Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  There were a hundred hiding spots for small kegs and bales in the ground floor alone, and above it a hay loft beneath a thatched roof that might conceal a thousand more.

  The path had been dry, but he scraped his boots off at the scraper by the side door anyway and went in.

  Two steps down and along a short, twisty corridor, he found the door for the main room. The din of voices within faltered and fell silent as he stepped inside, but he had expected as much and stared back coolly at the other guests. Sailors, for the most part, undoubtedly drinking down their wages on their shore leave, faces florid and pockets overflowing. A knot of miners sat by the fire, where a pot of something savoury bubbled—a kind of fish stew by the smell. A woman with a ladle and a choker of Belgian lace was the first to stir out of that forbidding silence and acknowledge him.

  She rustled over—a comfortably plump woman in a rusty-red petticoat and embroidered yellow day dress of a fabric that must have cost a pretty penny when new, but had been worn thin. It might have been bought secondhand, or saved up for and worn continually. It was right on the border of suspicious luxury, as was that flash of swan-embroidered lace at her throat.

  “I’m the landlady here; Mary Castille. What can I do for you, Officer?” she beamed. Her voice seemed overloud, but perhaps that was her nature. “You are that new riding officer, started here this last week? I was sorry to hear about the warehouse being emptied. You must be shook.”

  Someone hidden behind her fichu-wrapped shoulder sniggered. Perry marvelled again at the speed with which local gossip ran around this town, and wondered what swan-lace reminded him of.

  “Perhaps we could speak somewhere more privately?” he asked. “Your husband, yourself, and I, that is.”

  “You’ll have a job speaking to my husband. He’s been dead these ten years.” She shrugged. “But come help me change a barrel in the taproom and you can have a word there.”

  From the brief glimpse he saw of them, before he had to concentrate on rolling a hogshead of ale up the stairs, the pub’s cellars were extensive, and doors opening on every wall suggested they ramified beyond his sight. The barrel he had been asked to move was marked with the red star of a local brewery, but without examining all the others, there was no knowing what contraband might be stacked among the lawful purchases. He should be making a search even now, and would be, if he had not been hard on the scent of the kidnapped sailor. But a human life was of more consequence than a few smuggled barrels, and—

  And so I find my own reasons to neglect my duty, he chided himself. But his reasons were at least good ones.

  “All right, then.” Mrs. Castille cocked her head at the sight of him rolling the barrel laboriously up the steps. The regular grunt of Perry’s effort and thud of the wood rolling onto the next stair brought the volume of her voice down to a level that approached private. “What was it you wanted to say?”

  “There was a man taken up alive from the wreckage that came ashore last week,” Perry started without accusation or pressure. “A sailor, like so many other men of this town. But because of his complexion, this man is being held captive and sold to the highest bidder like a pile of crockery. A freeborn man, risking his life on the sea in the service of this country. Tell me your heart does not go out to him.”

  Mrs. Castille’s hands dropped to her beer-stained apron and twisted it. Probably from a trade spent working indoors, she had a nigh-aristocratic pallor, against which her green eyes stood out like plaques of sacred jade. There was some emotion in them, but Perry couldn’t tell if it was guilt, regret, or fear.

  “It does,” she agreed, opening the door at the head of the stairs so he could bump the barrel over into the corridor. “I do have a heart for any sailor on the sea. But I also have a responsibility to my own children, don’t I? Both my sons of the body and my little foundlings who’d have no one to care for them without me.”

  “You think Barnabas’s captors would harm you if you spoke to me?” Perry halted the roll of the barrel and straightened up for a moment, trying to impress her with his sincerity and willingness to protect her. “If you are afraid of someone, tell me and I’ll deal with them. Or call on me when you need me—”

  Mrs. Castille laughed, like a woman trying to be encouraging about a child’s slate of wobbly first words. “They don’t make appointments, these people,” she said, in a genuine whisper now, hard even for him to hear. “They’re not going to give me time to send a boy running to you and wait for you both to arrive.”

  The front of the inn looked out on farmland golden with barley, but the back overhung a cave-riddled cliff beneath which the long breakers of the Atlantic beat. The shore-path there was more suitable for goats than humans, passing by a dozen sheer drops where a loose-lipped woman might disappear forever, weighed down by the money in her pocket.

  “I could ask Sir Quick to furnish a guard for you. If you were willing to testify in court to information that allowed us to put some or all of these villains in jail, I’m sure he would consider it.”

  “Bless you, love.” Her regretful expression transformed into something worldly, even patronizing. “You do want to talk to that Sir Lazarus. You do, right enough. But not about giving me guards.”

  “What then?”

  She set a red boot to the barrel and gave it a shove, sending it rolling once again. A series of practiced kicks took it over the threshold to the tap room, with her following close behind. “And that’s all I’m saying about it.”

  When Perry went to follow, the door closed in his face.

  He rocked back and set his shoulders to the wall opposite, while he overcame his instinct to shove back in just because he could. Cultivating informants who knew they could trust him was important, and was not achieved by being overbearing.

  A heaviness settled in his stomach as he let her words sink in. While the whole town seemed to cheerfully agree that Tomas Quick was a smuggler and a good man with it, these hints of accusation towards the magistrate and his family also recurred. Perry found them almost more suspicious because they were so wary, so tentative. No one, he realised, was afraid of Tomas, nor reluctant to admit a connection to him, but Lazarus was a different matter.

  It had been like sitting in a silver box, in Lazarus’s study. Surrounded by opulence, beauty, culture. Perry’s desire to be part of that world was so intense it almost tasted like salt in his mouth. He would not believe that a man with such power and such position would use it badly—What could he possibly gain that he did not already have in plenty? No. It was jealousy, simple as that. Jealousy and an attempt to throw Perry off the true scent.

  Tomas’s vivid face was bright and contemptuous in his memory, unimpressed by the pistol trained between his eyes. Looking at him was like looking into the flame of an oil lantern, where the fire was blue hot and a kind of raging magic was almost tangible. As a child, Perry would have poked at the flame, trying to touch and know it. So now he decided to go back and talk to the man again. Something would give if he did—he could almost feel it now, realigning in his own chest.

  He left the inn by the back door and walked with his right hand swinging out over the sail-flecked sea. Another cloudy morning had cleared into sunlight, and a sky like an indigo dome sealed over the land. He was watching his feet amid the tan dust of the narrow path, clambering over inset rocks and trying not to crush the yellow samphire flowers, and at first the faint sound of voices didn’t strike him as threatening. It was the laugh, maybe, that made him stop and look back, piercing him with a fear sudden as a marlin-spike through the eye.

  Three young men were on the path behind him, cockades of black feathers in their hats. That should not have been suspicious in itself, but for the way they met his eyes—a cold gaze, a malicious smile, and a challenge.

  To Perry’s right, a foot of grass sloped at a forty-five-degree angle before giving way to an almost sheer drop over needles of rock in a basin of spume. To his left, a wall of rock rose higher than his head—nowhe
re in sight to hide. He sped his pace, aiming for a bend in the path where an ancient blackthorn tree made a tangled thicket of thorny boughs. Maybe there he would find a cut-through, where he could get out, up onto the tussocky moor that swept up to the barley. Anything to get off this narrow ribbon of a foothold over a deadly drop.

  His pursuers sped up behind him. And when he rounded the faithless tree, two men straightened up, truncheons tapping against the palms of their hands, and smiled as though they had been lying in wait specifically for him.

  Perry drew his pistol, flattening himself against the rock wall on the land side of the path. Fleetingly, he wished for his partner. Would even ambush wipe the smile from Jowan’s face? Probably not, considering he might easily be complicit. There was no friendship in this town for Perry—no one who would come to his aid now.

  “The first one that moves toward me gets a bullet in the head,” he threatened. At least if he had to kill the locals, he knew the magistrate would be on his side. “And the next goes over the cliff.”

  Something smacked into the wall just beside his gun hand, peppering his skin with sharp flakes of rock. A stone. One of the men on the high ground, on the inn-side of the track, had a slingshot. Already another pebble was in its pouch and the man was whirling it above his head. He might have pockets full of stones, and he could pick more straight off the ground. Perry swung the pistol in his direction but hesitated. For now, they were holding back—none of them eager to be the person who took his bullet. But once that single shot had been taken, they would all be eager to rush and overwhelm him before he could load the pistol with another.

  “You talk like we ha’nt done this before,” said the taller of the two men downhill from him. Perry almost turned to look—was almost distracted enough to miss the silent flight of the next shot. But he caught the movement as one end of the sling was released to fly out like a black whip against the blue sky. He jerked violently to the side, and the wind of the projectile swept his cheek as a rock the size of his fist passed his face and shattered on the wall. Splinters of granite drove toward his eye.

  Instinctively, he shut both eyes and flinched further away, his aim faltering. That was when they charged.

  Bodies slammed into him from both directions, hurling him hard against the wall. He managed to get his arms up to protect his head from the truncheons, but the long bones of his forearms threatened to break as the heavy wood came down on them like hammers. Pain seared through him. His hands shook, and though he could not see where he was pointing the pistol, he fired it anyway.

  The boom and blaze of gunpowder bought him a brief space while his assailants froze. In that pause, Perry braced himself on the wall, got both legs up between himself and the man directly in front of him—the one who had spoken—and kicked him away with all his strength.

  The man reeled backward, across the narrow width of the path. He doubled up, his hands clutching at the air as he tried to slow his momentum. But then his foot was over the drop, his toe slipped on a patch of moss, and he went over, hands scrabbling for purchase all the way.

  Fuck me, thought Perry, who had never killed a man before. Oh shit, this is real.

  Until now, a part of him had believed he was only facing a beating—that he would surely end up unconscious and trussed up for Jowan to find on his rounds. Tomas’s robbery of the warehouse had given him expectations of being treated gently. But those expectations dissipated now, as the man with the slingshot drew a long knife whose glitter pulsed like lightning in Perry’s already spinning head. A part of himself was shrieking, thin and shrill, but another part had come up out of the darkness like a bubble of lava, and his chest was full of power and fire.

  Getting his feet back under him, he launched himself at the man with the knife, grabbed his wrist, and pulled with all his weight, forcing the man’s hand into the wall behind him. The crack of knuckles meeting rock was like the pop of distant shotguns. The knife jangled as it hit the ground, and its wielder yelled bloody murder, punching Perry in the throat with his left hand.

  Knife-guy reeled away, clutching his bleeding fist to his chest, but Perry’s throat seized up too—something seemed to have broken in there. He couldn’t get air past the obstruction.

  He fought to breathe, as silver spots snowed before his eyes. The hunched posture opened his back to his attackers, and a cudgel cracked down on his spine. Another lunged in to his ribs, horizontally, and the shattering pain of both forced him to whoop out a sob and proved to him that he could still breathe.

  His discharged pistol was in his hand. Bent over, he brought its hard wood and steel pommel down on an attacker’s knee, hoping to force another man to withdraw.

  Instead, the man fell heavily, straight onto Perry’s back. The unexpected burden made him tip forward too. He had barely caught himself on his hands and knees when knife-guy kicked his elbows out from beneath him, and the third man flopped his weight on top of the pile, flattening Perry against the ground.

  Breathing felt like raising the world with one hand. His bruised ribs shrieked, and his eyes watered at the pain. His heart stopped dead as knife-guy picked up his blade with his off hand and tossed it a couple of times flamboyantly.

  “I’m going to cut your throat now, you tuss! You’re going over that cliff, and to hell with it.”

  Panic roaring through him like a leaping fire, Perry heaved against the weight pinning him, and felt the body-pile rock to starboard. He was aching and exhausted. Everything hurt, but with a harder heave and a sideways shuffle, he might be able to wriggle out again, get past them, and sprint away down the track to safety.

  As he prepared himself, bracing for a second all-or-nothing shove, a snatch of the tune of “Rodney’s Glory” gusted to him on the wind, hummed by a gravelly voice. Was someone coming? Were they rescuers or another threat?

  “We shouldn’t kill him, Eli,” the fourth man, who had hung back on the edges of the fight, intervened. Only his ankles were in Perry’s range of sight, and they were thin and bare. His voice was diffident and young, shaking slightly. “We should put him with the other one. Sell ’em both, that’s a whole hundred pounds between us.”

  A guilt Perry had been scarcely conscious of feeling lifted off his back like the weight of a third man. These were the slavers—the ones who had taken Barnabas. If anyone deserved to be kicked over a cliff edge, it was them.

  “Billy, you leave the plotting to us,” said knife-guy, aka Eli, “He knows who we are, and he’s got fancy patrons here and in London. They’d listen to this one if he got out and he lived.”

  The humming was definitely coming closer—coming from further down the path. A voice spoke, and another laughed in answer. A group of people must be walking up the coast road toward the inn.

  “Help me!” Perry yelled with all his might. “Help! Murder!”

  The bodies draped over his back jolted with surprise. He seized his chance to buck them upwards, and then rolled out from beneath them, spilling them onto their backs. They scrabbled to their feet, but he was already running at a crabbed trot before he’d managed to straighten up. Outrage and fear gave him a speed and sureness of foot like a spooked deer.

  The path turned in a sharp bend outwards, to the right, and another weathered tree, clenched into the cliff edge, had masked the approach of strangers. He had run into the middle of them before he registered their clothes—pea jackets worn open over trousers of white duck, the seams of which were embroidered with ribbons. Little round hats with a black ribbon around the crown on which, in gold, was embroidered the name HMS Harbinger.

  At the back of the party, a naval lieutenant, shiny in blue and gold, caught Perry’s eye and held it with interest. “Murder?”

  Perry thought fast. The sailors, too, were all carrying cudgels. A press-gang then, going up to the inn to recruit every admissible man to his majesty’s navy.

  He blessed his habit of always carrying his papers. “I’m Riding Officer Dean of this county.” He offered them to
the lieutenant. “I was just set upon by four smugglers. Good seamen all, I’m sure. Once you’ve pressed them, I would value a chance to question them—a man’s life is in danger.”

  The lieutenant ran a snappy dark eye down Perry’s identification and recommendation and raised his eyebrows in momentary surprise. But then he nodded, and six of his eight tars broke into a rolling bulldog run, inelegant but very fast, up the path toward Perry’s assailants.

  Perry followed—he wanted to see the tables turned, see how they enjoyed being outnumbered and overwhelmed.

  The initial shock of the encounter was all he could hope for, as Eli was knocked off his feet by the first two seamen and pinned to the dusty ground himself, cudgel down hard on the nape of his neck as the second tar bound his wrists behind him. As he was passed back, writhing and kicking, into the hands of the lieutenant’s two guards, he took the chance to spit in Perry’s face.

  Perry wiped it off with a smile. It was not quite slavery to which the man was going, but he’d be confined to a warship for however long it took to break him in, to ensure he would not run if he was let loose. Not perfect, but Perry would wring whatever irony he could from it.

  It was hard to see what was happening with the other three men, mobbed as they were. A moment passed in which the knot of elbows and shoving clubs could not be parsed. And then one of the smugglers tripped, taking his attackers down with him. There was a brief gap in the scrum, and the thin boy, Billy, used it to scrabble out of reach.

  He gave a great grasshopper leap, long arms outstretched. His fingers latched on to tiny gaps in the sheer rock wall of the landside of the path. His toes, in his soft seaboots, seemed to grab on too, and spiderlike he swarmed to the top and threw himself over onto the moor.

  If he got away, he would tell Barnabas’s captors that Perry was following. They would move their captive, or lie in wait for Perry and shoot him this time.

  Without finishing the thought, he threw himself forward, shouldered his way through the brawl and faced the wall himself. He would not have believed a man could scale it if he had not seen it with his own eyes, but perhaps if he put his right hand in that hollow, he could reach up with the left and cling where the tiny outcropping of speedwell was already bruised by Billy’s weight.