Havoc's Sword

by Dewey Lambdin

  Damme, what do they pay Yankee captains? he had to ask himself.

  He did set a good table, though, with boiled shrimp, done in a Low Country spice-broth, roasted chickens, odd yellow-orange potatoes that he called yams (and were quite sweet with a slather of his fresh butter), beef-steaks from a fresh-killed bullock, and miles fatter and tenderer than anything he could have purchased from the British dockyard, with lashings of cornmeal bread, island chick-peas with diced onions, and a tangy mid-meal salad. Wine flowed, as did whisky, and Lewrie noted that Lt. Seabright, Capt. McGilliveray, his First Officer a Lt. Claiborne, and a fresh-faced midshipman, introduced to him as one Desmond McGilliveray, freely imbibed the whisky like mother’s milk!

  Politics and religion were, of course, banned topics, and anything related to “business” was out, too, so supper conversation was limited. Americans and Britons shared little in common, the last fifteen years since the end of the Revolution, but a common language, and even that was beginning to diverge. They did not share music and song as they evolved, nor dramas, nor even London or Court gossip.

  Needless to say, the aforementioned yams came in for a lot of praise and discussion, which led to longings for fresh-killed venison, comparisons of “furrin” dishes they’d come across in their voyages, or the more exotic social customs witnessed, so long as they had nothing to do with prurient or bawdy talk, accompanied by winks and nudges.

  Food, it seemed, was safest, with farming practices coming in a strong second, and Caribbean cuisine third. Lewrie held forth for the Chinese or Hindoo cooking and seasonings, which led to questions about his adventures in the Far East ’tween the wars.

  “A little covert work, Captain McGilliveray,” Lewrie told him, with a wink, “’bout the time your first merchant ships were putting in at Canton. Many of ours, and more than a few of yours, were disappearing. More than could be blamed on local pirates. Admiralty sent out a strong Third Rate disguised as a ‘country ship,’ not part of the East India Company, and sure t’be a prime target. Turned out t’be a French plot, hand-in-glove with Mindanao pirates, to build an alliance that’d capture everyone’s trade but theirs, the next time war came. Well, we put paid to ’em, in the end. Couldn’t blurt out that the French had a disguised squadron out there, any more than we could reveal our own…’twas a hard three years, all in all, but it came right, at last.”

  And God, but ’twas priceless the startled, uneasy look on Mr. Peel’s face as he sketched out the nub of the tale! That mission, any of its sort, was supposed to be held forever “under the rose”!

  Wait for this’un, then, Lewrie mulishly thought as Peel pleaded with his eyes for silence and no more details, concluding with a harsh glare of warning.

  “In point of fact, the Frenchman who led their activities there is now here in the Caribbean, on Guadeloupe,” Lewrie told them, with a secretive hunching forward, as if sharing the unsharable. “His name is Guillaume Choundas, and I’m told he directs their privateers and minor warships. Brutally ugly fellow,” Lewrie said, describing Choundas’s current appearance. “You run across him, you would do your nation the greatest service by eliminating him. He’s the cleverest brute ever I’ve come across. Most-like sent out to counter your navy’s presence here.”

  “Don’t you wish to finish him yourself, Captain Lewrie?” young Midshipman McGilliveray asked, his eyes alight at the prospects. Evidently, the U.S. Navy was not quite as tolerant of outspoken “gentlemen in training,” for his captain (uncle?) glowered him to abashed silence, and the teen reddened and ducked his head.

  “I’d give my right arm, young sir,” Lewrie declared. “And save the world a great deal of future grief. Though I very much doubt we’ll ever heave in sight of one another. Just so long as somebody does. I will spot the victor a case of champagne, do I hear the glad news. My word, what a coup that’d be for your new navy, what?”

  That went down well; every American at the table got a wolfish, speculative expression at that suggestion. Promotion, glory, and honour for themselves, their new nation, and navy; a feat which would ensure a permanent U.S. Navy, never again to be laid up or sold off, once their “emergency measures” were no longer necessary.

  Lewrie took a peek cross the table to Peel, who was thin-lipped and flint-eyed at how much Lewrie had revealed, at how blatantly he had tossed the bait in their direction. Their eyes met, and Peel’s mouth quirked a touch, though he did incline his head in mute, and grudging, agreement. Perhaps he would have brought Choundas’s name up much more subtly, but…it was done, and no real harm had resulted. Yet.

  “And you, Mister Peel?” Lt. Claiborne, Sumter’s First Officer, enquired. “You look like a travellin’ man, so weathered, an’ all. Are you Royal Navy, too? I’d expect you have a favourite cuisine as well.”

  “Uhm, I am…” Peel began, flummoxing in search of a bona fide, of a sudden, “…Spain, Portugal, and the Mediterranean region, mostly. I represent Coutts’ Bank in London, so I do get about somewhat.”

  “Old family friend of my wife’s British relations, sir,” Lewrie lied, covering for him. “I bank with Coutts’, so when James wrote he was being sent out to search for suitable acreage for a bank’s client, I offered him passage to Antigua from Kingston. Safer passage than he could expect aboard a civilian packet. My wife, by the by, originally came from the Cape Fear country in North Carolina. Upriver, near Cross Creek and Campbell town…the Scots’ settlements. We first met during the last war, in Wilmington.”

  Why, that was right up the coast! Why, that almost made her a Scot herself, and had he ever heard the tale of Flora MacDonald, mistress of Bonnie Prince Charlie, who’d landed at Wilmington and married a local, who’d raised a Tory Highland regiment…unfortunately defeated at Widow Moore’s Creek bridge, just outside Wilmington, but…!

  A Chiswick, was she, why Captain McGilliveray had known of them, had met a Sewallis Chiswick before “the unpleasantness”…!

  “My late father-in-law, sir, and the namesake of my eldest son!” Lewrie happily exclaimed. “I served with Caroline’s brothers, Burgess and Governour Chiswick, quite incidentally really, at Yorktown. Rifle regiment. One of ours, actually, but…”

  “Why, I do b’lieve I was introduced to them, too, must’ve been in ’74 or ’75, just before…” Capt. McGilliveray gleefully said. He was a Carolinian, from a distinctive region of the United States, one thinly populated compared to the northern states. And he was a Scot, a Celt, and vitally enthralled, as all “Southerners” were, by family lineages, what Caroline had once said was a parlour game more popular than Blind-Man’s Buff or cards, what she’d termed “Who’s Your People?”

  “Just lads they were then,” Capt. McGilliveray recalled with a smile, “But likely lookin’. Dash it, I even think I remember a young girl, quite the sweet miss, with ’em. Blond hair, and the merriest eyes…?”

  “That surely was my Caroline, sir,” Lewrie agreed.

  “So all the Chiswicks are in England now?” McGilliveray asked.

  “No, sir. Just her immediate family. One branch remained, and still farm in the Cape Fear. Some Chiswicks, and most of her former kin, the McDaniels, who supported independence,” Lewrie had to say.

  “Ah, we lost so many good friends an’ neighbours,” McGilliveray said, sighing. “When there was no need for ’em t’cut an’ run. We’d of put all the bitterness b’hind us by now.”

  Not if you burned each other out and murdered your own cousins, Lewrie sourly thought, careful to keep a neutral expression, as he remembered how Caroline and her family had come as refugees to Wilmington in rags and tears of betrayal.

  “Now, as I recall Mister Seabright tellin’ me once he returned from bearin’ my invitation, Captain Lewrie,” McGilliveray went on, in a playful mood, “did you not tell him that you had met a McGilliveray some time or other?”

  “Forget his Christian name, sorry t’say,” Lewrie replied, “but there was a young man name of McGilliveray with whom I served for a few weeks, in �
�82, just after I gained my commission. He had been London-educated…came out from England with an older fellow who wished to try and influence the Muskogee Indians. Your pardons, Captain, but as I recall, this particular McGilliveray or some of his kin were in the ‘over-mountain’ trade with the Indian tribes, and he was of…partial Indian blood,” Lewrie stated with a hapless moue of chagrin, unsure of how tales of White-Indian unions went down with touchy Americans from the South, and with Capt. McGilliveray in particular. Had his kinsman been a black sheep, a “Remittance Man,” or a stain on their escutcheon? Was Indian blood as shameful as a White-Negro blend seemed to be?

  “We tried to get the Muskogee and Seminolee to side with us, to take on the Spanish,” Lewrie further said with another apologetic shrug. “S’pose that made him a Tory, to you all. From Charleston, he said.”

  And let’s not tell ’em the plan was t’turn the Indians loose on Rebel settlers, and drive ’em into the sea! Lewrie thought; Devil take the hind-most, and the scalps.

  “My uncle Robert’s son, my cousin Desmond,” Capt. McGilliveray said primly, almost sadly, all joy of comparing heritage quite dashed. “Worst thing the fam’ly ever did, sendin’ some of us to England t’make Cambridge scholars. Turned Desmond’s head round, sorry t’say.”

  “My abject pardons for broaching the subject, sir!” Lewrie said, much abashed. “Though I’m told that even your great Benjamin Franklin and his son took opposing tacks during the Revolution. I did not—”

  “Oh, ’tis long done with, Captain Lewrie,” McGilliveray allowed, “and Desmond’s been dead and gone, these past twelve years.” He tried to placate, but only came off grumpier, more uneasy, than anything else. “Half the families in America had a Tory-Rebel altercation, if you look close. Once the war was over, though, Desmond did come home and we reconciled our diff’rences. My brothers and I inherited the city firm and the sea trade, whilst Desmond managed the hide and fur trade among the Indians. Here, sir! You actually went among the Muskogee when he did, or merely—”

  “Aye, Captain McGilliveray,” Lewrie replied, just about to preen a bit more and tell them another tale of derring-do, and proper modesty bedamned. “Escorted him inshore, then up the Apalachicola River in our ship’s boats, then overland to a Muskogee town, the name escapes me, by a large lake. Me, him, a company of fusiliers, and a Foreign Office—”

  “You knew my father, sir?” Midshipman McGilliveray blurted from the foot of the table, startling them all to an uneasy silence.

  Lewrie turned to look at him. The lad was gape-mouthed in astonishment and sudden pleasure, the “stain” on the McGilliveray escutcheon best left unsaid or not. Lewrie suspected that the poor lad had never been told very much about his “half-breed” sire, who had served against his own kin during the Revolution, to boot, despite his uncle’s declaration that they’d reconciled and put the rift behind them.

  “Indeed I did, young sir,” Lewrie told him. “And a formidable fellow he was, too. Brave, alert, and clever…skilled in the lore of the forest, and the nicest manners of the drawing room. At home in a chickee or a mansion. A bold horseman, a skilled hunter…”

  The simple use of a long-forgotten Indian word for “hut” seemed to please the midshipman no end, for he beamed wider, expectantly, as if starved for information long denied him.

  “Of the White Turtle Clan, I recall,” Lewrie further reminisced. “Or was it the Wind Clan, on his mother’s side? Muskogee royalty, as it were, in any event. He stood high in their councils, with their…uhm, mikkos and their…talwas! Their ministers and chiefs, as grand as a peer in the House of Lords,” Lewrie told him, the terms springing to the forefront of his memory after all those years. “At his urging I ended up anhissi, myself, toward the end…”

  “Made ‘of their fire,’” young McGilliveray exclaimed with growing excitement, “to my grandmother’s huti. A grand honour, is it not, uncle? Captain, sorry.” Young Desmond reddened.

  “It was, indeed, Mister McGilliveray,” his uncle gravely said.

  “And…and were you there, then, Captain Lewrie?” Midshipman McGilliveray hesitantly pressed, his curiosity getting the better of him, and to the great astonishment of Midshipman Grace seated beside him, who had never heard the like back in staid old England. “Then you must have met my mother. They were married, grandfather Robbie always told me, on that trip. You must have seen her!”

  “Ah…?” Lewrie hedged, trying not to gawp. The boy’s father, he sourly recalled, had been the hugest sort of prig, and he doubted that Cambridge had had a thing to do with it. Desmond McGilliveray, as he knew him, had ranted like a Baptist hedge-priest against fornication ’twixt the English and the Indians, forever lecturing and scolding the live-long day regarding “sensible” Muskogee customs and how stupid and “heathenish” Whites, and Lewrie in particular, were! Frankly, Lewrie had come to quite heartily despise him! Don’t even look at an Indian woman, especially when she was in her “courses” don’t even piss in a stream above them! Lewrie couldn’t recall Desmond McGilliveray even smiling at one of them. He’d taken no wife, as long as Lewrie had been ashore and inland with him. Perhaps after they’d sailed off, that frail little dandy-prat from the Foreign Office dead and all their plans gone for nought, even after thinking they had a settled agreement that the Muskogee would back England in the war.

  Only one marriage I recall, and that was mine…at the point of the knife! Lewrie thought, working his mouth in silent, resentful, reverie; ’Twas Desmond made me do it, and thought it hilarious!

  “My mother was a visiting Cherokee princess,” young McGilliveray stated with a stubborn, piss-me-in-the-eye pride, as if daring anyone to demean his antecedents; probably from long practice. “Her name in Cherokee meant Soft Rabbit, Grandfather Robbie said my father was dumbstruck in his tracks by her, from the very first, and…”

  Soft Rabbit, God-DAMN! Lewrie quietly screeched, almost knocking his wineglass over; He ain’t that stiff-neck’s boy…he’s MINE! SHIT!

  His mouth dropped open of its own volition; his eyes blared as wide as a new-saddled colt’s, as he took note of the lad’s eyes. Grey-blue eyes, just like his own. And what had his father Sir Hugo smirked after calling upon Theoni Connor and her new-born bastard, right after the Nore Mutiny? “He’s got your eyes, Alan, me son,” the old rake-hell had cooed; followed by a gleeful cackle!

  His eyes. Soft Rabbit’s glossy and thick, raven-black hair; but with a fairer Englishman’s complexion that he’d never have gotten from a union ’twixt Soft Rabbit and a half-blood, even were McGilliveray as fair as a Finn! A leaner face, not rounded; a fine nose, not hawkish.

  “I knew her,” Lewrie confessed. “Met her,” he quickly amended.

  Damme, didn’t I just! he frantically thought, recalling all the sweet, stolen hours when they went at it like fevered stoats, like…newlyweds! And the only reason he and Soft Rabbit had been made to “leap the sword” was because she was war booty, a slave taken by a Muskogee war party up near the Tanasi River, far to the north. A girl slave of the haughty Wind Clan couldn’t birth a bastard, and holding a rantipoling “outsider” responsible was amusing to them! The poor, deluded lad, Lewrie thought.

  “What was she like, sir?” young Midshipman McGilliveray begged.

  “Oh, wondrous handsome!” Lewrie truthfully said. “Pretty as a picture. Not so very tall, d’ye know, but as slim and graceful as any doe deer. Sorry, but they didn’t wed whilst I was at their town. And I never conversed with her. Gad, imagine lettin’ an outsider, English sailor such as me, in such exalted company, what?

  “Point of fact, the last time I saw your father was when he and his warriors escorted us back to our boats, then downriver to the sea. The Spanish had gotten wind of our presence, and they and the Apalachee attacked us before we started unloading the trade goods and arms we’d promised. It was neck-or-nothing there, for a bit, ’til your father rallied his warriors and ran them off. All I was left to show for it was a bayonet in the thigh, and a tale
t’tell. Early spring of ’83, it was.”

  “And he called you imathla lubotskulgi,” Captain McGilliveray contributed of a sudden, drawing Lewrie’s attention to the top of the table. “In Creek, that’s ‘little warrior.’ Desmond told me that,” he declared, seeming to gawp in wonder over such a coincidence happening in regards to his long-dead relative. “All these years, and both gone to their Maker, of the smallpox. I’d quite forgotten, but…well, I am dashed.” The other supper guests smiled, but he didn’t.

  Though McGilliveray didn’t sound “gawpish” quite the opposite, in point of fact, as he squeamishly, uneasily looked away, eyes almost panicked and averted, “harumphing” to reclaim his proper demeanour.

  He knows! Lewrie thought, cringing, fighting manfully to keep a calm exterior, himself, and not turn and look at Midshipman McGilliveray; Desmond must have told him who really fathered the lad, he looks so English, he’d’ve had to. Indians annul bad marriages at the Green Corn ceremonies…Soft Rabbit must’ve said ours didn’t take when I didn’t come back for her, and McGilliveray took her on. Said he’d see to her, and didn’t he just…the bastard.

  “Well, gentlemen,” Capt. McGilliveray said, balling up his napkin and laying it aside. “Let us have the port, or the whisky, fetched out, and honour our distinguished guests with a hearty toast to the King of England. Charge your glasses, if you will?”

  Lewrie again chose whisky; he was badly in need of it.

  At a nod, Midshipman McGilliveray at the foot of the table rose and proposed the toast to King George III, with all the fulsome titles including “Defender of the Faith, of the Church of England” to which Midshipman Grace responded with a shorter toast to the President of the United States—then the serious toasting and imbibing began.

  Chapter Sixteen

  “Thank God for a quiet day in port,” Lewrie muttered to himself as he struggled out of his coat sleeves, with his long-suffering man-servant Aspinall trying to help, trying to keep up with his captain’s slow, staggering circle of the day-cabin. “Wouldn’t trust me with the charge of a row-boat, t’morrow.”