The Invasion Year (3 page)

Raised from the cradle to hate the French like the very Devil, as all good Englishmen should, with anger and grief over Caroline’s murder to stoke his hatred white-hot, still … Lewrie could not make war on helpless civilians, on women or children. He’d had a moment, admittedly, when ordering a broadside had been
so
tempting, but he had not. He could have taken them all back to Jamaica with the navy crews of the other prizes, but … had they not suffered enough?
They
were innocent of Caroline’s death, and New Orleans had been so close by.

Which camp’s Loring in, I wonder?
Lewrie thought as the oarsmen set a powerful stroke seaward;
Am I saint or sinner, to him?

*   *   *

“Ah, Captain Lewrie, welcome, sir,” Commodore Loring said, with all evident delight as Lewrie entered the great-cabins. “A glass, will you, sir?”

“Aye, that’d be fine, sir,” Lewrie replied, looking about at the gathering of officers. A steward came with a glass of cool Rhenish for him, and Lewrie took a tentative sip.

“Captain John Bligh, of
Theseus,
” Loring went on, doing the introductions, “Captain Barré … Captain Lewrie of
Reliant
. Pardons, for my brevity, but, French pride, and their touchy sense of honour, force me to be brief. I am sending a delegation to General Rochambeau once more, his last warning. Does he not sail out and strike his colours, I will leave him to the doubtful mercies of the rebel Blacks. At the same time, I am despatching another delegation ashore to speak with this so-called General Dessalines, and his cohorts. Bligh and Barré are to speak for me, Lewrie, but, given your long experience with the colony of Saint Domingue, I thought it useful to send you along with them, Lewrie … to supply these gentlemen with your insights.”

What?
Lewrie thought, gawping. His mouth dropped agape at the idea, his eyes went wide. What
bloody experience
? What
insights
?

“Beg pardon, sir?” Lewrie said, once he’d got his breath back. “In a previous commission, I came t’know the
coasts
main-well, but as for what passes ashore…”

“Did you not enter Mole Saint Nicholas?” Loring snapped, peering at him owlishly. “Spend some time ashore at Port-Au-Prince, when our army was here?”

One night … in a whore-house,
Lewrie recalled.

“We were
close ashore
at Mole Saint Nicholas, sir, providing indirect fire for our troops,” Lewrie explained. “I
did
go ashore for a day, to visit a friend at his regiment, and
dined
ashore that night, in Port-Au-Prince … the night the city was invested by L’Ouverture and his army, and we began the evacuation, sir.”

Those damned drums!
He remembered how they’d thudded like bloody beating hearts, ripped from the chests of the massacred.
They scared the piss outta me, for certain, and put my “high-yellow” girl into pluperfect shits, t’boot. Don’t see how
that’s
useful.

“No fluency in their Creole lingo?” Captain Barré asked, a brow up in doubt. “No background information?”

“I doubt anyone speaks their private
patois,
sir,” Lewrie told him, “but, they deal with the outside world in French, don’t they? As for background information, well … I did pick up on who-hates-who and how much, the various massacres and betrayals, but…”

“Know much of Dessalines, do you?” Captain Barré pressed, now with a faint sneer of disappointment. “Christophe, Petion, and Clairveaux?”

“All four of ’em have been betrayed, betrayed each other, even turned on L’Ouverture, more times than I’ve had hot suppers, Captain Barré,” Lewrie replied. He had no wish to go ashore and deal with the rebel generals, no wish to put himself at
that
much risk, but the way Barré spoke to him rankled. “None of ’em have a
shred
o’ trust for any Europeans, at this point,” he added, after a sip of his cool-ish wine.

“And with good reason,” Commodore Loring interjected. “After what the late, un-lamented, General LeClerc, and this chap Rochambeau, did to them. They came with a plan for complete extermination of any Blacks living on the island, and thought to re-populate it with fresh slaves, unaffected by thoughts of independence, or liberty. That is the only way that Saint Domingue could be returned to profitability,” Loring said with a shrug. “Their principal exports
depend
upon slave labour. Rochambeau deliberately rounded up Blacks and Mulattoes, and drowned them by the umpteen-thousands, right here in Le Cap Bay, not a year past.”

“They’ll burn the ships, and the survivors, to Hell,” Captain John Bligh said with a sigh. “With very good cause. Unless we arrange for the French departure.”

“I will offer Rochambeau and his naval officers rescue from that fate,” Loring told them. “But, only if they sail out by the deadline he has agreed to with Dessalines, tomorrow. I will allow them to fire broadsides, as honourable
tokens,
before striking their colours. But, that is
all
I will allow. For the sake of humanity, I wish the rebel generals to accede to that arrangement. You gentlemen will deliver to Dessalines the full meaning of my terms to Rochambeau, and extract from him an agreement that he will not fire upon the French ships,”

“
If
they obey you, sir, and leave harbour,” Lewrie pointed out. “If Rochambeau does not? Fort Picolet’s forges are
already
kindled.”

“Then, let us pray that General Rochambeau has seen that, too, and will be convinced that departing Cap François is in his best interests, hmm?” Commodore Loring replied.

“
All
of us, sir?” Captain Barré, ever a skeptic, enquired with a cutty-eyed glance at Lewrie.

“Aye … all of you,” Loring told the man with a shrug, cocking his head to one side as if thinking that three was more impressive than two; or, that, seeing as how they were already up and
dressed
…?

“Well, then … let’s be about it, hey?” Lewrie said, tossing off his wine and plastering a confident smile on his phyz, no matter the gurgly qualms in his nether regions that threatened to make themselves known to one and all.

Aye, I’ll go,
he told himself;
if only to rankle Barré!

CHAPTER THREE

They landed at the quays in Commodore Loring’s barge, a rather more impressive conveyance than any of their captains’ gigs, with her oarsmen tricked out in snowy white slop-trousers, shirts and stockings, flat tarred hats with fluttering long ribbons painted with the name of Loring’s flagship, in fresh-blacked shoes with silver-plated buckles, and dark-blue short jackets with polished brass buttons.

And, just in case, with cutlasses, muskets, and pistols stowed out of sight under water-proof tarred tarpaulins in the boat’s sole!

They, and their white flag of truce, were met by a guard of honour, and a fellow who introduced himself as a Colonel who spoke fluent, almost Parisian, French, and heavily accented English. The soldiers of the guard, warm though it was, were accoutred as well as any soldiers that Lewrie had seen in Paris during the Peace of Amiens, from their brass-trimmed shakoes to their trousers, with dark blue tail-coats and white waist-coats, white-leather crossbelts with brass plates shining. None wore stockings or shoes, though.

The Colonel, by name of Mirabois, wore a fore-and-aft bicorne hat with an egret plume and lots of gold lace, a snug double-breasted uniform coat with lavish gilt acanthus leaves embroidered on pocket flaps, his sleeve cuffs, and the stiff standing collars of the coat.

Sweat himself t’death, in all that wool,
Lewrie thought.

“
Bonjour, messieurs! Vous
’ave come to surrender to us,
oui
?

“Er, ehm … what?” Captain Bligh gawped, taken by surprise.

“Ze
tout petite plaisanterie,
ha ha? Ze wee jest?”

“Oh. Ha ha. I see, ehm,” Bligh flummoxed. “Commodore Loring, ehm … our Commodore in command of His Britannic Majesty’s squadron now lying off Cap François, has directed us to deliver a proposal to your General Dessalines, and a request to speak with him, should that be possible,” Bligh explained in halting schoolboy French.

As nigh-illiterate as me,
Lewrie thought, noting how Captain Barré, their resident critic, pursed his lips and almost grimaced to hear it. Bligh was surely senior to him, else Barré would have been the one to conduct the negotiations. And was certain that he would’ve been more effective at it. He was frowning like an irate tutor at his student’s lack of fluency!

Bligh introduced them all, then waited, his document held out in expectation that it would be accepted, and whisked off to Dessalines, instanter. In the short period of their landing and introductions, a substantial crowd of the curious had gathered; poor field slaves still in the cheap nankeen short trousers and loose smocks of slavery, their women in shapeless longer smocks, and the children in barely any garments at all. Many of them had cane-cutter knives or
machetes
shoved into rough rope belts … or in their hands. Ominously, some of the better-garbed looters in incongruous finery, and better-armed with captured muskets or pistols, joined them, muttering and scowling.

French, English … bloody
Russians, Lewrie thought with a bit of rising dread;
We’re White … their blood enemies. This could get
very
ugly!

“
Messieurs,
I leave ze guard
pour vôtre
boat,
oui
?
Et,
I will escort
vous au Le Tigre,
’is own face,” Colonel Mirabois offered, then turned and barked orders to his men. A round dozen of his soldiers formed a protective line to protect the barge, its wide-eyed Midshipman, Coxswain, and oarsmen, at the head of the quay, and another dozen formed to either side of their party.

Like prisoners, off t’the guillotine or firin’ squad,
Lewrie imagined, with (it must be admitted) a bit of a chill shudder.

A Black sergeant gleefully called a fast “heep-heep” pace as they were marched off to see “Le Tigre,” Dessalines, face-to-face.

“Think they’d’ve laid on some horses,” Captain Bligh whispered from the side of his mouth, panting a bit at the pace.

“Already ate ’em, most-like,” Lewrie whispered back, unable to quell his sense of humour, no matter the risk they faced. “And, how come there’s still so many Whites ashore, I wonder?” he pointed out.

It was uncanny; it was downright eerie, that long march through the littered streets. Now they were under official escort, the Blacks and lighter Mulattoes stood and scowled at the strange officers, with no sound; no jeering or hooting as they’d heard at the quays. Around the edges of the crowds stood White French colonists, men, women, and children; Lewrie could pick out the ones he imagined had been wealthy planters and slave owners, rich traders and exporters, by the finery of their clothing. The
grands blancs
, Lewrie recalled their being called. The others, though … the ones in humbler suits or working-men’s garb, with their women in simpler, drabber gowns, and the children in the same sort of hand-me-down “shabby” one could see in poorer neighbourhoods in England, were the artificers, the shopkeepers, the greengrocers, fruiterers, and skilled labourers, the
petits blancs
who might never have been able to aspire to owning slaves.

What had Jemmy Peel told him, when in the West Indies on Foreign Office Secret Branch doings in the ’90s and sniffing about how to undermine the French, the slave rebellion, or both?

Saint Domingue, or Hayti, was a bubbling cauldron of rebellion; poor Whites versus their betters; Mulattoes versus darker, illiterate field hands; house servants siding with masters in some cases, murdering them in others.
Petits blancs
then siding with Mulattoes like General Rigaud down south round Jacmel to fight L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and the others … and all wrenched from time to time by siding with the French if they’d seemed to have the upper hand, with the British when their own army had landed, even looking for shelter and security by allying themselves with the Spanish in the other half of Hispaniola, if that looked better!

“Uhm … Colonel Mirabois,” Lewrie asked, at last, his curiosity aroused, “I note a fair number of …
blancs
still in the city. Were they not able to find space aboard the ships?”