Cat Island (Privateers & Gentlemen) Read online

  PRIVATEERS AND GENTLEMEN

  CAT ISLAND

  Walter Jon Williams

  Copyright 1984, 2012 by Walter Jon Williams

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written permission of the author, except where permitted by law.

  Thanks to

  C. J. Cherryh for her Napoleon stick,

  Melinda Snodgrass for her dance,

  Julie Beiser for her song

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  Collections

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  Frankensteins & Foreign Devils

  The Green Leopard Plague and Other Stories

  CAT ISLAND

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright 1984, 2012

  Other Books by Walter Jon Williams

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

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  CHAPTER ONE

  He drove the frigate so hard he nearly had the sticks out of her. Every day at least two hundred miles passed beneath Macedonian’s keel, and then he drove her harder. He was shaping his course for New Orleans.

  Strictly speaking, Macedonian was not his to command. He had not been appointed to the ship by the Secretary of the Navy— when her previous captain was ordered away from a ship complete and ready for sea, he’d read himself aboard, then taken her out of New London in the face of an October storm, past the British blockade, and out to the freedom of the seas.

  Captain Favian Markham had been aboard less than a month. Rail thin, dyspeptic, and four inches over six feet, he stood alone on the quarterdeck, a stranger to most of his officers and crew— and he drove them all without mercy, his eyes upturned to the masts and yards, his mind filled with calculations to get more speed out of her.

  He drank coffee by the gallon and barely slept at all— he forever sent crewmen to the sheets or braces to make a trifling adjustment, to man the weather main and lee crossjack braces, to fuss with the studding sail guys and the squilgees... he watched intently as the upper masts groaned with every gust, a sound to make every aboard shudder as they envisioned the masts tearing right out of her in a ruin of splinters and canvas. Favian Markham watched as the chesstrees moaned and the hull worked, as seawater jetted through the strained seams— and then when the hairs on the back of the sailors’ necks were erect, anticipating the topgallants all going by the board, the captain would call up the watch and calmly order them to lay aloft, put on the lift-jiggers, and stand by the booms to rig the starboard topgallant studding sails. The watch would go aloft half convinced that they were doomed, that their very silhouettes on the yards might catch enough wind to bring the whole complex system of masts and rigging down.

  The crew were terrified he’d kill them all and roll the ship under. They knew he’d lost one ship already.

  It was small comfort that Macedonian’s voyage had been successful. Off Antigua Macedonian had crept up on a British corvette at night, and captured her with scarcely a casualty— but ever since parting company from the capture, Macedonian had been flying west as fast as her canvas wings could carry her. Flying until in a brilliant October dawn, beneath wheeling seabirds tinged pink by the sunrise, the dark, low mass of the Mississippi Delta appeared off the starboard bow.

  When the frigate lay for four hours off the Southeast Pass of the Mississippi waiting for the tide, Captain Markham was gratified to see the crew standing by the rail fidgeting, as impatient as he to get the Father of Waters under the keel. Even the tide didn’t add enough to the fourteen foot over the bar: Macedonian was kedged over only after pumping out most of her water and shifting some supplies into the boats, and then had to work its way up the long river— a frustrating and difficult job, for soon it was night and there was no pilot available.

  In the morning the frigate anchored under the guns of Fort St. Philip on the Plaquemines Bend, seventy-five miles below New Orleans, and Favian, his boat’s crew, Lieutenant Eastlake and Midshipmen Lovette and Stanhope, impatient with the slow journey in the frigate, took swifter passage on the pilot boat Beaux Jours, hailed just after dawn as it was heading downriver to the Head of the Passes.

  Favian, happy to let another captain do the work, spent the journey in his bunk asleep, using as a pillow a satchel of British documents taken from the Carnation. The sleep was dreamless, obliterating, and totally free of interruption. He was oblivious to the stamping of the crew, the movements of the other passengers, the sound of the mainsheet block being shifted over his head, the final splash of the anchor and the roaring of the cable— oblivious of everything until the hand of Lieutenant Eastlake came mercilessly on his shoulder and shook him awake.

  “Captain Markham,” came the calm, Virginian voice. “We have arrived.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  “We’re becalmed just under the city,” Eastlake said. “Captain Poquelin says we’ll have a wind shortly. There’s coffee and a cold breakfast in the saloon.”

  “Thank you, Mr. Eastlake.”

  Favian drew on trousers and a coat and stepped up on deck. The crew were crowded forward, eating breakfast from a common pot with Kuusikoski, Favian’s coxswain, and the crew of Favian’s boat. It was not yet dawn; the sky was a deep blue, spotted with fading stars; the banks on either side were pitch black, devoid of detail. The river, a moving darkness grander than anything Favian had ever seen, tugged insistently at the anchored pilot boat. Without a wind the air seemed thick, and it carried scents that were alien to Favian, the aromas of a strange land that he did not know but
was bound to defend.

  Far off, on the left bank, a rooster crowed and was answered by another rooster on the right bank. There was no light, no dwelling visible, no sign of the roosters’ owners or their habitations.

  Favian knew that the naval commander in New Orleans was Master-Commandant Daniel Todd Patterson, who had fought in Tripoli and been captured with the Philadelphia. Favian did not know him personally, but he knew that a great deal would depend on him and on his readiness— Patterson’s readiness, not only in the military sense but his readiness to cooperate as well. Favian outranked Patterson by a full grade, and that was easy enough, but then Patterson, as the commander of the entire New Orleans squadron—a couple of schooners, Favian remembered, and perhaps a dozen little dandy-rigged gunboats—was entitled to call himself commodore and to wear the silver stars of that honorary rank upon his shoulder straps—or epaulet, rather, since a master-commandant had only one.

  Patterson had been his own master for years. He had been freed from the interference of Washington by his distance from the capital, and his federal authority had freed him from interference by the recently formed State of Louisiana. The New Orleans station had in essence been Patterson’s private fief. And now there arrived in New Orleans Captain Favian Markham, a more senior officer who could alter any of Patterson’s arrangements, redispose his forces, and strip the silver star from Patterson’s shoulder. And Favian was an officer who, because of the documents he’d taken from the Carnation, would do all those things if necessary.

  Master-Commandant Patterson could prove as dangerous to the American cause as the British, Favian knew— or, if he saw the danger, knew his job, and showed himself ready to cooperate, he could prove as valuable as a ship of the line. Whichever he was, a risk or a blessing, Favian would have to know soon; and so he had determined that, before he did anything else in New Orleans, he would call upon Commodore Daniel Patterson.

  The sky lightened to a pearly gray in the east; the stars faded, and details of the low landscape became visible. The Mississippi River had created all the land here, carrying the soil from the interior; Favian could see the levees raised to keep off the flood, a long plain to the north, cut by canals, with a blackness of an unknown swamp behind. An alien land, he knew. He would need allies here, and he hoped Patterson would prove to be one.

  “The plains of Chalmette,” said a voice. Favian turned to find Captain Poquelin, a thin, short, unshaven man with a big voice, his hands in his pockets. “The city is ahead, ’round that big bend.” Poquelin removed a hand from a pocket and made a sweeping gesture, indicating the curve of the river. “The wind will come up soon— I can see the cat’s-paws on the water. We should arrive at the city in an hour.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Favian said.

  “Have you been to New Orleans before?” Poquelin asked, with difficulty wrapping his tongue around a name that he was probably more used to pronouncing as Nouvelle Orleans.

  “No,” Favian said politely, in French. “I have not had that pleasure.”

  Poquelin grinned, replying in the same language. “It is very unusual for a Kaintuck to speak French— even the governor does not, and the people used to call him ce bête to his face. Not any more— M. Claiborne was elected by a handsome majority, after Louisiana became a state.”

  “All my officers speak French,” Favian said, trusting that Captain Poquelin would never encounter Tolbert and a few of the other midshipmen. “But what was that name you gave me? Canuck—that is a Canadian, is it not?”

  “Kaintuck,” Poquelin said. “It is the name we giver American flatboat men, because the first we saw all came down the river from Kentucky. It’s often used as an insult, of course. Alors— the wind comes, Captain. I must get you to the city.”

  The hands were called to the windlass, topping lifts, and halliards; Favian, aware that the Beaux Jours was not his own ship, and that here he was only in the way of the trampling crew, went below to the saloon and had his breakfast of coffee, cold beef, and pickles. He ate efficiently in his doeskin gloves, worn to conceal the injuries he’d suffered in the Experiment wreck.

  After the pilot boat was under way, Favian went on deck again to watch as the boat, tacking laboriously against the current, passed the plantations of Chalmette, Macarty, Languille, Sigur, Pierhas, Dupre, and Montreuil, each pointed out by the captain who stood by the rail and spat tobacco into the great river. New Orleans appeared ahead as the schooner zigzagged across the water. The day had lightened, though flambeaux were still burning on the New Orleans wharves and showed that work had been going on through the night. Through his pocket telescope Favian could see gangs of black workmen rolling barrels up the gangplank of a steamboat, which had to be the New Orleans, one of Robert Fulton’s boats that had been built in Pittsburgh and had sailed down the Ohio and Mississippi a few years before.

  The waterfront consisted chiefly of great brick warehouses, the shingled mansard roofs showing the region’s Gallic influence. The few private homes Favian could see over the long levee reminded Favian of homes he had seen in Spain rather than France. They were stacked close to one another between wide streets, had a wide balcony out front shading a pillared veranda, and many were painted in pleasant pastel shades. The graceful riverfront homes were flat-roofed like the houses of Tripoli, allowing visitors to walk from one roof to the next: the effect was graceful though alien, confirming Favian’s intuition that this was not a typical American frontier town but a hybrid city, half-American, half-European, with well-established traditions of its own around which he would have to tread warily. He shifted his spyglass to the vessels flying the American commission pendant.

  These were two schooners, the Louisiana and Carolina, both anchored in the river some distance from the wharves. They both appeared in good order, rigging well maintained, white trim glistening on their billetheads and taffrails. Favian could see a commodore’s forked pendant flying from the main truck of the smaller. He did not know if Patterson slept aboard his flagship or had apartments in town, but he’d pay his respects to the flagship first.

  There were three dandy-rigged gunboats anchored near the schooners, and they did not present as fine an appearance. Though one seemed in trim condition, the others were not: their sloop-topmasts and running rigging had been sent down; they were not flying commission pendants; the air of disuse and neglect was obvious. Favian had himself spent five hated years as a gunboat commander; he thoroughly detested the offspring of Thomas Jefferson’s attempt to purchase national defense on the cheap with these absurd, unseaworthy craft; and it was not unusual, he knew, for half a dozen of the incompetently designed boats to be laid up in any port of the Union, abandoned by the Navy as unsafe or useless. But he also knew that if New Orleans was to be defended from what he knew was coming, such gunboats as were present would form an important part of the city’s naval defense. Their neglect here seemed alarming.

  More of the city came into view as the Beaux Jours rounded the bend; Favian focused his glass on the waterfront and saw, much to his surprise, a black vessel he recognized. He had last seen her in Portsmouth over a year and a half ago, just before he’d taken Experiment out on its raid to England; she’d been unfinished then, lying on the ways at Stanhope’s shipyard, but there was no possibility of a mistake— her lines were unforgettable. They had been drawn by Joshua Stanhope, the grandfather of the midshipman Phillip Stanhope now finishing his breakfast in the saloon of the Beaux Jours. Old Joshua had designed ships for the Markham family since before the Revolution, and this was clearly a work of something like genius.

  She was a tern schooner of radical design, designed for one thing only: to be the fastest Yankee privateer on the high seas, able to overtake any prey, even the swift Post Office packets, while outrunning any pursuit. The rake of her masts was prodigious, particularly the mizzenmast that leaned aft like a drunken sailor in a three-reef gale, actually overhanging the projecting stern; the yards were as long as those on a frigate and could raise alo
ft a cloud of canvas so vast that her fine-lined hull could drive through the waves as fast as a dolphin.

  She would be dangerous, Favian knew, and require constant watching. In a wind the oversparred schooner could be rolled right over on her beam-ends, but an American seaman would view that as a challenge rather than a threat. Favian remembered the jealousy he had felt seeing the radical schooner on the Portsmouth yards and knowing that it would be at sea gathering a fortune in prize money, all while Favian himself captained the slow, cranky Experiment, which would be lucky if it were not captured by a fast British cruiser the minute it stuck its jib out of port. Even now that he commanded a thirty-eight-gun frigate, Favian felt a touch of that jealousy.

  Favian knew the tern schooner had done well since— he knew because he knew her owner and commander: Captain Gideon Markham of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, Favian’s privateering cousin.

  Favian had not seen his cousin since before the warm and with sudden surprise Favian realized that he carried bad news for Gideon. Gideon’s father, Josiah, had died in September; he wondered if Gideon knew. The mail might take a long time getting down the Ohio and Mississippi from Pittsburgh, and Josiah Markham had died only ten weeks before... Favian feared that it would be he who would bring the sad report to his cousin.

  “Mr. Stanhope,” Favian said, seeing the midshipman coming out of the scuttle with his friend Lovette. They were both exceptionally promising apprentice officers, intelligent and standing fair to make their mark in the Navy: Stanhope had been with Favian in the Experiment and Irwin Lovette had been given high marks by all Macedonian’s officers.

  Stanhope gave the low, lush, leveed land a glance, then approached and saluted: a dark-haired, lithe, serious young man in a battered, much-mended uniform. Favian handed him the pocket telescope. “There is one of your grandfather’s designs— that schooner yonder.”