1812: The Rivers of War (54 page)

Marie glared at him. “Since when do you start spoutin’ this crazy Scots-Irishman’s radical notions?”

“You only known me a short while, girl,” Charles protested.

Marie’s glare never wavered. After a bit, Charles grinned and shrugged. “Didn’ say I did. But ’e’s right about that. And I’ll tell you what else.”

Ball clapped a friendly hand on Driscol’s shoulder, spilling some of the liquor from Driscol’s glass onto his lap. But nobody noticed. It wasn’t as if those were the first liquor stains on the now-bedraggled uniform.

“This here fine Irishman ain’t the first white friend I’ve ever had. Been several of them, before, in the navy. Still got some, in fact—three o’ our new unit is white, just ’cause they more comfortable with us than they was with the others. And you know what, girl? Not a one of those white-boy friends of mine had any bigger pot to piss in than I did.”

“Aye!” Driscol exclaimed, gesturing dramatically with his glass. The liquor stains on his trousers expanded. “That’s the point, Marie. I didn’t say poor people were virtuous. I’ve known far too many of them to think any such foolishness. All I’m saying
is that they can be—because the money isn’t standing in the way.”

He pointed to her hand. “Look there, woman. If that skin is ‘black,’ I’ll eat this fancy officer’s hat.”

“High yeller, we call it,” Ball said. He did his best to keep a smug tone out of his voice. His best was … not very good.

Marie’s lips twisted. “There’s a lot more white in me than black, is the truth of it. Not that it matters any.”

“Aye, and that’s the point, also. It didn’t matter to somebody else, either, or you wouldn’ be here at all.”

“You livin’ in the clouds! Maybe it didn’t matter when the blood was running hot, but it sure mattered afterward. Not a one of those white forefathers of mine ever married one of those black foremothers.” She hesitated a moment, taking a drink from her own glass. “Well. All right. I know that one of them wanted to, and lived as if he did. But the law didn’t allow for it.”

“Aye. And who passed the law? Poor men, or rich men?”

Driscol rose from the chair. He needed to use his remaining arm to brace himself, and still had trouble. He was very, very drunk, he realized. Drunker than he’d been in years.

“Feels good,” he muttered, thinking not of the drunkenness but the reason for it. It was nice to have lots of friends again. That had been missing, since Ireland, except for a few stretches in the emperor’s army.

“I’ll be to bed now, so’s to leave the two of you to yourselves. You don’t mind, I’ll just use a part of your floor.”

Marie nodded. There was a certain air of satisfaction about the gesture, as if she’d just scored a point in the debate.

“You best do so! You try makin’ it back to your officer’s quarters, in your condition and this late at night, you won’t get there. Not in this part of New Orleans. Not without being robbed, for sure, and maybe havin’ your throat cut. And it won’t be no evil rich white man do it, neither. Be one of those virtuous poor niggers you blathering about.”

Driscol grinned at her. “Did I ever say I thought being stepped on made a man a saint? Not hardly!”

He drained his glass and set it down carefully on the table. “Leave it at this, Marie. I just feel more comfortable—always did—in the midst of outcasts. Lot more than I ever do with the so-called proper classes, that’s for sure. Maybe that’s my ideals
at work. Maybe it’s just my contrary nature. Whichever, it’s the way it is.”

She looked up at him, coolly and consideringly. Marie had drunk a lot less than he or Ball.

“Good enough for me. Help yourself to the floor, Patrick Driscol. I recommend somewhere there’s a carpet. Thin as it’ll be, it’ll be better than nothing. And there’ll be some breakfast for you in the morning.”

Ball managed to sit fully erect. “Lordie,” he muttered. “Marie, what poison you give us last night?”

Marie was on her feet now, wrapping herself in a robe and heading for the kitchen area of the apartment. “Poison! I told you Criollo Jim’s so-called whiskey was rotgut. Maroons make it, out in the bayous. What you expect?”

Maroons were runaway slaves who lived in the semi-impenetrable waterways and cypress swamps west of the city. There were entire little towns of them out there, according to the stories Driscol had heard.

He was inclined to believe the tales, being a veteran of Napoleon’s Spanish campaign. Periodically, the authorities made sweeps through the bayous, but it was always hard to catch the maroons. If they were pressured too much, they’d simply drift further west, finding shelter among the scattered fragments of Indian tribes. In the meantime, they maintained a lively traffic with the large slave and freedmen population of the city.

The black city dwellers provided the maroons with needed tools and other manufactured goods; in exchange, they got the products of the swamp—moonshine always being a popular item—as well as, for the slaves, a potential escape route, should they ever need it. Most slaves were inclined to remain in bondage, though, since—in practice—most New Orleans masters were smart enough not to make that bondage too oppressive. But there were always some stupid or vicious masters whose slaves would eventually decide that the bayous were preferable.

There were some white people out there, too, or their mixed-blood descendants. Like any great seaport, New Orleans had a constant trickle of crewmen who jumped ship, as well as indentured servants brought over from Europe. For such white men
and women, the cypress swamps were often their best refuge, as well. One of the stories Driscol had heard the night before had amused him simply because of its rampant race-mixing—what proper American citizens called “amalgamation.” It seemed that, in the previous century, fifteen people had been accused of plotting to run away together to the Choctaw lands. Among the accused had been a teenage Indian slave, a teenage African slave, a French sergeant, a Swiss soldier, and a twenty-seven-year old French woman sent to Louisiana against her will in a forced marriage.

Amalgamation, indeed—and a lot more of it happened than polite society recognized and its antiquarians recorded. The history of families, formal and informal, whose members were semiliterate at best and thus beyond the pale of Official History as practiced by the world’s respectable scholars.

Marie started cooking up … something. Driscol wasn’t inclined to inquire as to the details. Food was food, and he needed it.

“So when you goin’ to propose to that Indian girl of yours, Patrick?” her voice carried clearly from the kitchen. “I’m warning you, she must be crazy. First, to come all the way here. Second—really crazy—looking for the likes of you.”

“Does everybody in the world know about my private affairs?” Driscol grumbled. He shot Charles Ball a very unfriendly look.

The gunnery sergeant raised protesting hands. “I didn’ say nothing last night! ’Sides, you were there. In all that commotion in the Place des Nègres, who could have heard me anyway?”

There was just enough truth to that claim for Ball’s protest to fall into the range of the Scottish jury verdict. Not proven. The Place des Nègres, on New Orleans’s northern outskirts, had been established for a century as the locale where the city’s black population—free or slave, either way or both—could create its own market. At night, the place also served as an informal outdoor ballroom. The beat of the bamboulas and the wail of the banzas were enough to drown out most anything, even leaving aside the congeries of dancers.

“You talked well enough in that same ruckus to wheedle your way into Mademoiselle Laveau’s good graces,” Driscol pointed out darkly.

Hungover or not, Ball shifted his defense with all the grace of
a mountain goat leaping the rocks on a hillside. “’Xactly so! How could I have been preaching on your private business when I was sweet-talking a voudou queen?”

The look he gave Driscol combined reproach and the injured innocence of a cherab. How Ball managed that, with his ragged sailor’s face, was a mystery to Driscol. “You think that’s so easy, Major Patrick, you try it sometime.”

He spoke loudly enough for Marie to hear him in the kitchen. “Sweet-talking is right!” her voice rang out. The tone was half angry, half amused. “I can’t believe I let a black curree like you sample my golden charms.”

“Did more’n sample ’em,” Charles said smugly—but, this time, too softly to be overheard by her. The quadroon in the kitchen was a fearsome woman in her own right, and now she was armed with kitchen implements, to boot.

Before he could continue, there was a knocking at the door.

“Answer that!” Marie hollered. “Tell whoever it is I don’t have enough for his breakfast, too.” Something in a skillet made a sizzling sound that was way too loud for any respectable foodstuff Driscol was familiar with. But, again, he didn’t inquire, simply went to the door and opened it.

Outside, standing on the open-air stairs that led up to Marie’s second-floor apartment, was Henry Crowell.

Grinning. Below him, the street seemed to be jampacked with young black men. Most of them dark-skinned, but with a sprinkling of that “high-yeller” color that usually denoted a black Creole in New Orleans.

“Oh, no,” Driscol croaked.

“Good morning to you, master and commander!” Crowell boomed. “The Freedmen Iron Battalion is present and accounted for, sir!”

“We are not marching in any parade today,” Driscol croaked.

“Course not, sir! These are fighting men. They’re here today to begin their training.”

Crowell’s grin was wide enough to scare a shark.

Charles Ball staggered over to stand next to Driscol, and gaze dumbfounded at the mob below.

“Where they come from?” he groaned.

“You recruited them last night, Sergeant! You and the major!”

Driscol had a vague memory of some speech making at the
Place des Nègres. The memory was so vague he’d passed it off as drunken fantasy.

“I did what!” protested Ball. He waved a feeble hand toward the kitchen. “Couldna. I was busy sweet-talking a voudou queen.”

“Yes, sir! Your valor impressed the men deeply, sir!”

“Will you stop shouting, Henry?” Driscol’s croak was beginning to resemble a respectable growl. “Listen, just keep them there. We’ll be down in a minute. Or ten.”

“Sir!” Crowell ripped off a salute that came from no army known to Driscol. Perhaps the teamster had learned it in another life, if the Hindoos had it right. The Fantastical Moola Scimitars of the High Panjandrum of Somewherestan. Who could say?

Driscol closed the door and gave Ball another glare.

“So. Speech making, when you were supposed to be sweet-talking a voudou queen. Who knows what else you were babbling about last night?”

Marie came out of the kitchen bearing plates full of … something. Driscol decided he could eat without looking, even with only one hand.

“You didn’t answer my question, Patrick,” she scolded. “When you goin’ propose to that Indian girl of yours? She’s waiting for you at the Trémoulet House. Her daddy must be rich, putting up there. Most expensive hotel in New Orleans. Didn’t know any Indians were rich.”

“Her father’s not an Indian,” Driscol grumbled. “Captain John Rogers is a thieving, swindling, conniving Scotsman—and a blackguard to boot. He got the rank of captain fighting for the Tories in the Revolution.”

“Oh.” She set the plates down on the table. Now that he had a better view of the contents, Driscol really didn’t want to look. If that was meat, it had way too many legs for a proper Scots-Irishman.

“She’s got one of you Scots-Irish for a daddy and wants to marry another? Somebody put a grigri on that poor girl. You send her to me and I’ll lift the curse.”

“Are you sure this Duclos fellow is telling the truth?” Admiral Cochrane’s tone was skeptical.

The young British army officer who’d brought the report started to shrug. Then, remembering the august company he was facing, Lieutenant Peddie caught himself and turned the gesture into a straightening of the shoulders. “The interrogation was most rigorous, sir. Unless the Frenchman’s a lot better liar than I think he is—”

General Ross interrupted him. “He’s not lying. But he’s not telling the truth, either.”

Cochrane swiveled his head to peer at Ross. The movement was done carefully. Cochrane was normally a vigorous man, and had he been in his own expansive quarters on his flagship, the admiral would have swung about dramatically. But in the very cramped quarters aboard the schooner he was using to supervise the landing of his troops at Bayou Bienvenu, his movements had become downright cautious. He still had a bruise on his forehead from the time he’d banged his head, having forgotten that a schooner’s dimensions were not those of a ship of the line. The first of three occasions.

“Explain, Robert, if you would.”

Ross had no need to watch his own movements. The general was still so weak that even sitting up in a chair was difficult.

“What I mean is that the man undoubtedly thinks he’s telling the truth. But he’s wrong.” Ross looked at the lieutenant, swiveling his eyes only. “Duclos is a civilian, you said?”

Peddie nodded. “Yes, sir, for all practical purposes. All the
men we captured were part of the Louisiana militia, under the command of a certain Major Villeré—who is also a civilian in all but name. The son of a wealthy local planter, from what we could determine. Apparently, Jackson ordered Villeré to send a detachment to guard the outlet of the bayou, and—”

Ross interrupted him again. “I’d think Jackson would have ordered the bayou obstructed, as well.”

“Well, sir, he may well have done so. Duclos was vague on the matter. I suspect his commander Villeré made it clear he was not too happy at the notion of interfering with the waterways.” Lieutenant Peddie smiled thinly. “The Villeré plantation is located along the bayou, and he may have been concerned that damage would result to his own property.”

Admiral Cochrane chuckled. “I almost feel sorry for Jackson. Imagine having to command such a pack of vagabonds calling themselves an ‘army.’”