Now they were under official escort, the Blacks and lighter Mulattoes stood and scowled at the strange officers, with no sound; no jeering or hooting as they’d heard at the quays. Around the edges of the crowds stood White French colonists, men, women, and children; Lewrie could pick out the ones he imagined had been wealthy planters and slave owners, rich traders and exporters, by the finery of their clothing. The grands blancs, Lewrie recalled their being called. The others, though… the ones in humbler suits or working-men’s garb, with their women in simpler, drabber gowns, and the children in the same sort of hand-me-down “shabby” one could see in poorer neighbourhoods in England, were the artificers, the shopkeepers, the greengrocers, fruiterers, and skilled labourers, the petits blancs who might never have been able to aspire to owning slaves.

What had Jemmy Peel told him, when in the West Indies on Foreign Office Secret Branch doings in the ’90s and sniffing about how to undermine the French, the slave rebellion, or both?

Saint Domingue, or Hayti, was a bubbling cauldron of rebellion; poor Whites versus their betters; Mulattoes versus darker, illiterate field hands; house servants siding with masters in some cases, murdering them in others. Petits blancs then siding with Mulattoes like General Rigaud down south round Jacmel to fight L’Ouverture, Dessalines, and the others… and all wrenched from time to time by siding with the French if they’d seemed to have the upper hand, with the British when their own army had landed, even looking for shelter and security by allying themselves with the Spanish in the other half of Hispaniola, if that looked better!

“Uhm… Colonel Mirabois,” Lewrie asked, at last, his curiosity aroused, “I note a fair number of… blancs still in the city. Were they not able to find space aboard the ships?”

“Mais oui, M’sieur Capitaine… Le… pardon, seulement, votre name I cannot say, ees tres difficile, n’est-ce pas?” Mirabois laughed rather drolly as he explained.