CHAPTER FOURTEEN

Lewrie was back aboard Reliant just long enough to remove the sash and star, warn his cook, Yeovill, that he’d take his dinner on shore, and ordered the Purser, Mr. Cadbury, to take a ship’s boat to seek out fresh victuals. Then, he was off in a whistled-up bum-boat for the docks of Nassau.

Captain Francis Forrester might not care for New Providence Island, or the Bahamas, but Lewrie still liked it… somewhat. Nassau was a raw and rowdy place, sleepier than grander ports he’d visited, and might lack the refinements of the symphonies, opera houses, or theatrical halls of London, and yes, its miniscule attempts at Cultured Society might be provincial and “chaw-bacon”, but Nassau had a bustle to it. The shoreside streets teemed with push-carts and waggons and vendors. The piers were lined with merchant ships, and thronged with stevedores landing and carting off cargoes, or lading exports. Lewrie found a Free Black with a push-cart from which he sold ginger beer by the pint and half-pint, right off, and savoured the sweetness and the sprightliness, along with the sharp bite of the ginger.

And there was the chop-house where he and Caroline had dined so many years ago, where he’d first met his friend and fellow officer, Benjamin Rodgers. Where they had politely declined the clumsy invitations of “Calico” Jack Finney, the rag-seller turned privateer, then local hero, then rich entrepeneur, and secretly, pirate. He popped into its coolness and dined on jerked pork and crisp-fried, breaded grouper, with white wine and a fresh salad, finished with the very same key-lime pudding he’d relished in his early days.

On a tour of remembrance, he later idly strolled Bay Street, noting the new houses and stores that had sprung up over the years. Where he’d first “bearded” Finney, in his massive, sprawling emporium, nigh a whole corner block once, with all the various shops opened to each other and to the streets through grand doorways, Lewrie found it changed, the interior pass-throughs now walled back up and divided into at least a dozen new concerns.

He made a courtesy call on the island governor at Government House, spent about twenty minutes there, then made his way back East towards the piers, beyond Fort Fincastle that loomed above them, and, on a sudden whim, hitched a ride on a passing empty waggon further to the East out towards Fort Montagu, on East Bay Street.

He alit by the gate house to the old Boudreau plantation that had been his and Caroline’s shore residence once. And, from the first moment, he was sorry that he’d come. It had had a tight cedar shingle roof once, but that had gone to seed, and was littered with reddish-tan detritus blown off the many pines and palmettos. Their little cottage had been an ambitious stab at grandeur, an un-needed stables or overseer’s cottage, all of stone or coral “tabby”. There had been the main section with two bedrooms, a parlour, and space for dining to one side, then a breezeway-Caroline had called it a “dog run”, he sorrowfully recalled-separating the main house from the smaller kitchen, pantries, and storerooms, the bathing facility, and “jakes”. His late wife had had the exterior painted a startling but cool mint green whilst he had been away on his first patrol down the island chain to the Turks and Caicos; his teasing about the colour had lit their first real argument!

Now, though… it had been painted and re-painted, then neglected for so long that it was hard to choose which pastel colour it was now. The deep front and back porches, and the dog-run breezeway held rickety tables and mis-matched chairs, occupied by off-duty soldiers from Fort Montagu, jaded doxies, and scruffy, ill-clad civilian topers, all of whom peered cutty-eyed at him, or found the presence of a naval officer amusing.

He looked past their old house up the drive towards the manse that had once been a sedate and solid home; even if it had been painted the colour of boiled shrimp with glaring white trim. It, and the rental houses, the wood “salt boxes” that the Boudreaus had run up had gone to seed as badly as the gate house, the wooden houses reduced to greying, weathered, tumbledown shacks.

The Boudreaus had refugeed from Charleston, South Carolina, at the end of the American Revolution, Low Country planters and grandees who’d upheld the Loyalist cause. Like so many “Torys” who had fled to the Bahamas, the West Indies, or Canada, they had faced sudden poverty, and the wrenching shock that if they could afford to purchase land, or slaves with which to work it, the island colonies could not support them for long. The sandy “white lands” were only good for truck gardening, and the richer “red lands” further inland were deceptive. Without livestock and their manure, the “red lands” gave out after two or three good crops; and Nassau could never have the grazing land large enough to support livestock herds.

The Boudreaus had quickly given up the idea of a plantation and had gone into housing, supporting themselves at a modicum of their old lifestyle from rents and the running-up of modest lodgings. They had stayed in the Bahamas, whilst so many others, heartbroken, fled.

Warily, Lewrie went to the front porch of his old home and ordered a pint of ale. “Have you ever heard of the Boudreau family?” he asked the tapster, who looked very much like a retired pirate.

“The who, Cap’m?”

“They owned all this, once,” Lewrie said. “I rented from them, my wife and I, back in the eighties.”

“Ye lived up there, ye did?” the old fellow marvelled.

“No. Here, This was our rented house. The Boudreaus lived in the house, yonder.” Lewrie corrected him. He took a peek inside the tavern, and was sorry that he did. The gleaming white woodwork, the pale tan-painted walls, had gone as scabrous as a basement dive in the worst London stew.

“Never ’eard of ’em, Cap’m. ’Tis a boardin’ house now, when it ain’t a whorehouse, hee hee. Th’ doxies board there, an’ all th’ soldiers foller,” the tapster supplied with goodly mirth.

“Ah, well. Ye go away a few years, they’ll change things all round,” Lewrie sighed, with a sad, philosophical shrug. He finished his ale, then went back to the road; he’d seen enough. He was certain that the Boudreaus were both dead and gone by now, and as French-born Huguenots-French Protestants turned Church of England-their graves could be found in some parish’s churchyard, but… he felt by then a dispiriting langour, and a desire to be away.

To make matters worse, it was a long, warm walk back to town and the docks, and no wheeled traffic from which to hitch a ride. By the time he was there, he needed another ale to quench his thirst and cool him off. He took a seat on a covered porch off the side of the public house, fanned himself with his hat for a while, and looked at the harbour and up Bay Street. The flowers, the flowering vines and bushes, and all the planters all about him! How could he have forgotten? Once more, he felt a pang, recalling how scrofulous and weedy the grounds about the old gate house and mansion were.

With help from Mrs. Boudreau and her old Black gardener, Caroline had created a new Eden, nigh a jungle! Their house had been awash in greenery, and blossoms of the most vivid and exotic colours. There had been tamarinds and flowering acacia, Tree-of-Life bush, cascarilla and red jasmine, bright yellow elder and bougainvillea vines growing up the trellises, poinsettias and poincianas, angel trumpets and flamingo flowers, graceful bird of paradise, and Jump-Up-and-Kiss-Mes in planter pots and beds. To screen their front gallery from the road, and the rear gallery from the main house, they had had palmettos, sapodillas, soursops, and guava saplings, and their own lemon or key-lime trees, their candlewoods and sea grapes, and Caroline had been so very proud of her fragrant and colourful handiwork!

Ghostlike, there was a shift in the breeze that brought scents of flowers from the nearby gardens, as sweet and intoxicating as the sunset breezes off Potter’s Cay and Hog Island had come to their old house so long ago, forcing Lewrie to recall the sweetness, the contentment, and lazy satisfaction of sitting with a young wife at the tail-ends of tropic days, and he had to squint and grimace in pain. To cover his public un-manning, he pulled a handkerchief out to dab at his eyes before even slight tears of grief came.

Thought I was beyond all that, he chid himself.

He finished his ale quickly, for he really needed to be back aboard his frigate, in the privacy of his great-cabins… where he could hide for a while.

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