Sea of Grey

by Dewey Lambdin

  “And the slaves hit you again,” Lewrie said, half-knowing the worst.

  “A big attack, that time, Alan old son,” Cashman said, sighing with disgust and sorrow. “Damn’ near a brigade, in a big block column, maybe two hundred across and might’ve been fifty deep, the front ranks with muskets this time, and skirmishers out front in pairs. I sent a galloper after Beauman, t’warn him what was comin’ and how we needed all our lads back, soon as dammit, but they were on us before he could stir his slack arse up. Damn him!” Cashman spat, slashing hard at the weeds, as if it were happening that instant, and not several days ago.

  “The line broke?”

  “No, we held! Men goin’ down like nine-pins, but we held for as long as we could,” Cashman said. “Sent another galloper back for the reserve regiment … warn ’em, d’ye see? Well, here comes help at last, Beauman with our four companies, but I look back at him, and do ya know what I see? He’s formin’ ’em a hundred yards behind the line! We’re on our own! Oh, he’s trottin’ back and forth, wavin’ his sword and makin’ his stallion rear, all glorious-like. Might’ve seen it in a damn’ painting, I s’pose … but he ain’t helpin’ us! After my lads see ’em, all lined up and ready … then see the enemy comin’ at a dead run with bayonets levelled, well … that was when we broke, and no holdin’ ‘em. Thought it looked safer to the rear. That tore the line wide open, our wounded are gettin’ butchered, and the Cuffies are rollin’ up the right flank of the Hampshires and the left of what regiment was on our right, and the race was on! Those units pivoted companies backwards, to refuse, and our lads took it for a retreat. So did Beauman, damn him, and he’s shoutin’ for us all t‘fall back on the reserves, and I’m yellin’ ‘No!’ but our people’re dyin’, no matter if I could’ve held ’em, then it’s Devil take the hind-most.

  “I tried t’organise volley fire … front rank fires and falls back ten paces t’reload whilst the second rank fires? But Beauman and his damn’ pets were orderin’ ’em t’run, so once the first rank retired they took off for the woods, and not a second later, the second rank, and it’s a complete rout, Goddammit!”

  “That’s where the whole army broke, then?” Lewrie asked.

  “The very place,” Cashman said with a sneer, “and it’s all our fault. Oh, I got’ ’em stopped, once they ran out of breath, and formed ‘em up, what was left of ’em. Even got ‘em t’go forward again, t‘help the reserve regiment. No help from Beauman or his beau-dandies! They scampered off God knows how far to the rear! Didn’t even see ’em ‘til late in the afternoon, when the whole army had fallen back, but they’d had time t’get their stories straight, and met up with General Maitland first and fed him a tale of woe … how no one could’ve held against such a horde, no matter their valiant efforts! Blamed the regular regiment, the Hampshires for gettin’ flanked … and me, for being unable to control the line!”

  “Surely you protested, Kit!” Lewrie barked in outrage. “You’ve witnesses … you could even demand a court t’clear your name.”

  “Sent Maitland a written protest, with a list of witnesses, but the way things are goin’ it’ll be months from now ’fore a court can be seated … and where’s my witnesses then?Half stand a fair chance o’ dyin’ on a darky’s bayonet long before I need ’em,” Cashman groused.

  “And in the meantime, Beauman’s free t’say anything he chooses, and lay the blame on you,” Lewrie realised.

  “Kingston and Spanish Town papers are owned by some of his very best friends, too,” Cashman said, continuing his litany of anger. “After we lost so many local men, I’ll be lucky I’m not hung before a court could sit … or ‘De-Witted,’ like that Dutchman got pulled to wee pieces by a mob with their bare hands.”

  “The sales price of your lands wouldn’t matter much then, hey?” Lewrie commented, using a stick to whack some tall weeds himself.

  “Even if I prevail at the court-martial, I’ll still be ruined,” Cashman spat. “Better I just challenge him, put a ball in him, and be done.”

  “Kit, for God’s sake!” Lewrie said, frowning. “You can’t just shoot him or carve him up! You’d have to resign your commission, and then you’d never get a court. Lieutenant colonels can’t duel colonels, anymore than I could duel an admiral. Have t‘be a civilian before you can ‘blaze’ with a senior officer. Otherwise, we’d have eighteen-year-old generals and admirals, and all my lieutenants would be ten! Want a promotion … want command? Just eliminate the next highest over you! Besides,” he added, “your Maitland ain’t a complete fool. He must know that Ledyard’s got the forehead of a hen, and you’re the one who saved what was left. Think it over … compose a letter of your own for the Jamaican papers, laying it all out. Believe me, no amount of money or power’s going t’make people believe he’s the better soldier. Any man who’s had dealings with him’ll most-like already think him a dunderhead.”

  “Might work,” Cashman allowed. “But if it doesn’t, and I don’t get my court, then I’ll have no choice but to resign my commission … and then duel him. If you’re still around, I’ll ask you to be my second.”

  There was no way that a friend, and a gentleman, could turn away from such a request; Lewrie could only dumbly nod his head and accept.

  “If there’s no other solution … and if that’s the only satisfaction you’ll have, then … aye, of course, Kit. I’ll second you.”

  “He refuses, I’m proved right, and shown him up for a coward,” Cashman said, looking wolfish with anticipated delight. “Does he take me up on it, then I’ll kill him! Think I could sail away happy after that. Thankee, Alan. I knew I could count on you.”

  “What friends are for,” Lewrie replied, feigning agreement. He had no doubts that Cashman could blow Beauman’s heart clean out with a pistol or carve him to chutney sauce with a sword. What sorrowed him was the fact that once the deed was done his old friend would be penniless, and too suspect to ever go for a soldier again. His lot would be ignominous exile, perhaps to those southern United States that he’d disparaged.

  “Think my writing General Maitland could help?” Lewrie offered.

  “Oh, please!” Cashman sneered with bitter amusement. “Support from a sailor who wasn’t even there? Hardly. But thankee for the offer, Alan old son. Hmmm … gettin’ on for late afternoon. Best we get you back to town. The darkies begin to play up at night.”

  Sure enough, the drums had begun again, and that infernal chant could be heard far off in the eastern jungles.

  “Eh! Eh! Bomba! Heu! Heu!

  Canga, bafio, té!

  Canga, moune de le!

  Canga, do ki la!

  Canga li!”

  “What language is that?” Lewrie asked, chilled to the bone once more by the sounds. “And what does it mean?”

  “Some African tongue from the Ivory Coast, where they came from,” Cashman told him, starting to lead them back toward the tent lines. “I was told it means ‘We swear to destroy all the whites, and everything they own. Let’s die if we don’t.’ Way they fight, I’d believe it.”

  “Anything I can send to ease your misery?” Lewrie asked him.

  “Can’t thing of anything, no,” Cashman sadly told him. “Keep a sharp eye peeled, mind. There’s always skulkers along the roads after dark.”

  “Oh, thankee for tellin’ me!” Lewrie barked. “I was nervous enough ridin’ up here alone in broad daylight!”

  “You could always stop in town at Jean-Pierre’s and look up yer little Henriette.” Cashman snickered. “There’s a spur t’move ya along.”

  “Way Port-Au-Prince is fallin’ apart, I’m better off aboard my ship,” Lewrie admitted, a knot of unease growing between his shoulder blades—where the musket ball, spear, cane knife, or poisoned arrow might strike were he unwary, or just plain unlucky on his lone ride back. “’Tis not a sailor’s fight, this sort of …”

  Cashman cocked an eye at the sky, and the place of the sun. He clapped Lewrie on the back, suspiciously near that knot of
unease, as if he suspected his qualms, then chuckled.

  “Nothin’ like a little dread t’keep you cloppin’ along faster. Think there’s time for the stirrup-cup at my tent, then we’ll get you on your way ’fore twilight gets too deep. There’ll be a last rush of troops and officers on the road ’bout now, so it shouldn’t be too bad.”

  “But keep my ears open and my head swivellin’?” Lewrie queried, suspicious of such blithe reassurances.

  “Reins in yer left, cocked pistol in yer right,” Cashman intoned.

  And Lewrie made it a quick stirrup-cup, both he and horse antsy to the faint chorus and the vibrating drums.

  “Canga, bafio te! Canga, moune de le!”

  Lewrie took the salutes from the side-party, doffed his hat, and stepped inboard, just as the late afternoon heat began to dissipate in the face of a freshening breeze off the sea, as the sun sank lower in the west. Lt. Langlie and the Surgeon, Mr. Shirley, were awaiting him on the starboard gangway, looking anxious.

  “Excuse me, sir, but this order came aboard for you, about one hour ago,” Langlie said, offering a single sheet of paper, folded over and sealed with a tiny daub of wax. Lewrie took it and split it open.

  “Aha,” he sighed, making a face. “I see. Well, damme.”

  “Bad news, sir? Pardon my curiosity,” Langlie enquired.

  “Seems that General Maitland and Admiral Parker have struck a bargain with our foe, L‘Ouverture, Mister Langlie,” Lewrie informed him, his weariness taking over after days of enforced activity and briskness. “Since we now hold untenable positions in Saint Domingue, and to spare the further ’useless effusion of blood,’” he went on, dripping sarcasm, “Maitland has proposed an armistice. Once he receives L’Ouverture’s assurances that the civilian populations of Jacmel, Mole Saint Nicholas, and Port-Au-Prince will be spared any ‘reprisals,’ we depart.”

  “Depart, sir? But …”

  “Strike our tents and sail away,” Lewrie spat, wadding up the order. “Abandon ’em to the ‘good offices’ of L’Ouverture’s men, tuck our tails twixt our legs, and slink off … without even a last bark at ’em. We’re to prepare to embark the Army and all its stores, and sail back to Kingston.”

  “Well, damme, sir,” Langlie groaned, removing his hat to swab his forehead and shake his head in sorry wonder. “They beat us.”

  “Aye, it appears they have,” Lewrie said. “Mister Shirley, the Army hospitals are filled with wounded. You’d best prepare for some of them to be put aboard.”

  “Of course, sir,” Shirley replied, hemming and hawwing a bit, though. “There is another matter that you must know first, Captain.”

  “And what’s that?” Lewrie asked, suddenly filled with a defeatist lassitude.

  “Several of our people are sick, Captain,” Shirley told him in a gruff mutter, all but wringing his hands in despair. “So far I cannot tell you with any certainty whether it’s malaria or Yellow Jack. Three hands show the fever, sweats, and headaches of malaria—along with the requisite icy chills—but two more also exhibit pains in the back and limbs one would expect to see with a case of Yellow Fever, so I cannot—”

  “Oh God, no!” Lewrie blanched, his worst long-lingering dread for the ship at last confirmed. “Only five, so far?”

  “As of the start of the First Dog Watch, sir, but it could be a dozen more by sunup,” Shirley grimly prophecied. “You are aware how quickly it can spread, Captain.”

  “Aye, I am,” Lewrie sadly whispered. “Let’s hope that chichona bark extract avails, Mister Shirley. Keep me informed, and make them as comfortable as you can. Anything you need …”

  He turned away and went to the quarterdeck bulwarks to peer out at the now dark and brooding shore of the anchorage. Port-Au-Prince, its docks and streets near the harbour, was lit by torches and faint lanthorns where soldiers and sailors off the stores ship laboured at the mounds of munitions and rations—this time to start reloading them for evacuation. Despite General Maitland’s truce, the dull crack of a musket now and then broke the twilight’s serenity along the lines deeper in the trackless jungles.

  For nothing, Lewrie thought, groaning with weary cynicism; ’twas all for nothing. Nicholas and Sevier, Seaman Inman …

  Toussaint L‘Ouverture, a plump little Black man, unschooled in weapons and tactics, and his army of tag-rag-and-bobtail former slaves with agricultural tools, had beaten the British Army! He had no way to fathom the “how” of it, except … to think that L’Ouverture’s victory, and the uneasy peace which might follow it, was for the best. Every experience he had with slavery, the more he was put off by it, just as Cashman was. In the face of such an amazing debacle, even a rake-hell as casually “churched” as he could shrug and think it God’s Will.

  That wasn’t to say that it didn’t rankle, though; the bitter cup of defeat’s gall had never been easy for Lewrie to swallow, ever since his first taste of it in 1780. And pondering the disgrace of sailing away after being bested by illiterate Blacks, by hordes of beasts with the musk of over-worked demons and not a jot of Christian mercy, not a jot of civilisation to their souls …! Truce or not, what would keep L’Ouverture’s hordes from butchering everyone indiscriminately … when they massacred petits blancs and townsfolk in an orgy of gore, would that be God’s Will, too? What would their Inquisition be like?

  The voudoun drums in the hills and forests throbbed on as they had since weeks before. Tonight, though, they sounded less funereal, though just as ominous. Now the drums almost had a lilt, a celebratory liveliness, and Lewrie could conjure images of men and women capering and leaping in the savage glare of bonfires, flaunting finery stolen from the dead, brandishing cane knives, spears, and muskets, firing rounds off at the moon and whooping like victorious Muskogee Indians in Spanish Florida.

  “Just thank God I’ll never have t’set foot on that shore again,” he whispered. “And you bastards are welcome to it.”

  For now, he had a crew to worry about, another debacle blooming on his own decks. Impossible as it might prove to be, to save his men from almost always fatal plagues, he didn’t think it God’s Will, or a form of punishment from On High that his poor sailors should suffer so for being unwitting pawns against the Saint Domingue Blacks’ eventual freedom. Perhaps God would take their innocence into account and spare them … or help him find a way to save them!

  BOOK THREE

  Sed ti qui vivum casus, age fare vicissim, attulerint.

  Pelagine venis erroribus actus an monitu divum?

  But come, tell in turn what chance has brought you here, alive. Come you driven in your ocean-wanderings, or at Heaven’s command?

  AENEID, BOOK VI 531-533

  PUBLIUS VIRGILIUS MARO “VIRGIL”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  “We may consider ourselves fortunate,” Sailing Master Winwood said, rapping his knuckles lightly on the wheel drum of the idle helm for luck, even so.

  “Fortunate … aye, sir,” Lt. Catterall replied with a roll of his eyes. “Eight dead so far, and thirty helpless with fever below. Why, with a run of luck such as that, I’d stake the family fortune.”

  “Consider the lot of those poor devils aboard the other ships,” Winwood pointed out, gesturing across Kingston Harbour. “Nigh half of their men down sick or buried. Consider the lot of the soldiers we brought off from Saint Domingue, sir. A full third of them are dead, and now interred ashore. No, sir, for my money, Proteus has come off rather easily, for all the time we spent close to that pestilential shore. Even as a good Christian, which I hope I am, I must confess I find a certain comfort in the tales told about Proteus and her almost inexplicable birthing … and about our captain. Though the tales of his last ship, Jester, and the tales about our own, smack of heathen, pagan old seagods, the idea of him, and us with him, being guarded by a benevolent Divine hand are a form of solace in the face of Life’s unfairness.”

  “Comforting, aye, Mister Winwood, but …” Catterall replied with a faint shrug; it was too warm for
wider gestures. Catterall, a happy-golucky Deist and cynic, found Mr. Winwood’s mysticism amusing. “The captain may be spoken of as a lucky captain, and his ships lucky by association, but … t’would take a pagan sea-god to deem us worthy in his sight.”

  That left unspoken the bald fact of Captain Lewrie’s adultery, his recent dalliance with a half-caste Port-Au-Prince whore, the rumour of which had made the rounds belowdecks, usually accompanied by hoots of appreciation and admiration, rather than disapproval or envy.

  “Ahem,” Mr. Winwood commented by clearing his throat, blushing at the unsaid reminder of their captain’s human frailty.

  “But God loved even his King David … Bathsheba notwithstanding,” Catterall drolly posed. “Something like that, sir?”

  “Ahem,” their priggish sailing master reiterated, tongue-tied and unable to respond to such wordly japing without violating his vows not to curse.

  “The proof of the statement that God loves a sinner, in hope of his eventual salvation, or has use of him in His majestic plan, stands before me, sir,” Winwood finally answered, glowering a touch.

  “Point taken, sir,” Catterall rejoined with a wink and chuckle. He was, in fact, rather proud of his repute as a rake-hell and a pagan, so Mr. Winwood’s comment caromed right past him. “And I will stand in humble abeyance ’til His fated use for me is revealed.”