"Ah!" Lewrie snapped, very much relieved, de-cocking his pistol.
"Thort I wuz t'onliest man alive fer a bit there, sir," the old veteran merrily cackled, pacing his horse up next to him. "Spooky of place, 'ese woods, sir."
"Indeed," Lewrie "windily" agreed. "I'm looking for the whereabouts of the Fifteenth West Indies."
" 'Bout a mile an' a bit straight on, sir, then veer right along the lines, first track ya come to. Woods open up so's ya can see your way, not a quarter-mile yonder, where a big plantation wuz, an' you're fair-safe, then… among soldiers, beyond 'em fields an' all, sir."
"Thankee, Corporal."
"Be glad t'get outta th' woods, meself," the corporal said, taking a swig from a wood canteen. "Get 'ese trace-chains fixed, so's me major's waggon'll draw again. Why, do I not find a handy smith, h'it'd take me
all this day an' night, sir! Major'd not expect me t'risk 'is road after dark, sir… no, 'e wouldn't!"
The "water" in the man's canteen smelled hellish alcoholic to Lewrie's nose. An experienced old hand, the corporal obviously wanted any excuse to toddle off and dawdle over his errand, getting a shot at a decent meal, a thorough drunk, and a woman before having to go back to the Army's misery.
"You goin' up to h'arrest some o' them officers from 'at regiment, sir, 'em Fifteenth? Good Lord knows somebody should, th' cowards. 'Tis said, sir… some of 'em rode off an' left 'eir men t'die or get took by 'em dark devils. Won't see 'at in an English regiment, nossir, but… wot can ya h'expect from such an idle lot, sir?"
"Visiting a friend," Lewrie answered.
"I'll ride on then, sir, an' keep safe," the soldier bade him, saluting for the first time, with a leery expression for anyone with a friend from among that regiment's officers.
"Same to you, Corporal," Lewrie rejoined, doffing his hat, and clucking his mount into motion once more.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
He found the Fifteenth at long last, after casting rightwards past the fork in the road, slowly walking his mount along the rear of several other units' encampments and entrenchments.
Lewrie had seen defeat and despair often enough in his eighteen years of service, and this army was showing all the signs of it. Care wasn't being taken of equipment, but for personal arms. Uniforms were still mud and grass-stained, and the clotheslines were not the usually crowded rows oн bunting. The soldiers looked hang-dog and lethargic.
When he got to the lines of the Fifteenth West Indies, it was even worse. There were very few tents, replaced with brush arbors or mere awnings stretched beneath the trees, where exhausted, sick, and hollow-eyed men lolled nigh-insensible to everything around them, not even raising their heads at the rare sight of a naval officer on horseback. What tents remained contained the wounded… and the still-neat line oн larger pavillions for officers. One, the largest of all, he took for Ledyard Beau-man's; that was where some fashionably dressed and rather clean officers had gathered, raising a merry din as if they were enjoying themselves, where fine horses stood cock-footed and shivered their skins and lashed their tails and manes against the flies, blowing and nickering now and again in exasperation or boredom.
Lewrie dismounted and led his horse down the lines until coming to a sizable pavillion with a large fly, and two sides halfway rolled up. He recognised the coat hanging on a nail driven into the tentpole in front. From within there came the sounds of snores.
"Hallo, the house," he called, rapping on the pole.
"Ummph!" came a querulous, half-awake plaint.
"Wakey wakey, lash up and stow, you idle bugger," Lewrie japed.
"Alan?" Cashman croaked, coughing and clearing his throat before sitting up on his sagging cot. "What the bloody hell're you doing way out here?" he asked, swinging his booted legs to the ground.
"Came in search of good cheer," Lewrie said, kneeling down and tying his reins through a rusty iron ring set in a tethering-stone.
"Came to the wrong bloody place if you did… more fool you," Cashman grunted, scrubbing his face with dry hands and yawning broadly, reaching for a towel to soak up his sweat. "No joy here, believe me."
"Ran into a soldier on my way here…"
"Not hard t'do, that," Cashman snorted, taking the lid off his tin water pail and dipping out a ladleful to swish around his mouth and spit out. "We're lousy with 'em. Least, we were."
"Said you'd had a spot of bother, recently. Asked if I was up to arrest anyone," Lewrie said, ducking under the tent fly to sit on a folding camp stool and fan himself with his hat. How Cashman slept under canvas was a wonder to him; the temperature felt as if it had increased by a full twenty degrees inside the tent.
"Wish someone would!" Christopher spat, dipping up more water, this time to guzzle down. "My luck, though, they'd come for me."
"What happened?" Lewrie asked, waving off Cashman's offer of a crooked, local-rolled cigarillo.
"Feel like a stroll?" Cashman asked, fumbling with his tinder-box and striking flint on steel several times before getting the lint burning, with which to light his cigarillo.
"Not really, it's hotter than the hinges of Hell."
It was no matter to Cashman, who, now puffing away, stood and pulled on his waistcoat, coat, hat, and sword-belt and led the way out to the bare and sandy tramped ground of the encampment.
"We'll go up and take a look at the lines," Cashman announced, setting off for the woods to the east. Lewrie could but shrug before following him; at least, from Cashman's initial pace, it would be the slow, ambling sort of stroll he had in mind.
"That purblind, Goddamned fool back there!" his old friend said at last, once out of earshot of the officers' lines. "He got us halfway massacred… and now swears it wasn't any fault of his! I've lost a third of the regiment, dead or wounded, and the rest're so terrified, I doubt they'll be worth a tuppenny shit the next time they face those devils of L'Ouverture's."
"How?" Lewrie asked.
"Why, by being himself, Alan," Cashman said, the scorn dripping. "By bein' his merry little, useless, witless self! General Maitland put us out on his left flank, braced by a veteran regiment of regulars on the extreme left. Heard about the battle we had t'other day, at Croix des Bouquets? The 'Port-Au-Prince Derby '?"
"Only that there was one," Lewrie told him.
"Had us some trenchworks, not much, 'bout waist-deep, with the bushes and such cut and cleared a couple of hundred yards out beyond," Cashman explained as they threaded through a worn path into the woods towards their new front. "Caltrops in the grass and all, two guns on the line for help. 'Bout a half-hour before sunup, here the darkies came, the sun in our eyes. Advance party, a 'forlorn hope,' that had most-like spent all night creepin' through the grass to us? Sprang up at the first volley, and got into the trenches with their cane-knives and short spears. Some o' them just fire-hardened canes or branches, if you can feature it. I'd kept two companies back for just such an emergency, and brought 'em up myself. First time in real action, our lads, so a fair number broke, no matter what the sergeants did t'keep 'em steady… you know how that is.
"I'm with you," Lewrie said, idly swatting a mosquito that landed
on his cheek.
"Don't do that!" Cashman snapped in a hoarse whisper. "It draws fire. The darkies snipe at any sound, and some of 'em are dab hands at shootin'. Not just muskets out there… some have jaeger rifles and rifled huntin' pieces… took 'em from their dead masters' plantation homes. Sometimes they take a blind shot, at night especially. T'keep us awake