The Captain`s Vengeance

Balfa and Lanxade would declare that they would take less than their customary shares, so the men would not be cheated. Just as soon as the de Guilleris and their arrogant compatriots were accused of supplying them with false information, a nebulous (but hopefully believable!) plot would emerge with the banker Maurepas, to skim off some of the silver as soon as it landed in New Orleans… Jerome Lanxade would even suggest that Maurepas, Bistineau, and the de Guilleris might have conspired to steal some of the silver from the prize during the night!

Which would conveniently explain why Boudreaux Balfa was taking some tonight, and wouldn't Jerome be surprised! Balfa gleefully thought as he shouldered another heavy keg from one of his cousins aboard the prize and carefully set it by the others in the lugger's amidships. He reckoned that he might be able to make off with about 40,000 silver dollars, which he might split with Jerome… or he might not. Maybe even 50,000, if the water in the creeks, coulees, sloughs, and bayous was up, and they could float that much away.

Did he take a reduced share of the loot in the morning, not the 200,000 he was due but only 50,000, say, the Balfas would be rich for life, rich beyond imagining, when he combined his public share with a little, trifling, miniscule private one, even if he had to give half to Lanxade to mollify him once he found that his imaginative fabulation was true, hee hee!

And just to be on the safe side, he had a second lugger for a quick departure, once the share-out was done, before anyone with quick wits could suspect him. After all, come dawn those witless play- acting bebes would be feeding the crabs; the prize schooner would be emptied, stripped, and burned; and Le Revenant awarded to the strongest, loudest-voiced, and quickest-witted pirate who wanted to stay in business.

'Vite, vite, mes chers, ' Balfa stealthily urged. ' Un autre … beaucoup d'autres! Another… a lot o' others!'

'It's so pagan!' Charite tittered as she sat cross-legged on a blanket atop one of the ancient Indian earth mounds where she and her brothers and kin had, by right as 'leaders,' put up a trio of lean-to shelters for the night. 'Like something out of an old book.'

Firelight flickered high and heathen from several bonfires on the beach, from cooking fires where cauldrons simmered and black-iron pans sizzled up savoury things. The flickering yellow and orange glow from so many fires lent an unreal aura to the shoreline for over fifty yards from end to end, from the beach line to the scrubby bushes above the beach, where the wood had been gathered, and illuminated the tall trees that shrouded their secret lair ^and the betraying sight of the ships' masts from view from any passing searchers. The light was reflected back onto the rough buccaneer camp by the bleached-bone whiteness of other, lower mounds of oyster, mussel, and clam shells that had been heaped up first by aboriginal Indians, then added to by White fishermen, wanderers, and outlaws. They were not as tall or as deep as the roughly flat-topped earth mounds, but they snaked along like a miniature mountain chain, slumped into each other a bit inshore.

The camp could boast a few rare tents, but most huts were of fresh-cut saplings and thin limbs, over which scrap canvas or blankets had been draped… more lean-tos, hastily thrown up by their sailors or built for them by the many wild rovers who made a precarious life along the bay and the inland lake. Wild, eerie, and isolated as these remote isles were, some few people did reside there and even more camped temporarily. And Barataria had been a pirates' lair and 'hurricane hole' for ages. And where there were pirates and bold buccaneers, there would be the chance for quick profits off their witless free-spending.

Almost as soon as their mast heads had been spotted, red-sailed luggers had veered down to them, and somehow the word had spread, drawing rowing boats, swamp craft, and pirogues full of hopeful entrepreneurs. Cooks had built lean-tos and fires, shrimpers and crabbers had turned up with their catches, farmers had arrived with bushel baskets filled with pod peas and corn for boiling or 'roasting ears.' Fruit, backcountry wines, pigs, chickens, and goats, carefully hoarded bottles of costly cognac or apple brandy from dearest la belle France, turned up for sale. Flounder, mullet, and mullet roe, even humble meat like muskrat, 'possum, rabbit, and raccoon sizzled on little spits and peeled twigs, their aromas blending with that of fresh corn-breads.

There were half-naked Spaniards and Canary Islanders, very poor Acadians, and even a few French Creoles who'd fallen on hard times; some light-skinned Free Blacks, swarthier negres who just might be Maroons escaped from their masters' plantations and eking out a meagre existence as honest runaways, or even a few sly-eyed ex-slaves now in a predatory armed marauder gang like that of the devilish Saint John, whose murderous horde were known to lurk along the west shore of the bay.

There were cooks, there were gamblers, and there were putains, too, of all nations and races. Some of those women danced singly as the drunken sailors danced to the music of the itinerant musicians. Some, nude and glistening, put on a show to music to lure tossed coins, then the 'socket-fee from the pirate who was the most enflamed. They flung themselves down under a lean-to and grunted in time with whoever had found them fetching, then sponged off in the salt water of the bay, standing knee-deep between the many grounded boats before going back to look for a fresh customer.

'Capitaine Lanxade said they only think they know how to celebrate,' Helio ventured to say, now that Charite seemed to be her old self again, after her hysterical tirade of a day or two before. 'This is nothing to the old days, he said. These modern buccaneers of ours can't hold a candle to the wild men he knew in his youth.'

'And we've only seen three fights,' Don Rubio added with a disappointed sniff. 'And none of them to the death.' Warily, Don Rubio still distanced himself from Charite's side. For if she could forgive her brothers and her cousin, even speak civilly to them again, yet she still gathered her brows together and scowled at him whenever it was necessary for them to converse, her voice distant and cold.

'The night is still young,' Jean-Marie Rancour commented with a hopeful chuckle and shrug. 'One never knows…'

'Hmmph!' Charite said, turning to look at Helio and Hippolyte. 'Even if this is only a dim shadow of an old-time pirate gathering, it is still a wondrous show. Tortuga and Topsail Island… Port Royal, before the earthquake destroyed it. Nassau, on New Providence, before Capitaine Woodes Rogers cleaned it out. And him an old pirate, too!'

'No honour among thieves, the saying goes, cherie,' Helio cited.

'The firelight, the Blacks,' she rhapsodised in spite of him, quite romantically taken by the scenes, the smells. 'So much nudity on display! Why, one could almost imagine us transported among those savage corsairs of High Barbary… in Algiers, where the sultans buy beautiful virgin girls for their hareems!'

'Christ!' Hippolyte sneered with a disparaging groan. 'Novels! Romances written mostly by eunuchs in a Parisian garret! There's not a single thing worth a sou in fiction books!'

'Most written by Anglais eunuchs!' Jean-Marie guffawed. 'French writers at least have the 'necessities' to write romances. From experience, not their imagination.'

Charite frowned over that comment, her lips pursed in an argumentative moue as she thought of telling them a thing or two about how equipped with the 'necessities' some Englishmen were, but didn't.

What was done was done, she told herself, and she'd never see her Englishman again. There was tonight, though, this heady and rapturous pagan display to savour. Tonight, she was not a patriotic revolutionary, she was… Mary Read or Anne Bonny, notorious girl pirates of ancient fame!

She sat cross-legged on the ground in breeches and boots, with a sheathed dagger in her sash, a blade up her sleeve, pistols at her hips, and her trusty sword standing close at hand. In her lap there was a coin-silver charger for her supper plate, looted from a Spanish captain's quarters, and she used heavy, ornate silver utensils from a dead man's sideboard.

She dined on roast goat and pork, like the bold Caribbean boucaniers had, on peeled shrimp and rice, corn on the cob, peas, and cornbread. By her right knee stood a large silver tankard, the piratical rogue's sort with a clear glass bottom, so big it could hold a whole pint of beer, half a bottle of wine, or an entire flask of brandy or rum. This night, it was strong, heady, amber rum.