Havoc`s Sword

Down went the right arm, hinging like a heavy gate beam, and the pistol and forearm were as straight and steady as a sword blade, and, Bang! Another.63 calibre lead ball plumbed the red wool Valentine's heart pinned to the straw man, now almost punched or clipped into the form of a many-layered cockade, or a rose blossom.

'Steady, is it? There's a wonder… after last night,' Alan said, thinking that even one as cocksure as Cashman could use a little encouraging toadying, that hour of the morning.

'Three shared bottles, and a brandy night-cap? Mere piffle,' Cash-man scoffed. 'Nought t'fuddle a soldier's constitution. Though you look a tad 'foxed,' still. Thought sailors could hold their wine, b'God! Game enough for't, I trust?'

'Oh, I'll toe up proper, Kit, no worries,' Lewrie answered, an angry second from a harsher retort. Cashman was not the same man he'd been over supper. Today, he had his 'battle-face' on, and friendship, or another's feelings, could be go-to-hell. He had a foe to kill, and consideration had little to do with it. Now, did he survive, and succeed, he'd be puffed full of relief and joy, and breakfast would be a nigh-hysterically blissful explosion of high-cockalorum. But that was for later.

Lewrie polished off his toast and took a sip of his coffee, as Cash-man snatched up the second pistol of a sudden, back to the target, pistol and forearm vertical again but close to his chest, to quickly spin on the balls of his feet, take stance, and fire. Another cloud of gun-smoke wreathed him, but he was smiling. His snap-shot had hit.

'Awake enough now, are ye?' Cashman snapped. 'Let's be about it, then. Here comes the coach. And God help Ledyard Beauman!'

CHAPTER TWO

Cashman's feud, his almost Corsican vendetta versus ex- Colonel Ledyard Beauman had been going on for months, Lewrie sourly thought as the coach-and-four jounced and rumbled over the irregularities in the sand-and-shell road, with both pairs of pistols in boxes in his lap. He sat facing aft, while Cashman took the rear seat facing forward, arms folded across his chest, chin down, and his face made of ruddy granite, centred on the rear bench with no need of support from the coach's padded sides or window sills. Lewrie was crammed into the fore-left corner, more than willing to wilt against leather and an open window sill. Not a word had passed between them in the quarter-hour since they'd entered the coach.

End o ' my relations with the Beaumans, root an ' branch, Lewrie told himself in the uncomfortable silence; and by God but they're rich and influential! Should've begged off, but… a friend's a friend, a promise is a promise.

Odds were, Kit would blast Ledyard Beauman's heart clean out of his chest, drop him like a pole-axed heifer for veal, and the Beaumans would blame him, damn' em! for agreeing to be Cashman's second, whichever way it went. The father was retired back in England, the sort of huntin', shootin', tenant- whippin', crop-tramplin' fool of the squirearchy… but with so much money to sling around, he appeared so much more civilised when he sat on his coin-purse, and surely was

more than welcome round Whitehall, the Admiralty, Board of Trade, the Court, and Parliament, with half a dozen 'bought' Members from his own Rotten Boroughs to do his bidding in Commons, mayhap even a 'skint' peer dependent upon his largesse to look out for his interests in Lords, too!

One letter from his son Hugh, now in charge of their plantings and enterprises here in Jamaica, and they could ruin him! Not that he stood in particularly 'good odour,' already, for all his successes at sea. The longer the war against Revolutionary France and her unlikely ally Spain continued, the more 'priggish' people were getting, he had noticed. Smallish peccadilloes and indiscretions so easily dismissed back in the '70s and '80s were now nearly the stuff of scandal.

Lewrie blamed the Wesley brothers, the Hannah Moores, and the William Wilberforces, and all their goose- eyed, slack-jawed tribe, for meddling, sermonising… Reformers… for mucking things up with all their 'shalt-nots' and 'viewing with alarm,' their evangelising, their… revivalising! Why, did they keep their mass-crowd preaching up, not only would fox-hunting and steeple-chasing go by the board, there'd be an end to bear-baiting, dog or cock- fighting, boys beating the bounds every spring, morris dancing, and cricket, too!

And fucking and adultery would be right-out, of course.

It was a mortal pity. Here he was, a True Blue Heart of Oak, a bold Sea Officer of the Crown, and just because he'd kept a courtesan for a year or so, had an affair with a young widow who'd produced him a child on the wrong side of the blanket… Even the two medals tinkling together on his chest for Saint Vincent and Camperdown meant nothing.

Without a career, without a commission or ship, he'd be back in England, permanently on half-pay, and facing a hostile wife, a clutch of estranged children, a too-fond amour with a bastard, so blissful she'd cry their 'love' from the rooftops… and another Beauman, his old love Lucy, more than ready to spite him and spread every sort of malicious rumour in the better reaches of English Society, from Land's End to John O' Groats!

If only Ledyard'd had a bit o ' brains in his head! Lewrie sadly contemplated.

But, no, he hadn't. His older brother, Hugh, had funded a local regiment of volunteers, had urged their swaggerin'-handsome and capable neighbour, Christopher Cashman, the distinguished ex-soldier, to take charge and mould it into a creditable unit, with that jingle-brained, ne'er-do-well, indolent fop Ledyard taking the honourific office, with no real responsibility, as Colonel of the Regiment. All he had to do was show up once a month on Mess Night, be fawned over by the locally raised officers much like him-idle second or third planters' sons. And what harm could've come from that? So utterly useless, surely he could soldier for a spell… or, pretend to!

But Ledyard had gotten it in his head that any damn fool with book- learnin' could be a military genius. Washington, Gage, and Green for examples in the recent past inspired him, accounts of Caesar's Gallic Wars, of Hannibal and Lake Trasimeno, Scipio Africanus who'd crushed Hannibal and Carthage; Marlborough, even that Puritan bastard Cromwell had quite turned his noggin. So, when the regiment had sailed to Saint Domingue to fight those ex-slave armies of Toussaint L'Ouverture {another self-educated general) Ledyard had taken command. In the smoke and confusion of their first battle near Port-au-Prince, he'd gotten a third of his men murdered or wounded or captured by those blood-thirsty rebel slaves, whose battle song was 'Kill All the Whites' or something near-like it, had caused a general panic and rout of half the army, then had dashed off atop his blooded stallion with his cronies and toadies croaking in his wake, and had left poor Cashman to clean up the mess, and naturally it was not a bit of his fault, but Cashman's panic, or misunderstanding of orders!

Cashman had been ready to sell up, anyway, and leave Jamaica for someplace new in the United States of America, change from being landed to a new career, one which didn't require slaves, for he was heart-sick of the institution. A successful last campaign season, and he could've resigned his commission, perhaps even sold it to an aspiring major… though colonelcies weren't bought or sold in the Regular Army, Jamaica was another kettle of fish, and a 'rancid' one at that, where sharp practice was more easily tolerated, or ignored.

Now, though, smeared in the local newspapers, by rumour and the sneers of the richer, his repute, and his property, weren't worth half a crown to the pound, and no matter how the duel ended, he'd be forced to slink off with but a pittance of his massive investment, the fruits of his adult life as a soldier and looter and speculator barely enough for a fresh start, and then only did he think small, not overreach!

Oh yes, Ledyard, and all the Beaumans, had a lot to answer for! A little heart's blood would pay for all.

The coach turned off the coast road and skreaked steeply downhill for a space, the wood brake-shoes ready to begin smoking as they made for the agreed-upon stretch of low-tide beach, where the footing would be firm. With a last thudding toss and clatter that came nigh to hurling them into each other, the coach gained the flatter ground of