Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Their front room was packed. His mother had thrown a shawl over her head and sat, slightly removed by the fire. In the seat he had occupied earlier, his pilot, Anne Lusmoore, was sitting and holding his mother’s hand reassuringly, while the gentlemen were gathered around the table with their hats in their laps. Even after many years married to an Englishman, Zuliy was not entirely happy with unrelated men in her living quarters, and Tomas’s associates had developed several ways of trying to seem inoffensive as a result.

  “Tomas.” Zeb stood to greet him. No longer a preacher, just a tin miner with an interest in ethical smuggling. “We heard what happened. Are you fit?”

  “I’m fine.” Tomas shrugged and eased himself into the only empty seat. “Or I will be by tomorrow. Bloody Quicks tried to run me down.”

  “Mm.” Zeb glowered at him, brows as black as the ingrained dirt across his nose. “‘Vengeance is mine, saith the Lord,’ in case you was thinking of doing anything rash.”

  Tomas glanced at his mother and scoffed. “I’ve been told as much three times already today. I can only hope someone is lecturing them about their duty to the Lord too.”

  “They wouldn’t listen to the likes of us even if we tried,” Anne protested, sliding her bare feet through the soft, dead siftings of the fire. “But that don’t mean—”

  “I know. I know.” Tomas sighed, and though he remained determined to bring the wrath of God down upon the Quicks as soon as he could find the necessary paperwork, he found himself mysteriously willing to be delayed. “I mean no more harm to them than their own deeds have wrought. That’s not what I want to discuss tonight. Report.”

  “My lads’ve got all the barrels of porter dispersed through the mine,” Zeb began, picking at the wax that overflowed his hat brim. “And the lace is being sewed into chemises by the miners’ wives.”

  “Mrs. Hedges of the Widows and Orphans’ is started on sewing the cotton inside pillowslips,” Anne chimed in. “And we split the silverware with old Harry from the customs, ’cause he threatened to turn us in otherwise.”

  “Did he indeed?” Tomas writhed in place, his bruised spine protesting his straight-backed chair. “They get one zealot on board and suddenly they’re all keen. We’re going to have to teach them not to get cheeky. Any news of the captive?”

  “No. None yet,” Zeb replied. “I asked the congregation too. They either don’t know or aren’t telling. You think we’ve new competition in town?”

  “I do,” Tomas agreed. Defiance flared up in him like the sun tightly focused through a lens. “This is a dangerous time for us. Mr. Peregrine Dean from London, with his high connections and his ambition—he will have to be dealt with. And we have an undisclosed rival about whom we know nothing.”

  “So perhaps we could now be content to live an honest life,” Tomas’s mother chipped in, though the tone was of one who knew better than to hope she would be obeyed.

  Zeb laughed. He picked a candle from his pocket and rolled it between his fingers, not meeting Tomas’s gaze. “We don’t need to go that far, but we maybe should go slower. Be a bit more careful.”

  “That’s what they’ll be expecting.” Tomas bared his teeth. “This new riding officer and this new smuggler? If either of them thinks I will grow cautious at the mere threat of them, they know me not at all.” He snapped out the piece of paper he’d been given at service.

  “Since we have not yet identified our new competitor, we will first put our old adversaries back in their place. This is a listing of the contents of the customs warehouse; including the one hundred and ten barrels of best brandy they took from the wreck yesterday. Wrack that falls on Cornish shores belongs by right to Cornishmen. Not to the customs, no matter how emboldened they may be feeling with their new hunter on board, nor to the far away government in England. Why should they line their pockets while our neighbours go hungry?”

  Zeb shook his head slightly, as if bracing himself for the rest, and Tomas carried on, a little less stridently. “At night, the warehouse is patrolled by four men, and two cannons defend it by sea. I propose that tomorrow night we storm the place and empty it. If young Mr. Dean is trying to give me a message, courtesy of old Harry, I will answer him.”

  “We’m be shaving it,” Anne Lusmoore whispered. Now with her long hair clubbed like a man’s, her skirt exchanged for petticoat breeches, she lay in the bow netting of the Swift, so close to the sea that she could put her hand against its swell. Since every child in Porthkennack grew up around ships and larked about Cornwall’s dangerous shoreline in tiny boats as soon as they could handle an oar, the town produced many fine pilots with an intimate knowledge of the rocks and shifting sands of the bay.

  Typically, those girls who enjoyed the sport gave it up in favour of marriage by Anne’s age, but she had yet to prefer a man to the sea, and Tomas was glad of it. She was the best, and if others refused to employ her because they thought she should be with child, it was their loss.

  “There’s barely a foot of water under the keel as it is, and it’s running out as we speak.”

  “It doesn’t matter if we ground outside the warehouse for half an hour at lowest ebb.” Tomas whispered back. Before setting off, they had disguised the Swift by taking the jib down and re-rigging her as a sloop. With tarpaulined sacks hung over her green livery and the small cabin disassembled and stowed beneath, she should be impossible to recognize in the dark. “We’ll need to be there awhile anyway to take the cargo on board.”

  “We’ll be sitting ducks for the cannon.” The white of Anne’s eyes gleamed as she glanced at him over her shoulder. “The whole time. Swift’ll be shot to pieces. We should anchor in Long Cove, come in from the land side.”

  “That’s what they’ll expect,” Tomas said again, mentally reviewing the measurements he had taken when the cannons were first installed, assuring himself again that this would work. “Trust me.”

  He straightened up as a gleam of moonlight poured out of the shifting clouds above and showed him the breakwater of the harbour within arm’s reach off the starboard side. They coasted without lights ahead of a warm land breeze, strong enough to curve out the staysail and slip them forward at about two knots.

  “I do,” Anne huffed, taking stock of the oceanic waves. “Why else do you think I’m here? What time is it?”

  He consulted his pocket watch, “Four thirty-three,” and she smiled, committing herself.

  “Get ready to throw ’er hard a-larboard on my mark, then clew ’er out at forty-five degrees.”

  “Aye aye.” He moved away to relay the instructions to old Ben at the wheel and the men on the sails. As he did, the brief moonbeam waned and darkness rushed back in. All at once, the utter indifference of the ocean weighed on him. The sigh of it and the suck and gurgle against the breakwater were the only indications that anything existed outside the square of deck his feet rested on. He stood helpless in the hands of God, and the hands of Anne Lusmoore, and the thought gave him a momentary shudder.

  Then Ben slid open the cover of his dark lantern, and the compass at the wheelhouse came into sight. Anne raised her voice. “On my mark. Three, two. Mark!” and Ben wrenched the wheel over while top and mainsail swung together to turn them on a course still invisible in the gloom.

  Now the thrum against Swift’s keel was the pulse of the wild waves, outside the harbour, and Tomas could feel the current racing between the rocky teeth of the offshore islands. If they strayed into that, in the dark, this wind would not keep them from being swept to Land’s End and beyond, but if they ventured too far from it, they would run aground on the sandbar at the entrance to Polventon Bay. Tomas, who was no poor sailor himself, did not know how Anne was threading her way between the two.

  “Starboard two degrees!” she called, beginning to count beneath her breath, and then “Port your helm.” The waves changed again as they came back under the shadow of the land. A lantern beneath the courthouse showed a square of cobbles. The loom of black beyond it was the war
ehouse they had come to rob.

  It was so dark, the brass of the cannons gave no gleam, but two tiny red specks of light on either side of the building must be the glow of lighted slow-match. Which meant the cannons were armed and crewed.

  Tomas strode to the binnacle and snapped Ben’s lantern closed. The heave of the sea beneath had lessened, and the Swift felt as though she was all but scraping her way through mud, heavy and reluctant. He opened the arms chest and passed out pistols and cudgels, hoping the firearms would not need to be used.

  A moment of foreboding moved through Tomas, sick and slow—a moment of anticipation before the storm. My only King. Help us and forgive us, now and in the moment of our need.

  “Spill your wind!” Anne’s voice pierced the darkness like a piccolo, and as the sail crew leaped to obey, Swift’s keel ground noisily against the sand. Light dazzled into being above their heads where the cannon waited on the boundary of the warehouse, and someone shouted.

  “Did you hear something?”

  “Shit, Perry, you’re right. They’re coming.”

  Ben flung his own lantern wide and seized Tomas by the shoulder. “What are we doing? We just grounded! We’re a sitting duck!” and Tomas bit his lip rather than laugh in the man’s face.

  “Unidentified vessel,” someone shouted from the shore, “lay down your arms, surrender immediately, or we will fire.”

  “Fuck your surrender,” Tomas shouted back, motioning for his armed crew to prepare to pile overboard, make their way to the steps on either side of the basin that would take them up to ground level. “Do your worst!

  “They’re going to be distracted and blinded by the blast,” he continued in a lower voice. “Once they start, you pour up the stairs, get behind them, and take them while they’re concentrating on the guns. Quickly—they’re idiots, but we don’t want to give them time to bounce back.”

  “Once they start?” Anne protested, but she pulled her neckerchief up over her nose and jammed her pistol in the back of her breeches, cudgel in the other hand. “We’re going to wait for them to shoot us?”

  “This is your last warning,” came the voice from above.

  Tomas flicked through his calculations again and resisted a wild urge to giggle. He covered his own face and jammed his hat further down over his revealing hair.

  Dennis Percher and Alan Henry were crouching by the larboard gunwale with cutlasses between their teeth. Solid family men both of them, and not inclined to run wild, but he felt the need to remind them: “Try not to kill anyone, lads. We’re gentlemen, remember?”

  “Tell that to them up there,” Dennis muttered through his thick beard, just as the bright points of the slow-match above floated, as if by themselves, over to the cannons and kindled the fuses.

  “Eyes closed!” Tomas called. At the same time, the hiss of the fuse met the powder and both guns erupted in tongues of flame. “Go, go!”

  The roar of the shot punched his ears, close enough to be almost instantaneous. Even confident of his maths, Tomas’s eyes snapped open and his body froze for a heartbeat as it anticipated the smash of the cannonballs into the Swift’s hull, the splinter of timbers and the spray of knife-sharp oak shrapnel.

  None came, and he was alive again. “Go, go now!”

  He leaped the starboard gunwale, with Anne and three men behind him, caught a rope halfway down to slow his fall, and landed upright on wet sand that was firm enough to run fast on. Above, on the pavement now out of sight at the top of the tall harbour wall, he could hear curses, the rumble of cannon wheels. Someone shouted “Get the wedges! Wedge them up!”

  Another boom, another slap of blazing light, and still no sound of impact.

  Sprinting now at his side, Anne Lusmoore let out a breathy laugh. “That’s why you grounded us? Fucking cannons are too high. They’re shooting right over the top of us.”

  “They expect to be firing on a ship with three foot of water under her keel,” Tomas agreed. “But we need to disarm those guns before tide turns and lifts us on the way out.”

  By now they had reached the starboard steps. He coaxed more speed out of legs still offended by his fall—anger from the memory was a goad he used to overcome the ache. Anne was at his side, swarming up the damp stone with the confidence of one accustomed to clambering rigging. She was a sinewy whippet of a girl, and in men’s jacket and breeches, indistinguishable from a thirteen-year-old boy. Hob Wright at Tomas’s back was a carpenter in normal life, fond of big meals. His breath was thunderous as he forced himself to keep up, but his feet were light, and their approach was silent—the breath mingling with the sigh of the sea.

  Tomas crouched to slip up the final few stairs. Expecting a pistol shot to the face, he emerged onto the pavement where the guns were chained. But when he straightened up, he could see that old Ben—who had remained on board as he was no longer spry enough for frontal assaults—had opened up his lantern again and was walking back and forth on the deck of the Swift as though he was passing orders from a hidden captain to an invisible crew. The customs men—and there were only four of them, two to each gun—alternated between speculating on what the old man was up to, and wrestling to load the cannon with more shot.

  They had placed their own lantern between the two guns, to give light for the adjustment of the aim, and with their night vision thus destroyed, they didn’t see Tomas’s crew ease into the darkness behind them.

  Tomas slunk within reach of the first, still silent enough not to cause alarm. He drew his arm back, calculating the angle, and struck cleanly, his oak-and-leather truncheon smacking into the side of the customs man’s neck. The man choked out a cry as he fell, and his partner turned, met Tomas’s eyes for a brief, vivid moment before Hob lurched out of the darkness behind him and took him down with a lead-weighted fish-priest.

  On the second gun, Dennis and Alan had done the same, dropping the warehouse’s defenders cleanly, not a blow landed on them.

  “Milksops!” Anne crowed. “That was easy!”

  It was, but it was also the end of surprise. The whole town would have heard the cannon fire; reinforcements would already be on their way. “Anne!” Tomas called. “Tie them up. Hob and Harry, Dennis and Alan, start loading everything you can onto the Swift. I’m going up front to be sure there’s no one else on guard. Fast as you please, we need to be ready to sail as soon as she lifts.”

  The back doors of the warehouse stood open, a powder barrel and two small pyramids of shot being kept dry inside. A tallow candle burned dim orange in a distant window where the warehousemen must have their office. Tomas would be stepping into its light as soon as he passed the threshold, and though there were shadowed corners aplenty in the aisles full of bales and barrels, that would be the moment when he was likely to be shot.

  He went in first anyway. An instinct of the building’s largeness and his smallness rolled over him strangely, and almost distracted him from the metallic click in the aisle of damp spices. He dived, and the plume of fire roared out over his head as he rolled back to his feet and dashed straight towards the gunman.

  It was a narrow thing. The man had finished tamping down his next shot and was ready to lift the rifle to his shoulder again, when Tomas rammed into the man as if he were trying to break down a door.

  They both went flying. Tomas, on top, grappled for his opponent’s throat, squeezing the man’s heaving chest with his knees—like riding an unbroken horse. Dark hands closed around his wrists with a grip that threatened to splinter them, and he looked down into the furious face of Peregrine Dean. None the worse for wear for apparently having been half drowned by overeager treasure hunters on the beach, he wrestled Tomas’s hold with terrifying strength.

  “I know who you are,” he spat, eyes trying to pierce the shade of Tomas’s hat. “I’m going to take you apart, one way or another. Your time is done!”

  Tomas’s blood was up, and the thrum of the man’s breathing, felt through Tomas’s thighs, was warming. The defiance on that bro
ad face, mahogany brown in the ruddy light of the candle, was magnificently self-confident considering that—

  “Put your hands by your head. I don’t want to shoot you, but I will.” Anne had arrived. Tomas disentangled himself, so she could better train her pistol on Dean’s face.

  Dean’s rifle had spun out of his grip on Tomas’s impact with him. It lay further away than he could easily reach without being shot, and as he visibly contemplated his odds, Tomas took his own gun from his belt and cocked it.

  Dean slumped and allowed himself to be tied up, hands behind his back, a noose of rope securing him to the nearest pillar.

  “I will see you hang,” he insisted, as Tomas’s crew rolled as many barrels out and down the harbour stairs as they could. “I promise you that.”

  It itched Tomas more than it should have done not to be able to reply. But he had been careful with his clothes, and the only thing about him that might be recognizable was his voice. So he could not give back the verbal blistering that pressed behind his teeth.

  He had to be content with taking two score hogsheads of brandy and leaving just as Dean’s reinforcements began to pry at the bolted door.

  By morning, the postbattle euphoria of Tomas’s spirits was long gone. Sailing out of the bay with the keel a bare inch from the sea bed and renewed cannon fire behind them, he’d had such an unquenchable grin that his cheeks still ached with it. But since then, they’d had to work hard to rerig the Swift back to her normal sail plan, hide the disguising canvas down a mine ventilation shaft, and decant the hogsheads of brandy into smaller vessels that could more easily be hidden.

  Most had gone to the mines, where Zeb had a small army of friends and colleagues willing to conceal them in worked-out corners that no one in their right minds would ever visit. But Mary Castille of the Angel and Eagle had hinted to him recently that she was having trouble making ends meet, so he had slung two of the small kegs on a pony and taken them up there as his final task of the night.