That quickly, he'd become an Aspirant entitled to wear steel on his hip, not a crude seaman's cutlass, but a midshipman's dirk of honour, even if his uniform had been a rag-picker's off-day ensemble. Hainaut had thrown himself into pleasing Le Capitaine during the purging of the Bordeaux fleet, and later in the Mediterranean, when they ran the infiltrating spy-boats, the coastal raiding ships, and small convoys to support the army facing the Piedmontese, the Genoese, Neapolitan, and much-vaunted Austrian armies.

And it hadn't been Hainaut 's fault when his small warship under an idiot captain had been taken by the British, when Le Capitaine had trusted him to supervise the mission, and "wet his feet" as a fighting sailor. A few weeks on parole on Corsica (rather pleasant, that!) and he'd been exchanged for a British midshipman, and warmly welcomed back into Le Capitaine'?, service-though the idiot had gotten "chopped" for failure!

Now Jules Hainaut was a seasoned Lieutenant de Vaisseau, polished and groomed, tutored and "pampered," and, did he continue pleasing his superior, the aspirations of commanding a small warship, later becoming a Capitaine de Vaisseau in charge of a tall, swift frigate of his own, were not beyond his reach.

If he survived this little disaster!

And it certainly looked hopeless.

Lt. Hainaut damned the Governor-General, Citizen Victor Hugues, for this insult. There were much nicer mansions to be had in the neat little community of Bas Fort, and much closer to the local seat of power, too. He suspected that Governor-General Hugues (a light-skinned Mulatto gens du couleur, but still a noir, Lt. Hainaut accused!) wanted to show how unimpressed he was by the arrival of Le Capitaine, a possible rival for his position, or a spy for the Directory, despite all their fulsome introductory letters from Paris.