“How are things at Jacmel, sir?”
“Apparently Pétion made it out, but Toussaint destroyed his army in the forest. I am told you witnessed it.”
I had an image of a woman’s head rolling across a moonlit road. There had been cavalry—I remembered the smell of the horses and the creak of the harness. And there had been a man on a litter, clutching his belly. None of it made much sense. Or maybe I didn’t want it to. And there had been a black knight with white hands, speaking in Latin with a knife in his back.
Peter studied me while I thought. “Mr. Quilty is of the mind that you should be below. Are you fit? Truth, now.”
“I ’low I’m glad of this chair, sir.”
“I mean in your faculties, Mr. Graves. Are you addled?”
“Oh no, sir, my thinking is entirely clear. It’s just that I seem to have forgotten a few things. They’re right on the edge of my mind, though, upon my oath.”
“Then perhaps we can clear a few things up for you. Here,” he said to Freddy Billings, a mop-headed ship’s boy who had been hovering behind him and looking at me shyly, “run down to the wardroom and tell our guest that Mr. Graves is on his feet again.” He gave me a quick half-smile. “So to speak. It seems you have stirred up a hornet’s nest, Matty.”
“I calculate I bung-holed it completely, if that’s what you mean.”
He pursed his lips. “Not at all. Your best thinking seems ever to get you in over your head, but you have a talent for surrounding yourself with competents to fish you out again. Speaking of whom—bonjour, monsieur le commandant.”
“Bonjour, monsieur le capitaine. How fares our invalid?”
“As well as may be expected, Major.”
“Bonjour, Juge.” I laughed as I remembered something from that horrible night. “Say, do you speak French at all?”
He gave me a puzzled look. “Obviously, as that is what we speak at this very moment.” He spoke it with a slur, too. Then he showed his broken teeth in a smile. “And the Creole, too, apparently.” He had a patchwork of plasters stuck to his head, white as spinster’s lace against his black skin. “He is ever the impertinent one,” he said to Peter. “No doubt you chastise him often.”
“Not so often as would be good for him, sir,” said Peter. “Your pardon, gentlemen.” He walked back over the slanting deck to the windward rail, where he stood with his chin thrust out and his fingers twitching behind his back, running his eyes aloft as he watched jealously for any flaw in the intricate balance of sails and spars and rigging that might warn him that something was about to carry away. He’d have been there these past three days, knowing him, wringing every last fathom he could out of the old schooner by sailing her on the edge of disaster and no closer.
I supposed the transport and the corvette were old and hadn’t had their bottoms scraped in a while, or they’d have sailed the Rattle-Snake under the horizon by now. Block would be playing it sly in the Croatoan, keeping the enemy in sight but spilling his wind from time to time to allow us to keep up. It wasn’t the dashingest way to snare a pair of weasels, but maybe it was the smartest way.
When I was sure Peter was deep in his thoughts I said, “My God, Juge, you didn’t tell him you’re a major, did you?”
Holding himself with stiff dignity—belied by the hasty way he grabbed at a backstay as the schooner corkscrewed over a roller—he said: “How do you know Father Toussaint did not promote me for my gallantry?”
“Did he?”
He gave me a lazy grin and said, “Bon sang, how you raved! You are not so tough, hein? I, however, am the remarkable fellow.”
“The remarkably green fellow,” I retorted, eyeing the color of his cheeks and the little beads of sweat on those parts of his face that weren’t covered in plasters. “How’s the stomach? Does it lie easily within you, or does it rise up and down with the sea?”
He lost hold of a little groan as the Rattle-Snake took an inconsequential lurch to leeward, but he steadied himself on the backstay again and recomposed the grin on his face. “I have the sea legs now,” he said, the English phrase sounding odd on his lips. “In time I become the veritable Sinbad.” Sea legs or not, he perched himself on the gun carriage beside me and gave me a close look. “But why so downcast, mon ami?”
“Seeing you has brought it all back to me. Connor, Franklin, MacGuffin and the Knights of the White Hand—I completely buggered it, didn’t I? Franklin was right about Connor, and I let him get away.”
Juge nodded. “Yes, it is so—Connor eludes us for the moment, but we know where to find him when we need him.”
“Where, then?”
He pointed forward. “Why, in one of those ships, of course!”
I wished I could stand up and take a look for myself. I could see the Croatoan’s topmasts about half a mile ahead, though, as we crested a roller. The sea was chopping up, and she was getting her studding sails in. Rogers looked up at our own topmast studding sails and raised an inquiring eyebrow at Peter, but Peter ignored him.
“Connor made me his pigeon,” I said. “And there he goes with all the evidence. He’s probably burned most of it by now.”
“No, he has burned nothing but his fingers, ha ha!”
I grabbed his wrist. “You got his papers?”
“Mais oui!”
“How, if he got away?”
He ducked his head, mumbling, “After I smote poor Voyou with my chain—”
“I thought I heard you hit someone.”
“An unfortunate accident. It was dark, you will remember. Anyway,” he said, sitting up straight again, “I grabbed Connor by his collar. I collared him, as I think you Americans say, no?”
“You nabbed him, yes. Then what? You arrested him?”
“Indeed so. I said to him, ‘I detain you, monsieur, in the name of France.’ At least this is what I started to say. Before I could finish, he slipped out of his coat and ran away like the deer, leaving us with all the papers in his pockets. Were it not that my friends are so much weaker than I—you with the bump on the caboche, Voyou with a chain wrapped around his head, and Franklin with a bullet in his middle and his teeth knocked out, I should have had him.”
“I recall hitting someone, and I remember you carrying a man on a litter. So that was Franklin?”
“Yes, of course. And Voyou was the man at the other end of the litter. A very tough fellow, that one. Never once did he complain of the headache.”
I started to scratch my head, but thought better of it in case Quilty was lurking where he could see me. “So, Connor shot Franklin, did he?”
Juge held up a finger. “Connor shot Voyou—through the lantern and not the body, I am glad to say, though I hardly think this was his intention. And before that, my pistol misfired.” He waggled the finger at me. “Only one loaded pistol then remained in the room, mon ami.”
“Franklin attacked me, Juge. He tried to kill me.” I thought about it. “Well, he tried to take my pistol, anyway.”
“Hardly the same thing, mon ami.”
“He had a dagger in his hand.”
He shrugged. “So he had a dagger in his hand. Did he stab you until you are dead? He did not. You mustn’t take offense. I think, mon ami, he tried to prevent your killing Mr. Connor. He wants very badly to take him back to Washington, no? Although for my part, I think the sooner the cockroach is stepped on the better.”
“Well, now, Franklin and I have our differences, but it’s a bit much to call him a cockroach.”
“Ha ha! I speak of Connor. But I tell you true, my interest is to see that he does not associate Father Toussaint’s name with a lie. To prevent this, I would have him die.” He touched my arm. “Assuming he still lives, of course. He may have died trying to leave Jacmel. All was chaos that night, and perhaps the buzzards have eaten his eyes these several days ago. But because these ships try to elude us, I think it is impossible he is not aboard one of them.”
“Of course they want to elude us. They’re full of soldiers b
ound for places they aren’t supposed to be!”
“Yes, but without Connor, they would not go in the first place, hein? It is self-evident.”
“I should talk to him.”
“Bon sang! Have I not said that many people wish to talk to this Connor?”
“No, I mean Franklin.”
He shook his head angrily. “There is no chance of speaking to him, assuming he still lives. Your captain refused me in the most astonishing terms when I asked it of him. I said to him he could just put this nimble little boat next to the big clumsy one and I could jump from one to the other. Simplicity itself, no? But he said it was dangerous. As if I, Juge, care about danger.”
Doing such a thing would risk staving in the schooner against the frigate’s stout timbers. I had such a perfect picture of the look of horror that must’ve crossed Peter’s face at the suggestion that I had to laugh.
“Bon sang, but you sailors are merry fellows,” said Juge, looking cross. “Always the laughter whenever I open my mouth.”
We crossed the Tropic of Cancer shortly after the first bell in the evening watch, on as pleasant an evening as ever there was. The stars and half-moon lighted our way, and green phosphorescence creamed along our bows and folded over itself in our wake, but Quilty cut my pleasure short.
“You must go below to take a light supper of portable soup,” he said. He took my pulse and examined my tongue, though I couldn’t imagine what he hoped to find there. “And after you’ve eaten, sir, you will confine yourself to your cabin, where you will stay except to take the air for an hour or two in the forenoon watch. Weather and your head permitting, of course.”
Portable soup, which is a sort of thin, reconstituted glue with bits of decayed vegetables floating in it, was reserved for the infirm and the addled. And because why? Because no one with the strength or the wits to resist would eat it. I ate it with a bit of ship’s biscuit with hardly any weevils in it yet. The Rattle-Snake had only been at sea for three and a half months, and the bread was no harder than a brick and probably as nutritious.
Juge had risen from his bunk to join me, taking only a biscuit and some tea. He watched me tap my biscuit on the table before I ate it. He mimicked my motions as if he’d been tapping his bread all his life, but curiosity got the better of him and he asked me why I did it. He blanched when I showed him what had crawled out among the crumbs, but he soaked his biscuit in his tea and made himself work a mouthful down before setting the rest of it aside.
“It counts as meat,” he said. “I really mustn’t eat it. And I of course have already eaten, anyway. I merely keep you company.”
“There are two kinds of sailors, Juge. Them that’s been seasick and them that’s going to be seasick. It’s nothing to be ashamed of.”
“I tell you I have not the hunger.”
I let it go. If he could take a beating and slit a throat without a thought, it was his right to blanch at a few weevils in his bread. I sat there, gnawing at my biscuit, trying to get a purchase on it with my teeth the same way I was trying to get a purchase on a puzzle in my mind. “Juge,” I said, “when you took those papers from Connor, did you give them all to Franklin?”
He fished some weevils out of his tea. “And why would I not?”
“But did you?”
“All the important ones. All I kept was a letter of no consequence.”
My hand jerked and my spoon flew across the table. “A letter! Addressed to a Madame Villon Deloges, perhaps?”
“I think so.” He wiped soup off his sleeve and handed me back my spoon. Then he took the letter out of his coat pocket and looked at the back. “Yes, the Madame Villon Deloges in the Rue Rigole-Haut. A funny name—”
“Give me that!”
“You need not snatch it. Is it so very important?”
“Franklin and Connor thought so. And Franklin thinks Madame Villon Deloges doesn’t exist.” I spread the letter open on the table. “And so did Pétion, although he seemed mighty glad to have this.”
“So, why?”
“I don’t know. Can’t you see I’m reading?”
It began:
“Mais où sont les neiges d’antan. O, where are the snows of yesteryear?” How often I reflect with remorse on the years that pass between us . . .
It rambled along in that vein for a while. It was pretty flowery stuff, I thought, even from a doomed man. “French script is squiggly enough as it is,” I said, “but the writing is funny in places. I can hardly make it out, sometimes.”
“I noticed this too,” said Juge. He had come around the table to read
it over my shoulder. “He mentions you.”
“Where?”
“Down at the bottom. There.” He pointed at the last paragraph.
I entrust this note to a monsieur Graves, a noble but naïve young acolyte in the navy of the United States. He assures me I will not hang. If you read these words, my dear, you will know he was mistaken.
I had been mistaken, all right. I’d even laughed at him while he clutched at my coat and begged me to help him escape. I thrust the memory back into the dark corner where I kept it and read the last of the letter. There were a couple of words crossed out, and then it finished with:
The Steersman comes for me, as he does for all. When he comes for you, give to him this answer and cross the sea of woe.
“What is this timonier?” said Juge, pointing at the word.
“Steersman. Haven’t you ever heard of a steersman?”
“Bon sang! Am I the Columbus that I should know this? And what
steersman?”
I shrugged. “Charon, I suppose. He ferries the dead over the River Acheron, according to the Greeks. And Acheron means River of Woe.”
“Then for why does he not just say ‘Charon’? And why does he say sea of woe when it’s a river?”
I poked my elbow into his ribs. “It’s poetry, man. You can’t just come right out and say what you mean, you know, otherwise the words just kind of lie there.”
“I prefer to say what I mean and leave it at that. And for why does he use the masculine when he says ‘my dear’?”
I shrugged. “Maybe he was a sodomite. What I want to know is what ‘this answer’ is.” I peered again at the misshapen letters. “That son of a bitch!” I shook the letter at Juge. “This is the answer!”
I dashed into my cabin and lit the lamp.
I went through each line with a pencil, underlining the oddly shaped letters. I found “Isla de Galvez,” which I didn’t know where it was, and the name Tejaz, which I guessed belonged to a Spaniard or a Portugee. In the back of my mind I was aware of a cry of dismay that floated down from above. It seemed to come from a distance, as across water.
“What is that?” said Juge. He went to the door and peered toward the hatchway.
“Nothing aboard of us.” If Peter didn’t want me, he could sail his own damn schooner. I worked my pencil across the lines of script. Here was a misshapen B, and an L in the next word, and then an A. “We’d have heard a great crack and plenty of shouting if we’d lost a spar or a sail. Someone will let us know if it’s important.”
But his fidgeting was making my head hurt again, and then the Rattle-Snake’s motion changed suddenly, as if we’d brought the wind forward of the beam. I heard the sound of the main topsail yard being braced around. “Maybe we’d better have a look,” I said, but he was out of the wardroom before the words had finished leaving my mouth. I stuffed the letter into my pocket and ran up the ladder after him.
Bosun Klemso was shooing gawkers away from the rail. “Get on about yer business there!” he bellowed. “Them as ain’t on watch, get below!”
His directives didn’t apply to us, of course, so we stepped up to the quarterdeck and glanced around. Despite my words to Juge my first thought was to look aloft. I was still half-blind from having had my head under the lamp, but all seemed shipshape up there, with no topmen bustling around in the rigging and trying to wrassle down a cracked sp
ar or busted sail. My next thought was to look toward the chases, but we were nearly abreast of the Croatoan and it was she that caught my eye.
She had flown up into the wind, and her profile was all wrong. As we surged up to windward of her I could see her main royal and top-gallant masts hanging down on her leeward side, and I could hear her topmen shouting and the desperate thumping of an axe. The rest of her sails flapped and thundered as if they meant to tear themselves apart.
“Back the fore-tops’l,” said Peter, and raised his speaking trumpet. “Ahoy the Croatoan! Do you require assistance, sir?”
“Nay!” came Block’s shout. “Light thee along after the enemy! Cripple ’em if thee can. I reckon I’ll be along shortly.”
That was a hell of an order, I thought. He was sending us to do what he’d been scared to do himself. It was also unneedful. All we had to do was keep them in sight till we reached the American coast. Once they dropped anchor we could annoy them enough to keep them from landing their troops till help arrived.
“Very good, sir,” said Peter. “I shall attempt to lure them to windward. Perhaps I can run one of them onto a cay between Andros and Grand Bahama.”
“I don’t give a hoot how thee does it! Go! Lose not a moment!”
“Aye aye, sir.” Peter returned his speaking trumpet to the beckets, we braced our fore-topsail around, and the frigate disappeared in our wake.
“What is it?” said Juge.
“We’re going to take a pounding,” said I. “We’ve been ordered to play hounds and hares with the enemy.”
“Hounds and hares? What is this?”
“It means we’re off to catch a Tartar by the tail.”
“A Tartar has a tail?”
“Dammit, I can’t think of the French for it. It means we’re going shark-fishing, with us as bait.”
“Ah, I comprehend at last—we are to fight them!”
“Not if we can fucking help it.”
“You astonish me. For why have we chased them these several days if not to fight them?”
“We were supposed to fight them with the frigate.”
The War of Knives Page 28
