The Captain`s Vengeance

Perhaps we should talk to Claude…'

'He is the only outlet,' Hippolyte grumbled, turning his glass round and round. 'If not the Bistineaus, I can't think of another of French blood who'd be bold enough. All the rest who could handle our goods are Americans these days, anyway,' he glumly stated.

'Mori Dieu, business, business, business!' Charite exasperatedly complained. 'We are here to celebrate, n'est-ce pas? Our cause gains cash, it advances… We have hurt and frightened our Spanish masters. And… we have money to spend… like sailors.' She twinkled to buck them up. 'Like buccaneers of the grand old days. A votre same!' she gaily proposed, raising her champagne glass.

Charite de Guilleri had enjoyed the freedom of movement that a buccaneering costume had given her on their first raiding cruise, and even before that she'd found it extremely droll to go out at night in the company of her brothers, or other sporting young males of her set, disguised as a man who could witness the games, pleasures, and amusing places that men could enjoy, whilst 'proper' young ladies were forced to sit at home… to hear the curses and uproariously funny and lewd stories and jests that a staid husband would never bring home to a genteelly sheltered wife after a night out with his contemporaries.

Tonight, Charite wore a silk shirt with a stylish broad cravat, a snugly

tailored waist-coat over that, and a man's wide-lapeled, nip-waisted coat, unbuttoned and loose enough to disguise her breasts. A pair of fawn-coloured trousers, snug as a second skin, and riding boots, covered her legs. Her long chestnut hair was pinned up high and concealed beneath a tapered-crown tall hat that was forced to ride far back on her forehead, as if cocked in a saucy, devil-may-care manner. And, like her brothers, or any New Orleans 'gentleman,' Charite bore a small pocket pistol in her coat, a pencil-thin dagger in a hidden sheath up her left sleeve, and a gilt-handled sword-cane behind her chair.

To help her disguise along, she had fashioned a narrow mustachio from gauze and her own hair clippings, attached to her upper lip by paste. Admittedly, it required a lot of fiddling to assure her that it wasn't coming loose, and it didn't take well to wine or brandy, but the surprise she elicited with it had been amusing.

Should Papa or Maman, any of her respectable family, ever learn that she went out without a female chaperone or body slave… that she went out after dark, and to such low dives as the Pigeon Coop, dressed as a man especially, well! Charite would end up on one of their isolated, dreary swamp plantations, and it could be a year or longer etre dans la merde-'Up Shit's Creek'-before they relented!

Nor would it help for them to learn that Charite long ago had become 'tarnished treasure'; that she had surrendered the particular commodity that fetched a high bride price. Charite wasn't sure which would shame her family more: to be caught in her disguise as a 'false, de-sexed' carouser, to have squandered her precious virginity, or to be tried and executed by the Spaniards as a dangerous revolutionary pirate!

Each, though, all of it together, made Life so piquantly exciting. 'Down with your tired old conventions and morals!' was, in her mind, as revolutionary a slogan as 'Down with Tyrants and Aristos' in the Place de Bastille.

It was thrilling to be, to act, so Modern!

'Look!' Helio said of a sudden as the tawdrily garbed stranger wandered over to a nearby gaming table. 'Your gaudy fellow, Hippolyte… See that scar on his cheek? Our slave Aristotle said the man who leads the bruisers off the Panton, Leslie ship, the one he heard them calling 'Capitaine,' has such a scar. He is fairer-haired than that Americain, that El… El-isson. I think it's the same man!'

'Why is he walking that way?' Charite wondered, snickering.

'Too-tight trousers,' Helio sneered. 'Cheap, ready-made.'

'A stiff-leg sailor.' Hippolyte tittered.

'Ah, but which leg, mes amis?' Cousin Jean-Marie giggled. 'Is he a sailor, he's one en rut, hee hee!'

'Zut, Jean/' Helio chid him. 'Our sister is present!'

'Your sister is not here, tonight, mes freres,' Charite pointed out. 'I am Armand, comprende?' She leaned back in her chair, one arm slung over its back in studiedly 'male' fashion, appraising their potentially worrisome stranger over the rim of her champagne glass with her eyes half-lidded. 'Mmmm… the scar makes him look… dashing. Very intriguing. Almost handsome,' she cooed, half to herself. Then she abandoned her male pose to whirl and chirp girlishly at her tablemates. 'We must talk to him, one of us! Get him to drink with us… tell him some jokes or something. Get him drunk and sound him out to see who, and what, he is… see if he is trouble.'

'El-isson, or that Capitaine fellow?' Hippolyte quickly objected, blanching. 'It's best if neither of them know us.'

'We must beard him,' Charite insisted. 'In drink, he may blab or even wish to befriend us to help him with whatever it is he's come for. If Capitaine Lanxade is wrong, and he's seeking pirates… we could pretend to help discover them!

'Oui!' Charite exclaimed, to their appalled expressions. 'We send him on a goose chase down the bayous, looking for truly desperate cut-throats. La Fourche, or Bayou Terre aux Boeufs, not Barataria, you see? And, if he's not a spy, we learn it. Come on, one of you! Have you no spirit? Must /do it?'

Oh la, how delicious! Charite thought suddenly.

Which would be sweeter: to sham the idle, elegant Creole gentilhomme and befuddle the man's wits, or reveal herself, beguile him with her novelty, her modernity! Perhaps even to seduce him, then get him to talk unguardedly, half-sodden and nigh spent? True Jacobin patriot girls, heroines of the glorious Revolution in France, had applied their wiles in such a fashion to ferret out Aristos and sympathisers. Could she do no less for their coming liberation?

She looked back over at him. No, it wouldn't be such a horrid chore, Charite decided, her lips parting in an expectant smile, with a frisson of pleasure-to-come swelling inside her. He is certainly not… unattractive!

Charite felt her nipples harden at the thought, felt them swell and pucker against the caressing silk of her shirt, the tautness of her waist-coat. That made her squirm a bit more on her chair, blaming the snugness of her trousers' crutch-fork for the restless, warm feeling that ghost-tickled up her innards, and clasp her knees together, clutch her buttock muscles as if…

'The Devil take you all,' she said with a bold laugh, draining her champagne glass and tossing her head in frustration, in a mad-cap finality. 'I'll be the one to beard him! Just you watch this, you… timid garconnets!'

With what appeared to others as a dashing stroke of her mustachios, but was really reassurance that that 'appliance' was still firmly stuck on, Charite de Guilleri sprang to her feet and began stalking her prey.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Bonjour, m'sieur… you are new to Le Pigeonnier?'

Alan Lewrie had been trying to make sense of the dealing, discarding, and redealing of the 'Poke Her' game, yet not get so close that the players might object, when that 'sweet' voice stole his attention.

'Hey?' was his bright rejoinder.

'I ask if you are new, here, m'sieur. You are not a familiar face' came the reply, from a slim, short, over-elegant fop, who put him in mind of cheap dolls sold at fairs, a 'Bartholomew Baby.'

Lewrie beheld a saucy, possibly half drunk cock-a-whoop so pale-complexioned he couldn't have seen sunlight since his christening; so lean-faced and pert-chinned, so young he had no need to shave, yet, but with an oddly lush mustachio; three or four inches shorter than Lewrie, even with the help of riding-boot heels. The idle jack-a-napes lazily twiddled an empty champagne glass 'twixt the lean fingers of his right hand, with the other challengingly poised akimbo on his hip.

For a second, another whippet-thin fellow came to mind: Horatio Nelson, his old squadron commander. Lewrie's