“My dear sir, there has always been, ahem!” Pollock told him with an amused chuckle and a twitch-whinny. “Creoles, though, are an excitable lot. As are most folk from Catholic lands, who speak their Romance languages. Talk is all they’re capable of. To hear the rants in the cabarets, one’d think they were on the edge of armed rebellion, but… perhaps it’s something in the climate that enervates them, or something, but they are quite incapable of ever really doing anything, in the end. The food and wine’s too good, heh heh!”
“But what if it was different this time?” Peel posed. “What if a small group of malcontents… young, excitable, and endowed with the will to take whatever act is needful… very like the cruel ones your sailors experienced, Lewrie… was of a mind to rise up against the Spanish. Do recall what your men told me of their schooner: she had two names, Le Revenant, or the Ghost, and La Réunion. Reunion with whom? With the new, Republican France? Hmm?”
“And you want to go sound ’em out?” Lewrie scoffed. “Feed ’em money for their little revolution, then spring a British invasion on ’em? Well, good luck to you.”
“Exciting as that sounds,” Peel seemed to demur, “as valuable to Crown interests as that may turn out to be… assuming that such a cabal exists, and would be more amenable to British possession than Spanish… or American, eventually!… I fear I have more pressing items to pursue. Mister Pollock is our eyes and ears in New Orleans. He can smoak out any hint of actual rebellion… which His Majesty’s Government would be more than happy to abet and encourage, and, exploit.
“If this suspected cabal indeed is violently anti-Spanish, with the wherewithal to succeed,” Peel grimly added. “Unless it turns out to be a forlorn and pointless geste, only a piratical cabal arranged merely for profit… In that case, naturally, it must be Scotched.”
“You’re saying I can’t whack ’em’til Mister Pollock tells me I can?” Lewrie snickered between sips of brandy. “You have an uncanny way of making simple things hellish complicated, James.”
“Mister Peel is correct, though, Captain Lewrie,” Nicely praised with his eyes alight with what Lewrie deemed a Crusader’s fire. “This must be explored. Should orders come to proceed against the Spanish, we must scout out New Orleans’s defences, determine the best route for invasion for Admiral Parker’s part of the expedition, and, put paid to these pirates, all in one. You spoke to Sir Hyde, Mister Peel? Lord Balcarres, the royal governor, as well?”
“Dined with them, sir,” Peel smugly told him, “soon as I ended my interviews with Lewrie’s sailors.”
“It would appear your mission has grown, Lewrie,” Nicely stated.
“Sir?” Lewrie nigh squeaked in dread, secretly crossing fingers in his lap.
“Here’s what we’ll do,” Nicely declared, up and pacing energetically, all but swinging his arms at full stretch to clap hands. “Sir Hyde has allowed me to, ah… coordinate things, so! Mister Pollock, your ship will sail soon for New Orleans? Good. Your role will be to discover whatever intelligences that Mister Peel requests. Lewrie!”
“Sir?” Lewrie reiterated, even more concerned, of a sudden.
“You are to go to New Orleans with Mister Pollock.”
“Me, sir?” Lewrie managed to splutter, taking a brief moment to glare hatefully in Peel’s direction.
“Take your Quartermaster’s Mate—Jugg’s his name?—with you so he can identify as many people from that schooner as he may,” Nicely forcefully ordained. “They didn’t recognise their old shipmate the first time, there’s good odds they won’t, the second. Take some hands along… your real brawlers and scrappers. Pass yourself off as an American, or …”
“Hindu’d be easier, sir,” Lewrie spluttered some more, tittery with disbelief. Self-amused, too; sarcastically so, to imagine that he could be taken for anything other than British for longer than ten seconds. Hindee or Chinee might be easier!
“What … ever!” Nicely snapped, pausing in his pacing to bestow a glare at him. “If, as Mister Peel suspects, someone funded the… Lank-diddle and Belfry, whatever their names are, we must learn if they’re in it for the money, or for France. If for France, discover as much as you can. If for the money, make sure you stop their business. Blood in the streets, bodies floating in the river, the ships burning at dawn! If you can’t get at ’em at sea, carry the fight to their parlours, and let ’em see the reach of the Royal Navy, and His Majesty’s Government, when we’re aroused!”
“That’s not… ahem! … the sort of aid to the Crown my firm usually supplies, Captain Nicely,” Pollock objected, leaping afoot in consternation. “Subtlety, d’ye see. To the Dons, I’m a mere trader. A useful trader. If I take Lewrie and a pack of bully-bucks to New Orleans, all my years of, ah… covert good works will end. I, and Panton, Leslie, could be banned, at the best. We could all be arrested… exposed, and publicly strangled, at the worst.
“Besides,” Pollock continued, turning to point accusatorily at Lewrie. “What does he know of covert doings? How obvious may he be, I conjure you, sir? Why—!”
“He’s damned good, really,” Peel interrupted, idly spooning up chocolate pudding pie, trifle, jumble, whatever, as if Pollock’s thin shrieks of alarm, and Lewrie’s red-faced surprise, were a street raree of only fair amusement.
“I am?” Lewrie roared. “Last time, you thought me an idiot!”
“My dear Lewrie, it ain’t like you haven’t done this, before,” Peel pointed out. “Apalachicola, in ’82. The Far East in ’84 or so. Genoa and Leghorn in ’94? Actually, Captain Nicely, I rather doubt if you really wish blood in the streets. A thorough sounding-out’d suit our purposes, anent the pirates’ finacing and organisation. A viable invasion route, well… Lewrie is a most knacky Sea Officer who knows the practicality of transporting troops and guns to the best place for a successful, and quick, victory. And what’s needful to support it so it is successful. Really, Alan… that’s your main task.”
“Sea Officer, Jemmy!” Lewrie fumed. “Wouldn’t an Army officer be better for …”
“Gawd, who’d put trust in a soldier!” Nicely guffawed. “Nought but idle fools who bought their rank and haven’t worked a day since! Peel’s right, Lewrie. You’re better suited. Though it would be nice could you eliminate the known leaders of our pirates. Without their expertise, men of less repute might find it hard to keep their crews together. Put an end to ’em.”
“Far be it from me to cry ‘croakum,’ sir,” Lewrie tried to say as calmly and reasonably as he could, though he was nigh shuddering with anger to have been… “bamboozled”… again! “But I thought I was to hunt ’em down at sea. Just how did I—how did this—turn into… spying?”
“Your record precedes you, Lewrie,” Nicely told him, obviously trying to praise, but failing badly. “Sir Hyde, the Governor-General, the Admiralty… Mister Peel’s Foreign Office,” he said, waving one hand in Peel’s direction, prompting a brief bow from the seated Peel, “all think you can do it. Sir Hyde said you’re the very man for the job, no error.”
“It won’t work, won’t work at all,” Pollock mournfully groaned.
“I can’t see how it possibly could.” Lewrie heavily sighed.
“Fine, we’re agreed!” Nicely declared.
It went downhill from there, o’ course.
BOOK THREE
Gonzalo: All torment, trouble, wonder, and amazement Inhabits here. Some heavenly power guide us Out of this fearful country!
THE TEMPEST, ACT V, SCENE 1
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER EIGHT
Crack!
“Shitten, goddamned son of a whore!”
Quickly followed mere seconds later by another faint crack!
“Take that, you son of a bitch!”
Crack!
“And that…” Crack! “And here’s one for you, too, you!”
Phfft!
“Well, shit.”
“Damn me eyes, sor … sorry,” Ordinary Seaman Liam Desmond, in the stern of the sh
ip’s gig, congratulated in his own fashion. “That’s five outta twelve, this time, an’ on th’ wing, too, sor!”
“Should’ve been six, but for this… thing,” Capt. Alan Lewrie griped, holding the rifled musket out from him as if it were a stunned-rigid viper. “Well, let’s round them up,” he said with a sigh.
“Needs spaniels, we do,” Landsman Furfy, Desmond’s inseparable friend, commented in a throaty aside. “Warter spaniels, wot kin swim for ’em, right Liam?”
“Out oars… give way all,” Toby Jugg ordered from the stern-sheets, waggling the tiller-bar a few times as if to scull the gig to faster motion, so the rudder would bite against the river current. It had been a wrench to Lewrie, but taking his longtime Cox’n, Andrews, to New Orleans would be a bad idea, Pollock had sternly advised. Cox’n Andrews was Black, a former house slave from Jamaica who’d run away to sea and freedom. Disguised as a civilian, though, his “protection” of being in the Royal Navy, and therefore untouchable by slavers, couldn’t be of help to him if taken up by the Spanish authorities. Even a forged certificate of manumission would be of no avail, since it was issued by British authorities. So, volunteer to go despite the circumstances as Andrews had, as had several of the Black sailors who had “stolen themselves” from the late Ledyard Beauman’s plantation on Portland Bight on Jamaica to sign aboard Proteus, Lewrie had reluctantly left Andrews and the others behind.
Lewrie, in the eyes of the bow with his rifled musket, levelled a chary gaze on Toby Jugg once again as he steered the gig towards the nearest slain duck, wondering still if the man was truly trustworthy, and dearly missing Cox’n Andrews, who’d been a strong right arm several times over. Now, though, he must place faith in the enigmatic Jugg, who had let his beard grow even longer, making him look even more piratical and outré?
“Ware oars, larboard,” Jugg grunted, hauling off to starboard as a drifting log approached on their left, from upstream.
The Mississippi looked sluggish at first glance, its surface as smooth as a marble slab under a nearly cloudless sky, reflecting blueness and the sun like a lying masquerade. But beneath that mirror, it was an onrushing, hungry beast, roiled by deadly undercurrents and eddies; and it kept its secrets, evils, and perils in its silty, brown-red depths, mere inches below its opaque surface, where no eyes but those of the dead and river-drowned could ever probe.
Now and then would come a visible danger—trees or giant snags, some entangled into rafts as big as a house foundation ripped from the banks an hundred, a thousand miles upriver, surging along deceptively slowly, and it was the wise boatman who steered very wide of them. The banks were littered with tree limbs, whole forests of them, so convoluted that geese, ducks, snakes, turtles, and other local creatures made homes in them, next to the carcasses of unwary deer, elk, and cattle.
It took two of the gig’s six oarsmen, by turns, to keep the boat abreast the current, and even with all six straining to put their backs into it, upriver progress was slow. Thankfully, the Mississippi wafted most of his kills down within reaching distance. Lewrie could even reach out from the tiny bow platform on his stomach to pluck one himself and drop the duck lolling-limp and dead into the boat, leaking blood and river water.
He could not swim, had never learned. And it was a rare sailor of any nation who could, excepting the Dutch, of course. Swimming, so the old salts said, just prolonged the inevitable and attracted some finned horror to come eat you alive. Deliberately drowning might be preferable!
With brisk oarswork and much “short-tacking” about, they recovered three of Lewrie’s latest kills. The Mississippi took the other two, last seen bound downriver for the Southeast Pass and the sea at a rate of knots. To chase after them would have required a half-mile descent of the river and an hour of hard rowing to get back to where they’d started!
Fetching the last fat grey-and-white goose caused their gig to stray close to the southern bank, where the tangled, dead-grey trees and snags had piled up deepest and abounded with wildlife; this set his boat crew to goggling, oohing, and aahing over the creatures new to them. Since the crack of gunfire had died away, the beasts had reemerged and acted as if they’d never seen humans this close before.
“Ooh, ‘ey’s another possum!” Ordinary Seaman Mannix exclaimed in wonder, “carryin’ ‘er babbies hangin’ off ‘er tail, kin ye ‘magine?”
“Snowy egrets!” said burly Seaman Dempsey. “Dere’s plenty o’ profit dere, lads. Quality’s mad f’r egret plumes, d’we shoot some.”
“Cottonmouth snake,” Toby Jugg laconically commented, spitting over the side. “Get ye ‘fore ye get th’ plumes, ya daft bastard.”
“Baby raccoons, yonder!” a teenaged Irish topman named Clancey breathed in amusement. “Wee li’l highwaymen, masks an’ all? Loik wee bears! Wonder do they make good pets? They do, Oi’d wish me one!”
“No, ya wouldn’t,” Jugg spoke up again. “They get t’be grown, they turn mean an’ snappish, no matter how ya treats ’em. Ol’ cap’m had one… ’til it bit ‘im, that is.” Jugg grinned in sweet reverie.
“Warshin’ their food, ain’t that a wonder, though?” Clancey insisted.
He, Furfy, the plume hunter, even Desmond, looked forward, each with a silent plea in his eyes, like children at a parish fair, as if begging their captain to shoot, trap, or fetch them something, to order the boat put in so they could scrounge about among the “rarees”… to pet or adopt some adorable but be-fanged “something.”
A splash and a crackling racket among the dead branches whipped their attention shoreward once more. The cottonmouth snake had nabbed one of the baby raccoons, and the rest were scurrying for their lives.
“Eyes in th’ boat, then, an’ mind yer stroke,” Jugg commanded, as if bored with the ancient struggle of survival.
“This thing’s had it,” Lewrie said of his improvised “fowling” piece. “Back to the ship, if you please, Jugg. And three of our fat ducks’ll be your supper tonight, lads.”
That promise perked them up considerably, and, turning athwart the stream, they made the gig fairly fly across the river towards the northern bank, where Mr. Pollock’s broad-beamed and shallow-draughted trading brig, the Azucena del Oeste, was anchored. Jugg kept the gig aimed a bit wide of her jib-boom, so they fetched up close-aboard and just a bit to the right of the starboard entry-port and the main-mast chain platform.
It wasn’t an officer’s place to do such, but Lewrie reached out with the boat-hook to play the role of bow man, snagged the fore-most dead-eyes and stays, then passed the gaff to the larboard bow oarsman as he swept the gig’s painter round the after-most and tied it off; a perfect arrival, all in all.
He should have been cheered by their prowess at small-boat work, by his recall of rusty skills; there were a round dozen ducks or geese heaped on the mid-ships sole of the gig, confirming his reputation as a keen shot, yet… it went without saying that cheered he was not. The how of being here, the fact of being halfway up the lower Mississippi and not on his own quarterdeck, still rankled. He was, in fact, still irked—pissed!—might even attain to “mad as the very Devil!” if he stewed on his situation for a bit.
It did not help his sullen mood that no courtesy due a captain could be shown by the trading brig’s crew, either. The Second Mate on her quarterdeck leaned out and peered over the bulwarks for a second, then disappeared, leaving Lewrie and his hands to scramble up the man-ropes and battens with only casual notice taken. As a Post-Captain, he was of course first out of the boat and aboard, yet… without all the usual twittering naval ado he’d come to take for granted.
After years of traditional welcomes-aboard, Lewrie was reduced to the status of “live lumber,” a mere… passenger!
Jugg, as senior hand, and Liam Desmond were allowed to paw over his string of kills to select two ducks and one of the wild geese for the hands’ mess, whilst the brig’s typical one-eyed and peg-leg ship’s cook and his helper came to take the others for gutting, stanching in boiling water,
plucking, and roasting.
It appeared that tonight would be a game-feast, for, whilst he and his Navy sailors had been birding, others from the brig’s wardroom had been hunting ashore in the forbiddingly dark woods on the northern bank. Two daintily lean yearling doe deer hung over wooden buckets on the larboard gangway stanchions. They had already been gutted, washed out with river water, hooves and scent glands axed off so their meat wasn’t tainted, and their throats cut to drain into the buckets so the cook could try his hand at making blood sausages. Mr. Caldecott, the brig’s hearty First Mate, was just beginning to skin and butcher them, surrounded by a clutch of hecklers and bemused “advisors.”
The Azucena del Oeste had become becalmed the afternoon before and had been forced to come to anchor for the night. Dawn had brought a contrary light wind, with fitful zephyrs from out of the East-Northeast, which in this stretch of river just below the English Turn, made for a “dead muzzler” right down her throat, against which the brig had no chance to make a foot of headway, unless back-breakingly rowed with long galley sweeps. Not being Navy, and in no particular hurry to get hernias, Pollock and his ship’s Master, a Mr. Coffin, had decided that they’d take a “Make and Mend” day of ease, secured with both her best and second bower anchors, with the river chuckling about her hull and frothing from her anchor cables, as if she still was making three or four knots.
Once secured about two long musket shots from the north shore, they had tried their hand at fishing. Last night’s supper had been a “mess” of catfish; big ones, Lewrie had been enthusiastically informed. The catfish had resembled be-whiskered, shiny-hided sharks, scaleless, and as big-about and long as a stout man’s thigh, and just about that meaty. Pollock had said they were reckoned a fine treat, after being breaded with crumbled ship’s biscuit and powdered day-old toast, fried in deep iron skillets and lard. “Just be wary of the bones!” Pollock had warned.
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