By the time they’d clomped back upstairs, having discovered not one whit of her skulker, she’d just been emerging from her bath, which kept them red-faced and at bay ’til she’d taken her own sweet dawdling time getting patted dry, have her hair dried and combed by her maid. She took even more time in choosing a gauzy morning ensemble sure to scandalise them by its sheerness.
Charité knew that she was being unspeakably cruel to them … but damned if they didn’t deserve it for being so hypocritically censorous and scolding!
“It might have been that Anglais you spent…” Helio grumbled, censoring himself to name what she’d been doing so bluntly. “Or one of his men.”
“It was not my Alain,” Charité sweetly whey-face lied.
“We saw that American, El-isson, walking towards his lodgings,” Hippolyte pointed out. “He might have been coming from our street.”
“I know what he looks like, and it was not him,” Charité said, daintily nibbling on a buttered and jammed croissant. “Besides, what would the Americans care of my doings… our doings? Are they not in competition with Panton, Leslie? If the new-come Americans are spies, I would think they were only keeping an eye on Alain.”
“Well…”
“Think, mes frères,” Charité insisted, abandoning her breakfast for a moment to look them in the eyes. “The Americans scheme to seize Louisiana, and our dear city. If they suspect that Panton, Leslie is helping the British do the same—you said everyone knows that, but for our dim Spanish masters, it seems!—then the Americans keep an eye on them. My Alain is a strange, new face, leading a band of hard men. To expand their trade advantage, or to scout for an invasion?”
“But someone followed you!” Hippolyte insisted.
“Mere curiosity,” Charité dismissed, covering her guilt over her lie by busying herself pouring a fresh cup of coffee. “Would you not be curious to see Alain with an elegant young man who becomes a girl at dawn? Was I Armand the raconteur or Charité, n’est-ce pas? “
“Stop calling him Alain… your Alain!” Helio shouted.
“Why not, Helio?” she asked with a half-lidded leer, “when we are on such intimate—”
“Gahh! You’re immoral, brazen!”
“It runs in our blood,” Charité shot back, shutting Helio down, for she’d touched a sore spot on their family’s escutcheon. Papa was a devilishly handsome, distinguished-looking roué who enjoyed amours in every quarter, reputedly even comely house slaves. Their elegant Maman, perhaps in spite, spent protracted visits on nearby plantings, ostensibly on a round of “good works” with the poor, but… And Helio and Hippolyte, cousin Jean-Marie, even that hopeful grandee Don Rubio, they were all of a piece!
“Let us be honest about our forebears,” Charité soberly intoned. “Our men were never bold Christian adventurer chevaliers obeying King Louis to conquer these lands. Our womenfolk weren’t virtuous, virginal bourgeois filles à la cassette, come straight from a convent in France to the Ursulines convent here.”
“Charité!” Hippolyte exclaimed, all but covering his ears.
“No sweet little ‘casket girls,’ with their dowry trunk direct from the King for their goodness,” Charité scoffed. “Oh là, never the street whores swept up to be auctioned off as wives. Never dregs from prisons… excess peasant girls turfed off the estates of the great, heavens no!”
“You are so scandalous, so …” Helio spluttered.
“We may be richer, but no better,” Charité remorselessly continued. “Louisiana then, as now, is still sans religion, sans justice… sans discipline, sans ordre, et sans police. Sans moralité, too, the lot of us. And nothing the hated Spanish, the Americans if they take us over, or the British will ever be able to change our Creole soul. No matter how long they hold us in bondage.”
“If that’s so, Charité,” Hippolyte gently asked, near a broken heart, “then what is the point of our hoped-for rebellion, if we free ourselves from Spain, yet remain so… if we reunited with beloved France, but—”
“Oh, Hippolyte!” Charité laughed, worldly-wise for her tender years, and rising to go to him and take his hands in hers. “We will be free to be French again. Free to take joy in being sans moralité … of being ourselves… Creoles. Then, laisser les bons temps rouler, and to hell with rest of the world!”
“Even so,” Helio, the far more practical brother, said. “You must not see… your Alain again,” he somberly decreed, playing the role of pater familias in their papa’s absence. “Even if he doesn’t spy on us, he’s drawn the Americans’ attention, and sooner or later he’ll draw the Spaniards’. Our cause, our movement must grow in secret ’til we’re strong, well armed, and ready to strike. We can’t afford the risk of exposure.”
“I told you, Helio, he thinks I’m a Bonsecour,” Charité calmly explained, though chafing at being told what to do. “He only knows you two as the Darbone brothers. He has no way to find me, or either of you.”
“He could spot you, one of us in the markets, and follow one of us here,” Helio fretted. “Anyone he asked could steer him right!”
“Then I will cut him off as a passing amusement,” Charité was quick to rebuff. “Alain aspired once to be a British officer, one of the gentlemanly class. And we know how mannerly and reticent les Anglais are, n’est-ce pas?” she said, chuckling. “They do not press themselves where they are not wanted. I snub him in public, deliver a ‘cut-sublime,’ it would tell him that I am… unattainable. Does he find our address, I do not have to answer his notes. One from me to him at his lodgings, saying that I am affianced and never to be his, well… he had his one glorious night, like a footman with a great lady,” Charité affected to sneer, though her heart was not in it, “and he’ll know he is much too lowly to ever aspire to—”
“Then do it,” Helio demanded.
“Only if he becomes tedious,” Charité snapped, whirling back to her breakfast table to sit down and spoon sugar into her coffee, pour fresh cream, and stir. She saw that that seemed to satisfy them.
“Though lowly footmen have their uses,” she could not help suggesting, twiddling one foot under the table in anxiety.
“What?”
“He is a trained naval officer, or was once. Alain might come cheaper than Capitaine Lanxade, or that buffoon Balfa,” she schemed aloud, making it up as she went along. Unwilling to be ordered about, certainly; to give up a pleasureable relationship just because Helio said to. Averse, too, because Alain Weelooby (however one said that!) had amused her, gratified her … touched her heart, and she doubted if she wished to give him up, unless her brothers’ fears were proven.
“Non non, mon Dieu, non!” Helio erupted, squawking like a jay. “What are you thinking? If the British didn’t trust him, why should we?”
“He has no love for Creole freedom, for us, Charité!” younger brother Hippolyte chimed in, in similar screechy takings. “He’d sell us out in a heartbeat. He might be a spy. What a horrid idea!”
“We’re in more danger of being sold out by faint-heart Creoles, Hippolyte,” Charité pointed out. “Both of you are illogical. Alain is a spy, or he is not. He is trustworthy, or he is not. He may be useful, or he is not. The only way to discover if he’s a danger to us is for me to continue seeing him, sounding him out. You cannot argue both ways,” she said, as if the subject was resettled.
“Whether this… Weelooby creature is a British agent or not,” Helio gravelled, disgruntled at his sister’s refusal to obey his dictates, “perhaps it would be best if we all avoided any involvement with him, before he discovers we’re not the Darbone brothers, or that you, sister, aren’t Charité Bon secours, and he becomes suspicious…”
“Even if Alain is really harmless?” Charité asked, smirking over the rim of her coffee cup.
“Capitaine Lanxade has paid our crew from our last cruise, but he said they could spend it in a week and drift away from us without a good chance for more,” Helio reminded them. “If we left town, went back to sea on another r
aiding cruise, made another pile of money…”
“Yes, we could!” Hippolyte enthused, suddenly in better fettle. “If agents look for us here, we could fool them and be where they cannot find us. The Gulf of Mexico is a very big place.”
“Before poor Jean loses all his booty money at Bouré,” brother Helio snickered. “Even if the cruise is fruitless, by the time we get back, M’sieur Bistineau and old Maurepas will have the prize ship sold and there’ll be something to show for it!”
“And we can set Aristotle and the other boys to keep an eye on Alain and his party,” Charité chimed in. “If he goes upriver or inland with trade goods, doesn’t linger in New Orleans and ask after us, then he’s harmless. Will that satisfy your worries, Helio… Hippolyte?”
“Mmm,” her brothers grudgingly allowed.
“Bon!” Charité chirped. “Then I can continue seeing him after we return. And if we’re to leave town, I must give him a reason why. After all, a mysterious, sudden disappearance might spur him to ask too many questions. No, think of it!” she insisted, to their sudden querulous expressions. “If I must go upcountry to the family plantations to… comfort my sick grand-mère, and you two ‘Darbones’ must tend to farm business or take a hunting trip, a harmless Alain will accept the tale and make no enquiries, you see?”
They may not have liked it, but they could see the sense of it. Charité, both sated and pleased with their surrender, dabbed her lips with her napkin and rose from the table, secretly thrilled to have one more meeting with her entrancing, yet possibly dangerous, Englishman.
“Oh là, dear brothers, but I am going to bed,” she said, rising. “If you wish to scheme or plot… or continue to complain about me… then do it quietly. In one of your thoroughly masculine coffeehouses, peut-être. Bonsoir, chers … bonjour, rather.
“And don’t clatter going down the stairs,” she added, swirling at her bedchamber door to face them for a moment. “Your chase after my pursuer has already upset poor Madame D’Ablemont once this morning.”
“Better safe than sorry,” Helio said in a harsh whisper as they gathered up their stylish hats, canes, and gloves to go out for coffee and their own breakfasts. “What did the old buccaneers say…’Dead men tell no tales’? Not a word to Charité about it, but… before we sail, I think we should eliminate this pesky Anglais. That American, El-isson, too. He was too winded and too hurried, like he had followed her, when we saw him. What do you think, Hippolyte?”
“Both at once,” his brother casually, happily agreed. “We get Rubio and Jean to help. They’re both excellent shots. And Rubio will love it. Oui. Bon. Let’s kill them!”
CHAPTER TWENTY
Another day, another guided tour, Lewrie thought.
They’d not found Lanxade or Balfa; indeed, they’d been rumoured to have departed New Orleans for parts unknown. Even with Toby Jugg, the only witness they’d dared bring along on the expedition, wandering the port on his own for days on end, they’d not turned up one familiar face from the pirate ship’s crew—or recognised a single one of the elegant young sprogs on the buccaneer schooner’s deck the morning that Lewrie’s prize-ship crew had been marooned.
So this morning involved “that other nonsense” that Lewrie and Pollock were charged to perform, and frankly, though Lewrie thought it a bootless endeavour, he had to admit that it was pleasureable work.
The morning was slightly overcast, but balmy. There was a faint breeze that felt refreshing, and it was not mosquito season, though a goodly tribe of flies were present round their horses.
He’d been shown the Cabildo and the cathedral their first days on foot, strolled the streets and pretended to shop… round the fort guarding the town centre and the levees, out Rue de l’Arsenal to the garrison barracks and the storehouses to count Spanish noses one day; rode to Lake Pontchartrain’s shore through the reclaimed marshes that were now greengrocer produce plots to sniff round decrepit Fort Saint John, and the reeky Bayou St. John that threaded right into the city.
This morning Pollock suggested a brisk canter out to the east, along the Chef Menteur road towards Lake Borgne, across the Plain of Gentilly, near Bayou Bienvenu, with a promised alfresco dinner at the end of it. Lewrie was a good horseman, but it had been a while since he’d spent that much time astride. In point of fact, his thighs were chafing, and his bottom was stiff and sore!
“Damme, Mister Pollock, I didn’t think you meant to emulate Alexander’s march into Persia!” he griped at last, trying to rub his ass.
“Almost there, no worries,” Pollock gaily replied.
“Almost where, the middle of another swamp?” Lewrie carped, as Pollock checked his horse to a slow walk from a canter in the shade of a tall cypress grove.
“What do you make of the country hereabouts, sir?” Pollock asked.
“Well, it’s green, frankly,” Lewrie said with a scowl as he cast his gaze about. “Hellish lot o’ trees, and such. All these fields… the usual marshy sponges, I s’pose, ‘neath the prairie grass?”
“Quaking prairie, such as we’ve seen before? No. Not quite,” his guide told him, sounding a tad pleased with himself. “Take note of the variety of the grasses, the sandier nature of the soil. Oh, rainy season will turn the sand and clay into a perfect quagmire, but in the winter, or a warm and dry springtime, it’s… passable. Grazeable.”
Lewrie took note that their horses’ hooves left fairly shallow prints and didn’t throw up much mud, except for the lower places… but they’d crossed a fair number of rivulets and seeps.
“Not much quicksand out here, either, sir,” Pollock mused.
“Nor much market for it, either, I’d expect,” Lewrie quipped. “Bad for egg timers and watch-glasses, hey?”
“The bulk of the grasses here, Mister Willoughby,” Mr. Pollock irritatedly explained, “are not marsh grasses, like those round rills and along the bayou channel. They’re dry-land grasses. If the soil along Lake Pontchartrain won’t support troops, artillery, or waggons, do you not think that this terrain might be more practicable? Please leave off your japing and take a good look, I conjure you!”
“Well, aye, I s’pose the land here is higher and dryer,” Lewrie allowed, dismounting and squatting to dig up a handful to crumble in his hands, wondering again why anyone in his right mind would send a sailor on a chore like this, instead of a soldier … or a farmer! He was, at best, a “gentleman-farmer” on his rented acres in Surrey, one who might “raise his hat” but little else. That was his wife’s bailiwick, what her experience and knowledge from an agricultural childhood in North Carolina had taught her; what their hired estate manager and day labourers tended to without Lewrie having to do much beyond shout encouragement, heartily agree like the Vicar of Bray, then toddle down to the Olde Ploughman tavern for an ale.
“Firm enough to support… things, perhaps?” Pollock hinted.
“Aye, I think it might be,” Lewrie dumbly agreed.
“Mount up, then, and we’ll ride on to the end of the road and have our meal,” Pollock suggested, pleased with Lewrie’s opinion.
“Bring any liniment?” Lewrie asked with a grin, taking time to massage his buttocks, with the reins in his hands.
“Sorry, no… Said you were a horseman.” Pollock snickered.
They dismounted and spread a groundcloth at the end of the Chef Menteur road, on a sandy, beach-dune hillock on the western shore of Lake Borgne. A vast expanse of open water—seawater—stretched out before them to the south and southeast, the lake’s horizon mostly limitless, except for due east, where, cross a fairly narrow channel or river, the swamps began again and made a vast, reedy, and marshy island that blocked the view; here and speckled with a few straggling groves of scrub trees.
Once the horses had been hobbled and let to graze, once they’d been led to fresh water to drink, Pollock did provide a decent spread, Lewrie had to allow. There were crusty, fresh baguettes, mustard and butter in small stone jars, and pickles in another. A choice of roast beef or h
am was wrapped in one cloth, and several pieces of crispily breaded and fried chicken were wrapped in another. A glass apothecary jar contained cold, cooked beans in oil and vinegar, and there were two bottles of imported hock. Pewter plates and utensils, spare chequered napkins, and proper wineglasses… Pollock had seen to everything.
Another thing Lewrie had to admit to himself as he concocted a thick, meaty sandwich (or was it, as his cabin-servant, Aspinall, had cheekily termed it, a “Shrewsbury,” for the real lord who’d first built one at an all-night gaming table?) and took a bite: risky though this expedition might be, he was actually beginning to enjoy it!
A night or two in a comfy shore bed, with fine coffee or hot chocolate delivered to his bedside by one of his pension’s servants; of sleeping lubberly, civilian “All-Night-Ins” with no emergencies to summon him on deck; and a myriad of coffeehouses, cabarets, wine bars, or eating places from which to choose had seduced him utterly. And the victuals, the viands, the delicious variety, all but a few low dives preparing piquant, unforgettable dishes, ah!
And Charité Bonsecours and her enthusiastic amour to savour… to contemplate another bout after the first and second, well! He was, but for a troop of nubile and nude nymphs feeding him ambrosia… or grapes… in the fabled Lotus Eater’s Paradise!
“Out to the Nor’east, yonder, is Cat Island,” Mr. Pollock intruded, rattling out the folds of his inevitable chart to lay between them as they dined. “Between Cat Island and the mainland is the inlet they call Pass Maria, ah… here, ahem.” Pollock indicated with a forefinger, which left a dab of mustard on Lake Borgne. “There is deep water on the seaward side, you see. Near to Ship Island, as well. This swampy island before us, t’other side of this channel, has a fort at the north end, Fort Coquilles, to control the pass into Lake Pontchartrain, but… there’s nothing to guard against ships entering Lake Borgne… coming right to the shore on which we sit, Willoughby! In your valued opinion, could Fort Coquilles prevent a landing here?”
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