The Captain`s Vengeance

spray behind him before he tumbled back on his heels, arms and legs spread as if he was crucified. Don Rubio spotted the shooter atop one of the higher shell heaps, a soldier in a red coat, white cross-belts, white breeches, and knee-high spatterdashes, with a white-laced tall hat upon his head. He wasn't from any Spanish regiment Don Rubio had ever seen, but he raised his air-rifle, took careful aim, and fired as the soldier laboured to ram a ball down the muzzle of his weapon.

'Damn!' he swore as his shot merely clipped the man's hat, making him jump back in alarm and slide-tumble down the far slope of the mound. Don Rubio cranked another ball into the firing chamber and recocked his rifle, hearing a faint hiss as he did so, as the demand valve opened. The gun smoke was thinning, as was the mist, and he shot at another red-coated soldier standing behind a waist-high slumped heap of shells. This one he struck, with a feral whoop of joy as he cheered his own skill, though the air-rifle still was shooting high… as it had when he'd tried to kill that damned Anglais, Willoughby, in New Orleans! His target flung a hand to his breast and dropped like a stone!

Don Rubio heard the cracks of other air-rifles firing near him as Helio and Hippolyte finally got into action. By his right side, he heard another crack as Jean-Marie summoned up his nerves and entered the fray, shrilling thinly as he saw one his shots kill a sailor, too!

'Stay down, Charite!' Helio was yelping. 'Go down the back of the mound and get to the beach. Get aboard the schooner!'

There came another murdering volley from the red-coat soldiers, scything down a few more witless buccaneers in the camp, forcing those with guns or cutlasses in their hands to duck and slink backwards, in the direction of the beach and the grounded boats. Rubio noted that some of them were starting to form up and return fire.

There was another belated crack, then the mallet thuds of balls striking flesh, and Jean-Marie's left hand was clawing at the sleeve of his shirt as he sank to his knees with a look of utter astonishment on his face, his mouth opening and closing like a boated fish. A moment later, and there was a flood of bright blood spilling from his mouth, down the front of his fine white shirt!

'Jean! Poor Jean. Oh no!' Charite wailed, standing in the open with her hands to her mouth.

Another of those damned red-coat men atop a shell heap! Rubio saw him lowering his weapon to reload it and knew that this marksman was Jean's slayer. Aiming at his waist this time, Rubio fired at him and saw the bastard spin around and stumble, dropping his weapon as he pitched forward and slid down the face of the mound in an avalanche of old shells. 'Got him, aha! Charite, get down! We men will fight them for you!' he shouted to her, plastering a bold, confident, dangerous smile on his face for her benefit.

'Marines will… advance!' they all heard a powerful voice cry. 'Poise muskets, and for-ward… march!'

'Oh, hell!' another, deeper voice was bellowing. 'Proteuses… cutlasses and bayonets, and… charge!'

'English!' Helio spat. 'They're Anglais, the 'Bloodies'!'

'The Anglais?' Hippolyte gawped. 'Run, little sister. Run for your life! Get aboard the schooner, now!'

'Up here, you men!' Don Rubio shouted, waving his arms to catch their buccaneers' attention. 'Get on the mounds and we'll shoot down at them. Hold the mounds! Kill the cochons/'

He had heard somewhere that the high ground was preferable in a real battle. Helio came round him to his right-hand side and looked down at his cousin, Jean-Marie Rancour, but that unfortunate youngster had already died, his lungs and mouth filled with blood, and his eyes already glazing over.

'His rifle,' Rubio Monaster callously snapped between shots as a dauntingly long line of Britishers tramped over the oyster heaps and slithered down the front faces, whilst the Anglais dressed as sailors came swarming more quickly from the flank, cutlasses waving aloft, in full, bloodthirsty cry. 'His four pistols, Helio. Use them!'

'Damn you, Rubio, Jean was just a…' Helio de Guilleri swore as he dashed tears from his eyes with his shirt sleeves, but gathered up the pistols and the air-rifle as directed. Hippolyte, still crouching by the lean-to, was already firing his Girandoni, fast as he could aim, pull the trigger, and crank, and Helio could see that his shots were telling, so he knelt and began to shoot as well.

The Anglais quickly took half a dozen casualties, dropped right at their feet. They stumbled as they tried to step over the bodies, and their ragged charge all but skidded to a halt. Pirates were clambering up atop the mounds, walking backwards as they loaded, primed and fired right in the Englishmen's dirty faces.

Charite had not obeyed them but had snatched up Helio's rifle, and was inexpertly, clumsily working its action to fire a few rounds of her own, making Helio and Hippolyte shake their heads at each other at her foolishness… sadly proud of her all the same.

'First rank… take aim! Clear them off the mounds! Fire!'

' Those bastards!' a blue-uniformed naval officer was bellowing down below them, waving his sword in the air and pointing with a pistol in his other hand. 'Shoot those bastards, lads! Kill 'em dead!'

The volleys stuttered out, loud and deep-toned, and buccaneers on the forward slopes went tumbling in heaps. Their hands on the east mound were completely scythed away, and another young man with a sword in a blue coat shrilly led an impromptu charge to its top. Their few men who had rallied below the centre mound, where the de Guilleris and Don Rubio fought, were shot down, or broke and ran round its edges for the beach.

'Run, Charite, run!' Helio ordered her again, even as musket balls whined about them like deadly bumblebees.

'Second rank… the centre mound! Take aim… fire!'

Stunned by the suddenness of the deaths below her, Charite at last came to her senses. She went as pale as milk, might have fainted if she'd waited a second longer to flee, but managed to turn round as quick as a spider and scramble on her hands and knees to the back of their mound and slide down the far side on the seat of her breeches, a hand still gripped white-knuckled on the barrel of her air-rifle. Her pinned-up long hair had come undone, and she instinctively reached up to let it spill, praying a silent prayer for poor Jean-Marie; praying, too, that the 'Bloodies' wouldn't shoot a woman, a girl so pretty!

She felt her lips begin to tremble, her teeth chatter uncontrollably, and tears stung her eyes. Sobs arose from the wrenching tautness in her chest. She got to her feet at the foot of the mound, her legs feeling juddery and weak, her feet oddly disembodied as she tried to run to find a boat.

'Mademoiselle!' Boudreaux Balfa's son, Fusilier, dashed up, in company with another young lad off Le Revenant. Both were armed, and Charite was glad for their company.

'Damn you all! Come back here!' the other youngster yelled at the few boats still in sight, Those who could had scrambled into any slight hull that would float and were fleeing northward, dangerously overloaded in most cases. There wasn't a single pirogue left, as far as they could see along the shore! 'A boat! Where's a boat?'

'We must swim out, mademoiselle!' Fusilier said, trying to be calm and brave but almost shivering with fear. 'Get aboard our ship and sail out of here.'

'No, we won't,' Jean, the other lad, dispiritedly growled, and pointed to the large shalope not a quarter-mile off from Le Revenant and their prize and stalking up slowly but remorselessly, a British Navy ensign atop her main-mast.

'We must swim, or die,' Charite determined. 'Somewhere we'll find someone to pick us up.'

'Papa will come for us,' Fusilier added, perked up considerably. 'He must!'

CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO