Satisfying himself that Consuelo is, at least until her term, in good hands (Beluche has set her up in a flat on Conti Street, near Jean’s own mistress, and prevailed upon friends at L’Abeille to translate and publish her fiction. When delivery time comes he will see to her accouchement, give the newborn a generous birthday gift, and look for another expectant beauty in need of protection), Andrew presses his inquiry no further, but decides to use some other English name in his dealings with Jackson.

It is this ready and thorough improvisation of identities which Lafitte finds most appealing in our ancestor. Himself at this time a suave 32-year-old who for a decade already has been chief among the Baratarian captains, he relishes pseudonyms and disguises, but has no gift for facial change and the imitation of speech. When Andrew now alters before their eyes the set of his jowls, the flare of his nostrils, the cast of his eyebrows and the pattern of his facial wrinkles, along with his stance, apparent height, and timbre of voice (he becomes “Jonathan Barlow, elder nephew of the late American minister to France: born in New England, educated in Paris and London, now come down from Kentucky as confidential observer for his old friend Henry Clay”), Lafitte offers him at once the post of minister of magic in whatever new Barataria might rise from the ashes of the old when the British are turned back.

But first they must be turned, and to their turning our forebear credits himself with three significant contributions. Early in December Andrew Jackson arrives, gaunt with dysentery and the rigors of his march from Florida, and assumes command of the city’s defenses. He inspires morale; he moves with industry and intelligence to fortify or block the likeliest approaches; but he has not enough men. In particular he lacks trained sailors and cannoneers, and heavy weapons for their use. Reinforcement is on the way, from Alabama, Mississippi, Tennessee, but it is all cavalry and infantry. Delegations of Creole citizens petition him in vain to enlist the Baratarians. To the bilingual “Ambassador from Kentucky” (whom he trusts for “speaking like a proper American and not a damn’d Frenchie”) Jackson confides that he has begun to regret his proclamation, but fears he will be thought irresolute if he rescinds it. “Johnny Barlow” opines that his friend Henry Clay, in such a situation, would subtly shift his stand and refuse the next such petition on jurisdictional instead of moral grounds: Baratarian leaders are in jail awaiting federal prosecution, and he Jackson has no authority to release them. “Barlow” will then see to it that the petitioners and the federal district judge get the hint; when prosecution is suspended and the Baratarians are released, Jackson may accept their service and materiel without having solicited them. The matter of pardon can be postponed until after the emergency. Jackson will thus have at his disposal the best sailors and cannoneers in the world, at no cost to the U.S. Treasury, together with an exquisite network of strategic information. Any contradictions of his proclamation will pass unnoticed; the Baratarians’ role can be ignored or understated in official dispatches to Washington; their prosecution can even be resumed at some future date, with or without giving them covert advance warning and time to escape.

Old Hickory grimaces. “Politics!”

“John Barlow” shrugs. What is a general of the army but a sort of chief executive? he asks. And what is the President of the United States but a sort of general, strategically marshaling and deploying the forces at his disposal to carry out as it were the orders of the Constitution? Jackson’s frown turns pensive.

Two days later Dominique You and the others are free, Jean Lafitte is reviewing his own maps with the general, Renato Beluche is organizing artillery companies, and the vessels that in September had fired Barataria are now manned by the Baratarians! “John Barlow” discreetly retires.

The British land their advance parties and assemble below the city. A sustained drive against them is out of the question: even with Jackson’s reinforcements, it is some 3,000 American militia against three times that many seasoned British regulars. Nevertheless, the first action between them — a bold and successful night raid by Jackson to induce the British to delay their own attack until their whole army is assembled (thus giving him more time to complete his defenses) — convinces “André Castine” that with the help of the Baratarians New Orleans can be defended. Word has come through Jean Lafitte’s spies that the British service commanders are at odds with each other. Major General Sir Edward Pakenham, Wellington’s brother-in-law, does not like the terrain: his army has the Mississippi on one flank, a swamp full of alligators and Indians on the other, the Americans before (who barbarously harass them all night long), and behind them a fleet that can evacuate only one third of the troops at a time. Admiral Cochrane is complaining that he has another General Ross on his hands; that if the army “shrinks from New Orleans as it shrank from Baltimore,” he will land his sailors and marines, storm the city himself, and let Pakenham’s soldiers bring up the baggage.

All familiar as a re-play’d play, writes Andrew Cook: the Chesapeake moved to the Mississippi! On the day after Jackson’s night raid — i.e., December 24, as Henry Clay and his colleagues in Ghent sign a treaty agreeing to the status quo ante bellum (which the British privately mean to interpret as invalidating Jefferson’s Louisiana Purchase) — he puts by his French alias and under his proper name gets himself “rescued” by the British.

More specifically, he devises with Lafitte and Beluche the following strategy: their agents among the Spanish bayou fishermen, who are cooperating with the British, will identify him as a friend of Lafitte’s with whom Jean has broken over the question of the Baratarians’ allegiance to the U.S. However much Cochrane distrusts him after the Chesapeake episode, the admiral will most certainly question him about the strength and disposition of Jackson’s forces. Cook will improvise as best he can to stall and divert a major British offensive at least until Jackson’s defense line is complete.

The crucial thing is that his “rescue” seem authentic. Unfortunate coincidence comes to his aid: Lafitte arranges for a party of Baratarian scouts to bring Andrew in from the marsh as a captured British scout; he is then quickly transferred under Baratarian guard, with other captured British scouts, through a stretch of bayou known to be patrolled by Cochrane’s marines. At the first evidence of British troops nearby, the Baratarians pretend to take fright and flee to save themselves, abandoning their prisoners. As the British congratulate themselves on their unexpected good fortune, Andrew experiences the first of those post-McHenry blackouts aforementioned: he wakes to find himself under a stand of loblolly pines on Bloodsworth Island, 36 years old, the war not yet begun…

Or so for a dizzy moment he imagines, till he learns from a redcoated officer that it is Bayou Bienvenue whose muddy bank he sits on, not the Chesapeake: those are cypresses, not pines, and it is Christmas Day, 1814. The sailors who row him down to Cochrane’s headquarters are jeering openly at the soldiers encamped along the way; morale does not seem high. At the Villeré plantation, British GHQ, word has it that Cochrane and Pakenham are still arguing strategy. An army aide comes out to interrogate the rescued scouts: Andrew declares to him that the key to Jackson’s defense is two armed schooners anchored in English Turn, a bend of the Mississippi below the city. So long as they lie there, he swears, no approach by road to the American main line is feasible; but to destroy them will involve the construction of artillery batteries on the levee above.