Contraband Hearts
Page 13
It was because of this vigilance that he saw something gleam across the heaving sea. He thought he’d imagined it at first—one of those grey pinpricks that comes when one rubs one’s eyes—and it faltered out almost at once. But no sooner had he told himself it was an illusion than it shone out again, a vibrant yellow star, the only coloured, the only steady thing in this grey and howling world.
But what was it? The lights of the town were grouped along the inner edges of the harbours and could not be seen when one had passed their sheltering walls. The lighthouse was further along the coast, visible to ships coming from the north east, but invisible from this southern approach.
Not for all his abhorrence for the Quicks did he think that they would have the inhumanity to kindle a light in a seaward window, and anyway, this was not coming from the Quicks’ house on the very top of the land. This was lower, on a . . .
His nausea returned as though someone were twisting his bowels. This was on a cliff edge. Someone out there was deliberately standing still on the cliff path with a light.
The American snow slid past Tomas’s jolly-boat at eight knots or more, jostling him with its wake. Above its name—USS Kittywake—he caught a brief glimpse of a boy in the stern windows. A youngster, someone’s nephew or son or little brother, brought aboard to learn navigation and the ropes. Then the snow club hauled and turned toward the light.
Something unconscious must have been calculating positions and speeds all along, because the moment they turned, Tomas was shouting “No! No! You’ll drive onto the Needles. No! Listen!”
His hands were chilled and wet, fingers swollen. He tried twice more to strike a good spark, but now the tinder was soaked from the rain. Hopeless.
Tearing his jacket off, he pulled his white shirt over his head. His jolly-boat’s sail was, by design, tea coloured so that it should be invisible by night, but a lookout might see a pristine white shirt if he waved it hard enough. He did, and hollered until his voice gave out. But the gale blew his words away, and the snow sailed primly on, thankful perhaps for that glimpse of salvation in a howling world.
Tomas threw himself back to the tiller. Could he catch them? Could he reach them before—
Even in the wind’s shriek, he heard it when she struck the rocks. The masts moaned like enormous bassoons. The rigging snapped with whip-crack staccato notes. In the belly of the ship something crashed—it must have been the galley, the lit galley. Smoke poured out from her hull from holes it shouldn’t have. He thought, hoped, that was the worst of it— She’d crashed but she’d retained her shape. If the sailors could anchor her to the rocks and ride it out then—
An enormous swell picked her up, drew back and then dashed her a second time on the anvil of the rock. Her spine broke with a roaring crack like that of lightning. Then a moment later the fire must have reached her gunpowder magazine. She exploded from within.
When the debris had stopped falling and Tomas had straightened up from his defensive crouch, the surface of the sea was covered in wreckage—some of it yet alight. The storm still raged, and his jolly-boat’s rigging was hard as iron with the strain. If he wanted not to join the snow in drowned and wrecked pieces, he should really resume his course for the shore, but . . .
How would he live with himself if he sailed away and left the sailors here to drown?
He wrestled his sail down and shipped oars—the jolly-boat was as buoyant as a cork and slid over the crests of the great waves and down the hollows in between with an almost exhilarating motion. Carried by tide and wind, the wreckage moved with him. He rowed among the shattered timbers, searching for the ship’s crew by the light of her own destruction.
There was a head, a shoulder, their rounded shape distinctive in the slowly ebbing flames. He leaned over and grabbed at the soaked material of the man’s jacket, pulling him until his head left the water. It lolled back as he tried to haul the man closer, and he saw the splinter of iron-hard wood that had been driven through the man’s neck. No hope for him.
Tomas let him slip back into the ocean, the burial chamber for so many sailors. He would be in good company wherever he fared to now.
Almost absently, while he continued to pick his way through the wreckage, a part of Tomas was aware of the weather. He felt the wind slacken as though his whole world had sighed in relief. But then the rain came down in earnest—a drenching so thorough he had to turn his face into the shelter of his elbow in order to breathe air rather than water.
With a great hissing and the scents of burned tar and saltpetre, all the various fires began to go out. He didn’t see the plank that rammed into his stern, only felt the jolly-boat leap and groan under the impact. He almost let go of an oar, flung sharply against the pillar of the tiller, its rod jabbing him in the armpit. Freezing, on high alert, he hushed and listened for the sound of planks separating, of the jolly-boat pulling herself apart.
It didn’t come, but as he waited, the water rose an inch in the bilges, slipping above his shoes, creeping up his ankles. She was sprung somewhere.
He brought the oars back on board and secured them. Then, going to his hands and knees in the rapidly deepening bilgewater, he felt over the hull for the breach. If it was bad, there was still time to lash oars and mast together and cling to them as a makeshift raft, but . . .
Ah! An incoming current pushed against his sweeping left hand. Examining it with his fingers in the dark told him the snow’s debris had staved in one of the jolly-boat’s planks. It was bent inward, letting water through the gaps at either side. Like a surgeon setting a bone, he nudged the plank back into shape, and pushed strips of his conveniently removed shirt into the gaps between the deformed strake and its neighbours.
As he worked, the rate at which the jolly-boat filled began to slow. When he had done the best job he could, he sat back on his heels and reached for the baling pail. The scoop and splash of dumping the water out of his little vessel was soothing to the nerves and kept him warm, but when he had her almost dry and felt around the edges of the patch, he found that the sea was coming in still. It was welling through the cracks, seeping through the tightly woven fabric faster by the moment.
He sighed and rubbed a freezing hand across his hot forehead. Another blow like that and she might crack in half. Another body’s weight in here and she might sink. It was questionable enough whether he would make it all the way to the shore himself or whether he might have to swim. There was nothing more he could do.
By now, he and the wreckage had all been swept within view of the lighthouse. Praying that the comforting pulse was not also a lure to disaster, Tomas raised his sail again and steered south southeast of it, to where he believed he would find the mouth of the bay.
The wind behind him clamoured with imagined voices, cursing him for leaving them, screaming, pleading, and although this was an artefact of his own imagination, it still wasn’t far from the truth. He was leaving them to drown. He was turning his back. His cheeks were so cold that the warmth of his tears burned like acid as they fell.
Or perhaps that was an outward sign of his inner fury.
Wreckers!
Tomas was a smuggler himself. For the reasons he had tried to impress on Peregrine Dean, he was not uneasy in that respect. He saw it as no worse a way of gleaning a living from the sea than fishing. Nor did he condemn the practice of making off with shipwrecked goods that had been brought to one’s shores by the hand of God himself. The sea brought its goodness to Cornwall’s beaches, and it was her people’s right to harvest that.
In the process, they should—and usually did—help those voyagers who were washed ashore with the produce. Many a shipwrecked sailor had found himself being nursed back to health by a Porthkennack fisher family, sometimes to be returned to their people, sometimes to fall in love and stay forever.
That was how it should be—established in time immemorial. A blend of cupidity towards the goods and mercy towards the unfortunate people of which surely even God approved.
It sickened him. And it filled him with the fear that he was losing his grip. For ten years he’d thought he knew the character of the people of Porthkennack, and that it was good. Yes, there had been occasional run-ins with ambitious men like Hedrek Negus—one interesting occasion where Negus had suspended Tomas from a yardarm by his feet to try to wring a concession out of him. Those things were in the manner of business, and no real harm had been done. And yes, there were desperate hungry men like Old Jack Baily, who sometimes allowed themselves to be led too far. But Tomas had not imagined anyone in his town would dream of wrecking a living ship and thereby murdering its crew.
Slavery and wrecking.
The storm continued to fade, and he heard the crash of breakers against the land. Hard to be sure in the pitch darkness, but it sounded like the approach to Mackerel Cove. The strong winds had turned fitful, gusting and veering, so he lowered sail again and rowed around a headland he could not see, counting the strokes of the oars and measuring off the distance travelled on a mental chart of where he believed he was.
His back was cramping and his arms and thighs were sore when he passed the final bulk of rock and saw the house lights around the harbour, barely stronger at this distance than a string of stars, but so very welcome.
Slavery and wrecking. And both had begun with the arrival of this new crew in the town of whom no one could tell him anything. All his normal sources of information would say was that the newcomers were strangers. That a man rarely saw the same one twice, and they seemed to not even know each other, as though each was taken on for a single job and then let go before he could become recognizable. And uniformly Tomas had been told that the new crew did not talk to the locals, and the locals dared not press.
Frustrated, Tomas grounded his jolly-boat on the beach, coupling her to the nearest buoy. Stepping out proved that he’d overdone it—liquefied his bones with overwork. He staggered up the cliff stairway, infiltrated his house through the back door. The place was quiet, though a mummy-wrapped lump on the chaise, visible by the light of their porch lantern filtering through the window, must be Iskander asleep. His mother would be in her room, perhaps listening out for him.
He made sure to step on the squeaky floorboard as he passed, to open and shut his door with an audible click. Then he stripped off his wet clothes before the ashes of his fire, dried with a linen towel, and forced himself into a nightshirt before falling into bed.
He had imagined he might have nightmares of drowning, but it was not the wreck that came to his mind as he drowsed, it was the shove of Peregrine Dean’s big hands in the centre of his chest. Increasingly as he contemplated it, it knocked the wind out of him. Perhaps he wasn’t a good man—perhaps he was mistaken in his self-belief—but he would do a lot to gain Dean’s trust, to make it so that next time the man drew him in and did not reject him.
The man is an idealist. Tomas turned on his side and pulled his pillow toward him so he could hug it. And he is known to be honest—insensitive, quick to anger, but incorruptible. A man of honour, and one with no smuggling business to enlarge, no particular iron in this fire. With such a man working with him, Tomas would not need to fear betrayal or double-crossing.
As he slipped toward sleep, his thoughts softened, growing golden, returning not to the rejection but to the kiss before it, the flare of heat and brightness and victory. Drowning voices clamoured at the back of his mind, but he shoved them down, promising them revenge.
Wreckers changed the game. He would go to Dean with the news tomorrow, make him . . . an accomplice? No, a partner in the business of stamping them out. If they freed Barnabas together and brought the wreckers to justice, that would forge a bond between them. And if Tomas were to kiss him again then, in the rush of victory, surely he would respond, he would yield. They both wanted it after all, and to that noose, Tomas was positive Dean would not betray him—equal in desire and in guilt.
And in joy too, if Tomas had his way. He would give the man joy, if he was allowed.
The next day was one of mizzle—grey clouds above a grey sullen sea, and the air filled with a thin mist that did not so much veil the world as drench it. A solid pot of porridge had been left to keep warm on the fire, and Tomas cut himself a piece and ate it from his hand, ducking into the front room to make sure all was still well.
His mother and Iskander seemed to have decided to retrim all her hats. They had shoved the seats to the edges of the room and were sitting cross-legged on cushions, ribbons and silk flowers and hat pins scattered all over the floor around them.
Zuliy seemed tired but calm. She smiled at his inquiring look. “Iskander did my Sunday bonnet yesterday while you were out, and it’s so much more stylish, I thought we could do them all.”
“It does not distress you, Mother?” Tomas asked. She was brave and good, but she might not want this continual reminder of a life when she had not been free. “And how is he?”
Iskander’s shoulders and back had stiffened at the sound of Tomas’s voice, but after a moment, he raised his head and met Tomas’s gaze with an expression of somewhat forced confidence. Already, dressed in clothes Tomas had outgrown in his teens and having had a good night’s sleep and a meal, he appeared stronger, cleaner. His ringlets had been teased out and re-dressed with—if the smell was an indication—the linseed oil Tomas kept in the woodshed for finishing treen.
“How are you?” Tomas asked Iskander, keen to support the boy’s efforts to re-engage with the outer world but not quite sure what to say.
Zuliy repeated the question in Turkish, and translated the answer. “He says he’s very well, and he heaps a thousand blessings on us.” She rolled her eyes. “But I think you make him nervous. Would you mind spending another day outside?”
“He will have to decide what to do with himself eventually,” Tomas muttered. Watching the protectiveness with which his mother treated the boy gave him an uncomfortable mixture of pride and jealousy. “Try not to get too attached—you know what the town will say if we keep him.”
“If he decides to stay with us,” Zuliy corrected, skewering a bow onto a flat straw hat with a hatpin almost as long as her arm, “Then they will say that he’s your brother, because that’s what I’ll tell them to say.”
The absurdity of it—of her baring her teeth at him like a mother cat protecting her kittens—made him laugh. “If I’d known you were so apt to adopt lost things, I would have bought you a puppy.”
She threw a pink paper rose at him, and he ducked away with a smile. “Don’t be rude.”
Iskander had dropped his eyes again and was teasing ribbons of five different shades of red into an intricate chrysanthemum that would perfectly complement the shade of Zuliy’s hair.
“Well.” Tomas sighed. “Don’t overinfluence him. I don’t want you breaking your heart if he decides to return to his home.”
“It is my heart to break,” she said.
Recognising a lost cause, he returned to the kitchen, where he made himself a pot of the good tea, gnawed his porridge, and considered his next move. The snow’s wreckage would even now be washing up on shore. He was not needed to supervise the retrieval of goods from the sea, or advise on their hiding places, but he liked to be present anyway so that none of his contacts forgot who was in charge.
He still had no fresh information on where Barnabas might be being held—the thought of which was another guilt, because the longer his ignorance lasted, the more chance there was of the man being moved out of Tomas’s reach, beyond his help. But he could not attack a problem without any idea of where to start.
He contemplated asking the Swift’s crew to help him to brea
k into Sir Lazarus’s boathouse to search for the man, but no matter how he hated his cousins, he couldn’t honestly see Lazarus being involved in something that might be proved to be overtly illegal. Damaris would have his hide—the old lady was one of those iron matrons, who ruled her family with a tight rein, and though there was little human warmth in her, she would not abide the possibility of disgrace inherent in doing anything against the law.
No, there was nothing to be done there until he knew more.
In which case, he would do as he had decided to do last night. He would approach Peregrine Dean and hope . . . His mental voice ran on with hope to forge some connection, but a giddy thing in his chest told him not to be so pragmatic, not to lie to himself—he was hoping not just for an ally but for a lover, and it had been so long. So long since he and Hector Jones had been apprentices together on the river wherries Hector’s father had run, sharing a bunk because there was so little space in the cabin, lapped in a darkness so absolute they had no fear of discovery and scarcely any sense that the sweetness they discovered between them might be the same thing as the degeneracy so loudly condemned in the papers.
Those two years had been among the best of his life, before the business went bankrupt, Hector had decided to become a tar, and Tomas had returned home feeling very much a man and ready to make Porthkennack bend to his will as willingly as Hector had.
He caught himself humming “Love Will Find Out the Way” as he made his way down to the beach. What were the words?
“You may train the eagle
To stoop to your fist.
Or you may inveigle
The Phoenix of the East.
The lioness, you may move her
To give o’er her prey;
But you’ll ne’er stop a lover;