De la Fayette perfectly understood his hesitation. "Have no fear, my friend," the Frenchman said. "My country will not stint nor scant my soldiers because I am not in the best of odors at Versailles."
Remembering how lavishly the French had already provided for their overseas army, Victor Radcliff decided he believed de la Fayette. "Good," he said. "Now that we've joined forces, let's work together until we root out the English from Atlantis once for all."
"Until victory, you mean," de la Fayette said. Victor nodded; he meant that very thing. The marquis cupped his hands in front of his mouth and shouted it in English: "Until victory!"
This time, the cheers from the Atlantean army seemed loud enough to scare Cornwallis and the redcoats all the way to Croydon. De la Fayette made a good friend. He might also make a bad enemy-Victor judged it very likely. Whoever had decided to let the marquis exercise his considerable talents far away from France must have known what he was doing.
However loud the Atlanteans' cheers, they didn't scare the redcoats away. Victor judged that a great pity. Cornwallis hung on north and a little east of Hanover. If anyone was going to drive him out of Atlantis, or even back to Croydon, it would have to be done with bayonet and musket and cannon, and, no doubt, with a formidable butcher's bill. Mere noise would not suffice.
Frenchmen and Atlanteans exercised together. They tried to, anyhow. The Atlanteans could have fit in fine with the redcoats. Atlantean drum and horn and fife calls were the same as the ones the English used. How could it be otherwise, when the Atlanteans had borrowed theirs from the mother country? But confusion ran rampant because the French used different calls and cues. Much polylingual profanity followed.
Victor wanted to place the steady French professionals in the center of the combined army's line of battle. His own men, more mobile and more woodswise, seemed likely to do better on the wings. Or they would have fared well with that arrangement, if only wings and center could each have been sure what the other would do.
"If we do not learn enough to fight together, we will fight our first engagement separately," the Marquis de la Fayette said. "We shall defeat the perfidious Englishmen even so."
"We have a better chance together," Victor said fretfully. "Your men didn't cross the ocean to stand apart from ours."
"We came here to win," the marquis said. "As for how-" He snapped his fingers.
"All right." Victor smiled in spite of himself. "I've been in a few fights like that. Sometimes you can't figure out afterwards how you won."
De la Fayette snapped his fingers again. "I tell you again, this for how! So long as you take the slave wench to bed and swive her good and hard, what difference does it make who climbs on top?… Are you well, Monsieur le General? Did I say something wrong? I have heard that English folk sometimes don't care to speak of matters that have to do with the boudoir. I never heard, though, that English folk don't care to do them!"
"I'm all right," Victor mumbled. Had he turned red? Or white? Or green? He would have bet on green. He and Blaise had joked about green men. But whenever he thought about Louise and about the child she carried-about his own child!-green seemed the only color he could go.
But, in law, the child he'd fathered on Louise wasn't his. In law, that child belonged to Marcel Freycinet. Throughout his arguments with Blaise, Victor hadn't felt slavery's injustice. How should he, when that injustice hadn't bitten him? Well, the trap had closed on his leg now, or perhaps on an even more sensitive appendage.
By this time, his letter should have reached Monsieur Freycinet… shouldn't it? No sure accounting for wind and wave, but Victor thought so. And the French Atlantean planter's reply ought to be on its way north… oughtn't it? Again, no way to be certain, but…
"You seem perhaps un petit peu distracted, Monsieur, if it does not offend you that I should speak so," de la Fayette observed. "If whatever troubles you can be washed away with brandy or rum, I should be honored to lend whatever assistance in the cleansing I may."
Victor Radcliff had never heard-had never dreamt of-a fancier way to propose that the two of them get drunk together. Most of the time, he would have liked nothing better. But if he started pouring it down now, his sad story might pour out of him. He was readier to trust de la Fayette with his life than with his reputation. He was, in short, a man.
"Once we've beaten the English, we'll have something worth
celebrating," he said. "Till then, I'd rather not."
"A renunciation! Crusading zeal! Almost a Lenten vow!" the marquis exclaimed. "Meaning no disrespect, but I did not look for such a spirit from an English Protestant."
"We don't always find what we look for, or look for what we find," Victor said. And wasn't that the sad and sorry truth!
His force and de la Fayette's kept working together. What choice had they? But Victor feared they would have to fight as separate contingents, not as parts of a single army. He wished he had the French nobleman's confidence. He wished… for all kinds of things.
A few days later, a courier thrust a sheet of paper into his hand, saying, "This here just got to Hanover, General."
"Thank you," Victor replied, breaking the seal on Marcel Freycinet's letter. One of his wishes, and not the smallest, had just come true. Now he had to discover how big a fool he'd been in wishing for it.
My dear General, Freycinet wrote, I am in receipt of your letter of the nineteenth ultimo. I regret that I cannot see my way clear to agree to your undoubtedly generous proposal. While I was pleased-indeed, privileged-to have Louise serve you for a time, I do not wish to be permanently deprived of her, nor of the child she is to bear. She is being treated with all consideration, I assure you, and is in excellent health. She sends you her regards, as I send mine. I have the honor to remain your most obedient servant… He signed his name.
Although Victor hadn't cared to get drunk with the Marquis de la Fayette, he hadn't said a word about crawling into a bottle alone. And he proceeded to do exactly that.
Chapter 20
Listening to gunfire while hungover wasn't something Victor would have recommended. However much he wished it would, his head didn't fall off. He disguised what the Spaniards called a pain in the hair with a stoic expression and a few surreptitious nips from a flask of barrel-tree rum.
Maybe those nips weren't surreptitious enough. Both Blaise and the Marquis de la Fayette sent him thoughtful glances. Neither presumed to ask him anything about his sore head, though. That was the only thing that really mattered.
No-that and the advance of the Atlantean and French armies. If not for their advance, musketry and cannon fire wouldn't have lacerated his tender ears. The things I endure for my country, he thought. But the rum, even if it did make his factotum and the French commander wonder, also took the edge off his headache By evening, he was more or less himself again.
"Anything I can do for whatever's troubling you, General?" Blaise asked, adding, "I know something is, but damned if I know what."
"It's my own worry, Blaise," Victor said, and not another word. He couldn't very well claim it had nothing to do with the Negro. Knowing what it was, Blaise would have called him a liar-and he
would have had a point, too. He didn't know, though. Victor hadn't been too drunk to burn Marcel Freycinet's latest letter the night before. He supposed things would come out sooner or later, things had an unfortunate way of doing that. As far as he was concerned, later was ever so much better than sooner.
By Blaise's expression, he had a different opinion. "If I knew what it was, maybe I could give you a hand with it," he said.