No matter how desolate or bleak the islet, La Reunion 's owners were in
happy takings, eyes alight with the novelty of it all, sipping champagne and snickering as they watched the crew aboard the merchantman struggle to sway out and lower her largest launch. The sailors manning the check or snub lines were having a rough go of it as the prize ship juddered about.
"I thought you said Capitaine Balfa was a salty man," one young man demanded, "a bold, experienced freebooter! But he goes about that like a clumsy, drunken… Bayou Barataria coon-ass, ha ha!"
The hired captain of La Reunion (or Le Revenant), standing aloof of them, clamped his lips together to bite off what harsh response that petulant plaint merited, eyes slit in frustration. Jerome Lanxade and Boudreaux Balfa went back a long time together, and a slur on Boudreaux might as well have been a slur on his own competence.
Dammit to hell, neither he nor Balfa owned this lithe schooner, only shares in the "enterprise"! It wasn't like the old days, back in the last war, when they'd commanded five ships at once, when the names Jerome Lanxade- Le Feroce, for he had been called "The Ferocious"-and Boudreaux Balfa- L'Affame, or "The Hungry"-had commanded respect and awe in every Caribbean or Gulf port. Then they could recruit an entire crew overnight at the snap of their fingers and fill every man's pockets with prize money or plunder. Under the old white-and-gold fleur de lis of Royal France, the heraldic red-gold of Spain… even the dreaded Jolly Roger or Black Flag, a time or two… their orders or slightest whims could have made fish bait of callow, capering lubbers like them!
Jerome Lanxade turned to face his employers, hands clasped in the small of his back, a black-visaged glower of warning on his dark-tanned face. Just for a moment, he fantasised, again, of murdering every last one of them, of just taking this splendid little ship for his own and continuing the business for his own profit. Kill all the young men, not the girl, though. Oh no, not for a long time…