The Captain's Vengeance

by Dewey Lambdin

  “Four at least, for us,” Jean-Marie added. “They aren’t that expensive. We could put down payment for four now, then get the rest from old Henri for the balance!” Jean-Marie was almost tail-wriggling and prancing in place, like a tot at first sight of his birthday pony.

  “We would be invincible!” Hippolyte gushed.

  His elder brother, Helio, thought that over for a second. He was seized by visions of a stalwart battalion of rebel Creole gentlemen marching under bright French Tricolours, with a band playing “La Marseillaise” as they strode bravely near musket range of an entire Spanish brigade, taking aim and strewing them flat as easily as reaping sugarcane stalks.

  “We should get six,” Helio announced. “For now. With them, we gain more profits from our cruise and can buy more later.”

  “With six, we could ambush the American upstart and that damned Anglais, too!” Hippolyte softly crowed. “All at once, the same night. Pay him back for what he did with Charité, even if…”

  “And what did that dog do to her?” Don Rubio Monaster demanded before Helio could even think to slap his brother’s arm to shut him up. Rubio, though, knew the answer to his jealousy even before they could confirm it. Their tight faces, stiff postures, and queasy shrugs said it all.

  “She came out with us to Le Pigeonnier,” Hippolyte had to admit, red-faced with embarrassment. “In her usual ‘costume’… n’est-ce pas? The Anglais, Willoughby, came in, too, and she dared us to engage him… to see if he might be dangerous to us, and, you know how bold she can be, when we wouldn’t go… one thing led to another, Bouré, then drinks, then they, ah… left together, round…”

  “He spent the night with her?” Rubio gasped with a cold twinge under his heart, even as he darkened with rage. “The salaud, that… English bastard! The cochon, pig… ravisher!” he spluttered.

  So dearly did he crave her, it could never be her failing that made her go off with the Englishman… could it? Women—girls!—with heads so easily turned were frail, weak, and biddable, even ones bold and outré, which boldness and unconventionalism in Charité made her even more maddeningly desirable.

  No, Charité was so young still, so in love with Life, galloping through it with her head thrown back in a laugh. Once her “enthusiasm” palled, surely she would settle down at last, would consider becoming the wife of a stalwart, bold, and assuringly steady fellow from a lineage as distinguished as hers, would take as a lifelong lover one who had gladly shared all her adventures, had been dashing and brave…

  “They are both dead men,” Don Rubio Monaster stiffly promised, manfully fighting the tears of disappointment that stung the corners of his eyes for being denied her wholehearted love, though his for her was boundless. He would not un-man himself with tears before his future in-laws; he would disguise his upset with righteous anger. “They are dead men, mes amis. At my hands, both of them, in the same night!” he heatedly vowed.

  Mr. Gideon Pollock sat down to a light first breakfast with his “wife,” a mere piffle of café au lait, half a canteloupe, and only one croissant. He’d take a second, more substantial breakfast with business associates, but Colette would feel neglected if he didn’t humour her desires for close, intimate, and talkative domesticity, a semblance of a righteous man and wife’s routines.

  Colette was little darker than Pollock’s heavily creamed coffee, as lightbeige as expensive letter paper, with long, straight and lustrous raven-dark hair, now demurely pinned up behind her ears, with deep bangs over her brows and crimped, springy coils depended on either side of her face. Her eyes were hazel, nearly as green as dark emeralds, and almost Asian-almond shaped. The palest yellow morning gown she had on perfectly complemented her hair, eyes, and complexion.

  Colette smiled, tweaking up the corners of her generous lips as she poured them both refills of coffee; which smile forced an appraising wry grin on Pollock’s face, too, recalling the night before, when her hair had been free of pins and combs and had fallen loose to the top of her sweet, round buttocks, had fanned out across the pillows as she had lain invitingly, her body dusky against the paleness of the bed linens.

  Mr. Pollock congratulated himself again for having her, despite his lack of height, imposing physique, or handsome features. Wealth, Mr. Pollock had found, atoned for almost anything, and he was nothing if not very well off after his years of neck-or-nothing adventures and toils. If it hadn’t been for a legitimate wife and three children back in Bristol, where he ventured only once every three years, he would have been sorely tempted to avow Colette his only woman, for she was the most pleasing, most passionate and abandoned, yet fine-mannered lover ever he had had.

  Five hundred English pounds she had cost to buy from her former owner and keeper, two thousand silver Spanish dollars; even more to set her in this grand pension and furnish her appartement in a style worthy of her sham status… even more to provide her with a slave cook, handmaiden, housemaid, and an elderly yet wakeful footman. And fees and bribes to the slothful Spanish authorities to start, then expedite, her manumission papers. And the price paid in embarrassment as those authorities leered and nudged each other to see the proud little Inglese twist-face prig turn red to free his paramour, whom he could have kept in bondage as his harem toy at half the cost and trouble… the way they maintained their own.

  Loco, utterly besotted… behaving like an old colt’s-tooth, a witless cully of a boy over his first milkmaid, he certainly was … and delighted in his folly. Did Panton, Leslie & Company allow him, Mr. Pollock would gladly chuck return voyages to England, gladly shed Kingston, and settle for a lesser post as company factotum permanently assigned to New Orleans, for the entrancing town, its burgeoning trade, its future promise, and Colette were equal opportunities to his mind.

  He could keep an eye on her faithfulness and escape the damnable, hellish pangs of jealousy and dread he felt whenever he had to sail off and stay apart from her for months and months on end. He knew they could never really marry, even in a city so casual about its licentiousness, so hypocritically, sinfully… Catholic!

  Mr. Pollock himself was a rock-ribbed Scot Presbyterian.

  “You wish me to ask in the markets about your mysterious young girl, cher?” Colette quite innocently posed. Seemingly innocent.

  “Hmm… what?” Pollock flummoxed, with a twitch of his head at the picture of her sauntering and sashaying past hordes of leering and lustful idle Creole “gentlemen,” returning the sly grins of a muscular Free Black dandy, even of an impressive slave horseholder! “No, no…”

  “Can it be you tire of me, cher Gideon?” Colette gently teased. “And your m’sieur Willoughby’s White Creole girl in male clothes fires your imagination, hmm?”

  “Oh, rot!” Pollock replied with a shuddery laugh to realise he was being lovingly twitted, as all older lovers would be by their much younger and more desirable paramours.

  “My dearest love,” Colette said, turning serious as she put down her coffee cup and folded her hands together on the table. “You allow me to be… decorative, but you never let me be the wife partner that I am to you, cher. Hermione and I,” she said, naming her stout and darker older maidservant, “have many sources. She knows the slaves to all the grands blancs families, and they see everything, n’est-ce pas? I … am on casual speaking terms with many of the town’s young ladies. The jeunes filles de couleur who are… kept. Their masters and beaus share their gossip when they come home from the cabarets, the pillow talk, the amusing tales? I know you wish to protect me from…”

  “No, dearest, I must insist that…” Pollock began to splutter.

  As dearly as Colette actually loved her wry little Englishman, there were times that his not-so-hidden jealousy, his fear of losing her, was maddening!

  “Allow me to aid you, please, Gideon? Just this once?” she almost begged, reaching across the table to take his hands in hers and squeeze reassuringly, batting her long lashes like a fearful kitten. “I already know … Hermione and I have already lea
rned… that this girl is not a Bonsecour. They have no young, unmarried daughter. And the Darbone brothers you mentioned have not been in New Orleans for at least a month. Their manservant boys were disgusted that they had to leave the city and go up towards Pointe Coupee to the Darbone lands… They despise the crude field slaves and are terrified that anything could happen to them so far away, if old man Darbone or madame takes a dislike to them. Three sass-mouth Darbone house slaves already died of whipping, after the Pointe Coupee rebellion, Gideon. Comprendre?”

  “Well…”

  “Let me call Hermione in, please, cher Gideon? Let her tell of what she has already heard?” Colette cajoled.

  “Hmm, I s’pose… ahem,” Pollock grudgingly assented, unable to deny his entrancing mistress anything. Almost anything. He did desire an answer to Lewrie’s mystery—just so long as he could keep Colette from laying eyes on the impressive lout!

  “Hermione?” Colette said, tinkling a porcelain bell by her place setting. “Ici, s’il te plaît.”

  “M’amselle wish?” the husky older woman asked, coming in from a mostly unused kitchen, wiping her square hands on a dish-clout, swiping at her garish satin headcloth. “Oh la! Dat girl who go about at night like ze gentilhomme? Mon Dieu.”

  The gist of her gossip (gleaned from a kitchen maid who was friendly with one of the oyster shuckers owned by the proprietors from the Pigeon Coop cabaret) was that the girl, who was uncommonly pretty, was no Bonsecour at all, but lived in a grand pension on Rue Dauphine and could be seen sneaking home arm in arm with two young men, always the same two. Both a groom and a girl body servant belonging to one of the houses on Rue Dauphine—”No bettah’n dey should be, and mon Dieu, don’ get me started on dem, m’sieur Gideon!”—said that they had both seen her, sometimes with the two young men, when all three of them would go into a house together. Sometimes the girl alone, dressed in suitings but with her hair free, would come traipsing in at cock-crow. For sure if Hermione asked a slave who worked a produce plot on Bayou St. John and came into town at dawn with his owner’s cart of greens to sell, he’d tell her the same and could show her the right house, even tell Hermione which floor where the candles got lit, after she went up to her appartement!

  “Oh, dey say she a high-born Creole gal, m’sieur Gideon… but not de finest sort, hein?” Hermione concluded.

  “But we could ask about her for you, cher,” Colette perkily assured him, “and I’d lay you any wager you wish that the secret is not a secret at all… That sort of delicious gossip surely is already the common coin in this town! Let us try for you, mon cher!”

  “Well… just so long as you don’t stray into a neighbourhood where Hermione could not protect you, dearest. Perhaps you had best take Scipio along to chaperone both of you. He may be getting on in years, but he still can appear forbidding, does he put a scowl on… ahem,” Pollock at last conceded.

  “You are the dearest man, Gideon,” Colette murmured, her eyes locked on his with the promise of a most magnificent night of reward.

  “The mails, m’sieur,” Henri Maurepas’s personal assistant and clerk announced with his usual unctuous air as the banker entered his inner sanctum. A fashionable thimble-shaped hat, gloves, and cane were taken from him and placed securely in a tall oak armoire that had come all the way from Paris as Maurepas strode to his imposing desk and sat down with a sweep of his coat-tails. Without a word spoken, a slave in formal livery tiptoed in with a tray bearing a coffee service and a candle-warmed silver-plate pot.

  “Merci,” M. Maurepas said in a distracted and bored grunt, as he almost always did to indicate that he had taken note of the service done him… but they should both now get out and let him get to work.

  He sorted through the many letters. There was one pile that was local business; those he shoved aside to concentrate on the few others that had come aboard the naval cutter. To his disappointment, none of his latest correspondence was from France, not even from distant kin. Certainly, there had yet to come a reply from the Directory in Paris to his many letters urging support for a rebellion in Louisiana… though there were some outdated newspapers.

  Ah! Two letters directed to the bank, one from Havana, with a date scribbled on it that was much earlier than the second, which came all the way from Ciudad de México.

  Both were in Spanish, a language he detested. No matter how flowery and elegantly written, Spanish could not hold a candle to the grace of a cultured man’s French.

  … to inform you, Most Esteemed Señor Maurepas, that, given your previous requests directed to His Excellency the Captain-General, combined with the humble pleas of your fellow bankers in the Colony of Louisiana and the city of New Orleans, His Most Catholic Majesty has graciously given assent to the shipment to the Colony of a considerable sum of silver specie, with which to ease the regrettable shortage of coinage which has, of late, caused such a hardship upon his Most Catholic Majesty’s subjects residing in Louisiana, due to the regrettable outflow of specie which the import of diverse American trade goods has caused. The Captain-General of His Majesty’s American possessions having received His Majesty’s gracious permission, the Captain-General at Havana has ordered the Captain-General of New Spain at Ciudad de México to order the mines at Potosi to refine, mint, and prepare for shipment pieces-of-eight and dollars to the amount of—

  “Sacré nom de Dieu!” Henri Maurepas almost screeched in amazement, choking on the smoke from his morning’s first cigaro, doubling over and hacking for a good two minutes before he could trust himself to reread the sum, and breathing very carefully ’til he had managed to pour himself a restorative, throat-clearing tot of brandy. It was followed by a second, larger one that he sipped in a celebratory but very thoughtful fashion.

  Coined money gushed northward into the coffers of the barbaric Yankees to pay for their flour, wheat, corn, lumber, and such, their whiskies and furs, hides, tobacco, and cotton. With the war, most of the merchant ships that came to trade in New Orleans were American, too. Yankees ending buying Yankee goods passing through the city and very little of the profits stuck to French or Spanish fingers. Hence Louisiana, New Orleans, and Maurepas’s bank were forever short of coin; which shortage drove up the price of everything needed or wished, even local goods.

  Spain had ignored the problem for years, halfheartedly closing the Mississippi to American traders for several years, which had been a disastrous policy that had fomented mass smuggling and even greater corruption and graft, was such a thing possible.

  Now, with the river open again, but Spain locked in a war, even wealthy bankers had to scrimp and scrounge to maintain comfortable cash reserves to loan out, and as to what their borrowers offered as payment, pah! M. Henri Maurepas had to lease several warehouses to hold consignments of molasses, sugar, rice, and cotton ’til it could be sold to someone, someday, before the mice, insects, or the ever-present damp ruined it, and he thought himself fortunate did he make a 2 percent profit!

  Shelling out so much silver to Lanxade and Balfa to reward their sailors, paying shares to those foolish youngsters who would foment a rebellion, after the hellish cost of buying artillery, weapons, and the pirate schooner for them to play with, had put him in a worse spot, and if they ever tired of their little “adventure” or failed to take more prizes to sell on the sly, failed to bring in more “free” goods for the scalpers like Bistineau to front, he and his firm could go under!

  Now, though…

  Six million dollars in hard silver coin could be his salvation. His bank’s share was to be a fifth of the total, charged against his “holdings”—lands, future crops, outstanding planters’ loans, or warehoused goods—and with that money he would be solvent again… for a few more years at least. His loans could be repaid in coin for a change, he could loan more…

  Or! Maurepas quietly mused, taking another sip of brandy and picking up the letters to reread them. He leaned far back in his chair, with his brandy glass resting atop his substantial paunch. All would come
aboard a single, undistinguished, fast ship from Veracruz, one not too obvious as a treasure ship, nor one so grand as to draw the attention of any prowling British man of war or privateer; nor the free-roving so-called privateers of other nations. Soldiers would be aboard, of course, a full company drawn from a trustworthy regiment based in New Spain, a Navy crew to be provided, skilled gunners …

  Both letters cautioned that the shipment was a matter of strict confidence, that upon receipt and perusal of the letters, they were to be handed back to the Governor-General, and that any idle mention outside his firm could result in harsh punishment, etc.

  Hmmm, Maurepas further mused, a sly grin creasing the corners of his eyes and lips. “Hmmm,” again, aloud this time.

  A fast ship, was it, and undistinguished? A shallow-draughted one, he thought most likely, so it could ascend the river quickly and cross the bars near Fort Balise without the risk of unloading all, or a part, of the cargo, thus exposing it to greedy prying eyes.

  Guarded by a “trustworthy” company of soldiers; well, that was a wry jape! The local garrison was made of weary, jaded place-servers and half-illiterate peasant clods; half the original Spaniards had run off or died, replaced with ne’er-do-wells too lazy to work an honest trade. So what would a regiment in New Spain consist of? A few hidalgo fops as officers, a few grizzled, over-aged sergeants, and the rank-and-file mostly local-born Mestizos, even Indios straight from the bean fields, still jabbering away in Nahuatl or some other savage language. Ill-trained, ill-clothed, poorly led, and indifferently armed, crowded elbow to elbow and at sea for the first time in their lives, perhaps? She’d not be a royal galleon, perhaps not even a fast frigate! What did the letter say, how did it phrase it? Ah!