"I am the senior naval officer on Guadeloupe, m'sieur le commissaire!" Choundas had thundered back, "appointed by the hand of Director Paul Barras, premier of the Directory of Five! They are my cannon, my sailors and officers, and do they sit idle in port for lack of cooperation from the island's commissaire civil, believe me, m'sieur, he will know of it in short order, unless… in the cooperative spirit, according to the ideals of La Revolution, prize vessels suitable to my needs… which also now lie idle for want of cooperation!… are not turned over to me I"
A bitter compromise had been reached. Hugues had not been sure that Choundas's writ might prove to carry more power than his own with the Directory, or that the ogre just might have the ear of Paul Barras after all. Hugues got Le Bouclier for scrap-yard use, and four of her great-guns, with which to form a protective shore battery at Deshaies. Choundas received a mere two prize ships for conversion a small brig and one schooner, to be armed with no more than ten guns apiece, crewed by as many matelots as he wished to employ for boarders and passage crews for any prizes taken. Wounded off Le Bouclier who recovered… they would become Hugues's. Naval Infantry, other than Choundas's personal guard detail, would be landed ashore and put under Hugues's command to re-enforce his skimpy 1,500 man garrison.
Choundas sat and sweated, stripped down to shirt and breeches and fanning himself with a "top silver" plaited palmetto hand fan. Among the princes of the Lanun Rovers or Mindanao pirate fleets, there had been tiny young girls with cool, wetted bundles of palm fronds. Extremely young girls, who would come whenever he had beckoned, would wind out of their colourfully printed batik wraps to service him, or cheerfully, submissively let themselves be pressed down, spread, and taken, as casually as they spat betel juice. Not so casually, the second time he took them, but their fear, then, their weak whines and pleadings, even their looks of revulsion, had been doubly sweet and invigourating. Back when he was a normal-looking man, before that salaud Lewrie lamed and maimed him.
He fanned a little harder, shifting his crippled leg to ease an ever-present dull ache, with perspiration popping anew to trickle down his cheeks and the small of his back-partly from the effort put into fanning for relief from the sullen afternoon's heat; partly from being frustrated to lose the tumescence in his groin that such fond reverie had engendered, and could never be relieved quite so easily as then; and partly from the intrusion of his undying hatred for the Englishman, and the harm he'd done his magnificent frigate!
His noir servants; damn Hugues for freeing them! Damn Hugues, too, for charging him rente on the use of them by the week! Damn them for drawing the line on what they would or would not do for their new master and his coterie, as if some things were below their dignity… as if they had any sense of dignity to upset!
They dared lay complaints of ill-usage with Victor Hugues's sous commissaires civils, they insolently dared to quit his house (when they didn't just run off!), and implored the commissaires for employment with any other house, even at lower wages, if they had to.
The commissaires had sent letters chiding him for harshness; he was to pay more for the services of those who remained.
There were fewer servants in his retinue doing the same amount of labour, and, illiterate or not, those remaining noirs seemed as if they knew those letters by heart. Cleaning, laundry, and yardwork was now done in lacklustre fashion; dishes and glassware appeared at meals spotted and stained, and had to be sent back over and over 'til he was satisfied. The cuisine, already upsetting, was now slovenly over-done or under-done, some days too spicy to be stood, and on others so bland as to be nearly tasteless, and the new male cook and his assistant had a rare knack for finding the toughest, oldest, and scrawniest victuals, whether fish, fowl, or meat. Lank, wilted, half-shriveled vegetables, half-washed salad greens almost brown or black on the leaf edges…!
And their mute, dog-eyed, blank-faced portrayals of dumb innocence, their shambling-slow, head-scratching shows of utter ignorance! They behaved much as that Lt. Recamier had cautioned. Spoons and utensils went missing, saucers and cups inexplicably got broken or chipped, costly bed-linens brought from France got torn, permanently stained, or so poorly repaired that the caterpillar-sized seams made them useless for sleeping.
Despite constant warnings about open windows and doors, birds, lizards, and shoals of cafards, the huge evil-smelling cockroaches endemic to the tropics invaded, infested the house (and their bedding!) every night and each dawn, resulting in a stampede of noirs who went tittering and yelping to chase them down and expel them-resulting in something fragile and valuable being broken each time.
Merde alors, every bottle of wine that was opened tasted as if it had been watered, no matter that he inspected the corks and leaden seals closely, no matter that his clerk Etienne practically stood guard over his cellar, with all the crates placed in de Gougne's cramped office and bed-chamber; with a Marine Infantry sentry in the foyer right outside the doors!
And not a blessed one of them would fan him!
Screeching tirades made no more impression than if Choundas had howled at the tide like King Canute ordering it to go out, not in. And he could not beat them, whip them, kick them, or slap them, as one could casually do Hindoos, Chinese, or Filipinos, and it was galling to him. One letter had suggested spending more of his pay to purchase a better cuisine for all, including servants, of garbing them in better clothing, of supplying shoes and stockings, but he would be damned if he would. The cost of that notwithstanding, there was no way Choundas would stoop to "bribing" noirs to treat him better, or be mocked for a "soft" touch. It would be a token of total surrender, and even if he dismissed them all and started with a fresh crew of servants word of his ineffectiveness-his de-fanging!-would be all over the island by the next sunset, making him the laughingstock of noirs, Creoles, and French-born alike.
He fanned himself some more, and swabbed his face and neck with a small towel that had once been coldly moist, but now reeked of sweat, mildew, and arm-pits. He painfully drew his chair up to his massive, and elegant, desk to study his manning problems.
Lt. Houdon could command the brig, the larger prize vessel now being armed and converted for a commerce raider; Lt. Mercier would be his second officer; and Capt. Griot would have to surrender one of his junior lieutenants to make the necessary third, bien.
Capitaine MacPherson, for all his drawbacks, was a masterful seaman, able to command La Resolue without his first officer; and his first lieutenant would be seasoned and made of the same mould as he by now. That officer would get the large schooner's command, aussi bien. Junior lieutenants would move up in seniority, aspirants would become acting-lieutenants aboard the corvettes…
No, the schooner needed two more officers, and the brig needed a fourth, perhaps, to serve as prize-master when she took a suitably big or valuable merchantman… the schooner, too? Damn this heat!