The Creole Princess (44 page)

Durnford is an obstinate man, typical of the British race. He has determined that we Spaniards should in our victory—which I must say is certain—have no place to lay our heads. He has ordered the entire town of Mobile to be burnt to the ground. There is no explanation for this sort of insanity. So when you next come to the town of your birth, you will find nothing as when you left it. I dreaded to make you aware of this tragedy, and Durnford has much to answer for with regard to his cruelty and intransigence.

On a happier note, Luc-Antoine bids me tell you that he has learned to make horseshoes, and that he intends to become the most skilful blacksmith in New Orleans.

Now, mi corazón, the courier is giving me the famous New Orleans “evil eye,” so I must close. The next time you hear from me, I will look in your eyes and pray there isn’t a knife in your bodice or a cake in your hand!

With all my love,
Rafa

M
OBILE
M
ARCH
12, 1780

For four days, Rafa and the other officers had supervised the Spanish forces as they dug trenches and built earthworks around Fort Charlotte, while the British emptied on them some rather paltry cannon fire, easily dodged for the most part. The Spanish surgeon had bandaged up a few gunshot wounds, amputated a leg caught in a misplaced bear trap, and generally eaten himself into a stupor.

Two days ago, a Spanish scout reported that British reinforcements, under General John Campbell, to whom Durnford had written several days earlier, were mired on the other side of a swamp somewhere between Pensacola and Mobile. There was little likelihood that they would arrive before Gálvez had completed the taking of Fort Charlotte.

Bolstered by this good news, the Spanish army had opened fire on March 10, bombarding the crumbling fort with eighteen- and twenty-four-pound cannons at a rate impossible for the under
manned and underprovisioned forces inside to withstand. As of yesterday, Fort Charlotte was out of ammunition.

Rafa stood atop a stack of cannonballs, watching for Gálvez’s signals and keeping an eye on the fort itself. She had to surrender soon, for the air was thick with smoke from the cannon fire, the embrasures of the fort falling in in huge chunks, the sound of screaming artillery a hideous accompaniment to the boom of the cannon. Sweat poured down his face, his neck, and his arms, making puddles of mud and gunpowder which clogged his nose and stung his eyes. He reached for an already filthy rag in his coat pocket and wiped his eyes.

There. It wasn’t a mistake, or a result of warped, faulty vision. The white flag had gone up the flagpole in the center of the fort. With a whoop, he raised his arm, whirling like a madman as he ran for Gálvez.

“Surrender! They just surrendered!”

The cry echoed, over and over, from soldier to soldier, across the battlefield, even as the cannon blasts continued until the officers should relay Gálvez’s order to cease fire.

At last the order came.

Eerie silence settled with the smoke.

An enormous cheer went up from the Spanish army.

Victory!

Rafa bowed his head and wept for Lyse’s home.

N
EW
O
RLEANS
M
ARCH
17, 1780

The bells of St. Louis began to ring as Lyse stepped onto the bank of the bayou with an armload of clean, wet shirts. Startled, she slipped and nearly splashed backward onto her seat, but managed to right herself at the last minute. Laughing, she dumped the
shirts into her basket, then bent to lift it onto her head. Something wonderful must have happened for the padre to ring the bells on a Friday morning.

“Hey, miss, I’m looking for a place to sleep tonight. Can you help a soldier out?”

With a shriek, she did fall this time. The shirts went with her, back into the soapy, mud-roiled water of the bayou. She sat gasping, bottom aching, lye-tainted water stinging her eyes.

“Lyse! I’m sorry! I thought you saw me.”

Fiercely she rubbed her eyes. Rafa’s face hovered above hers. He was reaching for her.

She grabbed his hand and yanked. He tumbled in, headfirst, and came up sputtering beside her. Flouncing out of the water, she stood on the bank, sopping, dripping, arms akimbo, while he sat and blew water out of his nose like a dolphin.

“That’ll teach you to sneak up on me!”

“Lyse! I didn’t sneak! For the love of all that’s holy, I had the padre ring the church bells!”

“Well. Well, I didn’t know it was you. Could’ve been for anybody.”

He propped his arms on raised knees and stared at her, one side of his mouth curling up. “Anybody?” He crooked a finger. “Come here.”

“No.”

“I am a conquering hero. You have to do what I say.”

She thought about that. “Oh, well, in that case.” Hands on hips, she sashayed into the water and stood over him. “Now what?”

His mouth was curling on both sides now. “Now you kiss me.”

“You know the rules.”

“Hang the rules. Your papa says I can have you. He’s tired of worrying about you. Now kiss me.”

“Oh, all right. You’re such a bully.” She splashed down beside him and puckered her mouth.

Very soon it went soft and warm. “Rafa,” she said, when she could breathe again. “Your mama isn’t going to like this. She will beat you about the head.”

“I don’t care what my mama says anymore. You are the one who will get to beat me from now on.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. I get my cake, and I get to eat it too.”

Lyse laughed, perfectly happy.

A Word to the Reader

I
always begin a book with questions that I must answer before my characters can come to life—questions about terminology, cultural and racial influences, literature and music, political power struggles, behind-the-scenes movers and shakers. But then a weird thing happens. As I immerse myself in the period and get comfortable with my imaginary people, I sort of forget how shocking some of those historically accurate words and ideas can seem to contemporary readers.

Which is where my editor comes in. It is one of her jobs to help identify places in the story where the reader may have difficulty swallowing some arcane or politically incorrect phrase, or where the context isn’t quite obvious enough to explain it. Then it’s a delicate dance, deciding how much is too much—which explanations can most effectively be woven into the story, which should be relegated to this type of afterword. After all, the goal of storytelling in a historical setting is to sweep the reader into an unfamiliar era, surround her with people of long-forgotten customs and language and dress, and make her forget for a time that life is zooming by at warp speed.

If you’ve hung with me this far, I assume you’re the kind of reader who wants to know a little more. You wonder which characters are the “real” ones, and which are strictly from the author’s imagination. You’re curious about background forces that led people to think a certain way or make decisions that seem bizarre in twenty-first-century hindsight. Or maybe you want to know where I got my information so you can do some further reading. Just for you, I’m pulling back the curtain a bit!

First of all, I should note that, during the period of
The Creole Princess
, the American Gulf Coast—which, for my purposes, includes everything from present-day Florida to the eastern coast of Texas—developed under a confusing succession of European monarchies. Every American schoolchild knows that the thirteen British colonies along the Atlantic seaboard rebelled and formed the United States of America. But few are aware that two other British colonies remained loyal to the Crown—East Florida and West Florida (which came into England’s possession in the 1763 Treaty of Paris at the end of the French and Indian War). Loyalist refugees from the rebelling colonies flocked to the largest settlements of the time, Pensacola and Mobile. Some also settled along the eastern shore of the Mississippi River, near Natchez, Mississippi, and Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

Meanwhile, Spain had taken control of the Louisiana colony lying west of the Mississippi River (along with Texas, Mexico, and most of Central and South America), with New Orleans as its seat of administration—and France had pretty much given up its stake in the American continent (for the time being, anyway).

Like players in a giant Monopoly game, the nations who held various pieces of American property rolled the metaphorical dice with regard to alliances, trades, and declarations of war, timing their moves for maximum economic advantage, and withholding and releasing information (both true and misleading) with an eye to manipulating friends and enemies alike. The history surrounding
the American Revolution is complex, fascinating, and surprising—much too complicated to distill into a one-paragraph explanation. The best I can do is roughly set the geographical stage, as outlined above, and let the story speak for itself.

Regarding characters, there were a few fascinating heroes and villains of American Revolutionary history that I couldn’t resist plugging into my story. Front and center looms Brigadier-General Don Bernardo de Gálvez, governor of the province of Louisiana and commander of Spanish forces out of New Orleans which captured the British forts at Natchez, Baton Rouge, Mobile, and Pensacola. Gálvez was an extraordinarily effective politician, military strategist, and administrator who was universally respected and admired by his own superiors in the Spanish chain of command, as well as those who reported to him, and who effectively negotiated the delicate relationship between the Spanish court at Madrid and the American Continental Congress. A short biography of Gálvez can be found on Wikipedia, but most of my information about his extraordinary life came from Thomas E. Chávez’s excellent
Spain and the Independence of the United States
(University of New Mexico Press, 2002).

Gálvez’s wife, María Feliciana de St. Maxent d’Estrehan, makes an appearance in my story, as does Oliver Pollock, the Irish-American merchant who served as liaison and supply agent between the Spanish government and Philadelphia. Pollock, whose significant personal fortune financed weapons, ammunition, and uniforms sent to the American militia, is a little-known hero of the Revolution. He eventually retired in poverty to his daughter’s Mississippi plantation, after unsuccessfully applying to the Congress for redress of his debts. The two governors of New Orleans previous to Gálvez, O’Reilly and Unzaga, are mentioned in the story, as are Spanish minister of state Floridablanca (stationed in Madrid) and Captain-General Navarro, governor of Cuba.

On the British side, the real governor of West Florida, Peter
Chester, is mentioned in my story, and Lieutenant-Governor Colonel Elias Durnford plays an important role in the first and last few chapters during the siege of Fort Charlotte. Durnford was apparently a man of many talents—he was the civil engineer who redesigned the city of Pensacola after the Spanish decamped in 1763 (at the same time the French ceded Mobile)—and that he was given command of Fort Charlotte during the Spanish attack is a testament to his administrative and political skills (ignoring the fact that the fort turned out to be unprepared to sustain the determined onslaught of Gálvez’s marines).

Beyond those few, all characters are strictly from my imagination.

One might well ask, Why have I never heard of these people? Early American history is full of the exploits of French allies like Rochambeau and Lafayette, but the contribution of Spain to the success of the American War of Independence is only recently coming to light—probably because it was of a necessarily clandestine nature. Spain’s aid to the Patriot cause remained under wraps until late in the war, in order to give her time to outfit her navy with sufficient strength to engage and overcome the significantly stronger British fleet. But catalogs and records available in Spain and the National Archives in Washington (as well as other sources cited by Chávez) reveal that Spain’s financial contribution to the American cause mounted into the thousands, probably millions, of
pesos fuertes
before her official declaration of war against Britain, and contributed significantly to the American victory at Saratoga. Perhaps most important, the fact that Spanish forces effectively split the British navy between two theaters of war became a deciding factor in the American success at Yorktown.