Jack Iron (4 page)

“Up you go now, and try not to muss the covers and be sure not to spill any of your dinner in bed, for you’ll be sleeping on these very linens.” The widow placed the tray of food on the table near the bed. She took care not to meet O’Keefe’s openmouthed stare.

“See here. I ain’t no wet nurse!” he protested. He looked at his daughter for help, but Raven covered her smile with the back of her hand and fled the room. “Raven. We haven’t settled the matter of these men… uh… Daughter!” He scowled. “Goddammit!”

Madame LeBeouf reached out and caught Iron Hand O’Keefe by his ear and gave it a terrible tweak.

“Yeow!”

“Watch your mouth—there’s a child present,” the widow painfully reminded her former lover. “The kind of sweet boy we might have had if only you’d been willing to surrender your heathen ways and live among your own kind.” Madame LeBeouf sniffed as if to hold back her mock tears. O’Keefe wasn’t fooled for a second. He glared at the eight-year-old who crawled up to take his place in bed alongside the burly Irishman.

“Any child of ours would’ve been full of piss and vinegar, wild as a wolf cub with twice the bite.”

“I would have refined him,” Madame LeBeouf flatly replied. Then she filled a plate with ribs and corn dumplings for Johnny, who silently accepted his meal. It was obvious he was as uneasy about this sleeping arrangement as the big man next to him. O’Keefe watched the widow load a plate for him and then hand it over.

“Enjoy your meal. My guests are below and it would be rude for me to tarry.”

“When you coming back?” O’Keefe surreptitiously nodded in the direction of the lad who was hungrily devouring dinner.

“I can’t tell. It depends on whether or not that handsome Mr. Belouche has arrived. They say he taught the Laffite brothers all they know of swordsmanship. I, too, should like to test his mettle.”

“I’m under your roof but one night and already I am the cuckold,” O’Keefe complained.

“Heal yourself, Peter O’Keefe, and I might change my mind—you hairy old bear.” The widow winked, and tugged his beard and kissed O’Keefe on the forehead, and then left the room with a swirl of her lace-trimmed dress. A trace of rosewater and lilac lingered in the air to mark her passing.

“Hrumph!” O’Keefe grumbled, and fixed the boy in a steely stare. “I aim to eat, then drink me another hot buttered rum and then sleep. You don’t interfere and we’ll get along.”

“I don’t like this any better than you.” Johnny gnawed the meat from a rib bone and dropped it back into the bowl, then sopped some juices with a corn dumpling. “I’d hardly call you a nosegay. And if we looked real close, we might find a flock of crows nesting in that briar thicket you call a beard.”

O’Keefe was taken aback by the boy’s outburst. Johnny Fuller was hardly the shy and quiet type. The Irishman had been deceived by the lad’s show, the way Johnny had clung to the widow and hidden behind the folds of her dress.

“Smart whelp, eh?” O’Keefe scowled. “Mind you keep a civil tongue in your head or I’ll cut it out and toss the meat to the widow’s hound outside.” The Irishman grunted in satisfaction, and spearing a particularly stringy morsel of meat, he plopped it in his mouth and wiped his lips on his sleeve.

“Too late for that,” Johnny said. “You just ate him.”

“Christ almighty,” O’Keefe muttered, and spat the chunk of meat halfway across the room. It landed a few feet from the hearth. Only when Johnny could no longer hold back his laughter did the Irishman realize the trick the eight-year-old had played on him. He started to scold the boy, but launched into a spasm of coughs that shook the bed. Finally, when the worst of it subsided, O’Keefe caught his breath and muttered, “You’re a black-hearted ragamuffin.”

“Did I do something wrong?” Johnny asked, all innocence again.

O’Keefe sat up in bed and, with his hook, skewered a chunk of meat from Johnny’s bowl. The boy fell silent as the Irishman slowly nibbled at the morsel. The ominous demonstration had the desired effect. Iron Hand licked the grease from the vicious-looking barb that capped his stump.

“How’d you lose it?” the boy asked, staring at the hook.

“A shipmate of mine asked me to lend him a hand. I did. The impudent son of a bitch never brought it back.” O’Keefe looked completely serious.

Johnny Fuller was a child in years, but the eight-year-old knew a tall tale when he heard it.

“I may have been born at night, Mr. O’Keefe, but it wasn’t
last
night,” the boy retorted.

Iron Hand O’Keefe chuckled and settled back against the pillow. The lad was as sharp as a needle and there was no denying his spunk. Reminds me of me, thought the Irishman, resolving to keep his observations to himself. Johnny Fuller was cocky enough.

C
ESAR OBREGON TOOK HIS
hair snips and carefully trimmed the curled tips of his blond mustache, then cleared a little of the “underbrush” from around his mouth. When he walked Raven out into the night and took his kisses, he wanted her to feel the full effect of his sensuous lips. Cesar Obregon was a fair-skinned Castilian garbed in a black waistcoat and trousers and a black silk shirt that fit loosely over his slender six-foot frame. His straight ash blond hair was brushed back from his features and hidden beneath a black silk bandanna that covered his head. His fingers were long and slender, his physique wiry and as resilient as whipcord. His brown eyes never wavered as he concentrated on trimming his mustache.

“If vanity were a virtue, you’d be a saint.” Obregon shifted the mirror to the flat homely features of Honeyboy Biggs, the chief gunner aboard the
Windthrift.

“And if I was a temperamental captain, you’d be a mute,” Obregon said. With a twist of the wrist, Biggs vanished from the hand mirror, a gilt-edged trinket that had found its way into Obregon’s possession during his days as a freebooter. The privateer finished his trim and then reappraised his appearance. Damn, if there was a finer-looking gentleman in all of New Orleans, Cesar Obregon didn’t know the man. He sat the mirror down.

“Come outside and join us by the fire. Young Reyner Blanche has his concertina, and Angel Mendoza has cooked up a squirrel stew that’s fit for King George if he were but sane enough to hoist a spoon.” Biggs was a rotund seaman in beige baggy breeches, loose yellow shirt, and a heavy wool coat made of beaver pelts to ward off the cold. Biggs was bald save for a fringe of soot-colored hair that crept up from his bushy sideburns and trailed off in a shaggy growth just past his ears.

“It is a fine crew I have,
mi amigo
, but not a one of my brave
compadres
can hold a candle to the senorita that awaits me on Bourbon Street.”

“A half-breed girl, eh?” Biggs snorted in disapproval. “You’ve enjoyed the charms of many a fair maid. What makes this girl so special?” Biggs hooked his thumbs in the wide leather belt circling his waist. At forty-six, he was old enough to be Obregon’s father and tended to address his captain in a paternal manner when the two of them were alone. “Now see here, my fine Hawk, this girl brings trouble, you mark me well. A man like Kit McQueen is no trifle either. Going against him will be inviting misfortune, like a hard tack in a hurricane. I warrant McQueen’s sent under his fair share of men or I’m a three-toed lizard.”

“I can handle the lieutenant,” Obregon replied, and for added emphasis, he reached toward his wrists and in a blur of motion freed a pair of double-edge throwing knives from the sheaths hidden beneath his sleeves. The six-inch blades glittered in the lantern light. The image of a hawk’s menacing talons had been etched into the length of the watered steel. They were silent, deadly weapons in the hands of a capable man. Obregon was a master and had a powerful arm that could hurl the daggers with uncanny accuracy.

“You forget this Hawk has talons,” Obregon replied.

“The girl is not worth it.”

“How would you know, my fat friend? When was the last time you took a wench to your ample lap without first crossing her palm with silver?”

Biggs scowled at the Hawk of the Antilles. Obregon’s words cut as deeply as the daggers hidden in the Castilian’s sleeves. “Hmmm,” he muttered, and “Humm” again, and glanced around the cabin that was but one of many hurriedly erected structures dotting the fallow fields of the Chalmette plantation south of New Orleans. Jackson’s Tennessee Volunteers lived in damp leaky huts and drafty barns, while the Baratarians like Obregon and his crew and Laffite’s freebooters had furnished their makeshift abodes with comfortable bedding, woven ground coverings, and tables and chairs brought out from their homes in town. Even the commonest privateer had a chest of belongings to make his miserable station more endurable. Manning the breastworks that guarded the southern approach to the city was onerous enough without sacrificing the pleasantries of a civilized existence, thought the Baratarians.

“It is a wise captain who curries his gunner’s favor. One day you may need these sharp eyes o’ mine when we pull a broadside and dance under the cannon of a war brig just waiting to blow us out of the water.” Biggs’s expression brightened as his gaze settled on a bottle of jack iron, raw cane rum with a bite like an alligator.

“And just what might you do, chief gunner?” asked Obregon, playing along with the older man’s game.

“I might just blink,” said Biggs, and with a smile of self-satisfaction he confiscated the bottle of rum and headed for the door.

“Where are you going with that, old thief?”

“Me and the lads thank ye for your generosity. As you’ll be warmin’ your toes at the widow’s tea table, we aim to fire some jack iron to keep us from freezin’ on this damn winter’s night.” A bracing cold gust of wind brushed past the man in the doorway and blasted into the room. Obregon reached for his frock coat, and followed his gunner and his bottle of jack iron out into the night air.

A group of men were huddled around the leaping flame of Angel Mendoza’s cookfire. The cook was crouching over a black kettle and stirring the contents with a long-handled wooden spoon. He lifted the spoon to his lips and took a taste while the remaining dozen men looked on in hopeful anticipation that Mendoza might pronounce the stew “done” and allow the hungry crewmen to dig in. Mendoza was a well-scrubbed privateer who served not only as the cook but the surgeon aboard the
Windthrift.
Mendoza had fled the Inquisition in Spain, choosing to live as a pirate for himself rather than die a martyr for God.

Mendoza’s hair was streaked with silver though he was only thirty-four. His knowledge of medicine was limited, but his prowess with cauterizing iron and bone saw were unmatched. He could remove a limb and stanch the flow of blood in a matter of minutes, no mean feat under fire. And he could cook, too.

“The man has a way with squirrel,” Biggs remarked.

Obregon kept the cabin between him and the north wind that had ceased its swirling gusts and was coming straight on as the sun set behind the eight-foot-tall breastworks built a hundred yards from the Mississippi. A makeshift palisade of mud and cypress logs protected Andrew Jackson’s beleaguered forces while the British continued to mass their troops, gathering strength, feinting against the far perimeters to test the mettle of their American adversaries. Well, it appeared the British wouldn’t attack today—a fact for which Obregon was profoundly grateful. With Kit McQueen pitching a cold camp somewhere in the woods south of town, Cesar Obregon, the Hawk of the Antilles, would have Raven O’Keefe all to himself. Obregon doubted the rumors of English patrols. The Choctaws were not the most reliable military observers, as far as Cesar Obregon was concerned. The last laugh was on McQueen. Obregon grinned. He noticed Biggs studying him.

“I’d give your weight in gold,” Obregon said, patting his gunner’s rounded paunch, “to see the look on McQueen’s face when he discovers the name I wrote in the dirt by the fire.”

Biggs shook his head. But he resisted the temptation to upbraid his youthful captain for such brash conduct. He was filled with misgivings. But what was the use of talking common sense to such a man as Obregon? Like the mythical sirens that lured ancient mariners to destruction, the Hawk of the Antilles was a prisoner of his own passions. Biggs, the loyal chief gunner, quietly resolved to save Cesar Obregon from himself—if such a thing were possible.

Black-haired handsome Reynor Blanche began to play a merry jig upon his concertina. A lithe and nimble lad, he leaped and kicked his heels while his shipmates sang. The privateers’ rough voices warmed their souls against the cold creeping in on darkening wings of dusk.

Obregon dug down into his coat and stepped out of the windbreak and headed for the dun-colored mare he had ridden out from town. The Hawk could feel the chief gunner’s eyes boring into him as he tried to leave. Obregon decided to take Biggs into his confidence and turned to face the older man, leaning in close and keeping his voice low.

“It is not for beauty alone that I attend the widow’s party,” Obregon said. “Jean Laffite has learned that Jackson’s Tennessee reinforcements brought a pay chest with them for the general to use at his discretion.”

“Gold!” Biggs exclaimed, and then continued in a hushed tone. “Where?”

“The war chest is hidden aboard a surgeon’s wagon. And to keep from calling attention to it, the general has hidden the wagon in the widow LeBeouf’s carriage shed.”

“Why doesn’t he just issue us our pay and settle with his Tennesseans and Kentuckians?” Biggs was skeptical, but anything was possible.

“Jackson’s a shrewd one,” Obregon said. “By the time we’ve driven off the British, there’s bound to be a lot less of us.”

“And more profit for himself, the clever rogue,” the gunner finished. “Is it well guarded?”

“That is what I intend to find out tonight,” Obregon grinned.

“Then you have my blessing,
Captain Romeo
, and God speed you on your way,” Biggs said, handing him the reins.

Cesar Obregon swung a leg over the saddle and mounted up astride the patient dun. Reins in hand, the Hawk of the Antilles pointed the animal north to New Orleans and tonight’s passion—and tomorrow’s profit.