“Mebbe we starts callin’ ya ‘Iron-Bound’ ‘stead o’ th’ Ram-Cat, sah.” Andrews tittered, immensely relieved and slightly teasing.
“We will not!” Lewrie snapped, struggling to sit upright despite his sailors’ protests. He gaped downwards, thinking it must have been a weakly propelled shot, for all of Charité’s remorseless accuracy. It had further been blunted by his white leather sword baldric that angled cross his chest, by a doubled-over gilt-laced coat lapel atop it, and lastly, by the insubstantial obstacle of his waist-coat and shirt that had absorbed most of the ball’s force. Even so, his flesh had been split by its impact, and when he gingerly massaged his chest near the seeping, slight wound, which was already swelling and turning the most garish shade of purply green in a bruise as wide as his hand-span, he thought he could feel something broken inside—a rib or two perhaps, his breastbone chipped, maybe? Dented? Thank the Lord, indeed, though, there wasn’t a gaping, spurting, grape-red hole in his hide!
“Damn my eyes, but she shot me,” Lewrie wheezed. “She actually shot me! Tried t’kill me!”
Not that I really blame her … much, Lewrie told himself with chagrin; ’Tis a bloody wonder some woman didn’t try ages ago! And by the queasy expression on Andrews’s phyz, his longtime Cox’n must’ve been wondering the same thing.
“Where is she?” Lewrie demanded, head aswivel in search for her.
“Way off yonder, sah,” Andrews had to say, waving northward at a fog-hazed horizon. Lewrie couldn’t spot another boat anywhere.
“Damme, we’ve lost ’em. But if Jugg is still after ’em… we might get lucky yet,” Lewrie sadly decided. “Might have ’em in irons by nightfall.”
“We head back to de ship, Cap’m?” Andrews solicitously asked. “Ya need t’let Mistah Hodson an’ Mistah Durant, de Surgeons, tend to ya, sah. Bind up yer ribs an’ such?”
“Aye, Andrews, that’d be capital,” Lewrie was forced to agree. “It strikes me that I might’ve done enough and more today for King and Country. I’ve earned myself a lie-down!”
“Amen t’dat, sah,” Andrews said with a chuckle. “Make y’self comf‘table as ya can, an’ Desmond an’ me’ll fetch ya back to Proteus, quick as a wink. Mebbe Jugg will cotch dat girl for ya, an’…”
“Ah-hemm!” Lewrie growled at that unfortunate slip, tossing in a grumbly “Arr!” for good measure as he pressed his handkerchief over his wound and eased down to sit on the gig’s floorboards, seepage and the state of his uniform bedamned, to lay against the forward thwart. Half prone, he found it easier on his ribs to breathe.
Andrews and Desmond got the gig turned about and set themselves a slow but deep-biting stroke that would get him to safety and still not completely exhaust them, and the metronomic rumbling creak of oars in ungreased tholes, the thrust and glide of the boat between strokes, and the gurgle-chuckling of passing water began to lull him.
Do I really want her captured? he asked himself, puzzling over why he didn’t utterly despise her and wish her heart’s blood, since she’d come damned close to spilling his. All in all, Lewrie reckoned, it had been a shitten business they’d done… but it was done. And even if Charité escaped, once the report on this affair was published in London papers the tale would make its way to New Orleans sooner or later and it would be up to the incensed Spanish to do the real dirty work. In spite of all the depravities she’d been involved with, he could almost pity her, when the Dons got their hands on her.
Luck to you, girl, he thought, lolling his head back to admire the clearing, bright blue sky; but, damme if I ain’t pleased t’be shot of you!
He would have laughed at his play on words,… but he suspected it would hurt.
EPILOGUE
Miranda: O, wonder!
How many goodly creatures are there here!
How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world
That has such people in it!
THE TEMPEST, ACT V, SCENE 1
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
Crack! went the Girandoni air-rifle, little louder than the dry snap of a twig on the forest floor, and the wily old tom turkey leaped as its tiny skull was shattered, wings flapping, breaking into a staggering run for a second or two before it realised it was dead and fell in a feathery heap.
“Waaw!” Peyton Siler marvelled. “An’ at a hun’erd paces, too!”
“Damn if ‘at don’t beat all, Jim Hawk!” Georgie Prater cheered, as loud as he dared on the lawless Natchez Trace without drawing undue attention from a roving Chickasaw or Choctaw band, a pack of frontier outlaws, or down-on-their-luck and desperate travellers. “Wisht I’d o’ bought me one, too.”
Jim Hawk Ellison painfully rose to his feet from where he knelt, still stiff from his healing wound, one hand dug into the bark of the tulip poplar tree he’d used for cover at the end of his stalk. “Damn’ if it ain’t a God-Hell wonder, at that, boys. There’s gonna be a lot o’ surprised squirrels in Campbell County once I get settled. Eat on squirrel an’ dumplin’s ev’ry goldarned night.”
“Dependin’ on whether ya find a wife t’cook ’em for ya,” Siler said with a sly chuckle.
“Figger, with what I won off those two sailor boys in Natchez, I just might manage, Peyton.” Ellison gently laughed along. “Georgie, I’d much admire did ya go fetch Mister Tom. Still got a hitch in my get-along.” And Georgia Prater dashed to do his bidding, though not without an Indian’s caution to go silently and skirt the clearing roundabout near the trees, his Pennsylvania rifle at the ready.
“Leastways, somethin’ good come outta Looziana,” Siler grunted. “B’sides gettin’ outta New Orleans with our skins still on, and a wind down our gullets.”
“’Tis a filthy, damp country, Peyton,” Jim Hawk commented as he slung his air-rifle over his shoulder, a wary eye kept on the dark and thick woods even so, for an unwary man on the lonely Natchez Trace was as good as dead, and even a party as large as his could still be taken in ambush, did they ever let their guard down. None of them would lay in easy sleep ’til they reached tiny Nashville. “At least we can say that we came all this way, saw it, and had us a little adventure. But I’d not give you five dollars for th’ whole damn’ place. Why Congress is hagglin’ over sendin’ an army down there t’take it, well… more power to ’em, but they’ve not had t’live in it like we did. They decide to try ‘er on, I’ll hoot an’ holler loud as anybody else, an’ pat ’em on the back as they march by, but… no thankee.”
New Orleans, Spanish Florida, and Louisiana would, Jim Hawk was certain, be American someday… but not anytime soon, as he reckoned it. President John Adams already had himself half a war, a quasi war with France, and he doubted if he’d be able to bring Congress round to his point of view before the coming elections. If Jefferson got in, he might manage it, but… soon as Jim Hawk was back in Nashville, he’d put his reports in the mails to Washington City, along with his letter of resignation, and head back to the Powell’s Valley to make a new beginning; a secure, settled civilian life, after years of war and filibustering for richer men. He had 250 Spanish dollars in his saddlebags, and that was enough for a man to found a mountain empire! So something good had, in truth, come from Louisiana!
“You foolish, foolish girl!” Papa Hilaire de Guilleri fumed yet again. Since he and Maman Marie had rushed back to New Orleans, he’d whiplashed between bawling, drunken grief over the loss of his sons and his patrie, to jibbering dread of exposure, trial, and garotting, to anger directed to her, the only living target for his icy wrath. “What were you thinking, you…”
“To free Louisiana,” Charité numbly tried to explain once more, her voice meek and her hands primly folded in the lap of her soberly black mourning gown. “For France, Papa, for—”
“Empty-headed, patriotic nonsense!” her elegantly tall and lean, distinguished father cruelly shot back. “Fervent twaddle for things an ocean away, and nothing to do with us, I tell you! And if the Spanish ever learn of what you did, we’
re all ruined. You’re… débile! You led your brothers into your—”
“Your sweet and gentle cousin, poor Jean-Marie, aussi,” Maman coldly fumed from the other side of her father’s study, plying a fan as if to drive off summer heat. Charité didn’t know which of them was crueller to her, her dashing beau idéal father or her elegantly gay and flighty mother, for Marie de Guilleri had been, still was, one of the most beauteous belles of her generation, the toast of the city and of the grandest Creole society. “Rubio Monaster, who might have married one of your sisters had he lived, made the finest match between us and the Bergrands,” she accused, daintily daubing at her dry nose with a laced silk handkerchief.
Their banker, Monsieur Maurepas, had summoned them and had spread a plausible lie to explain Charité’s stumbling return to New Orleans in a nameless Acadian’s pirogue and care. Maurepas’s sorrowful tale had hardly been necessary, for a week or more at least, since New Orleans had been rocked by the fire that had levelled poor Monsieur Bistineau’s old store and warehouse, and the simultaneous fire that had erupted aboard a newly arrived ship for sale, on the south bank of the river, and the way the used ship had lost all her mooring cables and had drifted onto the American emporium ship, burning her to the waterline as well! It had required the garrison turn out, the forts to be manned against any attempt to seize the port city. On top of that, only two of the three treasure schooners had come up the Mississippi, the third feared lost, and that caused even greater consternation.
Given the circumstances, the tragic murder of four of the town’s most promising young gentlemen at the hands of the cut-throat runaway rebel slave St. John’s evil band, while hunting and fishing on Lake Barataria, had almost gone un-noticed! Rumours had flown. Charité had escaped; been raped by the nègres; had stopped off with an Acadian family due to slight unhealth and hadn’t been with them … yet had almost lost her complete wits in grief. Quel dommage, n’est-cepas? It was well known that Charité had been the too-bold, outdoorsy, and de-sexed sort of girl, too outré, too modern, so…
“To think I nursed you at my breast, viper!” Maman Marie snapped. Her fan beat like a hummingbird’s wings. “Drinking, gambling, running the streets in men’s clothing, associating with whores and rogues… and reeling home as drunk as a nègre!”
“Maman…” Charité weakly beseeched, eyes grimaced in misery.
“Carrying weapons, playing at pirate like a…” Maman accused. “Whoring, most likely, too! Shameless, thoughtless, little… slut!”
“But, Maman!”
“You as good as murdered my fine sons yourself, whore! How I wish you had been the one taken from us instead!” Maman swore.
“I wish I was, I wanted to die, I…”
“Scheming as bold as a dragoon in public, where anyone might’ve heard you,” her father chimed in from the other side of the study, his worries of a different stripe. “God knows how many other grand, distinguished young people you will end up dragging to the garotte if the Spanish ever learn the truth. How many parents will be blamed as well, though they knew nothing!”
“We will end up penniless at the least, idiot-child! Hounded from New Orleans and Louisiana,” her mother bewailed, rocking with impending ruin on her gilded chair. “All our wealth and security, lost. Forced to flee among the filthy Américains, mon Dieu! Penniless, you hear me, girl? Penniless and damned by every good Creole family whose happiness you have destroyed, bah!”
“She is mad, chérie,” her father sternly declared. “Her mind is gone. I have spoken to Docteur Robicheaux, who thinks she is utterly débile … perhaps has been for some time.”
“That will not excuse what she did, Hilaire!” Maman wailed, then sniffed into her handkerchief. “The Spanish won’t care when she…”
“Only if they ever learn the truth, Marie,” Papa cautioned, one hand raised to make his point in peaceful deliberateness. “If we play our parts properly, they never will. The bishop knows nothing, and he will preach a fervent sermon against the rebel slaves, as if our sons truly died at their hands.” Hilaire de Guilleri hitched a deep sigh and daubed his own eyes as he said that. “We must be too stricken to speak, so we will not be forced to say anything to the contrary. After, we will quickly return upcountry, along with Iphegenie and Marguerite, and may stay for months and months. She, well… will be too grief-stricken to attend, n’est-ce pas? Though the thought of placing deer bones and rocks in our dear sons’ coffins, to rest forever in our mausoleum is … Ah, well. According to what she admitted to us, and what Capitaine Balfa wrote us, there can be no trustworthy witnesses to her perfidy. Maurepas too frightened of exposure? Bistineau, too? That Capitaine Lanxade and most of his crew dead or captured by the Anglais, who will quickly hang the rest on Jamaica? The three Anglais sailors, the deserters, are scattered to Baton Rouge or Natchez and have just reason to fear that the Spanish learn where they got their money…”
Charité stared unseeing at her hands, clenched white-knuckled in her lap, her eyes averted and her chin down, as she had contritely been ever since she had reached New Orleans and saw her parents. She was just as heartbroken as they, perhaps even more so, just as deeply wounded by her brothers’ deaths, the utter end of her dreams, hopes…
Yet Papa and Maman had scathed her for days, sputtering in spiteful, hateful rages or accusing tears. Speaking of her as if she was dead, too, over the top of her head as if she was not there, and frankly, she was getting irked by their waverings from dangerous hostility to bitter but arch grief. As if sorrow was the proper “thing” to do, the sham to portray, whether their hearts were touched or not! And being spoken of, not to, worse than a dog, given less regard than a piece of furniture…!
“… only living witness would be her, in fact,” Papa Hilaire declaimed, sitting on the edge of his ornate desk, swinging a booted foot, a brandy glass in his hand, and a so-clever smile on his face. Charité snapped up her head to goggle at him, chilling with dread. Her parents had always been testy about anything that might taint their family’s repute; beyond their semi-secret amours, of course, and everyone in Creole Louisiana would forgive those, Charité thought. But how far would they go to protect themselves, she had to wonder?
Her father gazed dispassionately at her for a long and somber moment, then shook his head in disappointment. “Docteur Robicheaux is already convinced of her derangement,” Papa said as he turned his attention to his wife again. “He has written us a letter to that effect. Such a condition will require years of … care.”
Charité winced, ready to burst into tears in fear of lifelong exile on their most remote and meanest plantation, a feebleminded exile confined to the garret to spare them embarrassment; there to turn old and cronish and desperately lonely, with only slaves for keepers. The rest of her life? She could not bear it! Dare they risk her with the Ursuline nuns, under a vow of silence? A convent might be better, but only just. New Orleans didn’t have a proper mad-house, but… what sort of “care” did he mean?
“She must leave New Orleans,” Papa gloomily intoned. “She must leave Louisiana, sorry to say, Marie. We lose yet another child.”
“Leave Louisiana?” Charité dared wail in consternation. “Where must I then go? Papa, please!”
“Hush, you ungrateful girl!” Maman spat, stamping a dainty foot. “No matter how evil you turned out to be, still, we are your parents, and we love you despite… Trust us to do what little we can in the best interests of our family name, your sisters’ futures. And in your own good, though you don’t—”
Papa shushed her mother and crossed the room to flair his coattails, take a seat beside her, and pat Maman’s hand. Charité knew she was completely doomed, seeing where his sympathy lay.
“Docteur Robicheaux suggests that there are several colleagues from his university days,” Papa said, squirming a little and unable to look his daughter in the eyes, not completely. “Progressive and clever gentlemen who are achieving marvellous results with the, ah… deranged, Charité. In France.�
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“In France?” Charité gasped. Her fear of lonely exile fled her soul in a twinkling, and her mouth fell open in utter surprise.
A second later came a blossoming, blissful joy! She would go to France? The very centre of the entire civilised world? The birthplace of the glorious revolution that she’d wished to emulate? A smile of wonder took her features, one she strove hard to disguise but could not quell completely; one she fervently hoped her parents interpreted as one of thanks for saving her life, out of their so-called love for her. Secretly, though, Charite was marvellously pleased, ready to leap to her feet and dance with glee, snap her fingers in their faces in elation!
“A Swedish ship is in port and will soon depart,” Papa intoned. “We have booked you a cabin aboard her, and Docteur Robicheaux wrote a letter explaining your condition, and how you must be kept in isolation and at rest. A neutral ship, which the British will not dare to board. You will not be disturbed on-passage, n’est-ce pas? You will be safe, all the way to L’Orient. Then…”
“But… where will I go in France, Papa?” Charité cried aloud. France did have mad-houses, and even if the Revolution had conquered the Catholic Church, there still were convents! “I mean… who will care for me, Papa? Maman?” she fearfully asked, play-acting as if she feared being separated from them forever more. “Will you really have me… committed to…”
She bit her lower lip and sham-trembled like a chastised puppy.
But, France! Yes! she thought.
“We have distant relations,” Papa told her, squirming a little more as he crossed his legs and put an arm about the back of Maman’s chair. “Your mother’s kin, the Lemerciers. They live in a very nice little village, a peaceful and bucolic place called Rambouillet.”
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