Peter Wicked

by Broos Campbell

  A girl of about my age had been giving me the eye all morning. She had a blush of freckles across her nose and cheeks, and eyes as blue as the Caribbean on a clear day. A few orange curls had fallen loose from her mobcap, and she smiled at me with the directness that is the Brotherhood’s way. I noticed that she also kept an eye on her parents, who sat on either side of her like a pair of stone lions. For all the attention she gave me when they were looking, I might’ve been Satan’s half-brother that the Beelzebub family didn’t like to talk about; but when they were distracted, as right at that moment, she looked like she might like to give Old Scratch himself a go. I raised an eyebrow, she smiled and ducked her head, and I decided I’d give her the chance to talk to me after the meeting was over.

  Which seemed like it might never come. The Brotherhood’s method of communion was to sit around silently waiting for the Holy Spirit to enter somebody, or at least till someone couldn’t stand the suspense and started jawing about whatever was itching him. Failing that, there was the Topic of Examination, which was written on cards that was placed on the pews. The Topic of Examination that morning was the abolition of slavery—they were all for it, which I would’ve guessed would kind of put a damper on the debate, but they managed to bring up some things I hadn’t thought about, such as the cost to the owners. There was some talk about the road to Mammon, wherever that was, and not serving two masters, though I would’ve thought just one master was plenty enough for any slave. At any rate the wind went out of it after a while and they turned their soul-searching lamps on the question of manumission and returning free blacks to Africa. They were for that, too, till someone readmitted the question of money. The silence got longer and longer.

  So I said, “Suppose they don’t want to go?” and that livened things up again.

  I felt some pleased with myself as I followed Constance and Phillip out of the meetinghouse. There was enough of the afternoon left for a ramble, and maybe once the sun went down I could find a tavern that dared stay open on the Sabbath. And who knew . . . I slowed down to let the orange-headed girl walk by with her parents.

  Mama and Papa nodded at me, despite my uniform, and Papa said something about business to Phillip. The girl give me a flicker of a smile, and then both barrels when she seen I noticed her. With an amused light in her eye, Mama took Papa by the arm and maneuvered him alongside of Phillip.

  It was easy enough for the girl to match my step, and easy enough for me to fall off a little more. Already deep in conversation, the oldsters headreached on us and began to draw ahead.

  “I’m Matty Graves.”

  “I know it.”

  “Might I know your name?”

  “Thee might.”

  She smelled like peaches, or maybe she just looked like one. Her skin was a delicate pink beneath the freckles, and softened by a pale down. It had rained that morning, and the clogs she’d worn against the puddles gave her a long-legged stride and put her at just my height. They also made her a little wobbly.

  I reached out to steady her, and she put both her hands on my arm.

  I nodded toward Phillip and Papa. “Them two know each other. It’d be easy enough to find out your name.”

  “Yes, but then thee would have to explain why thee wished to know.”

  I give her the ol’ twinkly eye. “Oh, I doubt they’d wonder why.”

  Her eyes turned into little upside-down crescent moons when she smiled.

  I pulled my elbow in to squeeze her hands against me. “Perhaps a fellow could come a-calling of an evening?”

  “We do not admit visitors after dark.” She glanced at her parents, who were still exchanging opinions with Phillip and Constance. Then she gave me an address in Albemarle Street. “The left-hand window on the second floor. I will go to bed early with a headache.”

  Oh, what a joyous world, thinks I, hauling out my watch to see how long I’d have to wait. Dick Towson had give it to me last Christmas. It was something to see, a fine silver piece with raised figures of dolphins and mermaids around the rim, an engraving of the Constellation taking the Insurgent on the lid, and a sailor and a half-naked Liberty tromping on the British crown on the back. I popped the lid and held it open in my hand like an oyster, the better to make it sparkle.

  “Shortly after supper, then,” I murmured. “Make it nine o’clock . . . Say, are you well? You seem took sick of a sudden.”

  “Brother,” she said, staring at the watch, “it is the intolerable hardships of the Indian slaves in the Mexican mines that make such frivolities as silver watches possible. I’d expect a man of color to know that.”

  “Man of color!” She had a prim look on her, like I had disappointed her after she’d overlooked some defect in me. I swiveled my head around in a panic lest someone had heard her. “Man of color? I am a sailor, Sister, which you’d expect me to be burned by the sun.”

  “Brother, thee is certainly burned as brown as a Negro.”

  “It’s from the sun.”

  “The right-living man is grateful to be what God has made him.”

  “And who are you to decide what I am?”

  “It is not I, Brother, but God.” She stepped along, pulling out ahead. She took her mother’s arm, and they made their good-byes.

  I resolved to spend my future Sundays loafing along the waterfront and letting Phillip believe I had joined the Episcopalians.

  “Thee mustn’t accost the Brethren,” said Phillip over dinner. “At least not their daughters.”

  “Remember my place, you mean?”

  “I did not say that.”

  Supper was a stringy hen that had stopped laying. Phillip’s embargo against violence didn’t extend to animals, I’d noticed.

  I picked a pinfeather off the tip of my tongue. “I wish you’d let Constance buy her chickens in the market. You ever seen her try and wring a chicken’s neck?”

  “No, nor have I seen thee do it.”

  I poked at the body in my plate. “I’m kind of delicate that way.”

  He looked at her, eating silently with her head down. “Dressed chickens are too dear,” he said. “We will do for ourselves.”

  “I will do for us, you mean,” said Constance.

  And then they did something I didn’t understand at all. He reached across the table, and she took his hand.

  The sulphurous reeks of gun smoke and asafetida filled the streets as July crept into August. The ordinary summer influxes of influenza and scarlet fever stalked the narrow streets, and more than one open window exhaled the stench of a corpse in the front parlor. Anybody who could afford them smoked cigars to purify the air—a lesser defense against fever than firing muskets into the air and wearing asafetida bags, but easier on the nerves. The high-tone people had cleared out of the city entire, not to return till the fevers vanished with the October frosts. Usually Phillip and Constance summered in the woods around upper Gunpowder Falls, but they didn’t go that year. Phillip had sold the cottage. I thought about going to sea again—which was about as far as I got with the notion at first. I felt like my brain was stewing inside my skull.

  To say the heat in Baltimore was fierce is to do it an injustice; Beelzebub’s left armpit weren’t in it. Stinking water collected in the gutters, and the skeeters bred in such numbers that sleep was a misery of tossing and turning and slapping. A dead horse lay in a pool of stinking ooze beside Jones’s Falls for six days before someone finally hauled it away; its stink permeated the brick walls of the houses even yet, and the muddy pool still swarmed with maggots. The sluggish water of the Basin stank. The piles of parings and bones and fish guts in the market writhed like living things; they stank. The people in the street stank. I stank.

  I was forever remembering a night in Port Républicain, coming down a stinking alley into the market. The paving stones were carpeted with chewed-up cane, and the air had smelled of sugar. And at the end of another alley had waited a man with a sword that was a twin to my own.

  I took to spending my a
fternoons in the coffee houses of Baltimore Street, spinning yarns and smoking myself into the jitters. In the evenings I tramped over to Reynolds’s Quid Nunc Club in Lovely Lane, a greasy back alley despite the name, where I tempered the effects of the cigars with frosty tankards of whiskey julep. The Quid Nunc was nothing more than a tavern in a damp and close series of low-ceilinged half-basements, not what your better sort of gentleman would call a club at all, but you could count on it to be open no matter the day or the weather—and you could count on Reynolds to find ice in August, which was handier than in January, when most folks have it. Those were its primary assets; it had few others.

  I sauntered in one evening to take up my usual station at a corner table in the best back room—“best” being a comparative and not an absolute, but it suited me. The night air had a tang to it from a load of salt cod down at the docks that had gotten prematurely reconstituted en route and hadn’t found any takers. It lay there yet, dripping and ghastly. I’d just about swear it emitted its own light. Runny cabbage and furry beans were weak sisters compared with that cod—puny invalids, hardly to be trusted outdoors on their own—but as I didn’t have the proper instruments to hand, I couldn’t do more than guess as to its strength. For sheer penetrating power, though, I gauged it to be the pure stuff.

  I was feeling a good deal content with myself as I come in. I had paid a call on a freckled dolly at a house I knew down in Fell’s Point. There’s something about a pumpkin-colored angel’s nest that makes a fellow want to holler heigh-de-ho—which I did, twice, and worth every cent. If it’s possible to feel any better than I did it’s probably illegal.

  As I ducked under the low stone archway and pushed open the familiar door, the memories flooded past me like a receding tide washing the sand out from under my feet. The Quid Nunc was where I had first seen Peter Wickett in action, the day after Christmas last year. We had been drinking there at Billy’s expense. Peter had had a few caustic things to mutter about the Royal Navy officers who had taken up the front room—they were from H.M.’s frigate Clytemnestra, which meant nothing to me at the time—and about P. Hoyden Blair, who was on his way with us to Port Républicain, there to take up his duties as assistant U.S. consul. Phillip had found me there at the Quid Nunc, and delivered to me a pair of dueling pistols—a gift from my father that later went down with the Rattle-Snake in the fight with the Faucon and L’Heureuse Rencontre. All the memories were jumbled together, like they’d been throwed into a box. I remembered a sunlit Peter in the Bight of Léogâne, pulling a broken tooth out of his jaw and telling me to go below and see to Billy. I remembered him later with one of my pistols smoking in his hand, and Billy’s breath coming out in a fine pink mist.

  It was a quiet night at the Quid Nunc. I was the only customer, and Fugwhit, who had recently been promoted from bar boy to bar man, gave me a grin that showed the stumps of his front teeth to advantage. “The usual?” he said, breathing through his mouth and talking through his nose.

  I nodded; he served me up a cold whiskey julep and went about his business. I took the tankard to my table in the back room, where I sat with my head tilted away from the smoke of the cheroot between my teeth and sorted through some recent numbers of the New York and Philadelphia papers.

  The War of Knives was sure as certain over down in San Domingo, in spite of a few misdemeanor murders and some inconsequential atrocities here and there, and editors were finding other things to blow about. By wading through the back pages, though, I was able to get some idea of what was transpiring in the nominally French colony. Toussaint would be taking over the Spanish side of the island soon, which was well with us as long as we were still fighting the French. It’d keep them occupied.

  I scanned the other columns. The madman John Chapman, who affected rags and preached Swedenborg’s Church of the New Jerusalem, had left western Pennsylvania and moved along to the Ohio country, planting huge numbers of apple trees and giving away seeds by the bushel. Over on the next page, Lieutenant Shaw of the 12-gun Enterprize schooner had captured the 10-gun L’Aigle on Independence Day. And below that was a paragraph about that impeccably polite French rascal, Captain Mesh—or Mèche, as the paper now had it—that Dick had mentioned. He had struck again, this time stealing four barrels of potatoes and a Negro sailor out of the Eliphelet G. York off Cape Fear.

  But here was something more immediately interesting to me: Master Commandant Asa Malloy, former captain of the Aztec, had returned from a cruise in the Insurgent frigate. She was the very same Frenchman that had forced us to run in ’98, and that Truxtun in the Constellation had captured off Nevis the following February—which was immortalized on the sinful silver watch that, in my vest pocket, even as I sat there, was ticking away the misspent moments of my life. I had to read the item again to be sure of what I was seeing, but there it was, sure as eggs is eggs: Now that Truxtun had been promoted into the President, a forty-four that was a-building in New York, Malloy had managed to talk his way into command of the Constellation. He’d be recruiting pretty soon.

  Which I needn’t even think about. Malloy had written me after Peter and Billy’s duel, and I calculated I could remember every word of his letter. He’d wrote it to express his “surprise and dismay” that his “former protégé had disregarded the laws of our country in pursuit of a false notion of honor.” He had “no doubt that, had a proper investigation been made into his appointment, the son of an obscure tavern-keeper would not have received a warrant.” Not that Malloy had taken any pleasure in writing the letter, of course, except in that it gave him “the opportunity to offer some healthful and necessary advices.”

  But I’d been called worser things than the son of an obscure tavern-keeper—worser things than that name, I mean; I guess obscure tavern-keepers get called all sorts of things—and there were worser things to be than that, anyway, which I wasn’t in the first place. It was an idiotic insult. I was stupid to be angry about it. God damn it.

  “Hey, in the front room, there,” I called. “More julep.”

  Fugwhit poked his head in, his mouth hanging open like he’d forgotten to shut it. He was smearing a glass with a dirty towel.

  “You sure?”

  “Yes, you slack-jawed drool-bucket. Look lively now.”

  It didn’t rectify the insult any that it fit him so well. Made it worse, really. I felt lower than before I had said it. The world’s coming to a pretty fix when you can’t even make yourself feel better by cussing somebody out.

  I remembered some American sea officers cussing up a storm one night in the Amiral de Grasse in Cap Français. A gang of British lieutenants had stood a midshipman on a table and were making him sing “To Anacreon in Heav’n,” which the Americans were throwing coppers at him to try to get him to shut up. His voice hadn’t cracked yet, and he’d been murder in the high ranges. Peter had stood drinks for us—“wetting the swab” as I’d just gotten my lieutenant’s epaulet. We’d had stewed goat washed down with sanguinaire, a punch made with rum, wine, and chunks of tropical fruit. Peter had been as cheerful that night as I’d ever seen him. And then Billy had come in.

  I reached for the Philadelphia Aurora. Matthew Carey, printer and bookseller, was offering a new volume of Parson Weems’s The Life and Memorable Actions of George Washington. I threw the paper aside. The General was barely half a year in the ground, and the cult that had surrounded him in life was now raising him to quasi-deity in death. Reynolds had taken his old engraving of Washington from over the fireplace—where it had been obscuring a particularly interesting Leda and the Swan since the General’s proxy funeral last winter—draped it in the Stars and Stripes and promoted it to the main room. He filled the urn below it daily with fresh laurel boughs. What most give me the snorts, though, was that he’d tossed out the Leda and replaced it with a new nude: the American Cincinnatus, bare-chested and barelegged, with three winged fat ladies clutching banners embroidered with Latin mottoes in their teeth. The artist had depicted the old man with one hand cl
utching a cloth across his middle and the other raised heavenward, perhaps in beatitude, perhaps in mortification—it was hard to tell.

  I had wandered out into the front room in my distraction and came to rest in front of the table where Reynolds kept a pile of the smaller and local papers. I sorted through them while I tried to decide whether to go up to Fayette Street and bed, or drink till I keeled over somewhere.

  Here was a promising item in the Norfolk Herald. Patrick Fletcher had replaced Malloy in the Insurgent, and was even then lying in Hampton Roads assembling a new crew. The article didn’t spell it out, but I was stupid not to have thought of it before: the Insurgent had been forced to leave Baltimore last month after her midshipmen had started a brawl in Fell’s Point. They’d been carrying one of the lieutenants around from tavern to tavern in a chair and knocking peoples’ hats off—well, it was a funny story, but the point was that one of the young gentlemen, a Mr. Brown, had lost the use of his left hand in the brawl that followed and had been put on the beach. If the transfer from Malloy to Fletcher had been an amicable one, and assuming Malloy hadn’t poisoned Fletcher against me . . .

  But no. Fletcher didn’t know me. He wouldn’t be interested in taking on his predecessor’s former shipmates, even to pull the nose of a snob like Malloy. My eye wandered down the page.

  And here was a paragraph that stopped me dead.

  “What is it, Mr. Graves?” said Fugwhit. He held a dewy tankard of julep out to me.

  I searched his face. “What?”

  “I were comin’ up the cellar stairs just now, sir, having gone down to see was there some ice left, which there was, which is how your punch come to be cold—”

  “And what of it?” I took a good long pull at the delicious whiskey.

  “And you shouted, sir.”

  “Shouted.” The tankard was empty, just chips of ice and green wads of smashed mint. I gave it back to him and wiped my mouth on my sleeve.

  “Yes, sir. Like this.” He throwed back his head and let out a caterwaul that sounded like a goat with the bellyache.