Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  He had been so sure—so sure that the blade had felt like the sword of an avenging angel in his hand. But if he had been wrong . . .?

  Tomas slumped, sighing. “No, you’re right. I thought it was you, because who else could it be, but even so I should not have jumped you. Forgive me, I—” He shook his head and rubbed one sore and stinging eye. “This matter is personal to me, but I acted impetuously. Unjustly. I’m sorry.”

  Negus’s laugh was three-quarters scoff and one-quarter indulgent. “Normally I’d ask you in for a brandy, but for some reason I’ve no taste for that at the moment. I will keep an eye out, though. See if I can find who has got him. There do certain seem to be a change in the air. Lot of strangers about, all of a sudden. Things being done that you and I wouldn’t hold with. I don’t want another rival in this town any more than you do. So I’ll just forget this happened and we’ll go on as before. Deal?”

  Tomas sighed again, unhappy but with no excuse to take it out on someone he wished to retain as an associate. “It’s a deal. Now if you’ll excuse me, I must get to church.”

  “Is this not the fast that I have chosen:

  To loose the bonds of wickedness,

  To undo the heavy burdens,

  To let the oppressed go free,

  And that you break every yoke?

  Is it not to share your bread with the hungry,

  And that you bring to your house the poor who are cast out;

  When you see the naked, that you cover him,

  And not hide yourself from your own flesh?

  “If you take away the yoke from your midst,

  The pointing of the finger, and speaking wickedness,

  If you extend your soul to the hungry, and satisfy the afflicted soul,

  Then your light shall dawn in the darkness,

  And your darkness shall be as the noonday.”

  The Methodist chapel’s whitewashed wooden walls swung faintly around Tomas as he watched the door to see who was sober enough to come in. He did not give work—a chance to transport or store goods—to those who were only going to consume half themselves.

  The day was already warm, and the chapel’s reed roof smelled of drying sap and straw. His mother had pressed a hot toddy on him when he’d come in drenched, and insisted on making a fire and sitting him in front of it for half an hour. As a result of which he had not been able to get the sleep he had promised himself. Even as he’d shifted his wet clothes for his Sunday best, his mother had been worrying at the thought of their new riding officer. He had made quite an impression on her, simply by coming to the door.

  “We had a eunuch that colour, when I was in my first household. Abdul ibn Yusuf. Such a clever man, economical, energetic, intelligent. Very fierce. I was quite terrified of him. Though that was because I was fifteen and terrified of everything.”

  “Yes, Mother,” Tomas had said, struggling into the narrow shoulders of his good coat. He didn’t like it when she reminisced about the harem, though she’d been there only as a lady’s maid.

  “My point is—” she must have seen his discomfort, giving a very unladylike snort before she leaned forward and pinned his hand with her own, seemingly both in tenderness and to emphasize her point “—that you must not underestimate Mr. Dean. Things are changing. All the women of my acquaintance are unsettled, and the more so because none of us can put a finger on why. If we were sailors, we would say there was a shift in the wind. And this riding officer has arrived like an omen in the midst of it. Be careful, son. I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  She had a point—she always did, brought up to intrigue and good at reading people as she was. Tomas had noticed it too. There were always new people making small smuggling ventures with a boat or two. Locals getting together a consortium to pool money and buy contraband in France, and so on. But always in the past he would be told of these ventures, he would know the people involved. Indeed, he would probably have been called in for advice.

  The idea of a new outfit in which he knew no one set a weight in his belly. While ships passed through every day and to see a stranger in the town was no cause for remark, these wayfarers usually passed through the webs of Porthkennack like a mist, making no great change. Why would they begin interfering now? How could he even begin to pick out who was involved, if they were hidden among innocent passersby?

  He pushed the heels of his hands into his gritty eyes. He was not presently alert enough to think this through.

  While Zeb Trewithy, acting today as minister, set his threadbare elbows on the lectern and began to expound on the meanings of the passage, Tomas let his mind turn towards the other new factor instead.

  Peregrine Dean. New men did not normally begin their career so vigorously. He had come after Tomas as though on a personal vendetta, but Tomas could not think how he might have wronged the man. Yet there had been a conviction in those dark eyes even Tomas could see, crouched on the deck of the Swift though he had been. What was the man? A zealot? A convert? Just a man eager to make himself so indispensable and successful that no one on seeing him would think of slavery—traitor and turncoat to his own people?

  The plain glass window above the altar let in a bridge of white light that slowly advanced along the rag rugs of the floor. “What do this passage mean for us?” Zeb Trewithy thundered. The rest of the week, he was a tin miner, and when he gestured, his palms and nails still showed the stain of earth.

  “Well, we’ve only got to look across at France. For year’n year a tiny few folk in France—the king, the courtiers—owned everything, had more money’n they knew what to do with. And did they use it justly, in the way as would please the Lord? They did not. They let the poor and the widows and the orphans to starve while they hoarded their riches in piles. Can any of us doubt that they made the rod that is now coming down on their backs? If they had obeyed the Lord and fed the hungry, let the working man work, left no babe unfed nor unclaimed, would they not have been secure in their place? I ask you—”

  The barn door opened, letting in a gust of summer air that trembled the petals of the posies of wildflowers on the altar—a kitchen table beneath a chalice and paten of blue-glazed stoneware. Tomas was glad of the distraction. In ordinary circumstances, he was eager for news from France, subscribed to a newspaper club and a philosophical society to debate the ramifications of the hope for freedom that blew in from the continent, but the gist of Zeb’s sermon was obvious and nothing he had not thought of for himself.

  Instead he watched as Tom Gristel tiptoed in, sweating at the gazes turned to reprimand him for interrupting, and slid into place next to Tomas.

  “St. Ia’s is letting out early?” Tomas whispered as the sermon ended and the congregation rose for a song.

  “No, I slipped out halfway. That new riding officer was in the congregation. So I thought ‘Well, let’s get the hearse out now while he’s busy.’ I packed ’er up tight with tea—that being less likely to slosh—and sent her off with our Allan and our Petre in full mourning, and my Molly in between them in widow’s weeds to weep her heart out should anyone try to stop ’em.”

  Molly’s weeping was an art form in itself. Tomas grinned at the memories. “Is that all the tea?”

  “All but what we’re sharing out.”

  “And the brandy?”

  “I’ll get to that next.”

  What it was to have an efficient network. “Good,” Tomas said, watching the front rows of the congregation go up for communion. “You’d better slip back up again to be there when Dean leaves, but . . .” He debated not saying this, not revealing a weakness, but fairness won out. “Negus tells me he doesn’t have the captive sailor. That means there’s someone else operating here who doesn’t care about my rules. That makes things dangerous. Be careful.”

  Tom was the perfect carrion crow of a man for his job on the hearse, skinny as the Grim Reaper and with a tuft of hair black as raven’s feathers, but his smile was all sunshine. “I always am,” he said. “You look
after yourself too.”

  When church was out, Tomas made a point of mingling, if only to conceal the moment when a colleague from the customs office slipped him a piece of paper. He tucked it away and carried on until he had spoken to everyone, whether that was to give orders or sympathy, or just to exchange a moment’s small talk about the weather. Afterward, Tomas stepped out into a noon where a buildup of grey cloud sweeping in from the sea suggested they hadn’t yet cleared the edges of the storm. He turned for home hurriedly, reluctant to get wet again.

  Droplets spattered on his eyelashes a moment later. He bent his head down to increase the meagre cover of his hat brim, and heard the distant rattle of iron-shod wheels and clip of hoofs behind him that suggested a carriage coming down from St. Ia’s at a trot.

  His thoughts were in his bed, soft and drowsy, when a voice he knew and hated called, “Stand aside there!”

  Tomas made no decision. His body simply stiffened by itself, knees locking and a rush of cold going up his backbone, stirring the little hairs on his neck. His feet planted themselves, and though he turned to face the onrushing vehicle, he could have moved out of its path as easily as he could have walked through a wall.

  The Quicks were on their way somewhere. Perhaps to the inn. Perhaps just driving in a lazy circle through the centre of town to show off their new carriage and their new clothes. The lace on Miss Constance’s dazzling white parasol threw shadows like black swans on Lazarus Quick’s steely face as he bellowed again. “You, fellow! Get out of the road!”

  There was plenty of space. Even now, the liveried coachman was reining the team of four matched chestnuts to one side. They would go past and—

  “No,” Tomas heard Damaris instruct her driver, her voice like a bell. “If he will not move, let him be ridden down.”

  This time the anger told him he was tall as the lighthouse, immovable as the granite. It told him he was a magazine fire, and if they drove into him, it was they who would be burned. He felt his body reach down to the rock below and take hold. He lifted his chin, looked Lazarus in the eye, and smiled.

  They were but a foot away. Tomas felt no fear, only a brightness. To him, the bits in the horses’ mouths were like lightning and their coats like copper. The thud in his chest that lifted him off his feet and threw him into the nearby wall was accompanied by no pain, though the world around him seemed to quiver like a struck gong. A moment passed in which he no longer seemed to exist in the world at all, cleanly cut from the fabric of existence, and that, too, was a type of joy.

  When he returned to himself, it was to find he had slumped onto all fours on the pavement with a bruising ache all the way through his torso from shoulder blades to sternum, and his hands and knees grazed from rebounding off the wall and falling forwards onto them. He had forgotten how to breathe, his lungs frozen into stillness by the great blow, and his eyes stung with unwanted tears.

  Panic clawed up his throat as he struggled for air, but then the nearest onlooker reached him. Margaret Ede, who had been walking by with a baby in one arm, wearing a hat like a wagon wheel bedaubed with lettuce. She hooked a hand beneath his armpit, pulling for him to rise. At the touch, some unconscious process was knocked back into place, and he whooped in a great lungful of air, coughed it back out again, the water that had been pooling in his eyes spilling down his cheeks.

  “I’m going to kill them!”

  “No,” Margaret shushed him, keeping her voice low and soothing, perhaps because her child’s face had puckered up in a threat of wailing. Perhaps in an effort to soothe Tomas. “Don’t say such a thing.”

  “They rode me down!” He shook off her helpful hand and struggled to his feet by himself, hurt. She was a good woman, Margaret Ede, kind to her neighbours, though a gossip and not by any means a good housekeeper. He had thought well of her before this, but . . .

  “They was turning,” she urged. “At the last moment. I saw it. They was turning to avoid you, but you was clipped by the shoulder of the lead horse. They were.” She glared at the departing carriage, where the footman on his perch was visibly avoiding everyone’s gaze. “They thought you would move, and then when you didn’t, they left it too late. They didn’t mean it, Tomas, I swear. You should have moved.”

  His legs trembled as he got them back beneath him, and shivers moved up and down his arms. He felt oddly unmade, as though an incautious move might cause him to fall apart. His breeches were ripped at the right knee, and as he brushed them down, he was aware of the whole crowd of folk who had now come out of the church. They seemed to be watching him, aghast and not sure what to believe.

  “Why should I move?” he managed, dashing the wet streaks from his cheeks with the heel of his hand. “Why me and not them? Just because they’re rich?”

  Nodding answered him among the Methodist congregation. But Margaret got him by the elbow and muttered, “Talk like that’ll get you in trouble. Go home, Tomas, and sit down. You’ve had a shock now, and you don’t mean it.”

  His floating sense of invulnerability had left his body with that first gulp of air, and he did feel disinclined to argue in a public square with a customs officer’s wife. Not that Jowan would make much of it, but he might repeat it to his new partner.

  “Maybe I don’t,” he managed, the injustice of it bitter in his mouth. “But maybe if they didn’t try to humiliate me as well as taking away my birthright, I wouldn’t have to say these things.”

  The uncertainty of the crowd gave way to an exasperated, tolerant look he found equally unjust. As though they were saying Tomas’s off on his rant again. Normality is restored.

  He waved a grazed hand at the thought. “All right, all right, I’m going. I know better than to pick a fight on the Sabbath.”

  “D’you need someone to help you get home?” Margaret asked, while behind her, Tomas’s friends and acquaintances stood poised in an attitude of eagerness to help. He would have welcomed their understanding, but he didn’t need their pity.

  “I’m fine.”

  The first step or two were tricky. He had to concentrate on bolstering his knees and ankles, which wanted to slide away from beneath him. Breathing naturally sent a hot, reverberating ache through his chest. But once he shortened his stride and wound both arms around himself to hold his rib cage together, he could get on well enough. Fixing his gaze on the pavement to avoid both concern and censure, he paced his careful way back home.

  Someone must have got there before him, however. His mother was in the garden to meet him. Her hand beneath his elbow was less burdensome than Margaret’s, and he allowed himself to lean on her support as he bent beneath the threshold and went in.

  She left him in the same seat he had vacated this morning. The embers of the fire in the hearth were still live, and he was grateful for them, weary suddenly in a landslide of dark velvet that seemed to push his heavy head down and sew his eyelids shut.

  “Miyme qeremische,” she said, settling in the other side of the snug from him, gathering her petticoats in tight with swollen-knuckled hands. “Young Jim ran down here and told me the Quicks had tried to kill you.”

  Tomas dragged his eyes half-open and smiled. “Did he? I’m glad someone noticed. The rest are claiming it was a misunderstanding.”

  “I hope it was!” She raked through the ashes, tipping the embers into a bed-warmer one by one with the tongs. “But, sweetheart, imagine how I’d feel if they succeeded.”

  She rustled upstairs to put the warmer between his sheets, and he tried not to think about what she had said until she returned. “That’s not the point,” he insisted. “I don’t care anymore that Father asked me to show them mercy. Told me it was Christian to forgive and be content. I don’t care!” Something of his rage returned, like a live coal in his mouth. “He’s not here anymore, and they tried to kill me! I’m going to find that birth certificate, wherever Father hid it, and I’m going to use it to fucking ruin them. They should be the ones who have to take in washing and boarders, and you should be
the one parading about in jewels. You should have the servants, the carriages. You should be sitting in that mansion on the cliffs, throwing parties, and I’m going to make that happen. I’m going to see them under my heel if it’s the last thing—”

  He staggered when she raised him to his feet again, pushing him up the stairs and supporting him when he swayed. “I don’t want any of those things,” she insisted, with a disappointed look that only infuriated him more. “We have plenty to live on. I need for nothing, except for the certainty that my son will be safe. Why will you keep provoking them—the Quicks, the law? You could be a tradesman, Tomas. Take my name, or your father’s. Give up the smuggling and this feud, please God and your mother in the process, and be safe.”

  They had expanded the upstairs when his father began to earn money by his legal practice, during that short happy time when he had been both prosperous and alive. So Tomas had his own small room, with a sea chest, and a bed with a coverlet of blue and red knitted squares, even though they kept an additional room for guests and one for boarders—currently empty. He was grateful to have his privacy, but they should have had better.

  The colours of the coverlet swam beneath his eyes as he sat and toed off his shoes with their Sunday Best buckles. He was barely conscious of leaning down and setting his cheek to the pillow, but suddenly his mother was upright and he was not.

  “I don’t want safety,” he managed, the last of the anger slipping out of his grasp as sleep pulled him under. “I want justice.”

  “You are your father’s son, after all,” she said ruefully, and brushed his hair from his forehead as she left.

  Tomas woke to voices downstairs, and knew that despite the light still flooding into the room, it must be the evening. His lieutenants had come to report.

  His head ached worse than it had when he had lain down, but his breathing was easier, and his sinews seemed to have knitted themselves back together. This collapse was due to shock, mostly. He flexed his shoulders and felt the muscles pull without undue agony. By tomorrow you should be fighting fit once more.