Peter Wicked Read online

  “Three hundred of them,” said Dick.

  “But then Talleyrand demanded fifty thousand pounds sterling just to be sat down with. That’s a quarter of a million dollars.”

  Corbeau shrugged.

  “Talleyrand’s your foreign minister,” said Dick.

  “Oh, la, I know this. But Monsieur Talleyrand, he wanted the money for to fight the British, no?”

  “‘No’ is right,” I said. “It was his personal walking-around money. He wanted another twelve million on top of that, and that was to go to the war effort.”

  I leaned out to watch a pair of sea pigs riding the bow wave. They glided along effortlessly, with their forever grins on their faces, and then they flicked their tails and were gone.

  “Which you got to admit,” I continued, “the British wouldn’t look too kindly on it. It would’ve meant war with ’em, which between you and me I would’ve been just as happy to see. The Jeffersonians calculated there was a plot afoot to make France look bad, but Adams spilled the papers and there it was in black and white.”

  “But this makes me feel bad,” said Corbeau. “I fight for the liberty, the equality, and the brotherhood.”

  “Well, we have all that already,” said Dick. “So why don’t you just pack your bags and go on home?”

  Corbeau laughed. “There is nothing I would like better, but I am your prisoner.”

  “He got you there, Dick, ha ha!”

  “I’ll say he don’t,” said Dick. “He’s Peter Wickett’s prisoner, and welcome to him. But anyway, by ‘you’ I meant ‘you French,’ not Mr. Corbeau here. Say, either of you chaps care to continue our game?”

  “I’d rather pound cockroaches with your hairbrush,” I said.

  “You mean your hairbrush,” said Dick.

  “What, and make mine all gloptious?”

  “It’s a moot point,” said Dick, “as Ben Crouch complained to Peter Wickett about it. Said the noise was keeping the watch below awake at night.”

  • • •

  About five leagues south-southwest of Cape Hatteras I was up in the crosstrees with a glass, admiring the lighthouse that had been built on the cape the year before. It was about ninety foot tall and its white paint gleamed in the afternoon light; even at that distance it seemed to tower over the low sandy ground on which it stood. It makes a fellow proud to see a sight like that, and I drank it in. At long last and about time, too, I was thinking—the cape was a notorious catch-hell for ships riding the Gulf Stream north or the inshore current south—when the lookout beside me sang out, “Sail ho!”

  “Where away,” called Peter from the quarterdeck, “and what is she?”

  “Two points abaft the starboard beam. Ship-rigged, sir.”

  I thought he hesitated before the sir and that he glanced guiltily at me before he said it, but it could’ve been nervousness at my presence. I put my glass on the strange sail. She was square-rigged on fore, main, and mizzen—what ship means to a sailor—with a jaunty rake to her masts. She wore no colors that I could see.

  “She turns toward us, sir,” called the lookout.

  She was still hull-down, but I’d seen enough. “Deck there,” I called. “She looks to be French. Maybe a privateersman.”

  “What, this far north?” said the lookout.

  “We’re indebted to you, I’m sure, Mr. Graves.”

  Peter’s voice had an odd note to it, aside from the usual sarcasm, and I glanced down. Every idle hand had turned to look at him, as well they might with a strange sail standing toward us and we armed only with eight small guns. But then I clearly heard Crouch say, “Nay,” and the men seemed to lose interest.

  “Bring us as near to the wind as she’ll lie on this tack,” said Peter, and the tillerman brought us on a course that took us farther west into the shoals, where the ship couldn’t follow us.

  THREE

  We shucked the Breeze at Hampton Roads in favor of the Baltimore packet, and transferred at the mouth of the Potomac into a grubby old log canoe. Her sails were more patches than canvas, and Dick and I could’ve ruined any number of hairbrushes on her hordes of roaches, but I for one was glad to see the last of Peter Wickett and Ben Crouch. Corbeau elected to stay with Peter, which I thought was a pity; but as we approached the capital city on the last of the tide the next day, I realized I not only had no interest in prisoners or even the navy, but that I didn’t even know what day it was. And I didn’t care, neither.

  High white clouds dotted the milky June sky, and the afternoon breeze smelled of dank woods and humid cornfields as we doddered along. Woodpeckers thumped in the forest on the starboard shore, and I thought there was a tarnal lot of them till I realized I was hearing the pounding of workmen’s hammers.

  A few men and boys swam naked in the stream. I shuddered to see it, for the sultriness of the West Indies lingered in my bones, and the northern air seemed thin and unable to hold its warmth. They stared at our uniforms as we lounged on the gunwale.

  “Prolly don’t even know dar’s a war on,” said Jubal.

  “Hush, you,” said Dick absently. He gripped the rail and stared off at the shore.

  I didn’t see anything remarkable. There was just a lot of trees and corn, and clay pits, and granite boulders among the stands of sweet-gum and the sassafras thickets that choked the runs.

  “Ignorantest fools I ever see,” said Jubal, but he said it quiet and Dick ignored it.

  I looked up past the swimmers, up and along a broad avenue that had been hewn out of the forest. It reached straight and true into the hazy distance for a mile or more, but the stumps hadn’t been yanked out yet, and you couldn’t have driven so much as a dogcart down it. At its junction with another wide avenue stood a cow, chawing her cud and waggling her ears.

  “Say, Mr. Plank,” I said to the master of the canoe, “where’s the President’s House? Where’s the War Department? Where’s the city?”

  “They be there,” he said, shifting his wad of tobacco to his other cheek. “They be new buildings all along in there, though you cain’t see ’em for the trees.” The canoe weren’t more than about five foot wide, but he ejected a brown stream into the puddle that sloshed around his bare feet rather than rupture himself trying to spit clear over the gunwale. “Miz Adams ain’t moved in yet. Reckon when the quality move in, that make it official.”

  “No,” said Dick. “No. No. Surely this is not the capital of the United States.” He glared at Jubal as if he had something to do with it, but Jubal wouldn’t rise to the bait and Dick turned his glare on Plank.

  “You bet it is,” I said, waving at the woods and tidal marsh and a herd of hogs belly-deep in the mud. I could suddenly see it all, just as clear. “This here’s the Federal City, a-building for the purpose.”

  “No, I guess not. We aren’t there yet,” said Dick. He said it fierce, like he’d set the words on his shoulder and wanted me to try and knock them off. He pointed upstream where some roofs and chimneys poked up out of the trees. “That’s it up there, I suppose, isn’t it, Mr. Plank? Those houses beyond that island?”

  Plank shifted his chaw and spat again. “Naw, that there be George Town.” Turning into a broad inlet, he nodded toward a tall square building on a hill that rose out of the woods to the east. Arched windows and white stone were visible beneath the scaffolding. “That be Washington,” he said. “That there be the Capitol, where, come the fall, the congressmen and senators will pronounce they edicts like bolts of blue from the fundament.”

  “I guess you mean to say ‘firmament,’” said Dick.

  “I know what I said,” said Plank. He pointed across the inlet to another pile of stones. “That be the President’s House. Now, gents, the wind and tide be falling and we done made our offing.” He spat out his chaw and yelled at his sole crewman, “Zeus, you lazy rascal, get ready to drop the hook!”

  Zeus hefted the canoe’s anchor over his bony shoulder and slouched up into the bows. I never seen a man slouch while climbing before, but
Zeus did it. He had talent. Plank flew his sheets, letting the canoe’s sails flap in the dying breeze, and fetched his moorings by throwing the tiller hard over and running the canoe up onto the muddy bank. Zeus dropped the anchor overboard with a splat.

  “Gents,” said Plank, looking down at us where we had tumbled in the sloshing bilge, “we be arrived.”

  “Plank weren’t wrong about not being able to see the buildings for the trees,” I said as we tromped down the brow and into the mud. The vale and hills for as far as I could see was all parkland and brushy woods, and not at all the pesty swamp that opponents of the relocation had made it out to be. It was marshy on the fringes, sure, and buggy where we happened to be standing right at the moment, but it’s always that way along a river. Stumps and cornfields sprawled across the boulevards, and pigs and cows wandered the thoroughfares, but it’s that way in Baltimore and Philadelphia, too, as anybody knows. I expect that’s the way of it in London and Rome and the whole world over, and maybe even in the palace of the Grand Vizier of Arabistan, too, except for maybe not the pigs. Stones stood stacked up all round about, but gangs of black men were turning them into the temples of government. You could see where the city was a-going to be by the brick kilns and clay pits and piles of lumber that was scattered across the landscape. It was like a giant hand had flang down stacks of building stuff and was coming back any minute to do something about it.

  “Will you look at that?” I waved my arms. “Will you just look at that?”

  “I’m looking,” said Dick. “But there isn’t much to see.”

  “There will be.” I throwed a glance at Jubal toting his and Dick’s sea chests under his massive arms like they was little music boxes or something. I’d lost mine when the Rattle-Snake went down, but a sailmaker’s mate in the Croatoan had made me a canvas carryall for what few duds I had left, and Jubal had slung that from his wrist like a lady with a reticule. “Ain’t that so, Jubal?”

  “Yassuh, Mars Matty,” he said, but you can’t trust a man’s opinion when he’s obliged to be agreeable.

  I turned back to Dick. “Imagine it, a whole city built for the purpose. They ain’t never been nothing like it!”

  “Oh, the Roman army did it all the time. The scouts would show up and get the lay of the land, then the soldiers would lay out streets and set up the tents, and the sergeants would make sure they all lined up shipshape, and by suppertime they’d have paved streets and marble fountains, practically.”

  “Well, there you go,” I said, laughing. “A modern Rome. There’s even a River Tiber.”

  “Yes, which I read was called Goose Creek until recently.” He turned around to see how Jubal was doing with the baggage. “Giving something a grand name doesn’t make it grand. Here! You, Jubal—keep your station.”

  On the north side of a road that ran below the bluff where the Capitol was building, across the swampy place where Plank had landed us, and on up past the shell of the President’s House, which asking around had told us the road was called Pennsylvania Avenue, we come to a group of six government buildings leaning against each other. The Navy Board made its temporary headquarters there in rooms owned by the War Department.

  “Think we ought to go in?” said Dick.

  I looked up at the halls of doom and glory. “I calculate maybe we ought to wash the taters out of our ears first.”

  “It might be good if we find a place to shift our clothes at least,” said Dick. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, planting himself in front of a gentleman in a torn coat and greasy britches. “Can you tell us where we might find lodgings?”

  “Try New York,” said the gentleman, giving us a long look. He was mud-spattered from the knees down and tobacco-dribbled across his chin and neck-cloth.

  “You look like a congressman,” I said.

  “Well, I bein’t one, begod,” he said, baptising the oath with tobacco juice. “Them idjits broke for the summer a month ago, and they was still up in Philadelphia for the first session, regardless. They don’t commence to conspire again till November. I don’t expect the Adamses will heave in till then, neither. But I tell you what”—he jerked his thumb at a muddy walkway of badly laid stones that wandered off westward—“you’ll find that most of Washington City lives cheek-byjowl in rooming houses, back parlors, lean-tos, and cow sheds over to George Town.” He walked away, chuckling to himself and saying, “Me, living on a congressman’s six dollars a day! Haw haw haw, that’s rich! Ain’t it just.”

  My excitement had faded away like dew on a summer’s morning. I regretted it. After even burned-out Le Cap, Washington’s namesake was sort of an afterthought of a city.

  A Marine sentry in the War Department building directed me and Dick to “the sar’n on dooty” in the guardroom. The sergeant on duty glanced at our summonses and then marched ahead of us down a short hallway into what I took to be the navy’s suite of offices. There he knocked on a door and entered. Dick and I pretended to examine the new portraits of the United States, the Constellation, the President, and the other three first frigates and their captains that lined the hallway, humming to ourselves and jiggling things in our pockets, until the sergeant came back out. He looked into the middle distance and bawled, “Mr. Graves! Mr. Towson! The gentlemen will follow me!” With our hats under one arm and our personal logbooks under the other, we entered the room.

  I would’ve expected Captain Thomas Tingey, late of the Ganges and now superintendent-to-be of the still largely fictional Washington Navy Yard, to have a more impressive office. From the look on his face, he’d expected it, too. The room was well lighted by three tall windows, but that’s about the best that could be said for it. Like near about everything else in Washington, it was unfinished and didn’t look to be finished anytime soon. There were no curtains or shutters, no rugs, no plaster on the walls or ceiling. It was higher than it was long or wide, which didn’t strike me as a very useful arrangement, and the desks and bookshelves and Tingey and his two assistants were crammed in there like twenty pounds of turnips in a ten-pound sack. Tingey, bald and bloated, didn’t look any too happy to see us, but that was fair enough. We weren’t happy to see him, neither.

  At a desk to his right sat a gray-faced lieutenant, with silver in his side-whiskers and his throat puffed out like a bullfrog.

  “This is Mr. Crawley,” said Tingey. “He will keep track of events during this inquiry.”

  At the word inquiry I snuck a peek at Dick out of the corner of my eye. He’d assumed an expression of polite expectation, which seemed a good way to look. I adopted it for myself.

  Tingey pointed at the other man in the room, a dumpling in a plain blue frock coat. “Whitlow, my clerk, will write down everything.” He pronounced it “clark,” though I doubted he’d been in his native London since before he’d joined the Continental Navy. He was half a century old if he was a day, and looked every second of it.

  Whitlow was perched with his back to us on a high stool in front of a standing desk; he didn’t acknowledge us, but moved his pen across a sheet of paper—writing down what Tingey had just said about him, I guess.

  “First order of business,” said Tingey. “You gentlemen are out of uniform.”

  Dick and I looked at each other. We’d changed our tropical whites for buff britches and vests, same as what the three of them had on, and we both of us had worn our best blue long-tailed coats with the three yellow metal buttons at cuffs and pocket flaps.

  “I don’t understand, sir,” I said. “Did the uniform change since we been at sea?”

  “Tell them,” said Tingey.

  “It’s the epaulets, boys,” said Crawley.

  The bullion of Dick’s epaulet shone on his shoulder in the sunlight streaming through the windows, and I didn’t see how Tingey could fault it. My own swab was sprung and brassy, as I said before, but it was regulation for all that. I hoped the new navy hadn’t followed the British example so far as to deny epaulets to lieutenants.

  Dick was quicker off t
he mark than I was. “I beg pardon, sir,” he said, “but we’ve both been appointed acting lieutenants by Commodore Gaswell.”

  “Yes, and I hereby unappoint you,” said Tingey, “at least whilst this dueling business is being straightened out. Until such time you are merely unemployed midshipmen as far as I’m concerned, and you’ll find my concerns carry great weight around here.”

  Tingey had commanded the Santo Domingo squadron before Gaswell did. I would’ve guessed he’d harbor a grudge against Gaswell, and maybe even some hard feelings, but I hadn’t expected him to extend them feelings to us. Stunned, I reached for my epaulet to unship it.

  Tingey threw up a damp-looking hand in horror. “Oh, don’t compound your error by disrobing,” he said. “Good God, man.” He waved his hand around, like he was drying it, maybe. “Whitlow, read the opening statement. You know, the thing that says what we propose to accomplish by being here in the first place.”

  The clerk picked up a neat letter-book and turned to a closely written page. “‘The late Lieutenant William Trimble,’” he read, leaning close and lifting his specs so he could peer out from under them, “‘having been deprived of his command, the armed schooner Rattle-Snake, by certain of his officers and men on or about the afternoon of January blank’— that’s to say I put a blank there, sir,” he broke off, “pending our acquisition of the proper date—‘of the present year, thereby preventing his defeat of a force of French picaroons intent on capturing the convoy which the said schooner was then engaged to protect, developed a mutual resentment of such intensity with his inferior, Lieutenant Peter Wickett, that the two subsequently met near the town of Cap Français in the French colony of San Domingo and engaged in a duel with pistols, which subsequently proved fatal to Lieutenant Trimble.’”

  “Sir,” I said, “that ain’t true.”

  Tingey’s face quivered like a slice of pork-fat pie. “D’ye mean to say that Mr. Trimble didn’t die?”