Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  “Big house,” Jowan had said. “Built by Admiral Quick nigh on thirty years ago. ’Tis his son lives there now, with the admiral’s widow, and his two children. Sticklers they are. I don’t envy you. You’ll know the house by the telescope, if nothing else. He did used to like to watch the shipping, the admiral, and they kept his room as it was when he died.”

  Perry double-checked, and yes, the bulky wooden tube and round golden eye of a telescope protruded from one of the seaward windows, a suggestion of movement inside the room telling him he was being examined in turn. He made another attempt to thumb the dust from his wig—or at least to spread it more evenly so it would look applied by design—then straightened his stock, his waistcoat, and his cuffs and went round to the front to pull the chain to ring the bell.

  The door opened a crack. Then it closed again sharply. Perry massaged the ache in his jaw with his fingers, sighing, and knocked a second time, more firmly.

  “We’re not interested,” a woman’s voice shouted. “Go away before I set the dogs on you.”

  “Not interested in what?” Perry asked—this was a new permutation of an old theme.

  “You’re one of them abolitionists, aren’t you? We don’t donate, and we don’t want pamphlets. We’re not interested.”

  You seem keen enough to profit from Africa, Perry thought, for there were pineapples growing in frames visible in the conservatory. The inner wood of the room appeared to be teak. Ivory was inset into the door handle and the pull of the bell. But of course you have no desire to aid her. He held his tongue on the hypocrisy, however—he was himself a freeborn Englishman, son of a free man, and if his mother had come out of slavery, well, that had been a very long time ago and she never talked of it.

  “I am Mr. Peregrine Dean,” he told the woman patiently. “I am employed as a riding officer, and I have been sent here by William Gwynn at Sir Quick’s bidding. Just tell him I’m at the door and see if he wants me let in.”

  “How do I know you are who you say you are?”

  He hoped it wasn’t going to be like this the whole time. At least the capital was cosmopolitan enough to accept that Londoners came in every shade.

  “I can show you my papers.” He took them out once more, and when she opened the door a sliver, passed them through. Moments later and she pushed it wide, handing them back. His heart softened a little on seeing that she was clearly still a child—tall but gawky, all eyes and elbows, her nose smudged with boot blacking.

  “I’m sorry, sir,” she said, dropping him a courtesy, “I didn’t know. You sit down here”—she indicated the row of chairs that lined the entrance hall’s right wall—“and I’ll go and get the housekeeper. It’s washday and we’re all at sixes and sevens.”

  The wait was welcome at first, helping him to calm down and taking the ache out of legs that had had a rude awakening to toil after a morning in the coach. However, he’d missed his chance at luncheon, and had begun to feel hungry and ill-done-by by the time the housekeeper arrived and ushered him into a glowing, rosy room adjacent to the orangery.

  She stopped him just outside the polished teak door and whispered, “Sir Lazarus Quick, Mrs. Damaris Quick—that’s his mum—and Miss Constance. Master Clement’s out riding.”

  Then, taking a deep breath, she announced him. “Mr. Peregrine Dean of the customs service, sir,” and he followed as if into a ball. There was even a footman into whose hands he could have thrust his overcoat, if he had been wearing one.

  His first impression was overwhelming pinkness, as though his eyes were closed and a bright sun beat upon them, but by degrees the details became clear. The dazzling light of the sea burst through the many windows of the orangery and streamed upon a chinoiserie wallpaper on which salmon-pink dragons floated amid rosy clouds whose colour was echoed by upholstered chairs of pink velvet with gilded legs like curlicues of flame.

  In this warm celestial setting, the Quick family themselves emanated a jarring chill. The old lady on the sofa in the centre of the room wore a sack-back gown of silver blue, paired with exuberant swan-patterned lace of an extraordinary daintiness, and topped with a long string of pearls like winter moons.

  The man who stood behind her must be Sir Lazarus Quick. He was much more austere—all his garments as iron grey as his hair and his jutting eyebrows.

  Only the young woman who sat by the window seemed to match the room’s floating romanticism—a pink ribbon wound in her blonde hair to match the pink of her sash, a few ringlets en déshabillé around her delicate face, and her eyes rarely straying from the window as she petted the white cat in her lap.

  “You are Mr. Peregrine Dean?” the old lady asked, thunderous. “I hope Gwynn is not practicing upon us.”

  Her voice was so sharp that Perry didn’t dare sigh. These were people of quality—people it would benefit him to befriend. “I am, ma’am. Those who know me well call me Perry. I understand you requested Mr. Gwynn to send you one of his men—he sent me.”

  “Gwynn does not employ a blackamoor.”

  “As of today he does, ma’am. I am newly arrived this morning.”

  “Extraordinary.” She raised her eyebrows at him and fell silent.

  “The man who was sent was a particular protégé of Lord Petersfield,” Lazarus Quick slipped into the silence left by his mother. Perry couldn’t tell from the tone if he was being accused of a lie or not, but it seemed likely.

  “I had supposed that information to be of a delicate nature, sir. Not to be widely spread about. Yet now I’m here, it seems everyone is aware.”

  “Do you call us ‘everyone’?” Lazarus demurred. His voice had a whispering quality like the scratch of snake scale over stone. “Do you mean to suggest this information is such as should have been withheld from the magistrate of the county? Or that I am a person who could not be trusted with it?”

  Perry raised both hands to his jaw and rubbed the hinges. He would break his teeth on his pride one of these days, but he had still rather have it than not.

  “My apologies,” he managed again, “that was not what I meant. Of course it was important for you to know. In that light, yes, I have been fortunate enough to gain Lord Petersfield’s patronage. My father is a sailor on a London pilot boat. He saved Lord Petersfield from a gang of footpads at the docks—saved his life, indeed—and in gratitude Lord Petersfield took an interest in me and my career. I consider any debt to have been wholly reversed by now, such that I could never repay him for his kindness toward me. I am eager to show him that his trust in me is not in vain, and if there is corruption here, to unveil and end it.”

  Over the course of this speech, some of his anger had joined his passion and hope and made his voice ring. When he finished, even languid Miss Constance was looking at him, her fan tip pressed to the end of her nose, the peach silk standing out vividly against her dark-blue eyes.

  Damaris huffed and rearranged the folds of her apron with ring-encrusted fingers. “I’m glad to hear you speak with such conviction,” she allowed. “Our purpose in calling you here was to make you acquainted with the greatest ruffian of the town. A man whose involvement in large-scale smuggling goes totally unchecked. He is clever and ruthless, and we believe he is not only a wholesale smuggler, but a pirate and a murderer also.”

  “And he tarnishes our reputation.” Constance rolled her eyes and offered this bored observation in a sweet mew of a voice. Her father’s frown in return just provoked a tiny smile. “Oh, you can’t claim our dislike for him is not personal. It’ll be obvious as soon as you tell him the name.”

  “I’m not trying to claim I am indifferent to his insult to us in particular,” her father bristled, drawing himself to even greater heights of rigidity. “But you should not pretend to know anything of this matter. Stick to your painting, my dear, and refrain from further interruption.”

  A fine watercolour view of Barras Bay as it might be seen from an upstairs window of this very house hung above the mantel. Perry flicked his eyes to it,
wondering if that was Constance’s work—the painting of which her father spoke. She was talented, if so.

  When he looked back, Lazarus’s eyes were trained on him, steely like the rest of him. “This smuggler we speak of has been so successful that the small independents of the town now contract with him. He has influence over the miners and the townsfolk. This is not a jug of spirits forgotten in the galley, nor even one or two barrels hidden among the mackerel. The man is making himself into a power to challenge the authorities. I don’t think I need to tell you how dangerous that is, in this time where the poison of rebellion against all God’s anointed leaders is also being smuggled over from France.”

  Perry nodded, letting his eyes fall closed on the confession that he had some sympathy with the ideals of the revolution himself. “The man’s name?” he asked, gently.

  Damaris scoffed again. “He calls himself Quick.” Her thin face was all cheekbones, hatchet edged with the sharpness of her gaze. “Tomas Quick. He has not the slightest right to the name. He simply chose it to mock us and to bring our family into disrepute—that is what Constance meant by saying our dislike was personal. This man is traducing our good name. But our dislike is also rational. The rogue has his claws in everything that goes on in Porthkennack, yet he is as slippery as a handful of frogspawn and as impossible to hold—”

  “If you could bring him to trial successfully, you would succeed in something the customs service here has been trying to do for the past ten years,” Lazarus Quick urged, all the distance and superiority in his voice having burned away in favour of zeal. Perry recognized with a thrill that for this moment, the magistrate was treating him as a valued colleague, as an equal.

  His thoughts took flight into a future where he also lived in a house like this, where his word was law, where his order kept the streets safe, and defended the honest citizens from those who would prey on them out of selfish strength.

  He could not quite see himself with a wife, a daughter. But if he, too, could become a magistrate, he could reinterpret the harshest laws to defend those men like him, who only wanted to privately love another man. Hell, once he had enough power, high enough rank, he could change the laws from the inside. All through doing good and doing it excellently.

  He was rather getting ahead of himself, though. One step at a time.

  “What do you say, Mr. Dean? Will you take down this villain for us?” the magistrate asked.

  Perry had to smile. “If he is as bad as you say, sir—and I have no doubt of it—I will be delighted to. You may confidently leave it in my hands.”

  “You will, I think, need more tangible authority than your own word,” Lazarus Quick had said to Perry later. Once he had pledged himself to their cause, the ladies had withdrawn, and Perry had followed the magistrate through to his study, a sumptuous room in shades of indigo and silver that put him in mind of a moonlit night. Here, despite the scorching heat outside, a fire burned in the grate and Perry’s travel-worn clothes prickled on him, reminding him that he had not had a change of shirt for days.

  Lazarus settled into his imposing chair and uncapped an ink-bottle in the shape of a schooner, pulling pen and paper before him and beginning to write. Perry did not tug at his collar, and if he found himself gazing wistfully at the firmly closed windows, it was easily passed off as a natural curiosity over the doings of the port. Admiral Quick’s house commanded an excellent view of the shipping just approaching the point, and a better angle to see the rocks lying beneath the water than Perry had seen before.

  “So here.” Lazarus shook sand over his note to dry the ink, tapped it off, then passed it to Perry. “A note in my hand to say you are in my employ and are to be obeyed with the alacrity with which a man should obey me. If you need to take charge of the customs cutter, the Vigilant, in order to intercept the rogue at sea, you will show this to her captain.”

  Even his eyes were grey, as he levelled them firmly on Perry’s face. “I hope I do not need to stress what a high degree of trust I am placing in you.”

  Despite being stifled, the flush of warmth within Perry’s breast at this was pleasant—barely arrived and he was already in the confidence of the highest authority. Why would that not feel pleasant? “I am sensible of the great honour you do me, sir, and I will not fail you.”

  “Good.” Lazarus’s prim little smile looked out of place on his mouth. The worry his face fell back into seemed habitual. “I feel it only right to stress to you that the man is dangerous. I did not wish to urge this in front of the ladies and frighten them, but you should go armed, for Tomas so-called Quick carries both blade and pistol. Though we cannot prove it, I believe he has murdered upwards of a dozen men. Let your zeal be tempered with caution, therefore. It will not do to find evidence against him if it is only to take it to your grave.”

  Perry had cherished a somewhat ill opinion of the Quicks thanks to their chill reception, but this warmed his heart. To receive both trust and consideration so far away from home and so early in the process of proving himself was a boon. If anything, the caution just spurred him on. “I am equal to the challenge, sir.”

  “Excellent.” Lazarus broke out the awkward smile again and rose to indicate the door. “Then I look forward to hearing from you soon.”

  Having arrived as a disrespected foreigner, Perry retraced his path into town as a trusted agent of the magistrate. He had been given no timescale but soon, so he considered returning to the inn to unpack a few things from his trunk, discover where he could have his clothes laundered, and perhaps take a bite of lunch. But all of that seemed tedious and time-wasting, and he wanted to get started on the important task that had been entrusted to him.

  He could at least find out what this Tomas Quick looked like, where he lived, and who his principal friends and neighbours were. Which boats did he have a share in, and which was his own principal vessel? If Perry did nothing more today than learn to identify his prey by sight, that would be a start.

  Down in Constantine Bay, the boats were landing pilchards by the hogshead. Pilchards in great sleeting mounds lay aflap on the sandy beach and in the hollows of the road beyond. The dazzle of them under the bright summer sun was dizzying, and the beach was packed like the commons of a popular play with the whole village out to process the catch.

  Fishwives stood ankle-deep in the slurry of fish, their bare arms white to the elbow with salt and their hands red, chapped, and oddly delicate as they placed each individual small fish in a radiate design—each layer of pilchards a sunburst, heads to the centre, tails outward, beneath a layer of salt.

  Perry stood next to a woman in a green skirt for some minutes, waiting for her to notice him. But in that time her focus never shifted from the fish, and at length he reached out and tapped her elbow, which was gritty with salt and slime.

  “What is it? Can’t you see I’m busy?” She shrugged her arm out of his grasp and turned her head minimally to put him in the corner of her eye.

  “I need to talk to Tomas Quick,” he said, trying to sound like he meant no harm. “Which is his house?”

  “Phew!” She gave a long, tired exhale through her teeth and straightened up to regard him more closely. He hoped the news that there was a new black riding officer in town had not yet had time to spread, and perhaps it hadn’t, because she smiled. “New crewman, are you? All right, then.”

  She tucked an errant strand of light-brown hair back beneath her yellowed bonnet and nodded to the cluster of cottages that rose from the stone on the other side of the beach—a mile of fine yellow sand and frantic fish packing in between. “’Tis beyond the bay over there. Blue painted door and a big glass lantern outside like something you’d see in church. You’ll know it when you see it.”

  He considered trying to interrogate her further but she had already turned back to her work. So instead he said, “Thank you,” and began to pick his way through the tumbrels, barrels, fishwives, fish piles, seabirds, thieving cats, gossiping sailors, children, and beggars of t
he beach.

  On the western side, the ground finally regained its firmness. Perry struggled up a loose sand dune, barely kept in shape by pale dry grasses, and then to stone and saxifrage. Here a row of whitewashed cottages faced inward toward the land, the walls of their back gardens towards him. He found a cut-through between two of them, heat coming off its stones.

  A black cat lying on the rounded cope of the wall to his left leaped down as he passed and disappeared into a yard full of white cloths—sheets, petticoats, shifts, and shirts—enough washing to clothe a regiment.

  When Perry emerged from the cut-through, he found a pretty gate in a low fence in front of a yard full of laundry, and behind it a cottage with a blue-painted door, over which the incongruous shape of a moorish lantern—shards and stars of blue and clear glass in a lattice of silver—glittered in the sun.

  The white fabric of the laundry clapped against the ropes on which it hung as the breeze skirled in from the sea. Used to London’s grime, something in Perry exalted unexpectedly at the smell of distance and wildness, at all the blaze and gleam of light.

  He pushed open the gate, coming through into a small front yard, bare but for the linen, with only a patch of yolk-yellow marigolds eye wateringly bright beneath the water butt. The cottage itself looked as though it had once had barely two rooms—one up, one down, but recent prosperity had led someone to build it outward in all directions. There might now be four rooms upstairs and four down. A particularly flat stone in the corner of the yard suggested to Perry’s experienced eye the presence of a cellar also. But it was still not the fortress nor the palace he had half expected.

  Perry wiped his palms on the skirts of his coat and considered whether he should have brought his pistols out of his trunk before coming here. No, this was a courtesy call, just to look and go away, just to let Quick know the game was on.