can live like a rajah, and stuff ev‘ry wench in the bibikhana
ev’ry night, do I get the itch. And never have t’buy folk, ever again!”

  “Surely, you knew, goin’ in …” Lewrie countered. “You were out here for years, and saw how a slave society …”

  “Ah, but it looks so dev’lish easy, goin’ in, Alan,” Cashman scoffed. “Sit on your balcony and watch the money grow? Play cards and dance in the parlour, with everything at yer beck and call, with nary a thought for how it’s fetched. Damned beguilin’ life, from the outside lookin’ in, when it’s other people’s slaves doin’ the bowin’ and scrapin’ to ya. Once in, though … it’s a hell on all sides.”

  At that moment, the pretty young mulatto serving wench arrived with a tray heaped with platters; split crab claws and legs, lobsters split and steaming, with fresh-caught pompano grilled in key-lime rob and crisp with breading; removes of fresh chickpeas and diced scallions; plump boiled carrots topped with brown sugar; and a basket piled high with piping hot yeast rolls made with imported fine wheat flour!

  “Ah, Paradise!” Lewrie extolled, after his first taste of every dish, rolling his eyes in ecstacy. “And damn all Navy rations!”

  “Another thing, Alan,” Cashman said after a bite of fried fish and a sip of their chilled hock, with a blissful smile on his own face. “When the time comes t’sell, a hero’s lands go higher than a poltroon who didn’t serve … or those of a secret Abolitionist. Ever hear of William Wilburforce or Hannah More?”

  “Aye, damn ’em,” Lewrie sourly replied.

  William Wilburforce was in Parliament, Hannah More was one of those Society Women with more energy than wit; both were determined to “reform” English Society in their own mould, to tame it, gentle it, and “improve” it. And they were Church of England, not Dissenters!

  “Church of England, but they talk more like the Wesley brothers and all their leapin’ Methodists,” Lewrie went on, after a cleansing slosh of wine. “Spendin’ all their time, and half their money, along with lots of other fools, ’bout Sunday schools, so please you, so our children don’t grow up wild. Or pick up Republican ideas, and rebel like the Fleet did.”