The Invasion Year

“Well, then… let’s be about it, hey?” Lewrie said, tossing off his wine and plastering a confident smile on his phyz, no matter the gurgly qualms in his nether regions that threatened to make themselves known to one and all.

Aye, I’ll go, he told himself; if only to rankle Barre!

CHAPTER THREE

They landed at the quays in Commodore Loring’s barge, a rather more impressive conveyance than any of their captains’ gigs, with her oarsmen tricked out in snowy white slop-trousers, shirts and stockings, flat tarred hats with fluttering long ribbons painted with the name of Loring’s flagship, in fresh-blacked shoes with silver-plated buckles, and dark-blue short jackets with polished brass buttons.

And, just in case, with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols stowed out of sight under water-proof tarred tarpaulins in the boat’s sole!

They, and their white flag of truce, were met by a guard of honour, and a fellow who introduced himself as a Colonel who spoke fluent, almost Parisian, French, and heavily accented English. The soldiers of the guard, warm though it was, were accoutred as well as any soldiers that Lewrie had seen in Paris during the Peace of Amiens, from their brass-trimmed shakoes to their trousers, with dark blue tail-coats and white waist-coats, white-leather crossbelts with brass plates shining. None wore stockings or shoes, though.

The Colonel, by name of Mirabois, wore a fore-and-aft bicorne hat with an egret plume and lots of gold lace, a snug double-breasted uniform coat with lavish gilt acanthus leaves embroidered on pocket flaps, his sleeve cuffs, and the stiff standing collars of the coat.

Sweat himself t’death, in all that wool, Lewrie thought.

“Bonjour, messieurs! Vous ’ave come to surrender to us, oui?

“Er, ehm… what?” Captain Bligh gawped, taken by surprise.

“Ze tout petite plaisanterie, ha ha? Ze wee jest?”

“Oh. Ha ha. I see, ehm,” Bligh flummoxed. “Commodore Loring, ehm… our Commodore in command of His Britannic Majesty’s squadron now lying off Cap Francois, has directed us to deliver a proposal to your General Dessalines, and a request to speak with him, should that be possible,” Bligh explained in halting schoolboy French.

As nigh-illiterate as me, Lewrie thought, noting how Captain Barre, their resident critic, pursed his lips and almost grimaced to hear it. Bligh was surely senior to him, else Barre would have been the one to conduct the negotiations. And was certain that he would’ve been more effective at it. He was frowning like an irate tutor at his student’s lack of fluency!

Bligh introduced them all, then waited, his document held out in expectation that it would be accepted, and whisked off to Dessalines, instanter. In the short period of their landing and introductions, a substantial crowd of the curious had gathered; poor field slaves still in the cheap nankeen short trousers and loose smocks of slavery, their women in shapeless longer smocks, and the children in barely any garments at all. Many of them had cane- cutter knives or machetes shoved into rough rope belts… or in their hands. Ominously, some of the better-garbed looters in incongruous finery, and better-armed with captured muskets or pistols, joined them, muttering and scowling.

French, English… bloody Russians, Lewrie thought with a bit of rising dread; We’re White… their blood enemies. This could get very ugly!

“Messieurs, I leave ze guard pour votre boat, oui? Et, I will escort vous au Le Tigre, ’is own face,” Colonel Mirabois offered, then turned and barked orders to his men. A round dozen of his soldiers formed a protective line to protect the barge, its wide-eyed Midshipman, Coxswain, and oarsmen, at the head of the quay, and another dozen formed to either side of their party.

Like prisoners, off t’the guillotine or firin’ squad, Lewrie imagined, with (it must be admitted) a bit of a chill shudder.

A Black sergeant gleefully called a fast “heep-heep” pace as they were marched off to see “Le Tigre,” Dessalines, face-to-face.

“Think they’d’ve laid on some horses,” Captain Bligh whispered from the side of his mouth, panting a bit at the pace.

“Already ate ’em, most-like,” Lewrie whispered back, unable to quell his sense of humour, no matter the risk they faced. “And, how come there’s still so many Whites ashore, I wonder?” he pointed out.

It was uncanny; it was downright eerie, that long march through the littered streets. Now they were under official escort, the Blacks and lighter Mulattoes stood and scowled at the strange officers, with no sound; no jeering or hooting as they’d heard at the quays. Around the edges of the crowds stood White French colonists, men, women, and children; Lewrie could pick out the ones he imagined had been wealthy planters and slave owners, rich traders and exporters, by the finery of their clothing. The grands blancs, Lewrie recalled their being called. The others, though… the ones in humbler suits or working-men’s garb, with their women in simpler, drabber gowns, and the children in the same sort of hand-me-down “shabby” one could see in poorer neighbourhoods in England, were the artificers, the shopkeepers, the greengrocers, fruiterers, and skilled labourers, the petits blancs who might never have been able to aspire to owning slaves.

What had Jemmy Peel told him, when in the West Indies on Foreign Office Secret Branch doings in the ’90s and sniffing about how to undermine the French, the slave rebellion, or both?

Saint Domingue, or Hayti, was a bubbling cauldron of rebellion; poor Whites versus their betters; Mulattoes versus darker, illiterate field hands; house servants siding with masters in some cases, murdering them in others. Petits blancs then siding with Mulattoes like General Rigaud down south round Jacmel to fight L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and the others… and all wrenched from time to time by siding with the French if they’d seemed to have the upper hand, with the British when their own army had landed, even looking for shelter and security by allying themselves with the Spanish in the other half of Hispaniola, if that looked better!

“Uhm… Colonel Mirabois,” Lewrie asked, at last, his curiosity aroused, “I note a fair number of… blancs still in the city. Were they not able to find space aboard the ships?”

“Mais oui, M’sieur Capitaine… Le… pardon, seulement, votre name I cannot say, ees tres difficile, n’est-ce pas?” Mirabois laughed rather drolly as he explained. “Zey refuse place in ze ships, m’sieur! ’Ave been born here…’ave property et business interests, comprend? Hayti ees open to ze trade, so zey make… accommodation. Wis ze ozzer blancs ’oo go away, Hayti ’ave need of zem, so…,” he said, shrugging in very Gallic fashion.

“Incredible,” was all that Lewrie could think to say.

“Ze blancs ’oo stay, zey know z’ings we pauvre Noirs do not,” Mirabois said further. “ ’Ave ze education, ze dealing wis ze outside world,” he admitted, with another of those pearly-white smiles, then sobered quickly to look almost feral. “Until we learn zese z’ings, z’en…’oo knows. Moi, I desire blanc servants. Ha ha ha! I make ze pauvre plaisanterie, again, n’est-ce pas? Aw ha ha ha!”

* * *

Their escorts led them from the looted, charred shabbiness of the harbour front to wide streets leading inland to a mansion district of substantial houses, what Lewrie took for banks, and perhaps government buildings, all smoothly stuccoed and painted, once, in white and gay tropical pastels; all with even more substantial double doors