Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Mary employed several of the town’s orphans as potboys, giving them houseroom and refuge in the attics. Arriving just before dawn, Tomas had found himself wading through them as they scrubbed up for school at the pump in the yard. Already, they knew better than to watch him arrive with two kegs, but a chorus of good mornings reached him once he was safely relieved of the horse.

  By that time he was weary again, and his buzz of action had turned into the dragging dread that inevitably came after. He had certainly sent his message to the forces arraigned against him: I am not afraid of you. But had he overreached? Had he been too arrogant? Disaster must surely be coming—it was only a matter of time.

  “You look worn to unravelling,” Mary said, once she had hidden the spirits among her own casks. The household was barely astir, and Mary herself still wore nightcap and gown over her stays. Though her youngest son was clattering in the snug as he raked out and reset the fire, the old inn had a thick aura of sleepiness and frowsty comfort about it at this time in the morning—an unwashed intimacy that few but the owners saw. “Sit down and I’ll make you breakfast before you go home.”

  Sardines with mustard sauce and a small beer had put the heart back into him, and he stayed to watch the arrival of the first coach out of Porthkennack and exchange a meaningful glance with the driver, who’d had several packets of the best Brussels lace sewn into his seat cushions last night.

  It was full day by the time Tomas finished his meal and walked back down to his own house. Both dread and excitement had settled, and he was ready to sleep again, and to contemplate a voyage to France sometime later in the week.

  The day was fine and fresh, the sun bright. So a horrified shudder went through him to see his front garden occupied with nothing but flowers. Marigolds were vivid to the eye, but the blue front door was closed, and in this drying weather not a stitch of laundry fluttered.

  Tomas ducked into the shadow of his next-door neighbours’ pigsty. Its inhabitant snorted at him and raised itself to its hairless legs, snout upraised and twitching for a treat. He passed it the heel of bread he had brought in his pocket, and pretended the trembling in his hand was due to the stench.

  What to do? If the laundry was not out, it meant his mother was either lying unwell indoors or someone dangerous to him was indoors with her and she was warning him to stay away. The devil was that he could not tell which.

  With the pig distracted, Tomas climbed over his neighbours’ wall, let himself through the house—all doors were open in Porthkennack at all times—and out onto the small path that picked its way between the cliff edge and the backs of the terrace. Flattening himself against the house wall, in case someone was looking out of an upstairs window, he slid crabwise sideways to where he could peek through the kitchen window.

  His mother sat at her kitchen table demurely paring carrots with hands that did not waver a jot. But her hair was covered with her shawl, her mouth was pressed tight, and across the table from her, Peregrine Dean sat with a pistol trained on her face.

  A hot icicle seemed to crash through the crown of Tomas’s head and freeze-burn his innards. There were innumerable things he could do. Go away. Send a neighbour to ask for Zuliy’s help. Set a fire in one of the derelicts on the beach. Sail past the window and thumb his nose as he went. But even as he thought of them, he was raising the latch, thrusting the door open. Too hard! Too hard—he must not startle the man who held a gun on his mother.

  The man was holding a gun on his mother!

  Tomas strode straight in, slapped his hands down on the table. The pistol swung to point at him. His mother winced, rose as if to come to him, the paring knife a glint of sullied silver in her fist.

  Tomas didn’t try to dissuade her. Didn’t look at her, his gaze fixed on Dean. The man was smiling—damn him—the smile a plush curve on broad lips. Smug as hell.

  “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?” Tomas demanded, some semblance of wit beginning to return to him now his mother was out of the line of fire. “By what right do you come in here and threaten a respectable woman? How dare you!”

  Dean’s elbows were on Tomas’s kitchen table; his arse was in one of Tomas’s chairs. It didn’t matter that the mouth of his pistol pointed unwaveringly between Tomas’s eyes. He was in the wrong, and he would learn it.

  Dean’s brow furrowed. “I know it was you,” he said eventually, the rumble of his voice oddly intimate in the heart of Tomas’s house.

  “You know what was me?” Tomas leaned forward, precisely as invulnerable as he had been ahead of the charging horse, and pressed Dean’s pistol down onto the tabletop. “And don’t wave that thing around. Someone could get hurt.”

  “I saw you!” Dean’s eyebrows climbed into his hairline, and his eyes widened until the sunlight brought out a glint of bronze in their darkness. “We were this close. You can’t possibly—”

  Idiot. Does he think I’m some kind of amateur to be terrified by weightless threats? It rankled, if so. “You saw me where?” Tomas insisted. “Doing what? What could possibly justify this kind of outrage?”

  “You’re going to pretend you don’t know?” Dean seemed surprised by the fact, as though London smugglers routinely rolled over to him and showed their throats. And yes, he was a big man with a belligerent presence, but Tomas had grown up in a world where most men were larger than himself. It had ceased to threaten him a long time ago.

  His mother wiped her hands on her apron and—disregarded now—left the room. At the sound of the front door closing behind her, Tomas cooled a little, pulling out a chair and sinking into it, relieved.

  “I don’t know,” he insisted. “I . . .” He shook his head, like an honest man trying to be civil. A part of him still wanted to break Peregrine Dean’s back for giving his mother a moment’s fear, but that impulse was waning in light of the fact that she was unharmed and out of danger. “I am conscious that you are only doing your job. And that you’re new here and you don’t know what you’ve run your neck into. On my own accord, I am willing to forgive you for mistaking me for whatever criminal you are in pursuit of today. But insult my mother again and there will be consequences. Are we clear?”

  Dean stood, monumental and solid, slightly too tall for their kitchen, frowning. Tomas’s heart beat loud in his ears as he watched Dean’s fingers tighten on the pistol—a bullet in the stomach would be worse than one between the ears. But then the fingers relaxed and Dean gave a rueful smile. “I’d like to see you try.” He paused, but Tomas refused to rise to the bait, just watched him, silent now and assured.

  Dean uncocked the pistol and tucked it back into the waistband of his sober breeches. His whole outfit said well-to-do professional, probably a lawyer, which was jarring in several ways. This was a man who took himself seriously. Tomas could respect that, and he reminded himself not to get cocky.

  “Well, if you’re going to play innocent,” Dean said, “then yes. I have received intelligence that you were involved with the robbery of the customs warehouse last night. I must insist on searching your house for contraband.”

  Tomas smiled—tried not to make it too smug. Received intelligence meant that Dean did not have evidence against him sufficient to convince a jury. He knew Tomas had been there. But “a tall, slight man in a large hat, with a mask over his face,” might be anyone as far as the court was concerned.

  “By all means look around, since you are here.” Tomas shrugged. He had nothing to hide—literally, since everything was already off the premises, and his accounts and deals were done by word of mouth and memory, leaving no incriminating documents.

  Over the next half an hour, he followed Dean as he searched the house, digging through the ashes in the range, feeling up the chimneys, pacing out the rooms from both within and without to check for lost space, hidden cupboards. He was thorough and imaginative—even Tomas had not thought of boring holes in the roof beams to hide coins or jewels, though he would do in future. Knowing himself to be unassailable, it was a p
leasure to watch the man work, and to learn from him.

  They ended the search in Tomas’s bedroom. He stood by the window and contemplated the way Dean’s back and biceps flexed as he manhandled the bed, stripping it to get at the mattress, checking the floorboards beneath for anything loose. To protect them from soot, Dean had taken off his coat and waistcoat downstairs, and in the summer heat, with his exertion, his linen clung to his powerful frame. Tomas was absolutely not going to touch, but he relished the opportunity to look.

  “I hope you’re going to remake that,” he said, enjoying himself now, as Dean completed the ruination of his bed by shaking his pillow until the tiny down feathers flew.

  Dean turned toward his mockery with a flush and a snarl, and in a flash of imagination, Tomas saw himself being pinned to the wall with an arm across his throat. He tilted his chin up in challenge, as the very sunlight through the window seemed to thicken and pulse.

  Then a boy’s voice shouted from downstairs. “Mr. Quick? I just come from the summersea lode. You been asking how much for the slave? They say they’ll take fifty pound.”

  All the heat in the room plunged abruptly to ice. Whatever else had been behind Dean’s fine brown eyes—the beginnings of a reciprocal enjoyment for a game well played, perhaps—it drained away and contempt replaced it.

  Dean turned to look as Ruan Nancarrow hobbled up the last step and froze, his young face caught in a picture of guilt.

  “Here is proof at least that you’ve been in contact with the wreckers. That you are intent on purchasing . . .” Dean’s voice fell off, and in a flash of empathy, Tomas knew he could not force himself to call a captive man stolen goods.

  Tomas’s honour revolted from what he was about to say, but his life and freedom were at stake, and he needed those. “The boy is talking about a deal I’m making with the captain of a slave ship in Liverpool to buy a man to train on a vessel stationed in Barbados. It is a perfectly legal deal, for which I will be happy to provide you with the papers when I return. But if the agent is waiting for me this instant, I must go at once.”

  Dean’s mouth was set in a harsh line, his eyes flat. He moved as if to block the door, and Tomas pushed him, angry himself and disgusted to be playing this part. By his knee, Ruan was so apologetic he was clearly trying not to cry.

  “Do you have any legal reason to stop me?” Tomas insisted, pushing again.

  Dean begrudgingly moved aside. “Not yet,” he said. “But I promise you, I will find one.”

  Speed was of the essence, for if the word had gone out that the shipwrecked sailor was available for purchase, Tomas did not wish to turn up at the summersea lode and find out he had already been sold. He regretted leaving Dean in possession of his house, but there was nothing there to condemn him except for Ruan. Doubtless the man would question young Ruan, but the boy was sharp and silent enough when he knew himself to be under suspicion. He would not say anything more.

  It would have been better to know which miner in particular he should speak to, but any further questions would only have destroyed his cover story, so Tomas withdrew fifty pounds from his bank, picked up his pony from the stables, and headed out onto the high moor, prepared to speak to whoever would speak to him.

  The pony had a fixed idea of what could be demanded of it. It would walk, doggedly along any path, scramble up piles of unmarked rocks. But if it was asked to trot, it would do so only for five minutes out of every fifteen, and spend the rest cropping the tough heather and thistles that swept in russet and purple patches over the moorland’s rough grass and mossy rocks. It would have been a pleasant ride, inland with the cool of the sea yielding to a great warm smell of sap and flower and soil. But Tomas paid no attention to the seagulls wheeling above like flecks of light cast from a diamond, nor to the skylarks, their voices like running water and bells mingled.

  He did not like to be looked at the way Peregrine Dean had looked at him when they parted, but it rankled more than it should. He told himself it was only that he liked his enemies to respect him, but felt a churning certainty that the truth was nothing so simple.

  It was a relief when the drying house came in sight—a small stone hut with a mossy roof nestled beneath a sloping face of granite, where bent trees clung with determined roots among the nests of plover. Summersea’s diggings were so old they had begun on the surface, and the entrance to the mine required no wheelhouse. One walked into it on a slowly descending path cut into the cliff, beside which a clay sled-track had been laid to make it easier for the ponies to drag out their loads of ore.

  Tomas had brought no lantern nor change of clothes, and he did not know the layout of the mine. Rather than venture alone into the dark, he put his head into the drying house in the hope of finding someone to help.

  Water trickled into the mines at all times. Sometimes braver or more foolish souls would follow a line of ore out beneath the sea, only to have those diggings collapse and flood lower levels. Whether or not it rained above, water seeped through the soil and ran down every wall, so the miners could as often be digging mud as solid rock. Down there in the dark, it was warm enough to keep body and soul together, particularly when the miners were working hard and sweating. But coming out, exhausted, in wet clothes, to a cold, clear Cornish sea breeze? It had been known to kill.

  So each mine had a drying house by its entrance, where the miners could strip off their soaked clothes and leave them to dry, wash the worst of the caked earth off their skin and hair in the warmth of a decent fire, and put on clean garments before going home to their wives and children. This one, Tomas was relieved to see, contained not only a hot water copper and basins, wooden drying racks spread out with an array of steaming rags, but also a miner in a blue neckerchief, sitting at his ease by the fire, blowing smoke rings from a long-stemmed pipe.

  Tomas didn’t recognize him—he was not a Porthkennack man—but that was natural in the mines, where any man hale enough to dig might seek his fortune. Despite the rakish touch of a single pierced ear, where a small black feather with a green sheen hung from a twist of silver wire, this elder had an honest face. The earring said he too had been a sailor at some point, but now he was dressed as a countryman, his flannel shirtsleeves folded back over forearms as ropy and strong as the tree roots above.

  “You’re the one I should talk to about buying the slave?”

  The man took a long, considering pull at his pipe and let the smoke out through his nose after in two plumes. He seemed to be weighing Tomas up. “I am.”

  “I want to buy him,” Tomas said, as though this was not obvious. “Bring him out to me, please.”

  Another cloud of smoke—the entire room seemed to hum with the peaty smell of tobacco, even though the door stood wide open to the scented summer air.

  “I’ll need to see your money.”

  Used to Zeb and the above-board way he and his associates did business, Tomas was surprised at the distrust. He had always been on the best of terms with the miners—terms of honour and acceptance. To be asked to prove himself after the years he had spent diverting wealth into the mouths of these hard-working, hungry people? It was—

  But this man didn’t know him either. He was newly arrived from somewhere, perhaps, where well-dressed merchants who turned up wanting to buy illicit merchandise could not be taken at face value.

  Tomas swallowed against a feeling that everything was shifting under his feet. New people. New rules. A reputation to earn again. He didn’t like it, but he would deal with it. Taking the bundle of notes from his pocket, he unfolded twenty-five of them. “Half now and half when you bring him to me.”

  “Deal.” The miner shook his hand, folded the notes away, and tucked them inside a waxed leather pouch that hung from his neck. Then he quickly stripped off trousers and jacket and replaced them with a below-ground set. “They got ’un a fair trek in,” he said, attaching a candle to the brim of a hat so permeated in stone dust it was more of a helmet. “Give me a half hour if not more. He may
be a trouble on the way out.”

  Tomas imagined it—the choice between walking into the grasp of a “master,” giving up one’s freedom, or tearing oneself out of the hands of one’s captives only to be lost in the absolute dark, perhaps never to be found again. He shuddered. “I’ll be here.”

  On this fine day, the hut was too hot for him. He occupied himself peaceably enough sitting on a hummock of turf outside, spotting wildflowers among the heather. A litter of foxes came out to chew the grass and play on a shelf of the cliff above his head, and their antics kept him amused and smiling for a further fifteen minutes. But when they ran back beneath the holly bush from which they’d come and he checked his pocket watch again, an ache of dissatisfaction began at his tailbone—uncomfortable on the dry-baked earth—and rose to pulse behind his eyes.

  When he had waited an hour, he got up and paced to the mine entrance, peering in. Nothing stirred in the sloping tunnel, though a faint tapping slithered up the walls and made him think of goblins. After he had gone to and fro a dozen times, another hour had passed, and a ball of seething darkness, heavy with resentment, was gathering in his chest.

  “Where are they?” he snapped at the pony at last. It raised its head from the grass and bit his coat pocket, perhaps hoping for an apple. The grinding teeth grazed his hip bone as they closed, and he sprang back with a sense of fucking betrayal that began with the bruise but increased in mass and momentum as every other new misery added itself to his thoughts. “God’s bollocks. He’s not coming back, is he?”

  Tomas put his face into his hands and dug his fingernails into his hairline, trying to use the pain to offset another inferno of anger. Fuck-shit—the fire gave him power, courage when it was directed at someone else, but at himself? It went from glory to burnt, black desolation far too fast. “Fuck it!” He raked his nails deeper in, giving himself a crown of thorns. “I just handed an unknown man twenty-five pounds and let him walk away. How could I be so stupid?”