'We carry a large crew so we can sail and fight the prizes that we take, and defend Le Revenant, you see?' Lanxade explained, striving for patience with them. Did he make them angry, he'd lose his berth, and the loot that went with it, more than he'd made in three years of the river trade. Lanxade knew in his bones that nothing would come of their scheming, but at least it was profitable while it lasted. 'This is so aboard any privateer in wartime, the cost of doing business, non? If we do not lavish profit on our hands, they'll jump ship, even strike out on their own in competition with us, n 'est-ce pas?' he instructed, with the simpery, bemused air of tutor to pupil. 'Capable and ruthless sailors cost dearly. But they are worth their weight in silver.'
'Ah, mais oui, I understand,' Mile Charite said with a heave of her chest, most wondrous to Lanxade's lascivious covert oglings. 'You are right as usual, dear Capitaine Lanxade. Forgive us our ignorance and lack of experience with such things, but… it is so frustrating for the coffers to fill so slowly, to glean but not to reap the funds to reunite us with beloved France! We all know that but for you and Capitaine Balfa and your sailors, we find so little support, so thin the contributions from other patriot Creoles. Our poor people,' she bemoaned as she drew a delicately embroidered handkerchief from her tight sleeve and dabbed at her eyes. 'We Creoles… so proud and prone to florid speeches. We can be so enthusiastic, but… so lacking when it comes to conclusions, or acting on them. So many swear they wholeheartedly support what we propose, but will they join us, fund us, or take up arms? Act? Really do anything?' she sneered. 'Like those snails, Maurepas and Bistineau! All is profit, profit, profit and gain, and freedom is someday, someday, someday… if it isn't too much trouble!'
She heaved another heavy, fetching sigh, nigh a hiccough.
'Forgive me, Capitaine Lanxade, but my lack is patience.'
'I quite understand, Mademoiselle Charite,' Lanxade cooed with a comforting, avuncular warmth to his voice. Had they been alone, without her brothers or calf-headed cousin or that prinking 'dago' Don Rubio with his sheep's eyes, he would have put a supportive male arm about her, offered a broad shoulder on which she could incline her weak head! 'We all share your impatience, my dear.'
Lanxade did lean closer, like a parish priest taking confession in the open countryside on his rustic circuit.
Charite de Guilleri bestowed upon him a grateful, wide-eyed grin for his support. Then slithered to her feet in a rustle of satins and crossed to the sideboard for the glass of wine that Helio offered.
Bitch! Lanxade thought, seething; She did it to me again! The minx, the mort, the… Lanxade knew he was being played like a flute, but there'd come a time, someday, when he'd take what he wanted if-
'There is another matter, Capitaine,' Charite said, once she had taken a sip or two of an excellent and effervescent white wine. 'That odious British trade ship from Panton, Leslie Company has docked, and has more people aboard than usual. Helio has heard rumours that Panton, Leslie has close ties to the British government. Do you think they might be trouble, Capitaine Lanxade?'
'Oh, in the American War, they might have had a contract to the British Army in Florida,' Lanxade airily dismissed with a soft chuckle. 'They still profit off the Indian trade, with the Cabildo's connivance… the American trade up the Great River, too. But I myself have met many of them, sailed upriver or down, and camped with them many times, and there is nothing mysterious about them. If they have extra people aboard, perhaps it is to guard the mule trains or learn the trade.'
'Half a dozen hard, well-armed men,' Helio contributed, frowning in concern, 'led by a man with fighting experience. I sent a slave to look the ship over, and he heard this man respectfully called capitaine. He has a scar on his left cheek, so he's certain to have been a soldier, but he walks like a sailor… They all do. What need has Panton, Leslie of sailors to guard their trade by land?'
'Might the Anglais send a pack of cut-throats or spies to look for their missing ship and the ones who took her?' Jean-Marie cried, leaping nervously to his feet.
'A lone prize, taken so far from here?' Lanxade scoffed. 'Not even the British are that vengeful! They're fighting a war with both France and Spain. Their hands are already full.'
'Nonetheless, it is… disturbing,' Don Rubio said, slinking near Charite as if to offer needful male comfort to allay any fears. Which offer almost made Capt. Lanxade curl his upper lip, twirl at his mustachios, and sneer at the hapless, lusting fool. Or turn gruff at the importunings of a possible rival!
'Shouldn't we look into it?' Hippolyte suggested fearfully, as if Jean-Marie's dread was catching.
'Well, if you must,' Lanxade replied with a shrug. 'This fellow and his bully boys will be easy enough to locate in a town as small as New Orleans, and if they are British sailors… sailors of any nation… they must come off their ship to get drunk and pleasured, must they not, hein? Watchers to track them, even talk to them once they're in their cups? You can manage that, I expect.'
All five of them stared at him, as if silently demanding more.
'I can ask around as well,' Lanxade allowed them, shrugging as if it was a bootless chore, but one he'd do despite how futile such a task would surely turn out to be. He got to his feet at last, since it didn't look as if his employers and fellow conspirators would offer him a glass of that white wine. 'You should worry more about a crowd of Americans who just sailed down from Tennessee. Backwoods rustics in stinking skins, but they are led by a man who also has the bearing of a soldier. And he was asking about the procurement of large quantities of arms, powder, and shot. Another pack of would-be filibustero freebooters, by the look of them.'
'Let them have a slice of the east bank,' Helio sneered. 'The damned Spaniards have all but given it away already! The Lower Muskogees, Choctaws, and Chickasaws will make short work of them.'
'They might be useful, though,' Lanxade tossed off as he gathered up his hat and cane from the commode table by the apartment's door.
'Americans?' Helio and Hippolyte scoffed. 'Hah!'
'Many of them war veterans promised land instead of pensions, but have neither,' Lanxade drolly pointed out. 'Shuffling from one hard patch of ground to the next, when the land plays out… or the rich and powerful snap it up, messieurs, mademoiselle? Such motherless ne'er-do-wells will do anything merely for the promise of better. And if part of Lousiana was promised to them… far north of here, of course… what sort of army would they make to oust the Spanish?'
'They're heathen Protestants!' Don Rubio exclaimed with all the disgust that both his hidalgo-Catholic-Spanish father and the French Creole Catholic Bergrands had drummed into him with his mother's milk. 'They're Anglo- Saxons, and they have no Spanish, much less knowledge of our beautiful French.'
'We Creoles would be drowned in a flood of heretics,' Helio de Guilleri quickly added.
'Our glorious language, our genteel way of life, our people./' Jean-Marie Rancour piped up, turning even paler. 'They'd sweep us from the face of the world! They're hideous, they're-'
'Ambitious, and powerful in their numbers,' Lanxade interjected. 'Draw a border far to the north, along the Arkansas River, let us say. The Yankees are not at war with France, not a real war, and are mostly of two minds about the French, or Creoles. Without us, they would not be free of the British, and for that they are thankful still. Their priests direct their anger at Spain and its Inquisition. Mon Dieu, Americans are so English, they still despise the Spanish for the Armada! The United States may end up with every last stick of Florida east of Pensacola, but with American settler- veterans fighting to carve out their own little empire in our service, in the northern half of Louisiana, all the way to Lake Michigan… hmm?'
'But, we're so few, and those bumpkins breed like rabbits. They would swarm us under in a generation, Lanxade!' Don Rubio objected.
'Ah, but what if an entirely new country… Louisiana… came to be. For that, do you
