Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  A bell in a distant clock tower gave ten rather strangled tolls, and Perry sighed, still fizzing with the need for action. Tomas Quick would be at his house right now, that oddly charming cottage that seemed too humble for a crime kingpin. Perry could go there and burst in, demand answers. But he had no evidence. He had seen nothing that could not be passed off as a fisherman trying to take up lobster pots. Even the fleeing might be cast as a free man’s high-spirited refusal to allow the government to meddle in his perfectly honest toil.

  It would achieve nothing, but the prospect of seeing that face with its spray of freckles turned up to him in lantern-light, like an angel spattered with mud, made it seem worthwhile nevertheless.

  He groaned, at himself and at the heat, and rose to write another paragraph to his mother by the light of the lantern that lit the passage outside his door. A pitcher of water and a basin had been supplied by the inn, so he sponged himself down, then wedged the door shut, cutting out the light. It was still hot as Hell, but these steps had been soothing enough to bring him back from the edge of precipitate action, and this time when he cast himself down on the narrow bed, he slept.

  A knocking woke him in time to hear the distant clock striking three. Taking his pistol from his trunk, he warily opened up, but it was only Jowan again, looking well rested and rosy—his cheeks reddened in the light of the lantern he held. “All right, my lover.” He grinned, taking in the sight of Perry with nightgown and pistol with easy equanimity. “Time to show you our rounds. ’Tis a beautiful night, perfect for a ride.”

  “I thought . . .” Disappointment settled like an itchy woollen vest on Perry’s shoulders, but he was already pulling on his breeches and stockings. “That I was seconded to Sir Quick to do what he asked.”

  Jowan chuckled. “True enough. But what the magistrate wants? That’s by way of being extra, isn’t it? Still got to do your job too, if you want to be paid for it.”

  “Of course.” Perry flushed almost as hot as the inferno of his room at having assumed differently. How did Lazarus Quick expect him to bring down an archenemy if he barely had an hour in the day to devote to it? Was he trying to set him up for failure? Well, Perry would show him. He’d do it anyway, and he’d make it look easy.

  He flung on shirt and jacket. Without the wig, his hat would not fit, but it was warm enough to go bareheaded, and surely anyone out at this time would not be too worried about decent standards of dress. “I’m ready.”

  Stepping out of the inn into the night brought little relief from the heat. The sky was blank above them—heavy cloud must have obliterated all the stars, and even a townsman like Perry could feel the weight of the air pressing on him like a hot stone wrapped in a wet blanket.

  Jowan had brought him a mare, revealed by the lantern to be a dispirited, dun creature too apathetic even to sidle under him as he swung into the saddle. “You’ll have to buy your own,” Jowan commented, cheerfully, “for she’s all we’ve got spare.” She followed Jowan’s equally enthusiastic animal nose to tail as they plodded out from the centre of town toward the cliffs.

  Leaving the final building behind was like stepping into a mine. Perry, used to London, where every dwelling had a lantern hanging before its door to illumine the streets, was deeply unsettled by the absolute dark. Jowan’s lantern light barely showed him the ground under his horse’s hooves, and after a while of riding like this, it seemed as if they stood still, while a variety of rocks scrolled beneath them and the sound of the sea grew ever closer like the breath of an exasperated giant.

  “How can they land anything in this without lights?” Perry whispered as though the dark itself was eavesdropping.

  “Some of the best pilots can know where they are by touching the waves,” Jowan murmured back. “Though sometimes even they need lights, and we spot ’em easy from that. Anyone who can’ll be coming to harbour tonight, though. Can you feel that? Storm’s on its way.”

  He had stopped. The circle of lantern light picked out rocks and grass below them as always. The trickle of breeze on Perry’s face was hot. He wasn’t sure what he was supposed to feel, but his hair seemed to strain at its roots. The tingle of rising gooseflesh swept across his skin just as—infinitely far away—a needle of intolerable light stabbed into the sky. In a flash, he saw the boiling black clouds above him and the sea below in waves as jagged as broken glass. He gasped, recoiling. They were on the very edge of the cliffs. Two paces forward off the path and he would have been falling to his death.

  The grey blaze across the clouds snapped off, leaving him once more cushioned in darkness, yet shaken to the core. How easily Jowan could have thrown him off the cliff if he had wished. How easily a man might disappear in this country.

  It was still and, save for the sea, utterly silent, and when the thunder came, what seemed hours later, it was almost too quiet to hear.

  “I don’t think we can expect the storm before tomorrow,” Jowan murmured. “But if there’s anyone out in it now, God save ’em.”

  The storm, as it happened, passed Porthkennack by. Only its edge brushed the town with a heavy rain early in the afternoon. Perry had been ready to return to bed by then, taking a noon meal that was for him his dinner in the Seven Stars with Jowan. He had just risen to bid his partner good night when a grubby boy with mud to his bare knees flung open the door and ran in beaming. “Wrack, masters! A great raft of it coming in now. Wrack on the shore!”

  It was the first time Perry had seen Jowan really move. The big man rose as if jerked from his seat by a string and was halfway to the door before Perry thought to follow. By that time, he was part of a crush. The population of the room, who had been so peacefully falling asleep over their newspapers, had risen and there was a scrum for the door.

  Outside, the whole town was aboil. Perry and Jowan dodged between tumbrels and barrows, women with baskets on their arms and hips, men with sacks, everyone pushing and jostling down the paths to the shore, heedless of the downpour.

  The pilchard nets had been cleared, the barrels of fish already moved into storage or shipped away, but the beach was, if anything, more heaving with humanity than it had been yesterday.

  A very different picture today. The swell of the waves rolled in like oncoming buffalo—as unstoppable and as dirty brown in colour. The beach was already strewn with splintered wood, and as soon as Perry sprinted into the surf, more wrack battered his shins.

  “There’s the boys!” Jowan shouted and began to shoulder his way to the inmost curve of the bay where Perry, following, recognized Mr. Gwynn, a pistol in either hand, standing guard over a wagon, while the other customs officers waded into the sea.

  “Merchantman called the Hyacinth,” Gwynn shouted. “According to what’s come ashore. Must have foundered last night. Seize what you can. Mark where the rest of it goes.”

  Then it was every man for himself. Jowan bounded away after a barrel like a black fleck on the crest of a wave. Perry—looking for survivors on planks or swimming—searched the whole bay with a glance. He was struck briefly by the sight of a young man—thirteen or fourteen, perhaps—on a ledge of the cliffs, up where he could act as a look out, spotting the most valuable wreckage and shouting down to his minions below. It was only a brief glimpse and he didn’t see the face, but the boy’s long yellow hair stayed with him as something with which to identify a person whose house should be searched anon.

  His gaze sweeping down from the boy, fell on another head of bright hair, this one more like flame. Tomas Quick was on the beach outside his house, waist-deep in the surf. He and three other men were hauling in a fat, foundering barrel. Perry ignored the desire to go storming off down the beach and accuse him then and there. There was nothing illegal about finding wrack. It was only if it was not turned over to the proper authorities that a case might be made, and—

  A hump on a distant slab of curved hull caught Perry’s eye. That slice of blue was a coat. The thing waving in the water was an arm. “A survivor!” he yelled, and as h
e threw himself against the power of the oncoming waves to try to haul the man to shore, three of the townsfolk turned from their salvage to join him. One of them even dropped a small cask and let it wash away in favour of going to the stranger’s rescue.

  His thighs aching from pushing against the swell, Perry managed to get in close to the driftwood, get a grip on its jagged edge. As he did, the tide sucked the sand out from beneath his feet, and he slipped face-first into the water, the current a mill race around him, pulling and battering at his arms and legs. His fingers burned and cramped and for a moment he was certain he would drown before he achieved anything at all in his life. But then the driftwood washed back into the shallows. He got a foot under him and pushed up, finding the black-bearded grinning face of the peruke maker meeting his streaming eyes. “Nearly lost both of you there! Hold fast!”

  They are good people, after all, these Cornishmen. You could not blame them for delighting in gifts from the sea, when their hearts were in the right place.

  “Will you carry this half-drownded lad up to the dunes?” the second of Perry’s helpers said. Perry hadn’t met this one before, but would know him again anywhere after this moment. “That’s where the doctor’ll be.”

  The castaway was cold to the touch, but fingers pressed to his throat discerned the push of a pulse, so Perry pulled him over his shoulders and staggered toward the dunes. The movement prompted his rescuee to throw up a considerable amount of seawater down Perry’s left side, but the doctor, when he found him, assured him that was a good sign.

  When he returned to the beach, there was already a stream of folk leaving, clutching bundles or rolling barrels between them. A group of young women went past with a bale of lace unwound between them, each one cocooned in hundreds of pounds worth of luxury that did not belong to them and crowing with laughter at their good luck. Nothing but thieves.

  The woof and boom of a shot snapped his attention back to the customs wagon, where Gwynn had had to fire his pistol in a show of force to prevent their load of hogsheads from being overrun by looters who had now got a taste for the sport.

  Perry plunged back into the crowd and the sea alike, trying to come to Gwynn’s aid, but currents both of man and wave shoved him off to the left of the wagon. There, a group of burly sailors seemed to be helping a panicking castaway. Trying to . . . pull him up? But he was fighting them. Yelling. Yelling . . .

  “I am a free man. My name is Barnabas Okesi. I am a freeborn Englishman and not a slave. I am not a slave.”

  Something both cold and hot at once swept over Perry from the crown of his head to his feet as he realized the men were not trying to help Barnabas at all.

  Even in the capital, one of the risks any black person faced was that of being kidnapped off the streets and taken to a place where the protections of the law were a thousand miles away, had one been able to afford them at all.

  As a healthy adult male slave, Barnabas was easily worth eighty pounds, and that was more than these men could earn in a year.

  “Let that man go!” Perry yelled, pulling his own pistol from his waistband. The powder was now well and truly doused, but it would serve as a blunt instrument. As one of them clubbed Barnabas in the back of the head with a fish-priest, Perry ran heedless and bellowing into the knot of sailors.

  Barnabas fell like a stone, just as something hit Perry in the back of the knees, lifting him as the waves swelled and pushed under him. He toppled over backwards into the sea, getting one brief, bright glimpse of what had struck him. It was a slab-faced man with a cormorant feather in his hat and an oar in his hand. As Perry convulsed to get his feet back under him, the man brought the oar down, cracking it into Perry’s temple. Again his weakened knees slid out from under him and, as everything went dark, the water closed over his face.

  A wreck was a bounty Tomas could not ignore. But it was also a day and night of toil. Having cleared as much of his trove off the beach as he and his people could, it had taken all the hours of darkness to dispose of it in places the customs men would not look.

  Now dawn was just beginning to grey the eastern edge of the sea. There was but one thing to do before he could lie his soaked and aching bones down for a bare hour of sleep.

  His eyes blurred and his head felt muffled and squeezed by the hatband of his aged hat. He had emptied the seawater from his boots, but his socks still squelched when he walked, and his sodden coat was a drag on his shoulders. At the beginning of the night, he had walked carelessly up from the beach in the dark, but now he was returning through the twisted alleys that backed the fishermen’s cottages on Turk’s Head Lane, and his step had shortened, quietened as he began to stalk his prey.

  He opened his mouth to breathe more silently even as his target came in sight. A new gate in a newly built-up wall where once there had been a pigsty and an outhouse at the end of Hedrek Negus’s garden was locked tight with two fist-sized padlocks. Negus’s neighbour, old Mrs. Trago, grew flowering vines over her wall, and in fifty years of neglect they had sprawled over the brim and down into the alley in a tangle of wooden ropes surrounded by the dipping white penumbras of flower spikes.

  Tomas pushed the vines apart and stepped into their shadow, leaning his back against the spider-infested wall behind them, allowing the cover to slide into place once more. He put his hand in his pocket and ran his thumb along the back of his folded razor. His heart raced like a current, and his cold hands tingled, whether with nervousness or excitement, he didn’t know. Didn’t care.

  A quiet moment passed, in which the cascading flowers blushed a little brighter in the first light. A cockerel crowed, and then he heard the clink of keys and the irregular steps of a one-legged man who had taken too much to drink.

  He brought the razor from his pocket and unfolded it, leaned closer to the vines so he could peer through their tangle to watch Negus limp by, a cask of stolen brandy under his arm.

  Tomas bit the inside of his lip, keeping himself steady and still in the dark. Negus passed him by, singing under his breath, and stumped to his padlocked door. He bent to place the barrel on the ground, and Tomas gently pushed the vines apart, slid his weight forward, quietly, quietly.

  “Make these damn locks so small . . .” Negus muttered, padlock in one hand, absorbed in his attempts to stab the key into the hole. It was but child’s play for Tomas to spring forward, grab the man’s hair, pull his head back, and lay his razor affectionately against the hammering pulse in his throat. Negus flinched, struggled, and Tomas tightened the grip on his hair rather than move the blade an inch away.

  “Ren ow thas!” Negus swore, his voice high-pitched from the press of the steel. “Who is that?”

  Fury licked up through Tomas’s bones, so hot it should have dried his coat. “As if you don’t know! We had a deal, Negus. You said you would bring every slave to me. So where is he? I am owed him by your own word. Where are you hiding him?”

  “Tomas Quick?” Another start of surprise, another wrench of the man’s hair against Tomas’s clutching hand. “I don’t— What slave?”

  The hair in Tomas’s hand threatened to tear out. Liquid seeped against his fingers as the scalp bled. “Don’t pretend you don’t know. I saw him brought down. Who else in this town has the resources to keep prisoners?”

  Belatedly, Negus stopped struggling, relaxed back against Tomas’s soaked chest, obviously still trying to put distance between his skin and the razor. Tomas kept it pressed close, but in answer he eased his grip on his old rival’s hair. “Did you get a good look at them?” Negus asked, sounding curious. From the abatement of his alarm, perhaps he was telling the truth. “Did you recognize them as my men? Because if so, they’re acting without my knowledge and against my will.”

  Tomas had been all the way down the other end of the bay. Almost a mile away. He’d seen the capture only in glimpses while he wrestled with his own bounty. “I wasn’t close enough to see faces,” he conceded. “I didn’t recognise the clothes.”

  Negu
s sagged further, his cheek now almost touching Tomas’s, his back and arse pressed to him—the closest Tomas had come to a lover’s embrace for years.

  You sad bastard.

  His hand moved the razor closer by itself, while his mind turned this over, and Negus squeaked as Tomas had rarely heard before from a fifty-year-old man with a voice roughened from a life at sea. “I swear to you, Tomas, I wouldn’t cross you. And not just because you’re a mad bastard with a knife. We had an agreement, and that agreement was good for us both. I don’t want no strife between us.”

  It sounded genuine. A part of Tomas—a part that worried him betimes—insisted that he could cut a little, for a warning, and for fun—and that part was never to be let in charge. He brought the razor carefully away, folded and pocketed it as Negus eeled out of his arms and stumped round to face him.

  The man’s nose was still ruddy with drink, visible now the light was broadening, and his face was transforming to match it, the blood flaming back into it around wary eyes. “You want to manage that untrustful streak, my friend,” he scolded, voice lower now, as if trying on his authority. “Might come back to bite you.”

  But Tomas was not in the mood to be obliquely threatened by a man whose life had been at his mercy a moment before. “If it’s not you, who is it? Who has him?”

  Negus’s fingers traced his unmarked throat, scratching through the wiry hair that joined his beard to his chest hair. His composure was now fully back, solid and impenetrable. The very reason Tomas had needed to startle him and throw him off-balance to believe a word that he said.

  “Son, you can’t go round threatening your allies like this. Especially not if there’s a new outfit in town, but—”