The Captain`s Vengeance

'Bistineau, and Maurepas, was it?' Pollock pressed, perked up as sharp-eyed as an owl.

'Aye, 'em names sound more like it, certain, sor!' Jugg agreed.

'Aha!' Pollock chortled half aloud, rubbing dry palms together. 'Now we're talking. Now we're in business at last, gentlemen! For I am familiar with both those worthies. Monsieur Bistineau is as crooked as a dog's hind leg, a right 'Captain Sharp.' He'd steal the coins off his dead mother's eyes, and Maurepas! Monsoor Henri Maurepas, he's rumoured to have been involved in some shady dealings in the past. The plantations he's scooped up for a song off people who fell behind with their loans… I imagine either, or both, can provide us valuable information, do I put the thumbscrews to 'em.'

'Ye would, sor?' Jugg asked, surprised. 'Fer real, an' all?'

'Manner of speaking,' Pollock off-handedly quibbled.

'Aww,' Jugg rejoined, sounding hellish disappointed.

'She's floating high above her waterline,' Lewrie said. 'So I s'pose her cargo's long gone?'

'Ev'ry stick gone, sorry I am t'say, sor,' Jugg told him with a mournful look. 'Her holds're as empty as an orphan's pantry. Not just her holds, neither, Cap'm, sor. 'Er second bower an' least kedge ain't there no longer, an' all her spare spars an' sails've been sold away. Cable-tiers are empty, too. Though, I 'spect 'at had more t'do with a need t'lash her bow, stern, breast an' spring-lines t' th' shore t'keep her moored agin th' river currents.'

'Then who do they expect to buy her, I wonder?' Lewrie said with a snort, recalling again his one reading of the prize's manifest, imagining middling-sized bags of prize money winging away.

'Most-like, that bastard Bistineau would be more than happy to play ship chandler and sell you her own fittings back as spanking new… at a hellish-dear cost,' Mr. Pollock sneered with a matching snort. 'Yes… Captain Coffin and Mister Caldecott could tell me more, well… a bit more, and for your sharp eyes and, ahem… sagacity, I thank you, Mister Jugg. I do b'lieve I should look them up at once. After your trip aboard her, Jugg, I do believe we have a lead at last!'

'Thankee kindly, sor,' Jugg replied, doffing his hat from long practice; though peering quizzically at Lewrie for the meaning of the word 'sagacity.'

'Good, clever work, Jugg,' Lewrie congratulated.

'Er, ah… thankee, Cap'm, sor,' Jugg said to him, plumbing to the approximate meaning of his praise. 'Hoy, ain't she a handsome wee thing there, sors? 'At cutter comin' upriver.'

They all turned to gaze upon a smallish single-masted craft not so far downriver, coming up slowly against the relentless current with all her fat jibs and huge gaff mains'l winged out into a starkly white cloud of canvas against the blue of the river, and twilight. She flew a Spanish flag, and Mr. Pollock cupped his eyes with his hands to peer hard at her, even without the aid of a telescope.

'Spanish Navy cutter,' Pollock announced at last. 'An aviso … a despatch boat. From Havana or Veracruz, most-like, making the round with the latest mails. Though they do have a few like her at Mobile and Pensacola for guarda costas.'

'A problem for us, is she?' Lewrie fretted half aloud.

'Oh, I rather doubt it… Mister Willoughby,' Pollock amusedly dismissed. 'Had the Dons tumbled to your presence, you'd have been in cells in the calabozo days ago, hah hah… ahem. Had the Spaniards a single clue about our business, they'd have sent a frigate!'

'Well, that's reassuring,' Lewrie said, scowling at the man.

'Being Spaniards, they won't land the mails 'til next morning'-Pollock chuckled-'after a good supper and a run ashore. As well known as I am, no one'll think twice of me wandering over to the Cabildo and asking the latest news in the Place d'Armes. It's what everyone else does, God knows. Tonight, though… ahem. It might be a good idea if you and your hands, being strange new faces, didn't do their drinking and carousing near yon cutter's crewmen, hmm? Make it an early night?'

'Aye, I'll see to it,' Lewrie vowed. Though, after his carouse with Charite Bonsecours, even an orgy in the Pigeon Coop cabaret would prove anti-climactic, and making it an early night held no charms whatsoever. Twiddle his thumbs in his rooms alone? Polish his boots and bed down by ten? It sounded like a hellish-dull evening.

BOOK FOUR

Prospero: Lie at my mercy all mine enemies.

Shortly shall all my labours end, and thou

Shalt have the air at freedom. For a little,

Follow, and do me service.

– The Tempest, Act IV, Scene 1

William Shakespeare

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Well before noon the following morning, more than a few events came to pass in the parlours, offices, taverns, lodging houses, and streets of the town of New Orleans.

At the corner of Rue Royale and Rue Toulouse, Jim Hawk Ellison was breaking his fast and taking in the latest informations from his men. Piping-hot cornbread, white hominy, and a rasher of bacon, with a pork cutlet aswim in gravy, and strong rum-spiked and sweetened chicory cafe au lait kept hands and mouth busy, while his watchers' reports occupied his mind.

'Don't see how we'd manage, comin' upriver,' one of his men, Silas Bowman, said in a hunch-shouldered low mutter over his plate of eggs and bacon. ' Fort Saint Charles and the Rampart batteries're too strong. Got eighteen heavy pieces, twelve- and eighteen-pounder guns, an' set for a wicked crossfire, Jim Hawk.'

'Crossin' Pontchartrain don't look too good, either,' another man, a disguised U.S. Army sergeant named Davey Lumpkin told him. ' Fort Saint John can slaughter anybody tryin' to cross the produce fields. Even with all the swamp-drainin' they've done, it still's too marshy for anything but men afoot, too.'

'Guess it'll have t'be done from the inside, then, boys,' Jim Hawk Ellison decided as he slathered molasses on a buttered slice of pone. 'Come prime trading season, we'll have to float men downriver in flatboats, rafts, and keel- boats, dressed 'country.' The Spaniards won't think a thing of 'em, and everybody comes armed with rifles or muskets, and they're used t'seein' that too. Peyton, what're those Englishmen been up to? Been keepin' a sharp eye on em:

'Hell, Jim Hawk,' Peyton Siler, another disguised soldier, said, 'yest'a'dy they rode way out east all th' way t'Lake Borgne and ate a meal outten a basket. Never could get all that close, but I could see 'em with my glass. Spent a long time pawin' an' head-cockin' over some map they brought with 'em. Pointed north and east a lot, they did. Up that way, there's Fort Coquilles… hmmm? Knew they warn't straight.'

'Well, I do declare!' Ellison chuckled over his laced coffee.

'Tore some kinda paper inta itty-bitty bits 'fore they left,' Siler said on, winking. 'Oncet they got outta sight, I picked up what I could of it. Whole lotta numbers, was all. Couldn't make no sense of it.'

'That's all right, Peyton,' Ellison told him. 'They were up to some kind o' devilment. And now we know they got something t'hide.'

'They stopped 'bout halfway back t'town,' Siler continued. 'I saw 'em get down an' paw th' ground. It's high an' firm. They looked right pleased with whatever it was they saw there.'

Ellison already had a map of the environs engraved in memory. He smiled at that news. 'Firm ground? Sounds t'me like they spotted a good place t'place defences an' guns… so maybe the rumours aren't true. Won't come down from Canada, like we thought. They mean t'land somewhere out th' end o' the Chef Menteur road an' strike fast, twelve or fifteen miles away from the town! You see anything out there could stop 'em, Peyton?'

'That'd be th' onliest place that might hold 'em up, Jim Hawk,' Siler decided after a long, contemplative rub of his unshaven chin. 'If they come so far south o' Fort Coquilles, that is. But it'd be a chore, 'less they had a