Hainaut chilled with foreboding as he rose and crossed to the double doors that led to his master's ground-story chambers. Hainaut gently pulled them back and stepped inside, fearing what he'd find.
A single candle burned on a night-table, a small bottle of good brandy lay on its side on the carpet, empty, along with two abandoned glasses. And a girl lay tangled in the bed-linens, her nearly White cafe au lait complexion a tawny contrast to the white of the sheets. Her hair was raven-dark and curly, now undone and bedraggled, down to the small of her back, and spilled like dried blood over the pillows.
Hainaut stepped to the side of the high bed-stead and swept her hair back from her face. She was beginning to purple with bruises his master had inflicted in his "passion," her lips split and caked with a colour darker than paste. Dried tears streaked her artful makeup, but she was indeed very pretty. Not over thirteen or fourteen, as most of Choundas's bed-mates always turned out to be, slight, slim, and petite. Child-women, with spring buds for breasts.
Hainaut put a hand under her nose and half-opened mouth to feel for breath, touched the side of her neck to see if life still throbbed in her. Yes, she was still alive. Hainaut knelt and sniffed the neck of the empty brandy bottle, and detected the aroma of laudanum, which Le Hideux had used to drug her into deliriously sweet helplessness, if not complaisance. Into furtive, whimpering silence, instead of wails or screams that could draw unwelcome attention from neighbours. Snuck in the back way, as always, long after full dark, muffled in anonymous cloaks or blankets. Carried out, before dawn, and still insensible.
Hainaut heaved a disgusted sigh before pulling the sheet up over the girl's bare shoulders and stepping out of the room, quietly closing the doors on her fate.
"Allow to me ask, m'sieur" Hainaut said, almost tip-toeing, and his voice a whisper, in some form of deference for that pitiful chit, "but what degree of disposal did you have in mind?"
"Scruples, dear Jules?" Choundas mocked. "This late in our association? My, my. Nothing drastic. She's a pretty little whore, but a whore nonetheless. Return her to her master at the bordel where she is employed, with a second purse beyond her rental. To compensate the bordel owner for his loss of earnings 'til she's presentable once more. The whoremonger has been warned what could happen to him if he makes a fuss. Have her out before the town wakes," Choundas grumpily ordered, reaching for his walking-stick leaned against his costly desk, and painfully getting to his feet at last, swaying with weariness and wincing at the pain of an old, old man. The low candlelight limned him as an ancient, grizzled dragon.
"The last matter I mentioned may be done at the same time you return our wee putain. That chore is official, public, and provides a mask for the first."
"Very well, m'sieur?" Hainaut assented, perplexed again.
"Please be so good as to step out on the porch and summon the front entrance sentries," Capt. Choundas grimly ordered.
"M'sieur?" Hainaut gawped in sudden, renewed dread that all he had been offered, told, had been but a cruel charade, that all along Choundas had been toying with him like a sly cat would torment a fear-frozen mouse, teasing it this way and that with soft, claw-sheathed paws.
"That spy, John Gunn or James Peel, whatever he calls himself, boasted a little too much to our Capitaine Fleury, Jules," Guillaume Choundas continued in a more-familiar growl, rage back in his face and voice, "accidentally revealing to him that the 'Bloodies' have a spy so close to me that the British might as well be sitting in this room this very moment. Now who could it be, Jules? Who could it be? Does it not make you wonder?" Choundas threatened, taking a clumsy pace or two towards him, stick, boot, and brace ominously going clump-shuffle-tick!
"He is here now, m'sieur?" Hainaut stuttered in surprise, and near-terror, did Choundas still suspect him, though he'd said… He turned his head to look down at Etienne de Gougne, for he knew it was not him. Besides, he'd never laid eyes on this anonymous Fleury, and could not recall snubbing or insulting anyone by that name. If this Fleury person had laid a charge against him to cover the inept loss of his precious ship, but how…!
"He is here," Choundas forebodingly confirmed, and slowly swept his own gaze away and down, to peer at de Gougne as well. The little clerk began to rise, but Choundas drove him back into the chair with a shove of his left hand.
"The mouse? Surely…!" Hainaut scoffed, never so relieved in his life.
"All these years you reported behind my back to the Directory, and their spy-master, Citizen Pouzin," Choundas gravelled. "You think I would not learn of it, Etienne, when Pouzin seemed to know too much and so quickly, on the Genoese coast, and ever since? Don't dare deny it! Did you think he would rescue you, should you ever become a liability to me? Where is Citizen Pouzin now, and where are we hein? "
"M-m-m'sieur," de Gougne blubbered in fright, barely able to find breath with which to protest his innocence. "Master…"
" That sort of treachery I could abide, Etienne," Choundas menacingly rumbled, "such pettiness. Was it your sly, meek way to get back at me for using you like the insignificant worm that you are? But to take British gold to slake your wretched, pitiful, mousy shop-clerk's, ink-sniffing, clock-watching, time-server's, slippered bourgeois, land-bound peasant spite on me? You will pay, Etienne… you know you will. I will break you into slivers. I will make blood-and-marrow soup with your bones, and make you drink it, before you die, with just enough of you left to ride the tumbril to the guillotine, so everyone can witness the reward for treason, and see justice done.
"But before that, Etienne," Choundas promised, leaning forward to whisper as sibilantly as a hideous boa constrictor, "you will name for me every traitor on this island you work with or… quel dommage," he suddenly mused, standing upright, and instantly bemused, as if his ire had gushed away like the hot air from a Montgolfier balloon.
For clerk Etienne de Gougne had pissed himself, had even fouled his trousers, as he fainted dead away, slumped bone-white to the floor.
"Him?" Hainaut gaped, quite unable to believe he had it in him.
"Oui," Choundas confirmed, jabbing with his walking-stick. "Get this gaoled in Fort Fleur d'Epee. And get that trull out of my house, too, Jules. Now, vite, vite!"
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
Lewrie had given testimony before the Prize Court, and the American merchant vessels had been released to their captains to complete their homeward journeys. Crews off Sumter, Oglethorpe, and Proteus had been given shore liberty, with sailors of both nations reeling arm-in-arm from one public house to the next, for a whole rousing day and night.