The Captain`s Vengeance

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

Capitaine Jerome Lanxade has slept aboard the pirate schooner, avoiding his soon-to-be-disappointed and angry sailors as long as he could, savouring the safe privacy of her master's quarters. Lanxade had slept alone too. None of the churlish drabs who had flocked to their camp had caught his eye. Besides, with so much loot soon to be his, he could afford to be picky. In New Orleans, where he would soon close out his accounts and pack up his valuables, there were at least a round dozen young courtesans, or bored and "sporting" wives of his acquaintance, some "obliging" young unmarried girls who'd be glad to give him a rousing send-off on his "honourable retirement" across the sea to "parts unknown." The sorts who didn't laugh when he took off his finery and revealed his taut-laced corset!

A shambling steward fetched him a silver pot of hot cafe noir, and he sipped from an ornate Meissen china cup and saucer as he shaved himself- never trust unruly pirates with razors to do it!-and combed in fresh hair dye, then pomade, through his thinning locks, daubing new wax on his pointy mustachios and twirling them stiffly horizontal.

He then shucked his silk dressing gown and donned his constricting "appliance." Jerome Lanxade never let a steward or body slave do it for him; that felt demeaning, making "Le Feroce " an object of fun, not fear! He laced it as tight as it could go, going almost purple in the face before he drew on his snug breeches and buttoned them up.

Capt. Lanxade heaved a worrisome sigh, then, fully dressed at last, went out on deck for a welcome breath of fresh but moist, mist-laden air, the dawn's first cigaro alit in one hand and a fresh cup of bracingly strong coffee in the other. He scowled at the beach, at the sleeping camp, and was satisfied that most of their henchmen would be weeping with hangovers, too fuddled to think straight when he and Boudreaux Balfa broke their sad news. Most of the scows and pirogues were gone. The honest backcountry folk had packed up and left once they'd sold their last goods. In the wee hours of a pirates' celebration, it was dangerous to linger too long among the red-eyed murderous!

Lanxade looked over at their prize schooner. There stood old Boudreaux himself, just arisen and yawning like a shambling swamp bear, stretching to get the kinks out, scratching his hide and even grating his back against the schooner's main-mast!

Lanxade rehearsed his plan for betraying the youngsters in his mind once more, once the hands were hot and outraged, as he would make them. Bind them all first, then do the reduced share-out, then offer the ships to the un-likeliest, most despised mate among them, setting them to fighting among themselves whilst he and Boudreaux made their getaway cross the bay and into the bayous-without getting savaged like sick sharks by the rest of the pack and torn to bloody gobbets! What happened to the de Guilleri men, their whey-faced cousin, or that arrogant peacock half-dago afterward was of no matter to him, though, he doubted the men would kill Charite to ensure her silence. She was too well liked. They might turn her loose eventually, Lanxade imagined, send her back to New Orleans after they sailed under their new leader, and there'd be nothing she could do about it-long after he had departed for safer climes, that was certain!

Oh, she might get "used," of course, protected, then raped, by the strongest to emerge as capitaine. Jerome even wished he could stay to rape her himself. After all her empty flirtations with him, Charite deserved a come-uppance, the "servicing" of a real man who knew…

"Eh!" a sailor up forward by the fuming galley funnel cried. He pointed over the bows, eastward towards the main channel. "A ship!"

"What?" Lanxade responded in a shocked screech, blanching with alarm. A drunken sailor roused himself in Lanxade's way as he strode forward, got shoved to the rails, where he began to puke over-side.

"Strange ship!" the sailor up forrud added. "Guns run out!"

"To arms!" Lanxade bellowed, seizing the lanyard on the ship's bell by the forecastle and clanging away with it. "All hands on deck! Dammit, dammit, wake up, you bastards! Up, and man the guns!"

He glowered at Boudreaux aboard the prize, was pleased to see him capering an alarm of his own among his few crewmen who had slept aboard her. The camp, though! Lanxade leaped to a swivel-gun by the starboard bow, jerked the tompion from its muzzle but found that no goose-quill fuse was handy, no slow-match burning, no tinder-box. He swung the light gun's barrel skyward, stepped back, puffed on his cigaro to a red-hot tip, then stuck it against the touch-hole, hoping that a pricked cartridge bag had been left loaded.

Bang! A faint howl of musket or pistol balls shot into the air, and that stern, startling noise was enough to rouse the campsite, roust out the last pig-drunk heavy sleepers aboard Le Revenant.

"Nom d'un chien, " Lanxade angrily hissed as he saw to his own personal weapons. The strange vessel-a good-sized shalope-advanced on him, bows-on. "You Spanish dogs have bitten off more than you can swallow this time. We'll show you what a real fight is!"

But, what was this? A stronger whiff of wind abeam the shalope flirted out her flag, and it wasn't the crowned red-gold-red of Spain but the red, white, and blue crosses of… "The Anglais? The hellish Anglais?" Lanxade yelped in stupefaction, realising that that distant prize they'd taken off Dominica might have spelled their ruin! Vengeance had come upon them, with lit fuses and bared steel!

Small ship, though, Lanxade thought, imagining a small crew to put up against his cut-throat desperados. He might win after all!

Off the same American smuggling brig that had yielded Toby Jugg as a reluctant "volunteer" a year or so before, HMS Proteus had also garnered a dozen or so deadly-accurate Yankee-made Pennsylvania rifles, bound for rebel general Toussaint L'Ouverture and his officers on St. Domingue. Those that hadn't ended up in the hands of Capt. Lewrie or the ship's officers, Marine Lieutenant Blase Devereux had appropriated for his keenest marksmen when posted aloft in the fighting-tops. Picking off enemy officers might be deemed by some to be ungentlemanly or dishonourable, but Lt. Devereux was one, as was Captain Lewrie, who ascribed more to "All's Fair in Love and War," that Fair Fighting was for dim-witted fools.

"I believe they're sufficiently stirred up and misdirected," Lt. Devereux muttered, once he'd taken another peek over the top of a low spot in the shell midden, noting how those pirates able to rouse themselves and stand erect after their night's excesses were all peering and gesticulating at the shalope's approach from out of the mists. "Do you think, sir, that we should take advantage of their astonished condition… even if the Captain has yet to close with them?"

"I do believe we should, sir!" Captain Nicely was quick to say "Aye," drawing his work-a-day smallsword from its plain black scabbard. "Up and at 'em, Mister Devereux… and God uphold the right!"

"Marines… shun!" Devereux bellowed. "Marksmen to the tops of the mounds! Rest… form line! Marines… level!"

Muskets came up to shoulders, the fixed bayonets wanly glittering in the misty dawn.

"Cock yer locks! Take careful aim.. -fire!" Devereux howled.

Barely thirty yards away, stunned, hungover pirates stumbled to their feet, not understanding the orders in English but knowing that danger was present. They came slithering out of their lean-tos, fighting Weariness and their encumbering blankets. Some saw the invaders, whose red coats, rarely worn aboard ship but for ceremonial duties and Harbour Watch, blossomed atop or behind the bleached shell hillocks as red as poppies… or blood. The buccaneers barely had time to blink or rub their disbelieving eyes, to shout a quick warning before those muskets barked and spat great spouts of powder smoke, before some much sharper cracks from rifles stunned their ears.

"Reload!" Devereux yelled. "Marksmen, look for ralliers!"

"Proteuses, up!" Lt. Catterall shouted in an irate steer's roar, the leather-lunged sort of cry that could carry from the quarterdeck to the bowsprit in a full gale of wind. "Level! Take aim…fire!"

Catterall's sailors, who far outnumbered the Marine complement, popped up from behind the shell mounds on either flank of the Marines, dressed in their usual slop-trousers, loose shirts, and tarred hats or head rags. Less used to musketry, or the rigid weapons drill of their compatriots, they were; but there were more of them, their targets were within a long pistol shot, and "Brown Bess" would not be denied.

Reeling, scurrying buccaneers were scythed down, at least ten by the Marines' initial volley, perhaps another half dozen claimed by Proteus's less-skillful sailors. A few cooks or vendors were killed or wounded, people who'd stayed to sleep off the night's revels, The gape-mouthed nearly innocent who stood still too long, in the wrong place at the wrong time, fell howling beside the panicked bloody-handed guilty, while others spurred into witless flight amid scared buccaneers. A raddled and terrified whore or two, rushing from their borrowed beds, were gunned down as well. Massed volleys of musketry were as uncaring as clouds of grapeshot.

"Recover and reload!" Lt. Catterall roared, over his frights in the eerie forests and never happier than when challenged to mindless combat. He cocked his pistol's lock, took a huntsman's lead on a running pirate with a musket in his hands, fired, and whooped with joy to see him tumble over and sprawl, instantly lifeless.

"Pick your targets… make 'em count, lads! Take aim, and…fire!" Lt. Devereux commanded, sweeping his sword blade chopping down.

"Merde!" Boudreaux Balfa gawped at the first shots, eyes fixed on the approaching shalope with her gunports open. "Oh, merde! We be up 'shit's creek.' Fusilier? Viens ici, son, come here, quick."

"He's not aboard," Pierre La Fitte told him as he scrambled up from below-decks. "He and Jean went ashore… after you went to sleep."

"What? I told him…!"

"They went to see the girls, get, ah…" Pierre confessed.

"Damn you! Damn your little brother, too! Fusilier get poxed, by damn I kill you both!" Balfa vowed. "We gonna lose de prize, maybe lose Le Revenant, we don't act quick. Get de men together, take dem to Lanxade, so he can man de guns! I cut de cables, an' let dis bitch go on de tide. Move, man! Vite, vite, allons!"

"I get my little brother," Pierre objected. "The Spanish have us for certain. All we can do is run for it, And I won't let those salauds hang him. I'm taking a boat for shore, then…" Pierre backed his decision with a hand about the hilt of a large dagger. "You can do what you like."

"Mutinous dog!" Balfa sneered, spitting at the man's feet. "Go, den! Run wit' your tail 'tween your legs, faithless son of a whore!"

Pierre was overside in a twinkling, paddling like mad in one of the hollow-log pirogues. Balfa shouted for his remaining sailors to go to Le Revenant and man the guns; he'd take care of their prize and all their silver. He'd be with them in a twinkling. Or… not.

That damned Pierre was right, things were all up with them, and it was time to obey the old maxim of sauve quie peut; run like hell and save what one could! Balfa ran forward and plucked a heavy boarding axe from the foremast arms chest. He stood, straddling the nine-inch anchor cable a moment later, and began to hack at it. It took only a few powerful strokes to part it, then leap out of the way as the last strands exploded apart, the inner end snapping inboard, and the bitter end slithering into the murky depths of the bay.

The Spanish schooner began to sidle sternward, driven by an incoming tide, began to make a slight leeway, even under bare poles, to the faint land breeze. Balfa ran aft and quickly did the same to the stern kedge-anchor cable, but realised that the prize would drift 'til she took the ground on Grand Terre, perhaps no more than two miles to the west. He'd have to burn her.

Bare feet thundering on the mid-ships companionway, Boudreaux Balfa dashed below and snatched a lit lanthorn from a hook set in one of the overhead deck beams. And, dire as things looked, he started to grin a sly little grin.

He and his Acadian friends and neighbours had gotten a bit more than carried away shifting coin kegs during the night, like they would when snacking on the peanuts their slaves insisted on growing. Greedy arms and hands had loaded hundreds of silver-filled barricos aboard a fleet oi pirogues, flatboats, and luggers, leaving only half the 1,200 kegs that had been aboard. Six hundred thousand Spanish dollars!

"Spanish never know where it go," Balfa mused, starting to titter and wheeze over his little geste. "Dem bebes and Jerome never know, neither!"

By the light of the lanthorn in his meaty paw, Balfa lumbered all the way forward to the cable-tiers and the Spanish bosun's stores. He ripped out fresh, resiny spare planking, rigging rope, loose oakum bales, and kegs of paint and linseed oil, and liberally sluiced down the cable-tiers and the decks. Another lanthorn hung overhead, but not for long. It was filled with whale oil, already hot and runny from being lit all night, and at once it made a dandy splash of fire.

Amidships, there were looted sea chests, hammocks and bed linen by the bale, too, and a second lanthorn set them alight quickly. Aft, the mates' and captain's quarters were full of papers and trash, with even more lanthorns available. His tortuous straw mattress, torn open and scattered, went up in a twinkling, and serve it right for his itches, by damn!

Balfa went over-side to larboard, what had been the dark, unlit side the night before, where a last little flatboat trailed from its painter at the foot of the main-mast chain platform. With two pistols in his belt, a dagger and cutlass on the boat's sole, Balfa freed the boat and began to row round the schooner to go save his boy.

"Take aim… fire!"

Atop their earthen mound, the first crackle of musketry snapped the de Guilleris from their rough beds as if a bolt of lightning struck the hillock, all sudden blue-white light, sizzle, and thunder crack! Hippolyte and Helio, sharing a lean-to, both sat up quickly, gasping as if throwing off a shared and terrifying nightmare, cracking heads on the bound-together saplings in a flurry of arms and legs and thrashing blankets, their eyes blared owl-wide in alarm. They were bootless and coatless, their weapons laid handily aside, but for long moments, any thought of dressing or arming themselves was lost in shaky fumblings as they tangled with each other… even as a second harsh volley rattled out, and shouts and screams assailed their ears. Hippolyte crawled to the open end of the lean-to and began to stand with a boot in hand, hopping as he raised his foot to draw it on, but the humming of musket balls past his head, and his older brother's sweeping arm, threw him fiat. "Keep down!" Helio growled in his ear. Regaining his wits faster than Hippolyte, Helio groped for his boots, writhed on his side to don them, then belly-crawled on his elbows and knees for his weapons. "Rubio! Jean!" Helio yelled.

"We're with you!" Don Rubio shouted back, from behind the lean-to he shared with Jean-Marie Rancour. Both had slithered out to hide behind its insubstantial shelter, dragging boots, clothes, and rifled muskets with them. "Charite? Stay down, cherie. "We'll deal with it!"

Don Rubio stomped into his boots and fastened his sword about his waist. He clapped his egret-plumed wide hat on his head, flung up the tarpaulin that had covered the lean-to, and reached between the saplings for his pistols to jam into his waistband, then warily stood up, hands working the complicated mechanism of his Girandoni air-rifle. A fresh air-flask buttstock had to be screwed on, the magazine under the barrel topped off with lead balls.

"Mon Dieu, merde alors!" Jean-Marie quavered as he gathered up his clothes and guns, hands visibly shaking and his white face pinched. "Who is it, Rubio, what's happening?"

Don Rubio Monaster didn't answer him. The son of a pure-blooded Spanish hidalgo, a genuine Creole, did not panic, as that weak-kneed Rancour boy did. He was horn to command, born to lead lesser people!

His eyes did widen in shock, though, much as Jean-Marie's did, to witness the camp and its doings. Their bold pirates, the hangers-on, and the whores were dashing about like witless chickens, scrabbling in their bedding for their portable loot or their weapons, crying aloud in chaos, and not knowing which way to stumble! They swarmed as unknowing as bees from a hive that someone had shot from long-distance, wheeling and darting ready for vengeance, but unable to discover where the shooter was.

"There! At the shell mounds!" Don Rubio cried, pleased that he could

keep his head, feeling that he was as sanguine as a professional soldier to react so quickly and so well. "Jean, your rifle, quickly. Helio, Hippolyte! The shell mounds! Shoot at them!" Another volley was fired from the shell heaps, the powder smoke almost hiding a ragged double line of men dressed like sailors!

"Garde vous, mes braves!"Rubio bellowed down to their sailors. "There is the enemy, in the oyster piles! To arms, I tell you, and fight them!"

On the next mound east, where some sentries had been posted, he saw from the corner of his eye a buccaneer or two raise their muskets and shoot back, which cheered him greatly. A second later, there was a lone cracking discharge, and one of the sentries screamed as he was struck in the forehead, his skull and brains erupting in a gory spray behind him before he tumbled back on his heels, arms and legs spread as if he was crucified. Don Rubio spotted the shooter atop one of the higher shell heaps, a soldier in a red coat, white cross-belts, white breeches, and knee-high spatterdashes, with a white-laced tall hat upon his head. He wasn't from any Spanish regiment Don Rubio had ever seen, but he raised his air-rifle, took careful aim, and fired as the soldier laboured to ram a ball down the muzzle of his weapon.

"Damn!" he swore as his shot merely clipped the man's hat, making him jump back in alarm and slide-tumble down the far slope of the mound. Don Rubio cranked another ball into the firing chamber and recocked his rifle, hearing a faint hiss as he did so, as the demand valve opened. The gun smoke was thinning, as was the mist, and he shot at another red-coated soldier standing behind a waist-high slumped heap of shells. This one he struck, with a feral whoop of joy as he cheered his own skill, though the air-rifle still was shooting high… as it had when he'd tried to kill that damned Anglais, Willoughby, in New Orleans! His target flung a hand to his breast and dropped like a stone!

Don Rubio heard the cracks of other air-rifles firing near him as Helio and Hippolyte finally got into action. By his right side, he heard another crack as Jean-Marie summoned up his nerves and entered the fray, shrilling thinly as he saw one his shots kill a sailor, too!

"Stay down, Charite!" Helio was yelping. "Go down the back of the mound and get to the beach. Get aboard the schooner!"

There came another murdering volley from the red-coat soldiers, scything down a few more witless buccaneers in the camp, forcing those with guns or cutlasses in their hands to duck and slink backwards, in the direction of the beach and the grounded boats. Rubio noted that some of them were starting to form up and return fire.

There was another belated crack, then the mallet thuds of balls striking flesh, and Jean-Marie's left hand was clawing at the sleeve of his shirt as he sank to his knees with a look of utter astonishment on his face, his mouth opening and closing like a boated fish. A moment later, and there was a flood of bright blood spilling from his mouth, down the front of his fine white shirt!

"Jean! Poor Jean. Oh no!" Charite wailed, standing in the open with her hands to her mouth.

Another of those damned red-coat men atop a shell heap! Rubio saw him lowering his weapon to reload it and knew that this marksman was Jean's slayer. Aiming at his waist this time, Rubio fired at him and saw the bastard spin around and stumble, dropping his weapon as he pitched forward and slid down the face of the mound in an avalanche of old shells. "Got him, aha! Charite, get down! We men will fight them for you!" he shouted to her, plastering a bold, confident, dangerous smile on his face for her benefit.

"Marines will… advance!" they all heard a powerful voice cry. "Poise muskets, and for-ward… march!"

"Oh, hell!" another, deeper voice was bellowing. "Proteuses… cutlasses and bayonets, and… charge!"

"English!" Helio spat. "They're Anglais, the 'Bloodies'!"

"The Anglais?" Hippolyte gawped. "Run, little sister. Run for your life! Get aboard the schooner, now!"

"Up here, you men!" Don Rubio shouted, waving his arms to catch their buccaneers' attention. "Get on the mounds and we'll shoot down at them. Hold the mounds! Kill the cochons/"

He had heard somewhere that the high ground was preferable in a real battle. Helio came round him to his right-hand side and looked down at his cousin, Jean-Marie Rancour, but that unfortunate youngster had already died, his lungs and mouth filled with blood, and his eyes already glazing over.

"His rifle," Rubio Monaster callously snapped between shots as a dauntingly long line of Britishers tramped over the oyster heaps and slithered down the front faces, whilst the Anglais dressed as sailors came swarming more quickly from the flank, cutlasses waving aloft, in full, bloodthirsty cry. "His four pistols, Helio. Use them!"

"Damn you, Rubio, Jean was just a…" Helio de Guilleri swore as he dashed tears from his eyes with his shirt sleeves, but gathered up the pistols and the air-rifle as directed. Hippolyte, still crouching by the lean-to, was already firing his Girandoni, fast as he could aim, pull the trigger, and crank, and Helio could see that his shots were telling, so he knelt and began to shoot as well.

The Anglais quickly took half a dozen casualties, dropped right at their feet. They stumbled as they tried to step over the bodies, and their ragged charge all but skidded to a halt. Pirates were clambering up atop the mounds, walking backwards as they loaded, primed and fired right in the Englishmen's dirty faces.

Charite had not obeyed them but had snatched up Helio's rifle, and was inexpertly, clumsily working its action to fire a few rounds of her own, making Helio and Hippolyte shake their heads at each other at her foolishness… sadly proud of her all the same.

"First rank… take aim! Clear them off the mounds! Fire!"

" Those bastards!" a blue-uniformed naval officer was bellowing down below them, waving his sword in the air and pointing with a pistol in his other hand. "Shoot those bastards, lads! Kill 'em dead!"

The volleys stuttered out, loud and deep-toned, and buccaneers on the forward slopes went tumbling in heaps. Their hands on the east mound were completely scythed away, and another young man with a sword in a blue coat shrilly led an impromptu charge to its top. Their few men who had rallied below the centre mound, where the de Guilleris and Don Rubio fought, were shot down, or broke and ran round its edges for the beach.

"Run, Charite, run!" Helio ordered her again, even as musket balls whined about them like deadly bumblebees.

"Second rank… the centre mound! Take aim… fire!"

Stunned by the suddenness of the deaths below her, Charite at last came to her senses. She went as pale as milk, might have fainted if she'd waited a second longer to flee, but managed to turn round as quick as a spider and scramble on her hands and knees to the back of their mound and slide down the far side on the seat of her breeches, a hand still gripped white-knuckled on the barrel of her air-rifle. Her pinned-up long hair had come undone, and she instinctively reached up to let it spill, praying a silent prayer for poor Jean-Marie; praying, too, that the "Bloodies" wouldn't shoot a woman, a girl so pretty!

She felt her lips begin to tremble, her teeth chatter uncontrollably, and tears stung her eyes. Sobs arose from the wrenching tautness in her chest. She got to her feet at the foot of the mound, her legs feeling juddery and weak, her feet oddly disembodied as she tried to run to find a boat.

"Mademoiselle!" Boudreaux Balfa's son, Fusilier, dashed up, in company with another young lad off Le Revenant. Both were armed, and Charite was glad for their company.

"Damn you all! Come back here!" the other youngster yelled at the few boats still in sight, Those who could had scrambled into any slight hull that would float and were fleeing northward, dangerously overloaded in most cases. There wasn't a single pirogue left, as far as they could see along the shore! "A boat! Where's a boat?"

"We must swim out, mademoiselle!" Fusilier said, trying to be calm and brave but almost shivering with fear. "Get aboard our ship and sail out of here."

"No, we won't," Jean, the other lad, dispiritedly growled, and pointed to the large shalope not a quarter-mile off from Le Revenant and their prize and stalking up slowly but remorselessly, a British Navy ensign atop her main-mast.

"We must swim, or die," Charite determined. "Somewhere we'll find someone to pick us up."

"Papa will come for us," Fusilier added, perked up considerably. "He must!"