No Quarter by Broos Campbell

Author:Broos Campbell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781590133040
Publisher: McBooks Press
Published: 2007-04-01T04:00:00+00:00

Nine

“You return to us,” a voice remarked in beautiful French. “You had the nasty shock when the gun exploded, hein? Ah, you speak French, mon cher petit ami—c’est bon! Can you see my hand? How many fingers? Excellent! You may dispose of that disagreeable souvenir now.”

Somebody was holding me upright. My head lolled and most of me lay sprawled on the deck, and the rails and rigging rode past my vision as if I was drunk and a storm was blowing. I was clutching something: a black man’s lower arm, ripped off near the elbow, its hand clasped in mine. Splintered white bone protruded obscenely from its end. I tried to heave the thing overboard, but it flopped against the smoking shards of the three-pounder and fell wetly to the deck. A picaroon kicked the thing into the sea.

“À bonne chance,” said the same voice, “my men are able to recognize a military uniform, though it be soaked in blood. You are an American officer, yes? On the strength of this, I have prevented the hanging of yourself and your sailors for the time being. The civilian officers of this ship, however … Disgusting, is it not?”

Here I was aware of a delicate honey-brown hand whose manicured fingers and pink palm compelled my eyes to follow its gesture and look up at Peavey and his mate, Tommy, dangling by their necks from either end of the mainyard. Filth dripped down Tommy’s legs.

“Perhaps you would be so kind,” continued the voice, and I bob-bled my head around, looking for its source, “as to help me sort out your sailors from the men who belong to this ship. The first are to be interned at the jail in Guadeloupe. The others are smugglers who must be disposed of as justice dictates.”

I shook my head, and the world spun nauseatingly. “Tous le miens,” I managed.

“They cannot all be yours,” said the voice. “You must be confused. Understandably so, hein? No matter. There will be time enough to hang everyone once we have returned to our base and a citizens court can be convened. Ah, but as you can see, we are arrived.”

The picaroons were towing the Jane into a natural harbor through a break in the reef. It was a long and narrow anchorage, not easily visible from the sea, but it was deep enough for the Augustin von Steuben to ride there at anchor and for the Jane to slip in beside her. Field guns peered from thickets on the headlands at either side.

I twisted around to look to seaward as we passed through the reef. Away off to the north through the open railing I caught a glimpse of the sails of the still-becalmed squadron, tiny with distance, a smoky mist hanging over them. They looked terribly far away on the broad bright sea.

Astern, half a dozen picaroons rowed our gig into the cove, with no sign of the runaway Janes but the blood on their hands.

From General Villon’s left temple to the point of his swarthy chin ran a crooked purple scar.

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