The window shutters hung nearly paintless, scabbed, broken-slatted and crooked. A skift of bright glass shards littered the floor, along with a few dead birds and a skeletal rat, now collapsed upon itself, and swarming with ants. Even as Hainaut fanned himself in the closeness of the airless salon with his gilt-laced fore-and-aft bicorne hat, he saw a lizard of some kind scuttle from the shutters to seize a cockroach nigh as big as his thumb, and he could hear the 'crunch' all the way across the room. To make things even worse, an entire flotilla, a whole shoal of cockroaches, fled at that seizure from beneath a torn and tilt-legged sofa to flood along the baseboard, before swirling beneath it like a spill of dark ale!

Jules Hainaut knew that he was in trouble; Le Capitaine would have him strangled for such carelessness, for heaping one more demeaning slight upon him, after the several he had suffered from the local officials since they had come ashore on Guadeloupe.

Working for Le Capitaine was rewarding at times, profitable in monetary matters and the best of confiscated or "commandeered" goods… such as his ornate sword, which formerly had been the property of an elderly junior admiral without the proper zeal and ruthlessness of a true revolutionary. " You wish it? Take it," Le Capitaine had told Hainaut after the court-martial for failure and Royalist sentiments, as it lay on the judge's table after the guilty party had been hauled out- blade exposed and point toward the doomed, signifying a verdict of guilty.

Rewarding and pleasing for Jules Hainaut, too, was the aura of fear he could create by merely stating whom he worked for, trading on Le Capitaine's dread reputation. His new boots the cobbler had made gratis, pouring heart and soul into the workmanship and materials as if his life had depended on it. His uniforms, if not free, were gotten at a large, shuddery, discount.