HMS Revenge Joseph De Ritis
CHAPTER ONE
The Kestrel
Even at eight bells in the afternoon watch it was difficult to find the unattached, the uninvited or the merely alone on the wharves of Ste. Pierre. Child or adult, man or maiden, people congregated in groups, for traveling alone, no matter how well armed, invited a bushwhacking and a thievery of such completeness that it was often bruited by Martinicians that there were two kinds of piranha: they what swam and they what strode the Caribbean's infinity of waterfront, ravening for crowns, cruzados and doubloons. Martinique could be fatally misleading in its allure: no Caribbean locale is as lush with verdure. The Arawaks called it Mandinina, the Island of Flowers. The number of varieties of hibiscus climbed into the hundreds. The hills around Ste. Pierre and the gently rising cinder cone of Mount Pele were rainbowed with clouds of anthurium, frangipani, orchids, and jade vines. Legions of papayas, mangoes, and bananas taxed the trees. West Indian cherries, large as walnuts, were a delicacy. The manchineel tree with its poisonous sap was so dangerous to the touch that even raindrops falling from its leaves onto human flesh could leave painful blisters. Yet for the abundance of the plant kingdom, Martinique exemplified the treachery of the animal.
Long before Columbus, the Arawaks had been usurped, and eventually eaten, by the Caribs. The Admiral himself would find little use and even less affinity for Martinique: sea legend records that he could not abide the island's armies of snakes. Centuries later French merchant seamen would promise the west coast to the Caribs in exchange for peace and the unmolested husbandry of the remainder of the island, but the bargain was not kept: the deep loams and pedalfers of the topsoil were far too fertile and thus vital to the sugarcane industry. The Caribs would disappear into French plantations or gaols or galleons, to be finally and fatally absorbed by the mercantile conquerors and the African slaves who bequeathed a Creole strain to the Indies.
The waterfront of Ste. Pierre was architecturally adapted to the needs and whims of the various naval and military establishments upon whom the island depended for commerce, provisioning and defense: a ruck of inns, brothels, taprooms, pubs, hostels, shanties, taverns, cafes, saloons, flophouses, alehouses, rooming houses, boarding houses, coops, and kiosks. Sailors thronged the quays in a cajoling, contentious horde, seeing only as far as the next jack of foaming ale. Cargomasters called to Creole slaves. Women quoted prices for a consideration to be rendered. Children waited in the shadows of crates on the long shore, vigilant for the invitation of a carelessly open and unprotected pocket. And everyone was armed: the wharves were a hidden, pulsing arsenal of stilettos and musquets, epees and bayonets, pigstickers and stylets.
The heat haze of the early April afternoon shimmered in miasmic waves above the harbor and the throngs on the docks began to file indoors, prodded by both the heat and the passing of the hour: it was nearly four in the afternoon, and the harbor would soon see in the hour before sunset the crescendo of the eternal sandflies and mosquitoes. Swarming throughout the day, they were especially copious in the hour before the onset of evening, and would sting the unwary traveler into dementia.
Le Oursin was one of the larger taverns fronting the harbor, a barnlike structure with a long gallery under a loft containing a row of guest rooms where sailors could conclude in privacy the business contracted for downstairs. Walls and rafters of rustic oak had long ago lost their amber hues to the grime of the ubiquitous smoke of mingled tobacco, cannabis, and peyote. Whole regiments of the three-inch long West Indian cockroach scuttled unfettered across the mudcaked floors. A beechwood table served as a crude bar, and the oaths and catcalls of the clientele made conversation difficult but not unmanageable, as one customer was discovering.
He was offhandedly regarding the tankard of ale and hops at his forearm. His companion was concluding his tale of desperation with a smile and a wink of sublime self-approbation.
"They're small ships, now," the speaker was saying over the lip of a jack of Tortuga punch, a viscid concoction of maplewood syrup and red rum. "Spanish pirogues, unhandsome craft if ever you saw them. Look like galleys, see. Small and flat-bottomed, and the freeboard's knee high, maybe a foot from the drink to the wale - the rowers spend as much time bailing their laps as pulling the sweeps, see. Monday last, my foretop captain sights this pirogue well off the beam making the logwood run from Roatan, and I say to no one in particular, me a sloop and he a Dago longship, what's to worry? Just a ripple of grape high on the truck, and he'll heave to." He leaned forward, eyes narrowed. "Doss, the good Lord in His infinite wisdom and mercy can be a right unpredictable Providence, a humorous Gent if ever there was one. He likes to laugh, now, that He does, and two days ago, He had a broad laugh at my expense, and the expense of six of my best seamen, one of them my bosun."
His listener was the Chevalier du Graux, a son of the largest of the Provence vintner families, a man who had once set fire to the surplice of the abbot of Avigon, and had fled to find service with the Sun King in the Royal French Marines. A cadaverous, clean-shaven man with a hollow chest and stooped shoulders, he wore a white silk blouse under a cowhide jerkin and ochre breeches tucked into calf-length boots of grey suede. From his right earlobe dangled a gold hoop; each finger was encased in a ring of gold, silver, or topaz. A bight in a girdle of plaited Madagascar hemp formed a crude sabretache allowing a square-bladed poniard to dangle from his right hip.
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