"No sentries, though," Devereux took note.
"Might've heard us thrashin' about and already mustered behind this wall, just waitin'," Catterall grumbled.
"Don't croak, Mister Catterall," Capt. Nicely chid him.
"Their fields of fire haven't been cleared," Lt. Devereux said in further assessment, pointing at the stumps of downed trees and the many small trees that still stood, the irregular clumps of scrub bush that remained. "Damn' shoddy way to maintain a fortification, really. The low places here and there could mask small cannon, but…"
"We're too few to attack that." Capt, Nicely sighed. "If it is manned, our villains are alerted. Might there be a way around?"
"No time for that, sir," Lt. Devereux said with a hitch to his voice and a fatalistic shrug. He began to strip off his red coat and bright brass gorget, unwind his scarlet officer's sash, and discard his sword baldric with its rectangular brass plate, removing his sword from the frog and holding it scabbarded in his left hand. "You gentlemen will excuse me for a few minutes, sirs?"
Devereux crouched down and warily sneaked from one large tree to the next 'til he'd reached the scrub, his spotless white shirt and breeches melding into the mists, hoping that he was mostly invisible, briefly praying that no marksman or sentinel behind the forbidding wall had already taken aim at him.
"Sweet Jesus," Devereux whispered as he steeled himself, then rose to a half crouch and sprinted to the cover of a clump of bushes. Halfway there! Dry-mouthed, panting, fear-sweat popping on his skin, he scanned the wall for danger. It was one thing for him to stand by his men and order volleys. He stood the same odds as a private facing enemy fire then, but this!
There was more sand than grass near the foot of the irregular, rough-surfaced impediment… as if a lane had been cleared. Nearer-to, it didn't exactly look intentional, its forward slope too gentle to impede a determined infantryman. So what…? Sprint again!
He crunched to the base of the wall, gasping like a hound, fears gibbering at his brain, his nerves twanging like harpsichord strings, chest upon its lumpy, irregular roughness as he tried to quiet the bellow's roar that came from his own frankly scared breathing, wanting to shush noises that his slightest movement made, the hollow tinkling and gravelly-
What the bloody Hell?
His left hand came up from his sword hilt to take up a palm full of loose, broken, sharp-edged but weathered shells! Clam and mussel, larger sun-bleached oyster shells. The smaller shells he rolled in his hand like dice before very quietly putting them back in place. Fighting to contain his giggles, he crept to his left under one of the high heaps 'til he reached a low saddle between mounds, peeked cautiously over it, and felt another giggling fit swell up, which he quickly stifled, then got to the business of reconnaissance, wishing he'd thought to fetch away pencil and paper.
It wasn 't a wall at all! Lt. Devereux silently exulted; just a garbage midden! The sleeping pirates' camp was just the other side of it, stretching perhaps fifty or sixty yards along the far shore, under the looming bulk of a series of odd flat-topped earth mounds, and them sloped so gently that he could almost mistake them for natural rises. The shoreline wasn't an hundred yards further north, with boats drawn up on the beach. Two schooners could almost be made out in the mists, anchored perhaps two hundred yards from the beach in deeper water, a black-hulled, red-striped schooner and another. Lt. Devereux despaired that he'd left his short pocket telescope in his coat. After a long few minutes of observation, he crept back beneath the cover of a high point in the mounds, steeled himself once more for the unseen sentry's musket, then dashed back to rejoin his fellow officers.
"Well, damn my eyes!" Capt. Nicely gasped when told the nature of that forbidding "fort."
"Allow me to suggest, sir, that we bring our men up to the foot of the shell heaps," Lt. Devereux said as he donned his uniform again. "Load muskets and pistols, my men to fix bayonets as well, then wait for our ships' arrival. Once the camp's well stirred to confront that threat, would be the ideal time to strike right to the beach, cut right through their camp and take possession of the earthen mounds, so our musketry has the only high ground, forcing the pirates to clamber up in the face of our cutlasses, bayonets, and muzzles, sir."
"Damme, I like it, Lieutenant Devereux!" Capt. Nicely chirped, suddenly reinfused with pep and vinegar. "Like it, indeed, hah hah! And two schooners, did ye say, sir? A prize they've taken, or… "
"One flies what looks to be a French Tricolour, sir. T'other has no flag aloft," Devereux replied as he hung his rank gorget about his neck once more and clapped on his cocked hat, taking time to set it in the regulation manner. "Though the wind is limp, sir."
"Harbour Watch aboard 'em?" Nicely pressed.
"Couldn't tell, sir," Devereux said with a wry grin as he took his telescope from a side pocket of his coat. "I quite forgot to put this in my waist-band, so… "
"Then let's be up against your heaps, sir, and I'll squint at 'em myself!" Capt. Nicely cheerfully, eagerly declared.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
Capitaine Jerome Lanxade has slept aboard the pirate schooner, avoiding his soon-to-be-disappointed and angry sailors as long as he could, savouring the safe privacy of her master's quarters. Lanxade had slept alone too. None of the churlish drabs who had flocked to their camp had caught his eye. Besides, with so much loot soon to be his, he could afford to be picky. In New Orleans, where he would soon close out his accounts and pack up his valuables, there were at least a round dozen young courtesans, or bored and "sporting" wives of his acquaintance, some "obliging" young unmarried girls who'd be glad to give him a rousing send-off on his "honourable retirement" across the sea to "parts unknown." The sorts who didn't laugh when he took off his finery and revealed his taut-laced corset!
A shambling steward fetched him a silver pot of hot cafe noir, and he sipped from an ornate Meissen china cup and saucer as he shaved himself- never trust unruly pirates with razors to do it!-and combed in fresh hair dye, then pomade, through his thinning locks, daubing new wax on his pointy mustachios and twirling them stiffly horizontal.
He then shucked his silk dressing gown and donned his constricting "appliance." Jerome Lanxade never let a steward or body slave do it for him; that felt demeaning, making "Le Feroce " an object of fun, not fear! He laced it as tight as it could go, going almost purple in the face before he drew on his snug breeches and buttoned them up.
Capt. Lanxade heaved a worrisome sigh, then, fully dressed at last, went out on deck for a welcome breath of fresh but moist, mist-laden air, the dawn's first cigaro alit in one hand and a fresh cup of bracingly strong coffee in the other. He scowled at the beach, at the sleeping camp, and was satisfied that most of their henchmen would be weeping with hangovers, too fuddled to think straight when he and Boudreaux Balfa broke their sad news. Most of the scows and pirogues were gone. The honest backcountry folk had packed up and left once they'd sold their last goods. In the wee hours of a pirates' celebration, it was dangerous to linger too long among the red-eyed murderous!
Lanxade looked over at their prize schooner. There stood old Boudreaux himself, just arisen and yawning like a shambling swamp bear, stretching to get the kinks out, scratching his hide and even grating his back against the schooner's main-mast!