Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Undeterred, its stringy black tail swishing flies from its back, the pony went for the other pocket. It was the trigger Tomas needed to stop clawing his face and turn his anger outwards. He clenched his fists and spun toward the drying hut. This new man thought he could just run off with Tomas’s money? Shimmy up one of the air shafts or stroll out of one of the less-used exits? Abuse Tomas’s trust and steal from him? No.

  Dashing into the drying house to raid the stock of candles, he put two in his pocket and lit the third. Gluing it to his hat brim with the spilled wax, he stormed into the mine shaft, heedless of the mud ankle-deep over his shoes. Heedless of the fact that he had no idea where to go.

  The entry tunnel ran downward shallow, then suddenly steep. Ropes had been rigged along its length, tied to metal rings hammered into the wall. An air from the depths guttered his candle, sent the shadows flapping around his head like bats. The tapping continued, growing louder as he descended, slipping on the viscous mud. Then the very earth shook beneath him, vibrations shaking his bones as dirt rained from the rock above him, and a gust of hot smoke, reeking of sulphur, engulfed his clammy face. In a distant gallery, someone was blasting through rock. Tomas could not help but wonder whether this would be the final jolt that brought the whole riddle of tunnels down.

  As the tremors rolled on beneath Tomas’s feet, he braced himself against the wall, mopped disgraceful sweat from his brow and tried to catch a breath gone tight in his chest. Deprived of air, his anger seemed to waver like the candle, and his resolution with it.

  Galleries had already opened off the main tunnel on either side—some large enough for a pony, some that had to be crawled through, or would admit only a thin boy turned sideways. Tomas was fairly familiar with the workings beneath the Hope & Anchor, but the Summersea mine was new to him. He knew better than to turn into a shaft at random, so he continued down the wide main shaft, hoping to find at least a boy at the bottom, left in charge of the horses, whom he might send to fetch the foreman.

  But when he emerged into the cavern at the foot of the shaft, he found only the ponies, idling in their traces, sleds half laden. As far as his light could reach, the gentle arch of the stone chamber was pierced with tiny passages, where the lack of light fooled the eye into thinking them flat. Haphazard scaffolding of mud-covered wet wood gave access to the upper lodes, and rope ladders trailed down into the holes in the floor.

  At this central point, it was impossible to say where the tapping was coming from, so he could not follow it to find aid. Worse—when the next explosion blew, it shook down flakes of stone from the cavern roof and made the rickety spiderweb of wooden structures groan aloud. Smoke puffed through a dozen small passages, and the flame of Tomas’s candle swooped and went out.

  He was familiar with the sea on a cloudy night—the sense of its vast power and his own fragility before it—but that was an abyss he knew how to navigate. This was not, and he couldn’t find it in himself to sit in the crushing dark and wait for someone to come. Not when his trust had been so badly bruised. Had even the summons here been a lie? Ruan was a good, honest boy, but like most children, he was easily deceived. Particularly by a man whose appearance of candour had fooled Tomas himself. No—he would have to find another way. Sore at heart and defeated, he set his hand on the handrail and followed it back out.

  My dear mama,

  I recall that you warned me I would be bored in such a small backwater as this after the bustle of the capital, but in truth there has already been so much excitement I fear to tell you of it in case it worries you. In the course of a free-for-all incited by the arrival of a wrecked cargo on the beach, I was clubbed about the head and would surely have drowned if my partner had not hauled me to shore and revived me. I was also held at the point of a pistol by the man Sir Lazarus Quick has trusted me to investigate. All this in the first week!

  I ask you not to fear, for this action suits my temperament, and I have felt no pull toward the vices of gambling or drinking since I arrived. Life is too absorbing to need augmentation.

  I wonder betimes why my quarry did not simply shoot me. He was in disguise; I was alone. There was nothing to stop him at the time or convict him afterwards. I find it in myself to wish I could think well of him. He should have done, for I will certainly see him hang.

  Perry had let Quick go, knowing there was no following the man in broad daylight. Instead, his gaze had fallen on the boy trying not to weep by the door. An ugly little creature with a harelip that showed the gleam of one front tooth even when his mouth was closed. The boy’s legs were bowed out with rickets, and one foot turned sharply inward, so he must always be falling over it. His trousers were whole enough, but his coat was more darn than fabric, a washed-out moon-colour that might once have been indigo blue.

  “I ain’t done nothing wrong.” The boy sniffed until his hazel eyes were dry, then wrapped the overlarge jacket almost twice around himself. “Can I go now?”

  “What’s your name?” Perry asked, as gently as he could—it would not do to blame a child for the sins of his elders.

  “Ruan.” The boy wiped the sniffles from beneath his nose with a grubby fist. “I don’t have to tell you anything, my mum says.”

  This time Perry’s smile was more genuine. Ruan’s attitude reminded Perry of the mudlarks of the Thames, who scraped a living by combing the river’s silty banks for lost coins and rags they could sell to the paper mills for a penny a bundle. He remembered when he had been that defiant himself, and that convinced that he was very grown-up.

  “Well, she’s wrong.” Perry smiled, softly but implacably. “I can in fact have you brought in front of the magistrate, and he can force you to give a statement.”

  Ruan’s eyes widened, but the glow of self-importance on his small face suggested he was imagining what a heroic figure he would cut. How the other boys would envy him. “Would they flog me? Would they have thumbscrews?”

  Since this speculation didn’t seem to be producing the effect he had intended, Perry took a step forward, tensing himself for the moment the boy turned to run. “Let’s not get ahead of ourselves. Where do you live, Ruan? I’d like to talk to your mother.”

  That certainly seemed to put the fear of God into the boy. He turned, and as he did, Perry reached out a long arm and lifted him off his feet by the back of his collar.

  “Let me go! Put me down!”

  “I don’t mean her any harm. I just want to have a sit-down with her and a chat.”

  Ruan’s legs thrashed in an attempt to kick or to run. “But I got a baby. Baby sister. Cadan says you people eat babies.”

  “Cadan is enormously ill-informed and ignorant,” Perry shot back, refusing to lose his temper with a child. “But if I promise not to eat anyone, will you take me to your house? I can stand here with you dangling from my fist all afternoon.”

  The leg windmill flailed to a halt, leaving Ruan dangling as limply as if he had been melted. “All right, I will. But only ’cause I know you’d find it anyway.”

  “That’s the spirit.” Perry smiled.

  Ruan’s “house” was a lean-to of driftwood and tarpaulin in the shelter of a middle-class family’s outbuildings. It was one such hut among several similar shambles, assembled around what had once been a formal knot garden, but was now a square of packed earth with an open fire pit in the centre. Perry had to step over three insensible adults—one lying in a pool of gin-scented vomit—to reach the greasy upright that Ruan indicated, and scratch on the tentlike wall for anyone inside to come out.

  “Shh, shh, shh!” An older woman with a dandelion head of frizzled white hair clambered through the low door and straightened up with a groan at the sight of him, one hand on the small of her back, the other holding the tent flap closed. The gesture was reminiscent of Zuliy holding Quick’s door closed while he made a run for the sea, but this time the dwelling was so tiny, Perry could see all around it, could see that no one was escaping.

  “Don’t wake the baby!” R
uan’s mother whispered, pushing Perry backwards toward the fire. “Poor mite. I give her a nip of gin to take the pain away, but this’ll be the first time she’s slept going on two days. What can I do for you now lad? You in trouble?”

  “He is trouble, mam,” Ruan piped up. “This is that new customs man as was almost drownded the other day trying to help that slave. He says he don’t eat people, but—”

  “Of course he doesn’t.” Ruan’s mother had the same deformity of the foot, and she limped forward like one whose every joint is sore, but the hand she laid on Ruan’s head was proud. Reassuring. “Come by the fire,” she said to Perry, indicating a couple of sawn-through barrels evidently meant to serve as seats. “And I’ll make you a cup of tea.”

  She took down a piece of brown-stained linen from a line stretched above the ashes, and shook what were evidently twice used tea-leaves into a pot. A cauldron of water was already simmering, hung from a tripod of driftwood, so a ladle or two later she was able to pour the tea straight into a hand-gouged wooden bowl.

  “Tastes like piss water,” she commiserated when he winced, and stretched out her bare feet toward the fire. “I buys the leaves already used from Matthews the grocer in town. He gets ’em from the Quicks, and they charge a pretty penny for ’em, though I reckons they use them three times themselves and add nettles to bulk it out.”

  If she could afford tea of any kind, she had aspirations and resources above the very lowest of the low, but the poverty still made Perry itch with shame. It was worse, somehow, to see the squalor of human desperation amid the clear floating light of the Cornish coast. In London, it at least harmonized with the fog and the dirt.

  “Speaking of Quicks,” he began in a gentle voice, “I was visiting with Tomas Quick when young Ruan here ran in to say he knew where the sailor captured during the storm was being held. Do you know anything about that?”

  “Could’ve asked me that,” Ruan interrupted, scooting up tight to Perry’s side and reaching out a filthy hand toward Perry’s embroidered waistcoat. For some reason, it had taken Perry’s fancy to wear his best clothes to arrest Quick, and the waistcoat was heavily stitched with golden flowers. According to Perry’s mother, it made him look dashing, but Ruan was not the person he had hoped to impress. He twitched his coat shut and buttoned it.

  “Barnabas, his name is, and the miners at the Summersea lode are keeping him. That’s all I know.” Ruan offered the information, and his mother nodded.

  “That’s as much as I know too.”

  “But Mr. Quick was looking to buy a slave?” Perry’s gut wrenched at the thought—another combination of anger and shame—the wish that he never had to be put into this manner of situation ever again. Even his waistcoat rebuked him. Ruan’s hands, after all, might be cleaner than Quick’s.

  “Tomas Quick be dealing in slaves?” Ruan’s mother frowned at him over her flavourless tea. “No, you don’t know the man. He don’t hold with that.”

  Perry snorted a humourless laugh. “He told me himself he had a deal with a slave trader in Liverpool. This is a very flimsy tissue of lies, madam, with each of you contradicting the other. You had better just tell me. If the unfortunate Mr. Barnabas is found and liberated, then no crime has taken place, and you, madam, will have been the agent responsible for restoring the boon of liberty to a suffering soul.”

  Ruan’s mother tucked a limp strand of iron-grey hair into her bonnet—an item that was exactly she same colour as the tea-cloth. She laughed. “You should write poetry in your spare time, Mr. Customs Man. I’d be moved if you han’t called me a liar first. But I ain’t lying.” Her gaze slid off him and wandered to the end of the street, where the skeleton of an old, burnt-out house was being crawled over by a gang of builders. A rumble and cloud of dust spoke of an untrustworthy wall being taken down.

  “I were up at the Angel,” she offered, “this morning. That’s where I heard about the miners being the ones who had Barnabas. Tomas Quick, he’d already put the word out he was to be tole if anyone knew. But not so he could buy ’im. So he could free ’im. He’s a gentleman, is Tomas. Which is more’n I can say for the others of that name.”

  “To free him?” Perry repeated, refusing to acknowledge the stir of relief in his breast. This was nonsense of course—the sort of thing any criminal might say of their accomplice. “Then why would he tell me otherwise?”

  “I don’t know.” She laughed and, digging deep in her skirt pocket, brought out a penny, which she passed to her son. “Go buy us a loaf of bread and a fish for dinner, Ruan. Your brother gets paid tomorrow.”

  They ate well enough, then; Perry revised his estimate of the family’s wealth upwards. Money to stretch until the next payday was luxury on par with money to splash out on tea. Though, doubtless, not having to pay rent was a factor.

  Ruan’s mother watched him limp cheerfully away, and turned back to Perry with a convincing expression of candour. “Tomas Quick’s proud, ain’t he?” she said. “Or humble—with him the two ain’t that far apart. Didn’t want to boast, is what I’m thinking. Or didn’t want you to blab to folks in the excise who might not be trustworthy. But he’s probably organizing with some friends to go rescue the poor man right now.”

  This was plainly ridiculous, if only because Perry wanted to believe it so much. He imagined the subterranean darkness being riven by a lantern held by a tall figure who moved through the gloom with the cutting certainty and speed with which his ship leaped though the waves. Imagined being rescued—chains falling away, and the blissful climb into cleansing sunlight. A pleasing fairy tale. That never was how it really went.

  “And that absolves him of being a smuggler, does it?” Perry asked, catching his jaw before it could clamp tight.

  Ruan’s mother laughed again. “If he was a smuggler—and I don’t say as he is—you’d do better to come to some arrangement with him. Folks around here would thank you for it. When my husband drownded last winter, I thought we’d all be dead come spring, but Tomas Quick give my eldest a job, and so we eat, and soon we’ll have money enough to move into a proper room. You take him away, there’s a lot of poor people’ll be after your neck. Can’t say the same for any of the other Quicks. Met any of them?”

  “I have the honour to have been personally chosen by Sir Lazarus to clean up this town and restore the rule of law,” Perry said. It didn’t sound as impressive, heard aloud, as it had when cherished in his heart, and Ruan’s mother scoffed at it, rolling her eyes.

  “That whited sepulchre? His time is coming, and the time of all like him. Their heads will roll and their blood will water the ground. Just look at France.”

  Perry was not certain if an unfettered revolutionary populace would be kinder to the men of his race than the status quo, and as he seemed to have got as much help from Ruan’s mother as she was willing to give, he made his excuses and let her be. She had let something slip for all her partisanship; “I were up at the Angel. That’s where I heard about the miners being the ones who had Barnabas.”

  So someone at the Angel & Eagle public house could tell him more. He set out at once for the pub’s commanding position on the lip of Big Guns Cove.

  His quick pace brought the blood into his injuries, made the rope galls around his wrists sting and ache from where he had struggled against his bindings in the warehouse. Though he had dashed off a flippant line about the experience to his mother, he had barely had time to think about the incident at the warehouse since Jowan had rolled up late at the head of equally reluctant “reinforcements” and laughed at him for being outplayed.

  The customs men stationed on the cannons had been coming round by then, commiserating with each other over the bad design of the cannon platforms and the strength of their headaches. But even they had been curiously phlegmatic about the incident. There had been no outrage or anger, only ruefulness as though this kind of thing was only to be expected.

  “Don’t you care?” Perry had asked, as soon as he’d been cut free. Jowan’s co
ntinual smile, in the centre of all that open space where once there had been salvage, had irked him more than usual. “They made a fool of us.” He made a fool of me. “They may as well have announced in the town square that they have no respect for us, and that criminals may do what they please. It needs to be stopped!”

  Jowan had given an easy shrug. “Wrack from the sea,” he’d said. “It don’t belong to customs, nor fine folk in London. We lost our bonuses for recovering it, but the wealth will come back to Porthkennack one way or another. It’s naught to lose your life or temper over.”

  As Perry turned onto the narrow coastal path that would take him up the cliffs, he wondered if he should report the entire town to Lord Petersfield. The riding officers were apathetic to the point of collusion, and everyone he spoke to seemed to be implicated or at the very least supportive of the smuggling. It was hard being the only honest man in the service. Little surprise that Lazarus Quick was so sour, with even his own house servants against him.

  Did he know the poor people of Porthkennack were wishing murder on him? Should Perry tell him?

  He rubbed at the hinges of his jaw, where the inevitable ache was building, trying to forestall the blossoming of full cranial pain. If wishes were horses, everyone would ride, and he had no desire to bring trouble to a homeless woman and her child. Mere jealousy was probably at the bottom of her words, and who could blame her for that?

  The Angel and Eagle was a fine, whitewashed building, Tudor in style. The exposed beams were black with protective tar, and the times of the stagecoach were written over the arch into the stable courtyard.

  A pump in the centre of the cobbled yard had a narrow bed of feverfew around it, the pungent lemon scent doing nothing to disguise the reek of horses. The stables themselves seemed clean—the tack hanging from the walls supple with oil, the mangers full and the piles of hay in each cell brown only at the edges.