Caribbee Part 78

inhaling the dense air of the island. He lingered pensively for a moment, then turned to Katherine. "Katy, do remember this isn't just any port. Some of those men out there have been known to shoot somebody for no more cause than a tankard of brandy. And underneath it all, Jacques is just like the rest. It's when he's most cordial that you'd best beware."

"I still want to go." She moved next to him. "I'm going to meet face- to-face with this madman who once tried to kill you."

Chapter Twenty-one

The ochre half-light of dusk was settling over the island, lending a warm tint to the deep green of the hillside forests surrounding Forte de la Roche. In the central yard of the fortress, directly beneath le Basque's "dovecote," his uniformed guards loitered alongside the row of heavy culverin, watching the mast lights of anch.o.r.ed frigates and brigantines nod beneath the cloudless sky.

Tibaut de Fontenay had taken no note of the beauty of the evening. He was busy tending the old-fashioned _boucan _Jacques had ordered constructed just behind the cannon. Though he stood on the windward side, he still coughed occasionally from the smoke that threaded upward, over the "dovecote" and toward the hill above. The _boucan _itself consisted of a rectangular wooden frame supporting a greenwood grill, set atop four forked posts. Over the frame and grill a thatchwork of banana leaves had been erected to hold in the piquant smoke of the smoldering naseberry branches beneath. Several haunches of beef lay flat on the grill, and now the fire was coating them with a succulent red veneer. It was the traditional Taino Indian method of cooking and preserving meat, _barbacoa_, that had been adopted intact by the boucaniers decades before.

Jacques leaned against the railing at the edge of the platform above, pewter tankard in hand, contentedly stroking his salt-and-pepper beard as he gazed out over the harbor and the multihued sunset that washed his domain in misty ambers. Finally, he turned with a murmur of satisfaction and beckoned for Katherine to join him. She glanced uneasily toward Winston, then moved to his side.

"The aroma of the _boucan_. Mademoiselle, was always the signal the day was ending." He pointed across the wide bay, toward the green mountains of Hispaniola. "Were we over there tonight, with the hunters, we would still be sc.r.a.ping the last of the hides now, while our _boucan _finished curing the day's kill for storing in our banana-leaf _ajoupa_." He smiled warmly, then glanced down to see if her tankard required attention. "Though, of course, we never had such a charming Anglaise to leaven our rude company."

"I should have thought, Monsieur le Basque, you might have preferred a Frenchwoman." Katherine studied him, trying to imagine the time when he and Hugh had roamed the forests together. Jacques le Basque, for all his rough exterior, conveyed an unsettling sensuality. She sensed his desire for her as he stood alongside, and when he brushed her hand, she caught herself trembling involuntarily.

"You do me an injustice, Mademoiselle, to suggest I would even attempt pa.s.sing such a judgment." He laughed. "For me, womankind is like a garden, whose flowers each have their own beauty. Where is the man who could be so dull as to waste a single moment comparing the deep hue of the rose to the delicate pale of the lily. The petals of each are soft, they both open invitingly at the touch."

"Do they always open so easily, Monsieur le Basque?"

"Please, you must call me Jacques." He brushed back a wisp of her hair and paused to admire her face in the light of the sunset. "It is ever a man's duty to awaken the beauty that lies sleeping in a woman's body.

Too many exquisite creatures never realize how truly lovely they are."

"Do those lovely creatures include handsome boys as well?" She glanced down at de Fontenay, his long curls lying tangled across his delicate shoulders.

Jacques drank thoughtfully from his tankard. "Mademoiselle, there is something of beauty in all G.o.d's work. What can a man know of wine if he samples only one vineyard?"

"A woman might say, Jacques, it depends on whether you prefer flowers, or wine."

"_Touche_, Mademoiselle. But some of us have a taste for all of life.

Our years here are so brief."

As she stood beside him, she became conscious again of the short- barreled flintlock--borrowed from Winston's sea chest, without his knowing it--she had secreted in the waist of her petticoat, just below her low-cut bodice. Now it seemed so foolish. Why had Hugh painted Jacques as erratic and dangerous? Could it be because the old _boucanier_ had managed to better him in that pistol duel they once had, and he'd never quite lived it down? Maybe that was why he never seemed to get around to explaining what really happened that time.

"Then perhaps you'll tell me how many of those years you spent hunting." She abruptly turned and gestured toward the hazy sh.o.r.eline across the bay. Seen through the smoke of the _boucan_ below, Hispaniola's forests seemed endless, impenetrable. "Over there, on the big island?"

"Ah, Mademoiselle, thinking back now it seems like forever. Perhaps it was almost that long." He laughed genially, then glanced toward Winston, standing at the other end of the platform, and called out, "Anglais, shall we tell your lovely mademoiselle something about the way we lived back in the old days?"

"You can tell her anything you please, Jacques, just take care it's true." Winston was studying the fleet of ships in the bay below.

"Remember this is our evening for straight talk."

"Then I will try not to make it sound too romantic." Jacques chuckled and turned back. "Since the Anglais insists I must be precise, I should begin by admitting it was a somewhat difficult existence. Mademoiselle.

We'd go afield for weeks at a time, usually six or eight of us together in a party--to protect ourselves should we blunder across some of the Spaniards' lancers, cavalry who roamed the island trying to be rid of us. In truth, we scarcely knew where we would bed down from one day to the next. . . ."

Winston was only half listening as he studied the musket-men in the yard below. There seemed to be a restlessness, perhaps even a tension, about them. Was it the _boucan_? The bother of the smoke? Or was it something more? Some treachery in the making? He told himself to stay alert, that this was no time to be lulled by Jacques's famed courtliness. It could have been a big mistake not to bring Atiba, in spite of Jacques's demand he be left.

"On most days we would rise at dawn, prime our muskets, then move out to scout for game. Usually one of us went ahead with the dogs. Before the Anglais came to live with us, that perilous a.s.signment normally fell to me, since I had the best aim." He lifted the onion-flask of French brandy from the side of the veranda and replenished her tankard with a smooth flourish. "When you stalk the wild bull, the _taureau sauvage_, you'd best be able to bring him down with the first shot, or hope there's a stout tree nearby to climb." He smiled and thumbed toward Winston. "But after the Anglais joined us, we soon all agreed he should have the honor of going first with the dogs. We had discovered he was a born marksman." He toasted Winston with his tankard. "When the dogs had a wild bull at bay, the Anglais would dispatch it with his musket. Afterwards, one of our men would stay to butcher it and take the hide while the rest of us would move on, following him."

"Then what?" She never knew before that Winston had actually been the leader of the hunt, their marksman.

"Well, Mademoiselle, after the Anglais had bagged a bull for every man, we'd bring all the meat and hides back to the base camp, the rendezvous. Then we would put up a _boucan_,

like the one down there below us now, and begin smoking the meat while we finished sc.r.a.ping the hides." He smiled through his graying beard.

"You would scarcely have recognized the Anglais, or me, in those days, Mademoiselle. Half the time our breeches were so caked with blood they looked like we'd been tarred." He glanced back at the island. "By nightfall the _barbacoa_ would be finished, and we would eat some, then salt the rest and put it away in an _ajoupa_, together with the hides.

Finally, we'd bed down beside the fire of the _boucan_, to smoke away the mosquitoes, sleeping in those canvas sacks we used to keep off ants. Then, at first light of dawn, we rose to go out again."

"And then you would sell your . . . _barbacoa_ and hides here on Tortuga?"

"Exactly, Mademoiselle. I see my old friend the Anglais has already told you something of those days." He smiled and caught her eye. "Yes, often as not we'd come back over here and barter with the ships that put in to refit. But then sometimes we'd just sell them over there.

When we had a load, we would start watching for a sail, and if we saw a ship nearing the coast, we'd paddle out in our canoes . . ."

"Canoes?" She felt the night grow chill. Suddenly a memory from long ago welled up again, bearded men firing on their ship, her mother falling. . . .

"_Oui_, Mademoiselle. Dugout canoes. In truth they're all we had those days. We made them by hollowing out the heart of a tree, burning it away, just like the Indians on Hispaniola used to do." He sipped his brandy, then motioned toward Winston. "They were quite seaworthy, _n 'est-ce pas_? Enough so we actually used them on our first raid." He turned back. "Though after that we naturally had Spanish ships."

"And where . . . was your first raid, Monsieur le Basque?" She felt her grip tighten involuntarily on the pewter handle of her tankard.

"Did the Anglais never tell you about that little episode, Mademoiselle?" He laughed sarcastically. "No, perhaps it

is not something he chooses to remember. Though at the time we thought we could depend on him. I have explained to you that no man among us could shoot as well as he. We wanted him to fire the first shot, as he did when we were hunting. Truly we had high hopes for him." Jacques drank again, a broad silhouette against the panorama of the sunset.

"He told me how you got together to fight the Spaniards, but ..."

"Did he? _Bon_." He paused to check the _boucan_ below them, then the men. Finally he shrugged and turned back. "It was the start of the legend of the _boucaniers_, Mademoiselle. And you can take pride that the Anglais was part of it. Few men are still alive now to tell that tale."

"What happened to the others, Jacques?" Winston's voice hardened as he moved next to one of the nine-pound cannon. "I seem to remember there were almost thirty of us. Guy Bartholomew was on that raid, for one. I saw him down below last night. I knew a lot of those men well."

"_Oui_, you had many friends. But after you . . . left us, a few unfortunate incidents transpired."

Winston tensed. "Did the ship . . .?"

"I discovered what can occur when there is not proper organization, Anglais. But now I am getting ahead of our story. Surely you remember the island we had encamped on. Well, we waited on that cursed sand spit several weeks more, hoping there would be another prize. But alas, we saw nothing, _rien_. Then finally one day around noon, when it was so hot you could scarcely breathe, we spied a Spanish sail--far at sea. By then all our supplies were down. We were desperate. So we launched our canoes and put to sea, with a vow we would seize the ship or perish trying."

"And you took it?" Winston had set down his tankard on the railing and was listening intently.

"_Mais oui_. But of course. Desperate men rarely fail. Later we learned that when the captain saw our canoes approaching he scoffed, saying what could a few dugouts do against his

guns. He paid for that misjudgment with his life. We waited till dark, then stormed her. The ship was ours in minutes."

"Congratulations."

"Not so quickly, Anglais. Unfortunately, all did not go smoothly after that. Perhaps it's just as well you were no longer with us, _mon ami_.

Naturally, we threw all the Spaniards overboard, crew and pa.s.sengers.

And then we sailed her back here, to Ba.s.se Terre. A three-hundred-ton brigantine. There was some plate aboard--perhaps the capitaine was h.o.a.rding it--and considerable coin among the pa.s.sengers. But when we dropped anchor here, a misunderstanding arose over how it all was to be divided." He sighed. "There were problems. I regret to say it led to bloodshed."

"What do you mean?" Winston glared at him. "I thought we'd agreed to split all prizes equally."