He then shucked his silk dressing gown and donned his constricting 'appliance.' Jerome Lanxade never let a steward or body slave do it for him; that felt demeaning, making 'Le Feroce ' an object of fun, not fear! He laced it as tight as it could go, going almost purple in the face before he drew on his snug breeches and buttoned them up.
Capt. Lanxade heaved a worrisome sigh, then, fully dressed at last, went out on deck for a welcome breath of fresh but moist, mist-laden air, the dawn's first cigaro alit in one hand and a fresh cup of bracingly strong coffee in the other. He scowled at the beach, at the sleeping camp, and was satisfied that most of their henchmen would be weeping with hangovers, too fuddled to think straight when he and Boudreaux Balfa broke their sad news. Most of the scows and pirogues were gone. The honest backcountry folk had packed up and left once they'd sold their last goods. In the wee hours of a pirates' celebration, it was dangerous to linger too long among the red-eyed murderous!
Lanxade looked over at their prize schooner. There stood old Boudreaux himself, just arisen and yawning like a shambling swamp bear, stretching to get the kinks out, scratching his hide and even grating his back against the schooner's main-mast!
Lanxade rehearsed his plan for betraying the youngsters in his mind once more, once the hands were hot and outraged, as he would make them. Bind them all first, then do the reduced share-out, then offer the ships to the un- likeliest, most despised mate among them, setting them to fighting among themselves whilst he and Boudreaux made their getaway cross the bay and into the bayous-without getting savaged like sick sharks by the rest of the pack and torn to bloody gobbets! What happened to the de Guilleri men, their whey-faced cousin, or that arrogant peacock half-dago afterward was of no matter to him, though, he doubted the men would kill Charite to ensure her silence. She was too well liked. They might turn her loose eventually, Lanxade imagined, send her back to New Orleans after they sailed under their new leader, and there'd be nothing she could do about it-long after he had departed for safer climes, that was certain!
Oh, she might get 'used,' of course, protected, then raped, by the strongest to emerge as capitaine. Jerome even wished he could stay to rape her himself. After all her empty flirtations with him, Charite deserved a come-uppance, the 'servicing' of a real man who knew…
'Eh!' a sailor up forward by the fuming galley funnel cried. He pointed over the bows, eastward towards the main channel. 'A ship!'
'What?' Lanxade responded in a shocked screech, blanching with alarm. A drunken sailor roused himself in Lanxade's way as he strode forward, got shoved to the rails, where he began to puke over-side.
'Strange ship!' the sailor up forrud added. 'Guns run out!'
'To arms!' Lanxade bellowed, seizing the lanyard on the ship's bell by the forecastle and clanging away with it. 'All hands on deck! Dammit, dammit, wake up, you bastards! Up, and man the guns!'
He glowered at Boudreaux aboard the prize, was pleased to see him capering an alarm of his own among his few crewmen who had slept aboard her. The camp, though! Lanxade leaped to a swivel-gun by the starboard bow, jerked the tompion from its muzzle but found that no goose-quill fuse was handy, no slow-match burning, no tinder-box. He swung the light gun's barrel skyward, stepped back, puffed on his cigaro to a red-hot tip, then stuck it against the touch-hole, hoping that a pricked cartridge bag had been left loaded.
Bang! A faint howl of musket or pistol balls shot into the air, and that stern, startling noise was enough to rouse the campsite, roust out the last pig-drunk heavy sleepers aboard Le Revenant.
'Nom d'un chien, ' Lanxade angrily hissed as he saw to his own personal weapons. The strange vessel-a good-sized shalope-advanced on him, bows-on. 'You Spanish dogs have bitten off more than you can swallow this time. We'll show you what a real fight is!'
But, what was this? A stronger whiff of wind abeam the shalope flirted out her flag, and it wasn't the crowned red-gold-red of Spain but the red, white, and blue crosses of… 'The Anglais? The hellish Anglais?' Lanxade yelped in stupefaction, realising that that distant prize they'd taken off Dominica might have spelled their ruin! Vengeance had come upon them, with lit fuses and bared steel!
Small ship, though, Lanxade thought, imagining a small crew to put up against his cut-throat desperados. He might win after all!
Off the same American smuggling brig that had yielded Toby Jugg as a reluctant 'volunteer' a year or so before, HMS Proteus had also garnered a dozen or so deadly-accurate Yankee-made Pennsylvania rifles, bound for rebel general Toussaint L'Ouverture and his officers on St. Domingue. Those that hadn't ended up in the hands of Capt. Lewrie or the ship's officers, Marine Lieutenant Blase Devereux had appropriated for his keenest marksmen when posted aloft in the fighting-tops. Picking off enemy officers might be deemed by some to be ungentlemanly or dishonourable, but Lt. Devereux was one, as was Captain Lewrie, who ascribed more to 'All's Fair in Love and War,' that Fair Fighting was for dim-witted fools.
'I believe they're sufficiently stirred up and misdirected,' Lt. Devereux muttered, once he'd taken another peek over the top of a low spot in the shell midden, noting how those pirates able to rouse themselves and stand erect after their night's excesses were all peering and gesticulating at the shalope's approach from out of the mists. 'Do you think, sir, that we should take advantage of their astonished condition… even if the Captain has yet to close with them?'
'I do believe we should, sir!' Captain Nicely was quick to say 'Aye,' drawing his work-a-day smallsword from its plain black scabbard. 'Up and at 'em, Mister Devereux… and God uphold the right!'
'Marines… shun!' Devereux bellowed. 'Marksmen to the tops of the mounds! Rest… form line! Marines… level!'
Muskets came up to shoulders, the fixed bayonets wanly glittering in the misty dawn.
'Cock yer locks! Take careful aim.. -fire!' Devereux howled.
Barely thirty yards away, stunned, hungover pirates stumbled to their feet, not understanding the orders in English but knowing that danger was present. They came slithering out of their lean-tos, fighting Weariness and their encumbering blankets. Some saw the invaders, whose red coats, rarely worn aboard ship but for ceremonial duties and Harbour Watch, blossomed atop or behind the bleached shell hillocks as red as poppies… or blood. The buccaneers barely had time to blink or rub their disbelieving eyes, to shout a quick warning before those muskets barked and spat great spouts of powder smoke, before some much sharper cracks from rifles stunned their ears.
'Reload!' Devereux yelled. 'Marksmen, look for ralliers!'
'Proteuses, up!' Lt. Catterall shouted in an irate steer's roar, the leather-lunged sort of cry that could carry from the quarterdeck to the bowsprit in a full gale of wind. 'Level! Take aim… fire!'
Catterall's sailors, who far outnumbered the Marine complement, popped up from behind the shell mounds on either flank of the Marines, dressed in their usual slop-trousers, loose shirts, and tarred hats or head rags. Less used to musketry, or the rigid weapons drill of their compatriots, they were; but there were more of them, their targets were within a long pistol shot, and 'Brown Bess' would not be denied.
Reeling, scurrying buccaneers were scythed down, at least ten by the Marines' initial volley, perhaps another half dozen claimed by Proteus's less-skillful sailors. A few cooks or vendors were killed or wounded, people who'd stayed to sleep off the night's revels, The gape-mouthed nearly innocent who stood still too long, in the wrong place at the wrong time, fell howling beside the panicked bloody-handed guilty, while others spurred into witless flight amid scared buccaneers. A raddled and terrified whore or two, rushing from their borrowed beds, were gunned down as well. Massed volleys of musketry were as uncaring as clouds of grapeshot.
'Recover and reload!' Lt. Catterall roared, over his frights in the eerie forests and never happier than when challenged to mindless combat. He cocked his pistol's lock, took a huntsman's lead on a running pirate with a
