Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Fighting the urge to close his eyes, the narrowness of the path behind him and the knowledge of the long drop on its other side pressing on his mind, he splayed himself flat against the rock wall and followed.

  By the time he reached the top of the wall and rolled over onto a patch of long-leafed grass and moss in the moor beyond, Perry’s legs were trembling and the palms of his hands were scraped raw. Muscles in his fingers, that he hadn’t known he possessed, ached and shook. Behind him the sound of the brawl rumbled on, but as he raised his head, he forgot it all in a wave of incredulity and thankfulness that he had not been a little later.

  From where he lay, the moor undulated gently up to the farmland. The grey greens and ambers of the heather, blotched with emerald mosses, were bisected by a ruler-straight line of golden crops. No trees or boulders marred the view which seemed to stretch on unimpeded from one side of the Porthkennack promontory to the other. He would have sworn there was nowhere to hide, if he had not been watching with his own eyes as the torso of Billy seemed to slowly descend into the earth itself.

  The boy’s back was to him, so Perry was free to gape as the narrow shoulders in their scruffy yellow coat, the long plait of chestnut hair, and finally the head with its unfortunate woollen hat disappeared into the ground with a sliding, swaying motion like one going down a ladder at sea.

  Afraid of being seen, Perry crawled forward on hands and knees, never taking his gaze from the spot where he had had his last glimpse of felted mushroom hat. If he looked away, he could search for days without finding the place again.

  Even when he came close enough to see it, it was hard to believe. A square of utter darkness had opened in the land. Its lip was two inches of soil threaded with white roots, giving way to nothing with terrifying abruptness. There was a hole in the country, just lying there uncovered for anyone to fall down, and from two feet away it was as invisible as a ha-ha from a mansion window.

  When he had overcome his horror at the unnatural nature of the thing, Perry straightened up and paced carefully around it. Once he was on the opposite side, he could see that sunlight did in fact slant into the hole and light the side that Billy had been facing. Below the thin scrim of turf on the surface, the ground became solid rock. A hand’s breadth from the top, two ring bolts had been hammered into the stone. A rope ladder hung from them, its cord and its round slats covered in mud and moss.

  This must be a way into the mines young Ruan had mentioned—an escape route or an air shaft. Perry flexed his grazed hands, willed his legs to firm up, and sitting on the edge of the shaft, he felt for the first rung.

  He was in to his waist when a wind stirred the darkness below him and an unearthly groaning hummed up into his face. The shock almost loosened his grip, made his hard leather soles slip on the treacherous rungs. But he clung tight and thought of organ pipes; they were close to the sea. Perhaps the water was moving down there, displacing the air. Such a phenomenon might cause a moan of impeccable philosophic provenance. If it moaned like a wounded monster, that was surely only Perry’s poetic imagination.

  Still, continuing down the shaft as the light failed, with no way to guess the depth of the drop, his arms and legs cramping and shuddering, was one of the bravest things he had ever done. When his questing foot met a rough stone floor instead of another rung, he put his face to the wall and clung there a moment, breathing steadily, half in thanks and half in an attempt to piece his nerves back together.

  It was not, he saw when he turned his face to the passage, pitch-dark down here after all. A brown glow lit the walls to his right, though even as he watched it seemed to grow dimmer, and the darkness rushed forward from Perry’s left to fill the rough-hewn places it had vacated.

  Billy must have lit a lantern, be walking away, carrying it. Quietly as he could, Perry followed, arse aching as he fought to move silently over the rough ground.

  The passageway, which had been large enough for him to stand up in, drew down until he was crouched with his hands braced on his knees. He passed the black mouths of two other tunnels, and one that shone faintly. Only when he had gone past it and lost the ability to see his own hands did he realize that the light he was following had turned off the straight path. The tunnel was now so tight that he couldn’t turn around. He could only shuffle backwards until he could find a side passage that seemed to be slightly more illuminated than the others, turn into it to try to catch up, pressure and panic nagging at him, as though his whole existence depended on keeping close to the tail end of the light.

  Two further turns and then a ladder, even more rickety and thickly coated in slime than the one at the entrance. He lost all confidence that he was still following the right man. What if Billy knew these tunnels well enough to navigate without a light? Perry might then simply be following the closest miner. What if Billy had known he was being followed, extinguished his light while Perry had gone on into that blind corner, and Perry, coming out again, had followed someone else entirely? Then all this would be for nothing.

  Perry had nightmares like this sometimes, dreams in which he began by mislaying something important, only to search for it endlessly down ever ramifying corridors, until he would gladly have given it up if he could only stop. If he could only get out.

  At the top of the ladder, his will-o’-the-wisp guided him down another crabbed tunnel. And then, as if there was not horror enough in being totally lost and buried under the earth, the tunnel floor fell away into an abyss. He stopped in time to see a pebble, dislodged by his foot, fall into nothingness, and felt as though he had plummeted with it.

  Across the abyss, which was a little over ten feet wide, two unsecured planks had been dropped. In the waning light, he could still see the muddy footprints over their surface where someone had scampered as confidently across them as though they were unending stone.

  The drop seemed to suck at his feet. His tongue felt hot and coppery as his mouth dried, all the water in him seeming to concentrate in his legs. Every place that had so recently been injured seemed to wail in his bones in protest at the thought of carrying on. His feet would slither out from under him if he stepped forward. He would overbalance. He would fall, and no one would ever know where he’d gone.

  His mother’s letter lay unfinished in his room. It would be packed up and sent to her with his small chest of belongings if he disappeared here, and the thought of her mourning was like a blow to the chest.

  But every moment he hesitated, the light he was following drew away. And if he did not cross, he would be as lost down here as if he had fallen.

  “CARELESSLY over the plain away, Where by the boldest man no path Cut before thee thou canst discern, Make for thyself a path! Silence, loved one, my heart! Cracking, let it not break! Breaking, break not with thee!” he thought, consoling himself with poetry. Then, holding his breath, he plunged forward.

  The planks bounded under him like the deck of a ship, forcing him into a stumbling run. Panic hit him like lightning—he was going to fall—but he managed to get another foot under him and to push himself to fall onto the platform of stone on the other side, the bruising impact of stone on his knees a benediction.

  As he paused to gather his breath and nerves, the sound of distant voices caught his ear. From this position, the glow at the end of the passage was stronger rather than fainter. He could see where the tunnel kinked to the right, and could smell gunpowder and tobacco and the sweet-sour reek that was human sweat dried into unwashed clothes.

  Enemies or no, the presence of other people gave him strength. As silently as he could, he edged up to the bend in the tunnel and peeked round.

  Two steps beyond the turn, the tunnel opened out into an underground gallery the size of a small cathedral. A pile of barrels at the entrance blocked most of Perry’s view, but was also a good place to hide and observe. He crept up behind them, noting that while most were marked as containing blasting powder, at least two had the broad arrow of government supplies, and one, barely in sight
even in the improved light, bore the Hyacinth’s name and the symbol for brandy.

  He wedged himself in between two of the lowest tier of barrels and watched through the crack. Now he could see into the large cavern, which was well-lit with candle lanterns. White stalactites like canine teeth lanced down from the ceiling and gave the place an unpleasantly organic air. It was clammy enough to be the inside of a giant’s mouth, certainly.

  The men who had gathered in the cavern seemed too deep in conversation to be made uneasy by their surroundings. And perhaps as miners it was homelike enough to them. They sat on tumbled boulders and unladen sleds with their pipes lit as if they were in their own living rooms.

  Billy was not among them. Nor could Perry see feather cockades in any of the hats. Every one of his attackers had borne one, and it had come to him since that perhaps the feathers were a badge—an emblem of some organization or crew. So perhaps . . . Perry loosed a deep sigh that made his ribs throb. Perhaps he had lost his quarry after all, and this was an innocent meeting of working men.

  “Maybe the doctors should charge less. When the revolution comes—”

  “You young pipsqueak! It won’t come, not here, and even if it does, ’twill be too late for Amos’s daughter. We got to do this, for her.”

  The first speaker was beardless and rangy, his face a red mask of mud, and his hair sticking stiffly around the brim of his hat as though he had clutched it with clay-covered hands. The second, if his position in the middle of the circle of men was an indicator, seemed to be an authority of sorts. He was twisting a cloth in his hands, then stroking it over his face, leaving his skin and grey beard damp and cleaner. His hands seemed to tremble, and there was a tic in his left eye that was probably due to nerves.

  “We could have a whip round,” the boy insisted. “Between the lot of us, surely we can raise—”

  That drew a clamour of voices: “I can barely feed my own childer.”

  “If I don’t make the rent this month—”

  “My Mary needs a doctor too. Are you going to pay for her?”

  “Look, none of us likes this,” said the elder, still wiping himself down—like Pontius Pilate, Perry thought, that’s not going to make you clean. This might not be Billy’s crew, but something untoward was afoot here nevertheless. “But we got to make ends meet. And none of us wants to make enemies like young Mr. C.” He raised a hand to forestall another protest. “Plus, it’s the life he knows. Probably doing a kindness to him. Not as though he’s got big prospects outside, is it?”

  Perry frowned. Was he wrong about Billy’s black-feathered crew being a different organization than this? It did sound like they were discussing doing something inimical to a person, and selling a man into slavery would fit. Who was this “Mr. C.”? And what did they mean by “it’s the life he knows”? Barnabas was a free man and a sailor.

  Perry edged forward a little, in the hope that an obvious cell door would be visible. But it wasn’t—the cavern only opened on more passages, disorganized and dirty and likely impossible to navigate without a guide.

  A guide I must have, then, he thought, conscious, now that he had stopped moving, of the draught of clean air blowing in from the passage down which he had come. It hit his back and ruffled the small hairs at the nape of his neck, carrying the rhythmic sounds of distant knocking from where miners were at work in other galleries. If Barnabas was a prisoner here, it would be necessary to wait until someone was sent to feed him. Then he would follow them. He would have to have some method, afterward, of inducing them to guide Barnabas and himself back out into the light, and at that thought he began to try the lids of the closest gunpowder barrels. If he could just get powder enough to recharge his pistol . . .

  His fingers were around a lid, rough and stinking with sulphur, when the air grew suddenly warmer at his back. He barely had time to realize that Those were footsteps I heard. Footsteps, not chisel blows! when the man who had come up the passageway behind him brought something down hard on Perry’s head and all the lights went out.

  Perry’s knees throbbed with a sharp red pain that he was aware of a long time before he realized that his head was also splitting. The head pain had been so ubiquitous that at first he had thought it was only some texture of the darkness—that the world itself naturally cycled through tides of squeezing and nausea, rather than the pain being something inside himself.

  It was a little like the night terrors he had suffered as a boy—his mind had wakened, but his body lay as if pinned under a demonic weight—and for a long time he could not move or even groan.

  Knowing what he would see if he opened his eyes before he was truly awake, he concentrated on flexing his toes, clenching his fingers. Nothing seemed broken. When he did risk cracking an eyelid open, the faintest bloom of brown spilled in through an iron-barred gate and showed him the roughly hewn walls of a tiny storeroom.

  “Ugh. Not again,” he moaned, trying to push himself up onto an elbow. The movement made his nausea crest and a wave of inner dark explode behind his eyes. He clamped his watering mouth shut and swallowed down the reflex to vomit.

  Slim hands tucked themselves under his armpits and tugged him until he was sitting. He tried to keep his eyes open during this manhandling but had to pinch them closed when his vision clouded with milky lights. There didn’t seem any ill intention in the hands—once his torso was upright, they guided him to lean back until he was reclining on a slender chest, this support interposed between him and the wall like a living cushion.

  “Barnabas?” he managed, when everything had stopped swaying.

  The narrow chest behind him took in a shaky breath, but when his cellmate spoke, Perry understood neither the words nor the voice itself. A woman’s voice? Or the voice of a child—but the chest was flat, and the hands that still cradled him were long and knob-knuckled like those of a man.

  Perry wished for water and then for a greater light, feeling out of his depth and stupid. So stupid. Whatever was going on here, he had not comprehended it at all.

  He levered himself away from the person’s grasp. They clung to him as though they were taking more comfort from him than they were giving. As soon as he turned it became clear why: this was a black teenager, acne scarred, in water-stained silk trousers and a little waistcoat embroidered with gold thread. Even peering closer, Perry wasn’t sure if they were male or female—beardless, with a soft layer of fat on their oval face, and their long hair—despite the sea—still weighed down with oil.

  “Well, you’re certainly not who I came to save,” Perry muttered, mostly to himself. “But I’m going to save you anyway.”

  He turned to the bars and examined them. They were, unfortunately, the matt black of newly forged iron, not a bloom of red rust anywhere. The upper ends fitted firmly into sockets chiselled out of stone, the lower into two slabs mortared together. He tried rattling them, but they were firm on both ends and did not move.

  Into this grille of bars, a narrow door had been set—he heaved on it—on simple ring-and-pin hinges. Under his straining effort, the door rose a finger’s breadth on its pins before the upper edge clanged into the bar that had been soldered over the top to prevent an inmate from lifting the door off its pins. That bar, too, was soldered and solid.

  The pin of the padlock was almost as thick as his finger. In the absence of a crowbar, he would not be forcing it. But with his face jammed between the widest bars, he could just make out the distant archway that was the source of the minimal light. The stalactite that hung like Damocles’s sword over its jamb was the one he had seen when he was hiding behind the barrels, and that meant the door was an entrance to the large cavern. Perhaps if the clay-haired boy was there, he could talk his way out.

  “Hey!” he shouted. “Hey, you in there! You’re detaining an officer of His Majesty’s Customs. I won’t disappear as easily as a few barrels of brandy. This is a road you don’t want to travel.”

  He thought of Jowan and his indolent smile. Jowan was not
perhaps the greatest of threats to hold over these men, but he was what Perry had got.

  “Let me out, or you’ll have cause to regret it. You may think you have the customs in your pockets, but that will change in an instant if you kill one of their own.”

  He hoped so, at least. In the London station, even the most hated of colleagues—even Ellis Mobray who drowned puppies for a giggle—could count on the aid of every officer in a pinch, if only because next time it might be them. There, Perry would have known his friends were on their way. Here—walking on this knowledge was like walking on quicksand; he might still be regarded as expendable. But the miners didn’t need to know that.

  “You’ll end up swinging from the noose,” he yelled, “and who will look after your daughters and wives then?”

  The distant doorway flickered and seemed to elongate into a strange shape with a darkness in the centre. When the shape seemed to snap, he saw it was the older man—the authority—carrying a lantern in his hand, its sphere of radiance separating from the light of the room as a bubble separates from the glass bottom of a tankard.

  Perry’s cellmate said something alarmed. Maybe a warning? Then they shrank to the back wall, jamming themself into a corner with their arms around their knees. They tucked their face into the cage of limbs—protecting themself. The little winks of gold from the embroidery on their clothes trembled like stars seen through flying cloud, and Perry’s headache boiled away as anger filled him right up.

  “You!” he snapped at the approaching miner, getting a guilty, peevish look in return. “What’s your name?”

  He had affected his most respectable accent, the one Lord Petersfield had instructed him to use when addressing nobility, and it seemed to shock a response out of the miner almost against his will.