Manly Wade Wellman - Novel 1955 Read online

  “Off with the coat and take the foil,” he directed. “So. Now, out in the courtyard, and show me if you remember anything from this morning.”

  It developed that Ben remembered a good deal. He took guard position, crossed blades with Casimir, and lunged again and again, while Casimir parried with effortless ease. But when the Creole lunged in turn, Ben found that he could, and did, ward the darting point from his own body. Sternly he practiced attack and defense until his arm was deadly weary and his back and leg muscles ached.

  Monsieur Beaumont came to watch, puffing a long-stemmed pipe.

  “Ah, you improve,” he praised Ben. “The parries come easier, hem? But I advise you to practice the lunge daily, against next Friday when Casimir comes from college to teach you again. Take your foil to your room and perfect yourself, morning and evening.”

  “How many lunges a day?” inquired Ben, mopping his sweaty face.

  “A hundred at the least,” Monsieur Beaumont replied casually. “Better still, two hundred. Do not stare; the sword is no easy tool to master. From time to time I myself will fence with you while Casimir is away.”

  Archimede drew bath water from the big cistern at the rear of the courtyard, and Ben gratefully washed himself and put on fresh clothes. That evening, Monsieur Beaumont insisted that only Creole French be spoken at table, and Ben was hard pressed to make his wants known. Again he went to bed early and slept soundly.

  When he woke, it was bright morning, and he went downstairs to find only Zeline in the house.

  “M’sieu’ Achille?” she echoed his query as she served his breakfast. “M’sieu’ Casimir? But they have gone to early mass at the Cathedral. Hark!”

  Voices spoke outside. “They return now,” said Zeline.

  “Then I’ll go out and apologize for sleeping so late,” and Ben swallowed the last of his coffee.

  He found Casimir and his father on the brick sidewalk— the banquette, Creoles called it—talking with three strangers. There was a spare, vigorous gentleman with bright eyes and sharp red-brown mustaches, a tall and handsome woman whose pale face and black hair were well set off by her sweeping brown dress and mantle, and someone else who was not quite a stranger after all.

  When he recognized Felise O’Rourke, Ben stepped back as though to vanish into the house, but Achille Beaumont saw him and beckoned with a long forefinger. Ben approached, conscious again of his black coat’s makeshift fit and his myriad shortcomings in Creole manners.

  “Our friend and guest, Monsieur Benjamin Parker,” said Monsieur Beaumont. “Ben, allow me to present you to Colonel and Madame O’Rourke, and to Mademoiselle their daughter.”

  Ben bowed formally. “Madame,” he said respectfully. “Mademoiselle. Monsieur the Colonel.”

  “The young gentleman is American, yes?” said Madame O’Rourke.

  “Alors/” exclaimed her husband, with such vehemence that Ben jumped. “We are all Americans, if so be we get through these formalities of statehood. Monsieur Parker, you are welcome in New Orleans.”

  So much French Ben could understand, even though the Colonel’s speech was pungently Spanish in accent. he managed to say. “You honor me.” And, as he spoke, he felt honestly welcome.

  “C’est gentilpronounced Madame O’Rourke grandly. “He is well-bred, this young American.”

  Then she, the Colonel, and Achille Beaumont began to speak together of something else, swiftly and incomprehensibly, while Felise looked gravely at Ben. Ben felt his cheeks grow hot, and Casimir smiled slyly.

  The daughter of the O’Rourkes wore velvet, as bright green as the waters of the Gulf of Mexico. Her abundant skirt was caught in gathers, and her sleeves descended to her wrists in puffy tiers. A bonnet contained the dark fire of her hair, with a broad bow of ribbon under her chin. Behind her shoulder she idly twirled a small parasol of figured silk. After a moment she smiled, slightly, but it was still a smile.

  “Do you like New Orleans, M’sieur?” she asked, gravely polite.

  “I am enchanted,” Ben managed to assure her.

  “He admires you, Felise,” bantered Casimir. “When first he saw you on your gallery, he could not wait to ask me your name.”

  Felise O’Rourke’s smile departed, and she folded her parasol. The attention of her parents returned to the younger people.

  “We look for my nephew Casimir to bring you to call on us,” Madame O’Rourke said to Ben. “Perhaps we can help you learn the things you seek to know about New Orleans.”

  “Since you are so kind,” he ventured, “I want to hear about Governor Claiborne. Some seem to think he is not a good governor for Orleans Territory.”

  “Zut/” boomed the Colonel, twisting his mustache. “Who from among the Americans could govern better? Claiborne came among us with no knowledge of our ways—”

  “Like me,” nodded Ben.

  “No, in far worse case than you, my young friend. At least you speak some French, he spoke none. I remember how, in the beginning, men insulted him to his face because he could not understand.”

  “Insults ceased when he fought his duel with Daniel Clark,” reminded Monsieur Beaumont.

  “And he managed to marry a beautiful girl of good New Orleans family,” added Madame O’Rourke. “When she died, he married another more beautiful still. Enfin, the despair among our bachelor beaux!”

  “You hear, Ben?” muttered Casimir at Ben’s side. “Your opportunity may come. Already my cousin Felise—”

  “What do you whisper, my son?” inquired Monsieur Beaumont.

  “Only that Governor Claiborne sets a good example to young Americans,” was Casimir’s glib answer.

  “Yet they say he’s unpopular,” said Ben. “They resent his efforts to put down the crime of smuggling—”

  “Do not call it a crime, please,” put in Felise O’Rourke. “My grand-uncle—the uncle of my mother and of Monsieur Beaumont—was as true a gentleman as ever breathed, and he was a smuggler in his time.”

  “Under another government, my daughter,” reminded the Colonel. “It makes a difference. And now,” he added, lifting his hat, “good morning. Come to call soon.”

  “You are pensive, Ben,” observed Monsieur Beaumont as he led the way to his own house.

  “He wishes that Jacques Mesner would finish his new clothes,” suggested Casimir.

  To this surprisingly correct guess Ben made no reply, but asked Casimir what they would do that day.

  “We will swim,” declared his companion. “My father says that Archimede may hitch for us the light carriage, and we will drive to Lake Pontchartrain, with a dinner basket. Does that please you?”

  “Of course, Casimir.”

  The drive to Lake Pontchartrain was a full five miles east from the river. Shells covered the road, close-packed and crunching beneath the wheels, and the way wound between thickets of oak, mulberry, and sweet gum, with swampy areas thickly grown up in dark bushes. The carriage reached the marshy brink of a great gray-blue expanse of water extending to the eastern horizon, and there was a row of crude jetties, with several cabins huddled together. Casimir knocked at the door of a cabin and talked to the man who appeared. Then he returned to say that they could leave the horse and carriage there, and that the man had rented them a boat.

  This craft proved to be a dugout, hewn and hollowed from a poplar log some eighteen feet long, with pointed ends, and fitted inside with seats. Casimir called it a pirogue, and expressed amazement when Ben proved himself able to paddle.

  “You call it a pirogue, I call it a canoe,” said Ben, in halfgrumpy triumph, “and I happen to have paddled canoes in my time.”

  Casimir, at the stern, guided them out to a small reeflike island, tufted with reeds and a few gnarled cypresses. Stripping off their clothes, they waded out through mud. An army of crabs scuttled from under their feet.

  Ben spent the rest of the morning striving against the waters of Lake Pontchartrain. Casimir stood chest deep, a hand under Ben’s jaw, issuing advice
and directions. Ben wheezed and puffed and grew as weary as after his fencing lessons.

  But Casimir would not let him stop to rest. “You make progress,” he said earnestly. “Try again. Try harder. You are getting the way of it.”

  Thus exhorted, Ben sprawled out in the water once more, with Casimir’s hand holding up his chin.

  “Kick the feet, paddle with hands! ” shouted Casimir. “Pull yourself forward—the head well back, I say! First one hand, then the other. Ah, you do famously! Forward, forward!”

  “You’re pulling me along,” spluttered Ben as he splashed.

  “I pull you? But no—look!”

  Casimir held both arms above his head. “I have let go of you. You swim alone!”

  Hearing this news, Ben instantly sank like an anvil. His feet found bottom and he rose erect, choking and snorting. But Casimir vowed that Ben had been swimming without help. Borrowing new strength from this success, Ben continued his efforts. Finally Casimir measured off fifty feet by pacing on the muddy bottom. When Ben had accomplished that course, not without straining and gasping, Casimir slapped him on the wet shoulder.

  “You will swim like an alligator,” he prophesied. “But it is nearly noon by the sun. Let us eat.”

  Wading out, they pulled on shirts and pantaloons. Ben gathered dry twigs and made a fire with flint and steel, and Casimir brewed coffee in a soot-covered pot. Their lunch was cold chicken, rolls of white bread, some fruit and a big bowl of salad. When they had finished, Casimir relaxed, his back to a cypress root and his fingers laced behind his head.

  “You learn swiftly, both fencing and swimming,” he said. “What you have accomplished today will make the next lesson easy—say next Saturday or Sunday. It will be too cold to swim by October, but by then you will be a good swimmer.”

  “I hope,” said Ben, sinking his teeth into a banana.

  “It was hard for me to learn, and I began as a small boy,” continued Casimir. “Again, you have begun much better than I at fencing. Soon you must seek a better teacher, and then you will surpass me.”

  “Thanks.” Tossing the banana peel away, Ben smiled.

  For he knew now that he and Casimir would never have a reason to quarrel. They were friends.

  A new week began and ended for Ben, with Casimir returned to his college. New Orleans lost some of its mocking strangeness for the young North Carolinian, and took on a warm, mellow attraction. He found himself beginning to understand some of the accents and idioms of Creole speech, even to use them himself. Daily he perspired in his room, practicing the lunge with a foil against his coat hung on the bedpost, and Monsieur Beaumont gave him three additional fencing lessons. By Friday, Jacques Mesner had finished Ben’s frock coat and pantaloons, together with a snug flowered waistcoat. On Saturday, Ben walked out in these new splendors.

  On Sunday morning he attended mass with the Beaumonts. Meeting Felise O’Rourke on the steps of the Cathedral, he swept off his tall hat with the consequential grace of a Horner Banton, and her smile acknowledged his greeting.

  At the offices of Hatch and Parker he found himself working hard, with more and more intricate tasks of computation and correspondence. Frank Parker was determined that Ben should learn all the executive mysteries of the New Orleans trade. He took his nephew on visits to incoming cargo vessels, on barge trips to plantations above town to inspect fragrant warehouses full of tobacco and sugar, and also sent him on many confidential errands to fellow merchants.

  The men Ben met thus interested him in a thousand ways. Monsieur Julien Poydras, gray-haired and strong-faced, seemed to Ben the very ideal of ancient Creole aristocracy, until someone remarked that Poydras had come from France to America as a pack-laden peddler and had toiled hard to attain his various successes as planter, poet, and leader in territorial politics. Poydras was a strong and persuasive speaker in favor of accepting the offer of Congress to make Orleans Territory a state. New-York-born Edward Livingstone, a brilliant lawyer with almost as much fashionable charm as Horner Banton, was another impressive pleader for statehood, while chubby John Randolph Grimes, the territory’s attorney-general, seemed only amusing and gay. And Thomas Robertson, the territorial secretary under Governor Claiborne, was whispered to be Claiborne’s mortal enemy.

  Some cases of yellow fever, reported toward the end of September, caused the College of Orleans to dismiss classes for the time being, and Casimir remained at home for several days. He fenced and swam with Ben, and listened when Monsieur Beaumont and Colonel O’Rourke mused above their coffee cups on disturbing news from Mobile.

  Neither the Spanish commander whose troops had seized Dolphin Island nor Maxmilian Maxent, the Spanish governor at Pensacola, had replied to Claiborne’s stern protest at the occupation, and American ships of war, cleared for action,, were prowling just outside Mobile Bay.

  “A taunt or so, maybe an exchange of shots, and we may well be fighting,” said Monsieur Beaumont gravely. “I would feel safer had Orleans become a state of the Union and was no longer a mere outlying territory.”

  “I, too,” agreed the Colonel, tweeking his coppery mustache. “My friends, I was once a subject of the Spanish crown, but I am American now. I do not want to see this land go back to Spain. Like you, Achille, I hate war. But if war comes—“

  “Ah, ah, trust Claiborne,” urged Monsieur Beaumont. “He is in contact with the President and the Secretary of State.” “Yet we should see a stronger garrison here, and a larger, better militia,” elaborated Colonel O’Rourke. “I have thought of offering to raise and train a regiment of gentleman volunteers.” He glanced toward Casimir and Ben. “What say these young men? Would they serve in my regiment if I should be given one?”

  “It would be an honor, my Colonel,” said Casimir warmly.

  “Just say the word,” seconded Ben in the same breath.

  A tigerish grin gleamed under the mustache. “I hear that from all the best young blood in New Orleans. Tiens, I shall write to our governor. When he returns from touring those upper parishes, perhaps we shall see about uniforms and muskets.”

  It stirred Ben strongly to hear talk of military service. He remembered again his boyhood ambition to be a soldier like his father. What had Captain Parker said? “. . . a soldier in time of war, a civilian in time of peace.” Maybe war was coming. If it came, Ben would be ready to play his part. In the days that followed he thought often of being ready, while September became October, warm and bright at first, then giving way to stormy rain.

  Ben now felt at home in New Orleans. Here, he told himself, was a town worth fighting for. He prospered at the office, was made welcome in coffeehouses and drawing rooms, strolled among the shrubbery in the Place d’Armes and in the gardens behind the Cathedral. On the night of October io, the O’Rourkes gave a ball in the great main room of their house. Ben was invited, and he danced three times with Felise O’Rourke, while half a dozen spruce young Creole gentlemen glowered jealously. On the next day, a Friday of lowering clouds and gray gloom, Monsieur Beaumont and Colonel O’Rourke drove off together to visit some property they owned jointly beyond Lake Pontchartrain.

  Frank Parker was also absent from New Orleans that day, and would not return to his office until midafternoon. Ben took lunch at the coffeehouse that was a favorite with both the Parkers, and sat eating highly seasoned shrimps with a happy sense of belonging to his bright, noisy surroundings. He made haste to finish, for he had told Casimir they would fence at half past one. Lately, he flattered himself, his skill with both foil and saber had improved considerably. Casimir no longer could beat him so easily. If war did come, and he, Ben Parker, had an enemy of his country at sword’s point . . .

  He glanced out through the bright window. Two men stood there talking. One was an active, well-dressed figure, the other broader built in hunting shirt and deerskin leggings. As Ben watched them, the broad man lifted his face to speak to his companion. Ben saw the bannerlike dark beard of Jethro Wicks.

  Ben took a swallow of hot
coffee and set down his cup. Just then the other man faced around, peering through the window. It was Jean Laffite, and he stared directly at Ben. He nodded his head in swift, furtive recognition. Then he looked at Wicks again, and began to speak, but one hand seemed to beckon Ben stealthily.

  Wicks went striding away toward the Faubourg Sainte Marie. Laffite stood where he was, watching Ben.

  At once Ben rose, threw money on the table, and walked out of the coffeehouse. “Monsieur Laffite,” he said with dry lips.

  “Monsieur Parker,” replied Laffite good-humoredly. “I am glad to see you. I had hoped to find your uncle here.”

  “He’s elsewhere, on business,” Ben told him.

  “Then I must give my message to you. I take it that you are as true an American as Frank Parker himself.”

  Laffite paused and glanced around quickly. Wicks had vanished.

  “Doubtless you do not know the man who was with me just now.”

  “I know his name,” said Ben. “Jethro Wicks.”

  “Allons, let us walk together.”

  Laffite slid his arm through Ben’s and drew him along the banquette. “Perhaps,” he continued, “you are also aware that Wicks is a violent man.”

  “So I’ve heard,” agreed Ben guardedly.

  “My young friend, you do well to be careful in your speech. I, then, must be the bold speaker. This Wicks is here on a bad business.”

  Breaking off, Laffite lifted his jaunty hat to an acquaintance across Bourbon Street.

  “Bad, let me explain,” he went on, “for anyone who cares for the fortunes of an American Orleans.”

  “I care for those fortunes,” declared Ben promptly.

  “And so do I. You are amazed, perhaps? Some Americans are so without good will as to call me those names you have heard—pirate and smuggler. But I seek patience to hear the accusations, even from Governor Claiborne. You know our governor?”

  “He’s been out of town most of the time since I first came here,” said Ben. “They say he’s coming back home.”

  “Not if this Jethro Wicks can prevent it,” said Laffite, in the softest of voices.