The War of Knives Read online

  THE WAR OF KNIVES

  Also by Broos Campbell

  No Quarter

  THE WAR OF KNIVES

  a Matty Graves novel

  Broos Campbell

  MCBOOKS PRESS, INC.

  www.mcbooks.com

  ITHACA, NY

  Published by McBooks Press 2007

  Copyright © 2007 Broos Campbell

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or any portion thereof in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the publisher. Requests for such permissions should be addressed to McBooks Press, Inc., ID Booth Building, 520 North Meadow St., Ithaca, NY 14850.

  Cover Painting by Daniel Dos Santos © 2007.

  Dust jacket and book design by Panda Musgrove.

  ISBN: 978-1-59013-104-6

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Campbell, Broos, 1957-

  The war of knives : a Matty Graves novel / by Broos Campbell.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-59013-104-6 (alk. paper)

  1. Sea stories. 2. Historical fiction. I. Title.

  PS3603.A464W37 2007

  813’.6--dc22

  2006031084

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  Printed in the United States of America

  987654321

  Disclaimer:

  This is a work of fiction. All persons, places, and events depicted herein, except those clearly in the public domain, are figments of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, is unintentional.

  To Jerry Cowan

  Contents

  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 Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Author’s Historical Note

  Glossary

  A map of the northern part of the WEST INDIES,

  including the relative positions of

  SAINT–DÓMINGUE and the BAHAMA CHANNEL.

  Dramatis personae

  Matty Graves, our narrator.

  Cyrus Gaswell, commodore of the San Domingo squadron.

  Lieutenant Peter Wickett, captain of the Rattle-Snake.

  Toussaint L’Ouverture, governor-general of San Domingo.

  Rigaud, leader of the mulatto faction in San Domingo.

  Samuels, a quarter-gunner in the Rattle-Snake.

  Brodie, a quartermaster in the Rattle-Snake.

  P. Hoyden Blair, assistant U.S. consul at Port Républicain.

  Alonzo Connor, an American adventurer.

  Franklin, his secretary.

  An assassin, not very good at his job.

  Mr. Jeffreys, a midshipman on loan from the Columbia.

  Mr. MacElroy, ditto.

  Schmidt, master gunner in the Rattle-Snake.

  Horne, bosun’s mate in the Rattle-Snake.

  Rogers, sailing master in the Rattle-Snake.

  Quilty, surgeon in the Rattle-Snake.

  Klemso, bosun in the Rattle-Snake.

  Ambrose, wardroom steward in the Rattle-Snake.

  A Knight of the White Hand, deceased.

  Joséphine, a horse.

  Grand-père Bavard, or Grandfather Chatterbox.

  Juge, his keeper.

  The Parson, also known as MacGuffin.

  Bertrand, steward at the foreign officers’ quarters.

  Dessalines, commander of Toussaint’s forces at Jacmel.

  Major Matou, senior officer at the troublesome hamlet.

  Forcené, an officer in Toussaint’s army.

  Cahoon, a sergeant of Marines.

  Treadwell, a wandering Englishman.

  Négraud, a turnkey.

  Pepin, a doctor.

  Pétion, commander of Rigaud’s forces at Jacmel.

  Cravache, his adjutant.

  Christopher Block, captain of the Croatoan.

  Williamson, his first lieutenant.

  Dick Towson, his third lieutenant.

  Jubal, Dick’s slave.

  Christophe, a colonel in Toussaint’s army.

  Voyou, a soldier in Toussaint’s army.

  Chips, ship’s carpenter in the Rattle-Snake.

  Doc, ship’s cook in the Rattle-Snake.

  THE WAR OF KNIVES

  One

  “My mother died before I was born, sir,” I said. Through the Columbia’s lightsome stern window I could see the Rattle-Snake schooner off the starboard quarter. Peter Wickett, her captain, had edged her down from windward to wait for me; and she lay hove-to with her fore-topsail backed as she sank and rose on the Atlantic swell. Beyond her, to the south, the mountains of San Domingo loomed like jagged fangs on the horizon. “I’m told that’s quite a feat.”

  Commodore Cyrus Gaswell crinkled up the corners of his eyes, but I’d said it solemn and he didn’t laugh. He just sat there on the other side of the huge Cuban mahogany table he used as a desk, waiting for me to answer his question. He had the weather gauge on me, was the thing, and I was having to come at it in short tacks across the eye of the wind. My father had forbidden my brothers ever to speak of my mother in my presence, and to me he rarely spoke at all. Not that my old man had been there when I was born, if the way I arrived in the world can be called being born.

  While I tried to figure out what to say next, I studied the commodore’s elegant blue coat with its garden of gold lace and its bullion epaulets, each with a single silver star. He wasn’t wearing the coat; it hung half-hidden behind a painted screen in the corner, for Gaswell was a warrior who liked his comforts. He wore a seaman’s checked shirt and loose nankeen trousers in the tropic heat, and had dispensed with shoes entire; but he kept his uniform near to hand, the way some men keep a fierce and loyal dog.

  And dog me if I knew how to answer him, but when a commodore sets a seventeen-year-old acting-lieutenant down on a hard wooden chair in the day cabin of his flagship and asks a question, it’s best to keep right on fishing till you haul up something he wants to hear. “I don’t know as I ever did get the truth of it, sir,” I said. “I’m told she come from Saint-Louis in the Louisiana country. A Frenchwoman. But a portrait of her?” I shook my head as I thought of the empty walls of the house in McKeesport. “No, sir, there never was one.”

  “Yes, a Frenchwoman. Well,” said Gaswell, shifting his bulk and coughing into his thick fist. “French is as French does, I guess. Like yourself, Mr. Graves, I never did get the pleasure of meetin’ her.” He hitched his reading spectacles higher up on the mottled bulb of his nose, and let them slide down again so he could see me over them. “But there was a portrait, a miniature in a locket. Your father carried it all during the Revolution. He showed it to me many a time at Yorktown.” He rubbed one horny-nailed bare foot against the other under the table and said: “But I’m a Navy man now. Beats the hell out of the Army. There’s the prize money, and no goddamn horses. You won’t catch me fightin’ ashore again, not if I can help it.”

  “Yes, sir. I don’t much care
for horses myself.” That’s the nice thing about being a commodore, I thought: you don’t have to do much you don’t care to do. That’s what junior officers are for.

  He rumpled what hair he had, as if I wasn’t being as helpful as I might, which I wasn’t, and said, “He spoke of her often, your old man did. Your mother was a great beauty, Mr. Graves.”

  “Thank’ee, sir. I didn’t know that.”

  “Same high cheekbones as you got, and the same dark complexion. A woman like that, ye keep her near to your heart.” He tapped his breast, as if reassuring himself that something was still there. He wore an old pewter chain around his massive neck, and for an odd moment I wondered if the locket he’d mentioned hung at the end of it.

  I let the silence lie between us as I watched the way Peter filled the Rattle-Snake’s fore-and-aft mainsail from time to time to keep some way on her, lest the flagship make a sudden lurch to leeward and stove her in.

  “She was a great Creole beauty, Mr. Graves.”

  My stomach flipped and sank, as if maybe the Columbia had indeed made a sudden lurch. Gaswell waited for his words to sink in. I waited for him to get on with it. The Rattle-Snake seemed suddenly far away, and the Caribbean sunshine seemed to have lost its brilliance.

  “Now, ye know as well as I do that Creole has more than one meaning,” he said. “It can mean someone that ain’t all white, and it can mean a European that was born in the colonies. Besides, she weren’t hardly more’n an octoroon, I’m sure,” he said, dashing that hope. “So legally speaking you’re probably as white as any man, have no fear o’ that. Or perhaps she was part Osage or something. I’m sure I don’t know.” But it was too late for him to take back what he’d already said. He cleared his throat and drummed on his desktop with his blunt fingers.

  “Now, look’ee here,” he said, when I still said nothing. “You’re not the first man to catch a lick o’ the tarbrush. There’s no shame in it, if it’s far enough back. You’re as good a man as any. I’ll lay odds on it. I have laid odds on it: ain’t I bucking for your promotion? Ain’t I give ye your order as acting-lieutenant, free, gratis and without charge?”

  I’d sunk forward till my head hung nearly between my knees. I straightened up again and said, “Yes, sir, and I’m grateful.”

  It weren’t true he’d given it to me without obligation. I’d had to get rid of my cousin Billy for him. Billy was even then on his way home, floating in his last barrel of whiskey with a hole in his chest. But, a lick of the tarbrush!

  “Don’t think for a minute I done it just out of friendship for your old man, neither,” Gaswell said. “It’s because I know ye won’t let me down. Ye got sand. You’re copper bottomed and got saltwater in your veins, I allow. And never ye worry—I’ll keep your secret right here.” He thumped his barrel chest. “Won’t breathe a word of it.”

  “That’s white of you, sir.”

  “I never spoke it yet, till now.”

  I had to get up, commodore or no commodore. I stood behind my chair and leaned on it to keep my legs from shaking. “So why now, sir?”

  “Because I need an officer to go ashore that can pass for Creole.”

  “If you mean mulatto, sir, I ain’t aware I could pass for colored.”

  I was as dark as any sailor, of course, but his words cast a new light on it. I hadn’t been allowed in the house much as a kid. I’d spent my days in the fields and slept in the barn. There’d been some teasing, but me and my brother Geordie had put that to rights often enough, till a Virginia dragoon shot him during the Whiskey Rebellion. It was just sunburn, anyway—I was sure of it. Pretty sure.

  “Well, not exactly colored,” Gaswell said. “I mean, what d’ye call it—mixed blood.”

  “Sang-mêlée, sir?” That was the lightest of the fifteen or twenty degrees of color recognized by French law in San Domingo.

  He snapped his fingers. “Sang-mêlée, that’s the word. Not dark enough so’s a white man would notice, but a colored man, now, he might see something that a white man couldn’t.”

  “Is that right, sir?” Which was the country way of saying that’s a damn lie, which I guessed he knew full well—but might be he was right. A good many of the Rattle-Snakes were black, and I got on well with them. They had a way of looking at me and talking to me that was different than with the rest of the officers, although I treated them no different than I treated any of the other foremast jacks. Except the English ones—I never could cotton to an Englishman.

  “And with the way ye speak French—just like an islander, don’t deny it. I’ve heard ye.” He pointed at the chair that I still leaned against. “Sit down afore ye tear that thing apart with your bare hands.”

  I sat. “My tutor was an émigré planter from down in the Artibonite, sir. I guess some of the accent might’ve rubbed off on him, but he always said it was the pure Parisian he taught me. He’d been to the Sorbonne, you know.” But Gaswell wasn’t listening to me, even if he knew what the Sorbonne was. He had me. He was going to offer me a job and already knew I’d take it, without waiting to hear the particulars. I needed to commit a power of mayhem to wash Billy’s blood from my soul.

  “Ye’ll wear your best undress uniform, of course,” he said, handing me a thin sheaf of papers. “It’ll get sadly mauled in the woods, but Frenchmen and coloreds love an epaulet. Playing with revolution’s a dangerous business, Mr. Graves, and I’m sending ye into great danger.”

  “‘Playing with revolution,’ sir?”

  “Aye. Ye know there’s rumors afoot that Toussaint L’Ouverture means to transplant his slave rebellion to the Southern states?”

  “Yes, sir. The papers are full of it.”

  “I don’t put much stock in ’em, myself, neither,” he said, mistaking my meaning. “I think Toussaint’s already bit off as much as he can chaw right here in San Domingo, what with this civil war he’s got himself into with Rigaud and his mulatto renegados. His situation is precarious enough without he got to worry about planters from Georgia to Delaware getting the wild squirts that maybe a bunch of country bucks is set to come a-roaring through the countryside with blood in their eyes. He needs our trade to keep his army in corn and gunpowder. No, sir, it don’t benefit Toussaint a damn. Which don’t mean maybe there ain’t some in his camp that’d like to see it come about.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Hark’ee well, now. The Rattle-Snake will put ye ashore at Port Républicain or Léogâne, whichever seems best.” He handed me a sealed packet with the schooner’s name and P. Wickett, lt. commanding wrote on the front. “From there ye’ll make your way overland to Jacmel on the southern coast. Toussaint’s General What’s-his-name, Dessalines, has got one of Rigaud’s armies bottled up there under a chap name of Pétion, but with as little artillery as Dessalines has got, he ain’t likely to dislodge him anytime soon. I want you to keep your ears open and your mouth shut and find out which way the wind blows. That’s your official orders.” He fixed me with his pale blue eyes. “I dasn’t write down that bit about any plot to transplant the slave rebellion, o’ course. Them kinds of orders might get ye shot or worse, was anybody on either side to take it personal. But if there is such a plot, that’s what I most want to know about. Ye’ll tell no one what your true mission is, except them as ye can trust with your life. And Mr. Blair down in Port Républicain, o’ course. No way around that, I’m afeared.”

  I near about got a case of the galloping fantods at the mention of Blair’s name. He’d been a friend of Billy’s, if either of them could be said to have a friend.

  Gaswell unlocked a cabinet beside him and rummaged around in it. “Ye’ll have expenses, o’ course—miscellaneous bribes and board and whatnot. To save ye the trouble of trying to get reimbursed from the Navy Department, I’m advancing ye fifty dollars out o’ my own purse. You can reckon up with me personal when ye get back.”

  Assuming I got back, he meant. He slid a leather pouch across the polished tabletop and told me to count it for myself. It was
in mixed coin, mostly Spanish silver but with a few French gold pieces. It seemed like a lot of money to me—more than two months’ pay at my official rank of master’s mate—but it didn’t weigh nearly as much as my heart did at that moment.

  He had me sign a receipt for it, and said, “I’d sew that purse in my boot, was I you. Harder to steal that way. Unless someone robs your boots, in which case ye’ll probably be in deeper water than fifty dollars could get you out of anyway. But if all goes well, you’ll go aboard of the Croatoan frigate off Jacmel in a few weeks—say, by the second week of March. I wrote Captain Block to fill him in on what you’re up to, and ye can tell him what ye’ve learned when ye see him. I’m sure he’ll find it useful. And if he ain’t there by the time you’re done, ye can report to whoever the senior officer is on the station.” He looked at me in a way that was almost kindly and said, “You were pretty cocky coming in here, weren’t ye?”

  “Yes, sir,” I shot back. I dropped the purse into my pocket and stood up. “I held my head high when I walked in, and I aim to walk out the same way.”

  “That’s a lad.” He held out a brawny hand and said, “Just don’t get yourself kilt, that’s all. And mind how you handle Mr. Blair.”

  Blair was the assistant U.S. consul in the nominally French colony of Saint-Dómingue; San Domingo, we called it, to differentiate it from the Spanish colony of Santo Domingo to the east. I would have to present my credentials to him before I could travel through the interior. He’d try to foul my hawse if he could. Let him try, I thought; I’d snap my fingers in his face. Despite what you might call trepidations, my state of mind was such that I actually wanted to travel through the interior. It was full of angry men with guns and knives.

  Two

  The Monongahela Valley in western Pennsylvania was a wild and deathsome place when I entered the world in 1782. The British had withdrawn to their forts along the Great Lakes and the Saint Lawrence, but the Shawnee were still fighting, and the tales around the watchfires at night were peppered with weird Celtic lore. You couldn’t tell our Scotch-Irish neighbors nothing but that I’d sprung from the steaming blood of my mother’s womb, squalling the mallachtaí curse of my forebears on the brave who’d tomahawked her belly open. I discount it. So far as I knew, whoever murdered her was the only eyewitness, and he never told his story to ary a white man I ever heard of. Besides which, I ain’t Irish.