Dewey Lambdin - Havoc`s Sword

"Would this afternoon prove soon enough, Citizen?" Capitaine de Fregate Jules Hainaut lazily enquired. "I have in mind a delectably sweet Octoroon, just barely seventeen, but already possessed of skills one could not find in Paris, itself. Petite, playful…"

"As a matter of fact, Hainaut, I think I will go home at once. Take my mid-day meal, so many preparations for our supper, tonight…" Desfourneaux announced, all but fingering his crotch in anticipation. "Uhm… by three this afternoon, you might… ah?"

"By half past one, Citizen," Hainaut promised, him. "And may I wish you… bon appetit?"

Late that evening and far out to sea to windward of Guadeloupe, USS Hancock prowled a moon-drenched sea hungry for prey, like a wraith on All-Hallow's Eve. While Citizen Desfourneaux improved his digestif ' with a second courtesan fetched as a house-warming present by his old aide-de-camp, Capitaine Guillaume Choundas sat on the edge of the hard bunk in his tiny deal-partitioned cabin forward of the officers' gun-room, beset by American cuisine. Salt-pork, soup beans, yams, ship's biscuit, and greasy gravy griped his innards like smelting lumps of ore, and bile surged up now and then to sear his throat. As for that corn-whisky they had offered… pah!

Griot, in the insubstantial next-door cabin, snored away, insensible to swinish victuals, defeat, and captivity alike, making Choundas despise his peasant's dullness. His own ears and face burned with the utter shame of loss, of being out-witted, of failing so completely… of being so wrong ! His repute and career were utterly lost, his place sure to be awarded to one of the handsome, swaggering charmers, and all he had done would be forgotten, dismissed as ancient history if remembered at all. The Americans might hold him, gallingly inactive; months and months, years\ of penny-pinching, miserly parole.

And that swaggering pig Lewrie still lived! As if his life was charmed! As if the very Heavens, the fickle ancient gods, conspired to preserve and reward him!

Choundas fantasised that he'd find a way to kill him, slip into England as a crippled emigre beggar and murder his wife and children, if nothing else, but how? All his fortune would be gone, he would be penniless! And Choundas could feel that time for revenge was growing shorter. His marvelous body, his iron constitution, was betraying him. If Lewrie were to die by his hand, it might be with his last breath, as he had always vowed, never suspecting…!

Nonetheless, Guillaume Choundas vowed that he would murder his Nemesis; find a way to delude the simple-minded Americans and escape; destroy Griot for letting him down, for being a dull shop-keeper fraud in bear-skin slippers, not a Venetic conqueror! He would take revenge on faithless Jules Hainaut for abandoning the battle like the cynical coward he really was, he would win back his position and honours…!

But he had to press a grimy towel to his lips to stem a flood of bile and vomit; had to squeeze his buttocks together to prevent an even greater shame before he could stagger aft to the quarter-gallery with the aid of a crude loaned crutch. His bowels screamed in stony rendings, and shuddery looseness, both, while fiery stabbings in his stomach popped cold, woozy sick-sweat that flooded his body like an Arctic dunking. Weak and faint, his sphinctre failed him, and for the first time in his life, Guillaume Choundas succumbed to despair, giving out a faint, bleak whimper as he crammed the end of the towel into his mouth to deny the world the pleasure of hearing his helplessness. Hot, galling tears trickled from his eyes, searing his cheeks, to make his humiliation complete.

"I must not die before he does, please!" Choundas whispered to the groaning oaken darkness, almost in prayer. But to which gods?

The hilltop overlooking the vast encampment was bathed in moonlight as General Toussaint L'Ouverture stood under the fly of a grand pavillion that once had sheltered a French General of Brigade in splendour, looking down at his sleeping army and its guttering cook-fires, and felt his own despair for his long-suffering but hopeful people… for the future of St. Domingue, which some had begun to call Haiti in Creole patois. Its reluctant leader, short, bandy-legged, and unremarkable, plied a cane fan, seeing not a rag-tag army, but an island beset on all sides by a brutal, opportunistic outside world, just as the encampment was girded by forbidding forests and jungle.

The Americans threatened; those bland-faced, smiling slaveowners must be shown that they could never buy or steal part, or all, of Haiti. He must use them, but keep them at arm's-length. Else their merchants would buy, or raid for, slaves close to home, much cheaper than human chattel shipped from West Africa. Sadly, there were "Haitians" who'd be more than happy to profit in such an evil trade, preying on their darkest and poorest, just like the kings of far-off Dahomey or Guinea.

The aggressive and wily British, who'd sent that perfect fool to barter with him, still lusted for St. Domingue, though they ruled all the other Sugar Isles already. Their "gifts" and pledges would bring fresh chains for his people, too. And so, must be beguiled and strung along, yet ultimately spurned.

And-heart-breakingly-Mother France plotted to restore the plantation system, to fill her war coffers with gold, and if that new-come General Hedouville's schemes bore fruit, hordes of the grands blancs

would flood back in, with a huge army of occupation, to enforce their will. Vast profitable plantations would re-arise, their workers only half- starved this time, paid next -to-nothing, if not re-enslaved outright… after the requisite bloodbaths and "taming" massacres.

Hedouville craftily hoped to divide, conquer, and weaken, play rivals off in another "War of the Skin," then crush the feeble winner. To stave him off, to counter that brute, there was only one course of action open, though Toussaint L'Ouverture dreaded the price his people would have to pay. But St. Domingue-Haiti-must be one, or it was doomed, so the island's reluctant, unschooled master of war could not shrink from it if he wished his people's fragile freedom passed to their future generations.

So… in the morning, before first light, his sleeping soldiers must march on South Province, make a pre-emptive "War of the Skin" on those who would rule a breakaway part of the whole, for the profit of a few, armed, succoured, and beholden to the re-enslaving outsiders, and make all the blood, fire, and horror suffered so far-enough for the entire world, enough for a millennium!-to have been in vain.

Before first light, Toussaint L'Ouverture would march against the Mulatto Republic, and faithless General Andre Rigaud.

Under that same moonlight, HMS Proteus snored her way Sutherly under all plain sail, to the West of Guadeloupe, her eerie ghost-grey sails spiralling metronome-fashion against the star-strewn sky. Five Bells of the Evening Watch were struck up forward, slowly tolling half past Ten- dong-dong… dong-dong… dong -that the ship's boy at the belfry let echo brassily on as he turned the half-hour glass, and went back to nodding.

Captain Alan Lewrie, RN, lay nude under a sheet in his swaying wide-enough-for-two bed-cot, flat on his back with his hands enlaced under the musty down pillows, striving for sleep. He'd dined on fresh red snapper that Gideon, the frigate's talented cook, had caught in a slack-wind hour that morning; he'd washed it down with a whole bottle of tangy, fruit-sweet Beaujolais from a mixed case that the Georgian, Capt. Randolph of USS Oglethorpe, had presented to him off one of those rich prizes they'd taken. He should have been snoring, but he wasn't.