Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  “Jack, sir. Old Jack, on account of my brother’s son is Young Jack.”

  Perry turned the silver spoon in his mouth into steel. “Well, Jack, my people will come after you. They will come after you and they will see you hang. I am a personal friend of Lord Petersfield of Marylebone. I cannot just be swept under the rug like insignificant dust.

  “And this young man.” He felt bad immediately at calling attention to the youth who was so carefully making himself into an invisible ball. But it had to be done. “He may have once been a slave, I don’t know. But the moment his foot touched English soil, he became free. That is the law. There are no slaves in this country, and you are imprisoning an innocent . . . person. Let us both go now and I’ll say no more about it, but—”

  “I can’t. I can’t, master.” The man’s kerchief was now so soiled that when he wiped his forehead again, it left a red stripe. His eyes were wide, almost pleading, as if for Perry to have pity on him. “I’m a poor man, and if I don’t do as my betters tell me, I’ll end up on the street. Me and my family. I dursn’t.”

  “What betters are these?” Perry asked, hoping and yet also dreading to hear the name of Tomas Quick. “If there is corruption afoot, I can help you. We could work together to free you from these noxious obligations.”

  “I . . .” Jack swallowed, his eyes following the bars of the cage until they came to rest on the ground in front of Perry’s feet. His sigh was so disconsolate Perry wanted to scream—If you don’t want to do this, then don’t do it! Have some heart, some backbone. Be a fucking man!

  “I dursn’t go against the Quicks.”

  Perry’s anger faltered in the face of something colder. So Tomas was responsible for this after all? It hurt to think of that beautiful vivid face harbouring so monstrous a spirit, but if his more righteous cousins wanted nothing to do with him because of it, that was remarkably progressive, laudable in them. No wonder they had been so quick to accept Perry—to give him their confidence and their trust.

  “You are backing the wrong half of the family,” he insisted. “Soon Tomas and his mother will be unable to harm you. I work for Sir Lazarus—he is intent on bringing the man down.”

  Old Jack’s mouth fell open and he pressed his red rag to it to stifle some outcry. Perry thought it was protest but the ground shifted under him when he saw the shaking shoulders. It was laughter. “Bless you,” Jack choked, his eyes shining with mirth. “For a moment there I thought you knew what you were talking about. It’s Lazarus who’ll buy you. Him or one of the Roscarrocks. Got plantations in the Indies, haven’t they, and always an eye out for a bargain.”

  “Wait!” Perry exclaimed, because Jack had already begun to turn away, chuckling. “What do you mean?”

  “Nearly the end of our shift.” Jack turned fractionally back, to make a performance of checking his pocket watch. “So I’ll say farewell now. Someone’ll be by soon enough to put you aboard a ship for the colonies. Don’t show off so much for them—they won’t like it, and it won’t do you no good.” He paused, guilt washing strongly over his features again, and for a wild moment of hope, Perry believed Jack was having second thoughts. He allowed himself to wish for rescue.

  “Maybe you can escape when you get there,” Jack said, as though this was a consolation more for himself than for Perry. He walked away.

  His light went with him. For a short time Perry and his cellmate were left in the dim gloom to which Perry had awoken, but gradually, insensibly, that began to dwindle too. The dark crept closer like a wolf at the edge of a failing fire, and the weight of the stone above his head leaned directly on his chest until he could barely breathe.

  Another miner must have gone, taking his lamp with him. It had become almost too dark to see, and the sense of being trapped, suffocated, turned into an object that could be placed in its locked box until it was needed, became unbearable alone. Understanding the youth’s greeting now, he lurched across the room by the last of the light and folded himself around the other person there, as if to confirm by touch that they both still lived, still breathed, still mattered.

  Keeping thoughts of chains, of slavery out of his head—he would fight, he would kill them or himself—he took the youth’s hand and patted his own head with it. “Perry.”

  “Perry?” the youth repeated, in that voice, strong as a man’s, sweet as a woman’s—an angelic voice, like that of a castrato singer. He was a eunuch then, Perry realized suddenly, one small mystery solved. He brought Perry’s hand to his own head. Perry uncurled it and rested it there, on ringlets strangely textured by oil and dried salt water.

  “Iskander.”

  This poor child. How long had he been down here, dressed for the harem in his flimsy silk pantaloons, at the mercy of these ghost-faced foreigners? Had the miners fed him since the shipwreck? Had he lost friends, lovers, on the ship that had gone down?

  “I’ll get us out of here, Iskander,” Perry promised. His pistol had been taken from him, but his belt remained. He slipped it off and knotted the holed end around his hand. The buckle would make for a weighted whip that clawed its victim even as it bruised. These stupid miners could only get through the door one at a time. “I’ll knock them down and we can run—I will remember the right way out when I particularly need to. It will be fine. I promise.”

  The dark sat on Perry like a mountain, and by insensible degrees robbed him of thought and courage. He tried to hold on to his sense of time at least by counting his breaths, by counting the rise and fall of Iskander’s ribs in the circle of his arm. But the numbers seemed to scuttle away from him, leaving only a sense of tides ebbing and flowing endlessly. The small warmth that gathered between them was just enough to lull him to sleep, and then sleep robbed him of his count entirely.

  In his dream, a tawny monster with blazing eyes rattled the immovable bars outside the cage. He startled awake to find it was the light—the light had returned. A key was rasping in the lock.

  Perry edged his feet under him, his weight on his left hand as he prepared to spring, his belt still wrapped loosely around his right.

  The gate swung open, and a figure moved through it, silhouetted by the lantern Old Jack held behind it. The beam of light caught Jack’s beard and his floral buttons, and lanced out to make the figure’s white hands on the bars shine like new snow. They wore a boat cloak, its hood pulled low over their face. The hands were the only identifiable mark, and they were empty.

  Perry had expected weapons, cuffs, and chains, but he wasn’t going to pause now to think about their absence. As soon as the cloaked person stepped out of the shelter of the door, he threw himself upwards, whipped out the belt, and as they flinched away from the snakelike punch of the buckle, Perry barrelled into them and got an arm around their neck in a deadly chokehold. He squeezed.

  “Ayi!” Iskander yelled from the corner.

  Almost at the same time, Old Jack croaked out “Let him go, you heathen. Let him go. He’s trying to help you!” and Perry realized that his victim was not trying to pry his arm away—he was simply tapping it, as if to indicate that he yielded.

  All this and they expected mercy from him? Perry growled and shook his captive until the hood flopped down from his head and revealed red-gold hair, shining like his hands in the beam of Jack’s lantern.

  A strange revolution twisted all the fibres of Perry’s body. He became breathlessly aware of the long, sinewy body against his not as a threat but an intensified level of reality, as though his mind had thrown on spectacles and everything about the experience had sharpened. His arm slackened, and he felt Tomas Quick take in a deep gasp of air as the ribs of his back flexed against Perry’s chest.

  Perry struggled to make sense of any of this. Was this not the party that was to put him aboard a ship and sail him into life-long captivity? Was that why neither of them had so much as a walking stick for a weapon?

  “What?” he managed.

  “The gentleman done pay for you both,” Old Jack mumbled, mouth d
rawn down and eyes dissatisfied.

  “I’m not being your possession!” Perry let go. Tomas turned, folding the cloak back over his right shoulder and exposing a green worsted waistcoat. The way it nipped in his slender torso, drew the eye to the line of white shirt exposed where it had not been fully buttoned up . . . Those things should not be occupying Perry’s thoughts at this time. He wrenched his gaze away and up to the hot shock that was those luminous eyes.

  “It was a bribe, you idiot. This is a rescue,” Tomas said, clearly angry, but perhaps not with Perry—for Jack shuffled from foot to foot at the tone, looking hard done by. “You should not have been in this position at all. I apologize on Jack’s behalf. He has been sadly misled.”

  “I still have them cousins of yours to get around,” Jack wheedled. Despite his stained grey beard, he stood like a scolded child next to Tomas Quick, who commanded respect as a drawn dagger commands it. “God knows what they’ll say to me when I tell them the bird’s flown.”

  “You’ll blame me.” Tomas shrugged.

  “I will!”

  Accepting this change of circumstances, albeit with scepticism, Perry backed towards Iskander, who was still flattened to the far wall, watching with wide eyes. “It’s all right,” he said, his voice as gentle and coaxing as he could make it, his hands beckoning. “Come with me. He says they’re going to let us out.”

  “Algebagnim.” Iskander shook his head, pressing himself further into the rock. “Betam asnalew.”

  Tomas’s gaze snapped to the youth—the first time he had looked away from Perry during this whole encounter. He narrowed his eyes. “Türkçe biliyor musunuz?”

  Iskander’s face lit up. “Evet yaparım,”

  “Benimle gel.” Tomas nodded toward the cell door, which remained open behind him. “Her şey yolunda.”

  Perry remembered his earlier musings on what it must be like to have some bright saviour come down into the dark and throw open every door. He had thought it would be sublime, but as it turned out, it itched. Until a moment ago, he had been Iskander’s hero. A moment ago, he had been master of his own fate, his own rescuer, and while being rescued was excellent, he wasn’t sure he liked the sense of obligation it brought. Tomas Quick was a criminal, after all, and what he wanted in recompense for this act of charity was probably going to be more than Perry’s conscience would allow him to pay.

  The man’s pale gaze was on him again. He felt it like a tether between them, and that was not a good thought in these circumstances.

  “Do you speak any Turkish, Mr. Dean?”

  “No.” Perry gave up waiting for anyone else to move, and pushed past Old Jack, out through the cell door. Watching this, Iskander took a tentative step away from the wall. “Why should I?”

  “Mine is poor.” Tomas took Jack by the arm and pulled him out of the cage too, clearing the space. “But my mother’s is better. She will be able to talk to him, if you help me bring him to my house.”

  Why should I trust you? Perry’s faith in human nature had been all but destroyed by the hours he’d spent in the dark. Why should he trust anyone in this place anymore? But that was shock talking, and moral injury, not his rational self.

  “What about this?” Perry jerked his chin at Old Jack, who had resumed his endless hand-wiping as soon as Perry got within attacking distance. “This peddler of human misery? Am I to be content with the fact that he has made money by holding myself and this poor foreigner captive? That he was about to sell us?”

  Tomas’s cupid-bow mouth twisted in some combination of amusement and frustration. “I suggest that contemplating your revenge should wait until we get out of here, Dean.” His face softened abruptly, as though he had noticed the shivers that were still working their way up and down Perry’s spine, and he nodded towards Iskander, who had finally stepped across the cage threshold and now stood with his thin arms hugging his inadequate waistcoat closed across his bare chest.

  “The child is distressed, and I believe you are too, though I know you’d rather cut off your nose than admit it. Come to my house. Have tea. We’ll talk this all through there.”

  “It is not an uncommon occurrence,” Tomas said later, when they were sitting around the kitchen table where Perry had held him at gunpoint earlier. “For the ‘property’ that washes ashore after a shipwreck to include slaves. Although legally they become free men the minute they set foot ashore, in practice their fate depends very much on who they have the fortune to fall in with.”

  The sun shone through the many-paned windows and the door was propped open to the sea breeze. Light gleamed from the glass-green water in the bay outside, and from the bright scoured copper pans that hung above the range. In Zuliy’s bread oven, something was crisping with a smell of toasted cinnamon, and Zuliy herself, in a dress and a turban of turquoise linen, was chatting in Turkish with Iskander, whose back was almost pressed to the heat radiating from the stove. He was wrapped in a blanket and hunched over a bowl of oatmeal rich with butter.

  The dark, however, lingered in Perry’s heart—he found this scene impossible to believe in. He was waiting, he realized, as he watched Tomas Quick’s long hands fiddle with his teacup, to wake up, to discover that this was a dream and reality was bars and indifference.

  “The Methodist congregation here has a fund put aside for the ransom of sailors and other travellers who find themselves in such a situation. And though to my shame I wasted half of it on a con man, I was not without means to make up the difference myself.”

  “Why did you tell me you were going to buy a man from Liverpool?” Perry asked. He was certainly tired enough to still be asleep. Tired with a bone-deep weariness that was more in the spirit than the body.

  Tomas gave a huff of laughter and turned his rope-calloused palms down against the tabletop. The backs of his hands were not the fresh snow that Perry had thought them—they were scattered all over with freckles like flecks of copper, a lighter colour than the constellations that had been splashed over his cheeks. Tomas studied them with his head lowered almost bashfully. “I did not want to show away in front of you,” he said, smiling with a rueful warmth that struck Perry to the core. “As though I were boasting about doing that which any decent man would do.”

  He did have the most beautiful smile. That rosy-pink mouth was all but obscene, and his unexpected shyness made Perry want to ruffle him further—make him laugh, or moan. Those lips would look even better around his cock.

  “And it seemed to me that you would not believe it, since you already supposed me to be such a villain.”

  Oh. Well there was a bucket of water thrown over that train of thought. For yes, he was a villain. Or if not a villain, a criminal, and were not those two things the same?

  “What will you do with the . . . Is he a boy? What will you do with Iskander now?”

  “He’s a eunuch, I think. Mother?” Tomas called over to the pair at the range just as his mother slid a wooden paddle into the bread oven and brought out a plaited loaf. She transferred it onto a board, and brought it to the table, saying something that made Iskander come too, carrying a pat of butter and a small pot of honey.

  “What is it dear?”

  “Did you find out who our guest is?”

  She pulled the bread into quarters and pottered away, returning with plates for everyone. The reddish crust was sticky under Perry’s fingers as he tore off a piece to butter, sweet as sugar and spicy with nutmeg and cloves. Soaked with butter, dipped into honey, it satisfied a deep need for comfort in him that he had barely been aware he had.

  She watched them eat for a moment, Perry and Iskander both, and smiled as they sighed with relief.

  “He’s originally from Gondar in Ethiopia.” She touched Iskander’s hand reassuringly when he looked up, as if recognizing the names. “He was travelling to visit his grandmother when he was captured by slave traders and castrated.” Her eyes were knowing and sad as she caught Perry’s gaze. “That’s a terrible ordeal, poor boy. Most of them die
, but the ones who survive are more valuable for it. The traders thought they could sell him to the Sultan, but he developed the . . .” she gestured to her face, perhaps indicating the boy’s acne, “the spots. So instead he was sold to a silk merchant as a companion for his wife. That’s where he learned his Turkish—in the harem—just as that’s where I once learned mine.”

  She huffed, the same small laugh her son had inherited. “Biz ikimiz ayniyiz, sen ve ben,” she said, and Iskander forgot himself enough to grin.

  “Hamd Allah’a mahsustur.”

  “He and his mistress were sailing up the coast on their way to their summerhouse when their ship must have caught the tail edge of the same storm that wrecked the Hyacinth. He says that the lightning inspired him with a kind of madness. When the crew were distracted fighting the waves, and his mistress prostrate, he threw himself overboard, hoping at least to die free.”

  Hearing of Iskander’s ordeal and bravery, Tomas settled a hand on his mother’s arm. It didn’t even tremble, and he was again proud of her rocklike composure. Though rocklike wasn’t quite right; she was as enduring as a ship that flexed to meet the waves, one that could conform itself to the shape required, but retain everything inside itself untouched.

  “You are not Ethiopian,” Peregrine Dean offered, his frown tentative as though he knew it was rude to question Zuliy’s word, but couldn’t quite help noticing . . .

  “I am Circassian, originally.” Zuliy smiled at the customs officer in a way that was friendlier than he deserved. “My people are prized as slaves among the Turks, for our complexion and our hair colour. I, too, was shipwrecked off a xebec, and when I washed up here, my owner was among the survivors and insisted on having me back. Tomas’s father, Peder, was the lawyer who argued for my freedom.” She leaned over to pour Dean more tea, catching his eye. “Whatever else you think of us, you will not think that we are involved with this business of that poor sailor. My son has been working tirelessly to find him and save him—something of which I think you have cause to be grateful.”