“You just made that up?”
“Aye.”
“You are a rare Englishman… with the romantic soul of a true Frenchman,” Charité admiringly declared. “Are you certain you weren’t born French?”
“Quickened in Holland, but born in London. Son of a penniless rogue and a disinherited heiress, dammit all.” Lewrie snickered.
“No matter, mon Anglais,” Charité said, wide-eyed and serious, all but biting her trembling lips as she bestowed the sweetest little kiss on his mouth, “for … je t’aime, Alain mon chou. Je t’aime! “
“Darlin’!” Lewrie gasped, stunned right down to his curling toes by her sudden declaration of love; not intimate fondness, but her true love. Wondering what the Devil to do with it, but …!
When in doubt, lie like Blazes, Lewrie told himself; It surely won’t cost me much, and she might even halfway believe it!
“Je t’aime, aussi, ma chérie… ma petite biche,” he growled in reply, his forehead pressed to hers. “You darlin’ little doe-deer, I adore you, too. Ev’ry lovely inch of you.”
Well, that seemed t’make her happy, he thought as they embraced even tighter. And, despite her protestations, it did lead to a frantic tumble back onto his bed, and one more glorious, feverishly passionate romp, spare cundums, her expensive chemise, the lateness of the hour, her family, or society’s expectations bedamned.
Oh, make him happy, Charité told herself at the same time; Men! So easy to entrance… and enlist! He will aid us. For me. And it will be pleasurable for both of us. And he is so adorable, I think I truly am falling in love! Well, perhaps I could.
It was well past seven in the evening when he handed her down to the street and walked her the short block from Bourbon Street, up Rue Ste. Anne to Rue Dauphine, where she insisted that they must part at last. Now, on public view, their behaviour had to be most circumspect and formally courteous. Lewrie gallantly doffed his hat and swept it across his chest, was just about to make a “leg” in congé, she about to drop him a brief curtsy and elegant incline of her head in parting as well, when it suddenly struck him that he still hadn’t plumbed the matter of her address. He’d had other things on his mind.
“When I return and wish to see you again, how do I reach you?” he asked suddenly. “Where do I send my best regards?”
“To… Mademoiselle Charité,” she seemed to stumble for a moment before resuming her gay, coquettish airs. “Write me at La Maison Gayoso. Twenty-Six, Rue Dauphine.”
“Not Mademoiselle Bonsecours?” Lewrie pressed, hat in hand and shamming amiable, fond confusion.
“Our concierge will see that I get it,” Charité attempted to explain, for one brief instant almost snippish with him, before relaxing into her customary air of flirtatiousness. “My parents and family… for now, mon chou, for only a while longer, just my given name, please? Until you are well settled in New Orleans, n’est-ce pas?”
“Well,” he quibbled, shuffling from one foot to another.
“And you will keep your lodgings while you are upriver, Alain?” she asked with a disarming smile. “When I return, I may write to you there?”
“No, I’ll…” Lewrie flummoxed, considering that he would most-like never see her again, that his secret doings would be finished by the time she got back to the city; then hit upon a sudden inspiration. “When I come back, I expect t’be much richer, and I’ll take a grander appartement, not a low, single room. Where I may ‘entertain’ you in proper splendour, and… discreet privacy, hmm? Oh! You could pick it for me! Choose it and help me furnish it to our, ah… our mutual satisfaction?” he said with the suitable anticipatory leer. “Try the Panton, Leslie offices first, though, and I’ll come running.”
Aye, feather a nest, he smugly thought; women just adore that!
“Je t’adore!” Charité cooed under her breath, her eyes glowing under the brim of her fashionable bonnet, and the parasol carried over her shoulder spinning in delight. “But of course, I shall be more than happy to help. And I shall be distraught every day that we are apart, Alain, mon coeur. ’Til then, though, alas,” she said with a tremble of her lip and a forlorn hitch of her shoulders and a heartfelt gulp in her voice. “Au revoir, mon cher Alain! Trust that I do love you … madly!”
“And I you, Charité… as mad as a Hatter, as a March Hare!” he declared. “English sayings… I’ll explain them all to you, soon.”
“You will have to!” She chuckled. “Soon. Le plus tôt possible, mon amour … as soon as possible, my love. Again, au revoir!”
A slim hand gloved in lace net almost reached out for him, but she remembered her distinguished place in Creole society—in public at least!— and dropped him a slow and graceful curtsy, that elegant incline of her head, then she was gone in a trice, rising and spinning away down Dauphine without a backward glance, as if all their fervent day had never transpired.
Lewrie shrugged to himself and turned away as well, clapping his hat back on his head and fiddling with his sword-cane. He walked a few paces back down Rue Ste. Anne as if to return to his rooms or to head for the part of town where the most eateries were located… but then paused, theatrically felt his waist-coat pockets as if he had forgotten something, and turned back to lean his head round the corner, once he’d almost assured himself that no one was watching him. A few lamplighters were sluggishly making the rounds with their ladders and port fires, igniting the entire hundred (some scoffed and said only eighty) publicly funded streetlights of which New Orleans could boast. In the entryways, above the high stoops of shops and houses, private lanterns were already lit and feebly glowing, throwing little pools of light and even deeper skeins of darkness. But he could pick her out by the pale colour of her gown, the flounces on her hat, the now-furled parasol in her hands, as she flitted from one illuminated pool to the next…
A moment later, and she’d melted away into an iron-gated entryway of a blank-walled building. Close enough, Lewrie decided, thinking that his sauntering past the place would blow the gaffe. He would recognise the building again, counted it off as the twelfth from his corner, on the north side of Rue Dauphine, and from the look of the place at his acute viewing angle, it would most likely turn out to be one of the many walled-courtyard appartement houses. No more than three storeys above the street, but with spacious sets of rooms on all four sides to face the central courtyard. Eight appartements or twelve? he speculated, seeing no sign of commercial establishments on the ground floor. With their own stabling out back, it’d be even fewer, he deduced.
Ste. Anne began on the east side of the Place d’Armes, the main city square by the riverbank; Rue St. Pierre ran down its west side, so… how did they number their houses? Outward from the centre, the lowest numbers starting on those two streets, or from Rue de l’Arsenal on the east straight to the west? No matter, he thought with a sniff; She’d said number 26. Unless she’s been lying like a dog right from the start!
He shrugged again and drew out his pocket watch. It was nearly eight! Long past time for him to hare back to the Panton, Leslie & Company warehouse offices and catch up with Mr. Pollock, to see what he’d learned today, and proudly impart to him what he had garnered. A growl from his innards warned Lewrie that it was long past suppertime, too. Frankly, he suddenly felt ravenously famished, now that the most important items of his activities list were done, and he had only the idle Spanish to fret about.
Play-acting and fucking! Lewrie happily pondered as he strolled along, clacking his cane on the pavement; Both damn’ good for buildin’ an appetite, ha ha! Lewrie, you sly dog!
Down Ste. Anne to cross Bourbon Street, then down to Rue Royale, headed for Rue Charles, where he thought he might take a little amble in the Place d’Armes before diving into the commercial jumble round Levee Road, where it was darker, poorer-lit, and the streets narrower, filthier, and nigh abandoned at this hour.
The first two thin and muffled shots, the twiggish crack! crack! made him slam to a stop, head swivelling to track the con
fusing echoes that swirled from God knew where—closer to the river, or westward down Royale? A third crack! and by God that was a shot, quickly followed by a chorus of harsh shouts and the discharge of a weapon and a keen whine of a ricochet off brick! Definitely westward down Rue Royale, near St. Pierre or Toulouse!
Lewrie took a hesitant step in that direction, recognising the shouts as being made by English speakers. His men from Proteus or some of Pollock’s men? Instinct made him reach under his coat and pull out one of his doublebarrelled Manton pistols, then spurred him to turn in the direction of the commotion.
The fourth thin crack! was much closer; so was the musket ball that droned past his ear and spanged off a wrought-iron balcony pillar with a departing harpy’s howl inches from where he’d stood dithering but an eyeblink before!
The fifth shot forced him to throw his body flat in one of the ‘tween-lamp pools of gloom!
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
Lewrie feverishly searched for a betraying cloud of spent gunpowder to mark the shooter’s position, but saw nothing. He perked his ears for the telltale sounds of a nearby marksman reloading, the rattle of powder horn on a muzzle, the tinkle of a ramrod—nothing! He got his feet under him, spotted a deep doorway further west down Royale… popped up and turned as if to dash for it…
Crack! A second after he had flung himself down again, a ball went zing-humming over his head, and Lewrie was up and running for the shadowed doorway, reaching its shelter and flattening himself against the east side of the vestibule, out of sight for a moment as he cocked both firelocks of his Manton pistol, tore off his “wide-awake” hat and put it on his fisted left hand… stuck it out as if fearfully taking a peek, and… Crack! came another shot that spun the hat like a top on his fist after the ball had taken a round bite from its brim!
He swung out—head, shoulders, and gun hand in plain view—to see the faint gleam of a bright-metal movement. Laying his gun hand over his left forearm, he fired one round, absorbing the recoil upwards for a second, then levelling again and firing the second barrel towards the slightest vertical glint of lamplight off what he took for a musket’s barrel. The Manton belched two large clouds of blackpowder smoke, in which he slithered away, low to the pavement in a duck-walk to another deep entryway farther off.
With his second double-barrelled Manton, he fired off a round in the general direction of his last vague target, then ducked under the resulting pall and sprinted the short distance to another entryway on the south side of the street, this time.
He heard no more Crack! aimed against him; after a long minute he took note that there were no more shots down Rue Royale, either. A loud chorus of shouts and curses, aye, but no more gunfire. He traded the spent Manton for one of those single-shot pocket pistols, then set off down that way. Halfway there, skulking from one shadow to another, it suddenly struck him…
Twig-crack … no powder smoke or ramming! Four shots, got off in less than a minute, at me! he furiously thought; Bright-metal, not treated blue or brown. Hell’s Bells, someone’s got a Girandoni rifle!
“Mine arse on a band-box!” he seethed aloud. “I find out who it was, I’ll have his nutmegs off! Pollock’s hen-head clerks sold… pah!”
He could not go back the way he had been walking, that was for certain, to attain the relative safety of the evening crowds strolling in the Place d’Armes where, one might assume, the Creoles didn’t take pot-shots at each other all that often. Even if the shooter was long gone, the commotion would surely draw the Spanish foot patrol and the idle curious, and he’d much rather not have to answer their questions or be recognised and recalled later.
A slight distance more and he’d be at the intersection of Rue Royale and Rue d’Orleans, but d’Orleans dead-ended behind the impressive cathedral, and Lewrie could not recall but one narrow alleyway leading to the square, where the odds were good that he might re-encounter the bastard who had shot at him… or meet up with Spanish soldiers, who’d block both ends and delight in questioning or arresting the first foreigner they came across.
There was nothing for it but to keep on westerly down Rue Royale at least as far as St. Pierre to get to the Place d’Armes, then Levee Road—right into the crowd he could see gathering at the scene of the first shooting he’d heard! At the least, Lewrie thought, he could blend into a much larger crowd and sidle through it with eyes curious and wide, play-acting an idle gawker … hoping that the reek of gunpowder on his person wouldn’t be noticed.
One last desperate and intense study of the intersection he had fled, and Lewrie shoved his pistol back into hiding under the tails of his coat, and he launched himself from the deep doorway, sword-cane in his right hand once more to peck out a languid pace down towards that hubbub and growing knot of people near Rue Toulouse, hoping that once near there, he could turn down St. Pierre to the square, on a well-lit and peopled street…
“Empty yore hands, yew English sumbitch!” came a harsh whisper from an unlit doorway he had just passed, almost in his left ear, and chilling him to his bones. He felt the prick of something sharp right through his layers of clothes in the small of his back!
“I was shot at, too,” Lewrie managed to say, though just about as frightened as he had ever been. “Back there, at Sainte Anne street!”
“Huh!” came the faceless response, with the slightest shove of the sharp object against his skin. “Gimme ‘at sword-cane.”
“You’re American… one of Mister Ellison’s men?” Lewrie asked as he let his cane clatter to the cobblestones. He winced to think that he hadn’t spotted his assailant lurking in the shadows, had not got a whiff of his stench as he passed him, for up close now, the reek of a crudely tanned deerskin hunting shirt or fringed trousers was overpowering. “Damn you!”
A rough hand groped under his coat, discovering one of his twin-barrelled pistols. Lewrie could hear the man sniff the muzzles.
“It’s just a cane, and I shot back at whoever shot at me, that’s why the—” Lewrie tried to explain, insulted to be man-handled.
“Yeah… shore it is,” the man sneered.
“There’s another Manton, both barrels fired. A pair of pocket pistols, too, not fired, and couldn’t hit anything over ten paces if my life depended on it.” Lewrie announced. “I heard shots, rifle shots, fired down your way, before they shot at me. Like twig-cracks? Quick together? Was that how it was down yonder? If you’re with Mister Ellison, you came aboard the emporium ship with him… you saw the Austrian sharpshooter rifles, the Girandoni air-rifles? That’s all of a sound they make, a twig crack. Think, man!”
A hand hammered onto his left shoulder to spin him around to face his accostor and his wide-bladed ten-inch skinning knife, as big to Lewrie’s eyes as a Scot’s claymore. And he was an American, clad in a mix of homespun and leather, glaring face and eyes beneath a massive coonskin cap with the mask on, with glittering brass beads in its eye sockets winking from the street lamps’ lights.
“How d’I know ye didn’t have a hand in shootin’ Jim Hawk? ‘At ye didn’t sic some o’ yore men t’do it?” the man accused.
“Why the Devil would I?” Lewrie shot back. “He doesn’t even owe me money!”
“‘Caws yore an English spy, come here t’scout New Orleans ‘fore ye take it fer yore own, an we got in yore way, an iff ‘n Jim Hawk dies I’ll draw out yore innards an’ roast ’em on a stick right b’fore yore eyes. An’ ‘at’d be just fer starters,” he vowed with a feral grin.
When among the Muskogee towards the end of the Revolutionary War, Lewrie had heard of savage tortures, so he could not help gulping in dread, but…
“And you and Mister Ellison are here to scout the place so you can take it before we do,” Lewrie retorted, “but we came to hunt down pirates who stole a rich prize ship from us. That ship moored highest upriver of the emporium hulks. Looking for a large, black-hulled, and red-striped schooner. Some of the men with me survived being marooned on the Dry Tortugas, and they could recognise both the schoon
er and the faces of the pirates. That’s why we’re here, the only reason. I am a Post-Captain in his Majesty’s Navy. Unless you and your party had anything to do with the piracy, we’d have no cause to shoot your leader! And how is Mister Ellison, by the way?”
All that truth, carefully mixed with lies, discomfited the man, Lewrie could see. His fierce glare subdued, replaced by a thoughtful but puzzled expression.
“We stand here with your knife drawn much longer, man, and we’ll draw the Spanish watchmen, sure as Fate,” Lewrie suggested. “Neither side needs that, for God’s sake. Keep my damned Mantons if you wish, but shouldn’t we try to blend into that crowd yonder? Find out how it stands with your Mister Ellison, hmm?” Lewrie gently urged.
“Put yore hands down,” the man growled, shoving both of Lewrie’s pistols back at him. “Anybody gets caught with fired guns, it’ll be you, not me. Pick up ‘at cane o’ yor’n, and we’ll go. Mind now, I’ll be right at yore back. Play me false, and I’ll cut yore kidneys out.”
The first frontiersman turned Lewrie over to another member of Ellison’s gang while he went inside the mean tavern to pass on what he had learned. Lewrie and his guard stood near the door, where he could see inside. Ellison was propped up on a threadbare settee, biting his lips, grimacing as a Creole surgeon worked on him. Now and then, he’d let pass a faint groan, then take a sip of whisky from a tall tumbler as the surgeon probed and plucked inside a plum-purpled wound high on his right chest. They rolled Ellison on his side so the surgeon could feel about, then use a slim scalpel to excise a rifle ball from under his shoulder blade. That forced a cry from him, but Ellison’s torment came out in a battle-roar, or the snarl of a cornered bear. From that incision, a shiny .51 calibre ball appeared, one that Ellison demanded be laid in his palm. Which plucky, courageous geste raised great cheer among his anxious men and even made Lewrie feel relief.
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