Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  His arms were aching when he finally pulled himself over a grassy lip into a hollow on the seaward side of the rock. Above it, the stairs continued up, but here a misplaced willow had rooted itself, and its trailing tendrils and fluttering leaves closed behind him like a curtain as he crawled gratefully within. On the other side of the tree, a two-foot sliver of grass curved up into the cup of the hollow, and there sat Tomas with his back to the rock, examining his greened stockings with an expression of regret. He had put down his satchel and there were pies and a stoppered leather flagon beside him.

  Affection joined the burning lust in Perry’s veins and made it holy. This was a trap, but he walked right on in anyway. Putting a knee down between Tomas’s spread legs, he leaned in and kissed the man hard, like they had both been wanting for weeks.

  “Oh!” Tomas gasped, and then his hands were in Perry’s hair, tilting his head so he could fasten his teeth in the soft skin of his throat, sucking and biting down in little shocks of pleasure-pain that made Perry fumble at his own breeches, desperate.

  Buttons—so many buttons to undo with shaking fingers, and each one was a transgression and a thrill. Perry was pulled down to blanket Tomas’s slender body and to rub that fine blue suit into the dirt. When he got both flies undone, both overlong shirts untucked, and wrapped his hand around Tomas’s prick along with his own, it was with the sense that he had finally arrived at the centre of creation, the still point around which everything revolved. Then Tomas made a sound that was half laugh, half sob, and they went scrabbling for joy as though the earth itself rocked.

  Afterward, Perry lowered himself to Tomas’s side and tugged him close to his chest in an embrace perhaps more protective than Tomas’s sharpness deserved. They lay for a long while catching their breath and drowsing.

  “What is it between you and the Quicks?” Perry asked, idly, intending only to fill the time until they could go again. No one could see them here. They could fuck as much as they wanted. Though fuck was too harsh a word, perhaps, for a thing that made blowsy roses of contentment blossom in his chest. “Why do they want you gone so badly?”

  “The admiral is my grandfather.” Tomas sat up to take a pull on the flask and offered it to Perry after, still wet from his mouth. Grog, warming and sweet.

  “My father was the admiral’s first child. From a marriage he contracted as a young lieutenant. My grandmother was a barmaid. She always maintained that they were married properly, in church, but evidently in time he grew to think their connection was not advantageous to him, and he married Damaris Fairbairn for her money, claiming that my grandmother had only been his mistress all along.”

  Perry worried at this knowledge for a moment, and then it opened to him in its horrible entirety. “Good God!”

  Tomas’s wolfish smile bit the jugular out of Perry’s good mood. “You understand? Somewhere in my father’s papers—which are extensive, for he ran a legal practice for several years—is my grandparents’ marriage certificate. Once I have unearthed it, I can prove that Damaris’s marriage was never valid. That Lazarus is a bastard, and that the Quick estate should have come to my father and thence to me. My father was content with his life, and would not give me the document when I asked. But now that he’s dead—God rest his soul—it wants but time for me to find it. When I do, I can ruin their reputation. I can kick them out of their house, which should have been mine, and I can end their stifling grip on this town for good.”

  “And replace it with your own?” Perry asked, all the flowers inside him curling up and dying at the thought. This grudge was bigger than he had supposed. No wonder the Quicks were vehement and even scared. No wonder Constance had looked at Perry with such condemnation at their last meeting. He had allowed himself to be seduced by the man who wanted to ruin her.

  “I will be a more benevolent dictator than he ever was.” Tomas laughed, and abruptly Perry was so cold that he had to scramble back into his clothes, holding himself tight against a storm of new doubts. For that kind of prize, a man would do anything, play anyone as a pawn. What if Perry himself had been—

  “Perry? What’s wrong?”

  “To think I believed you were a good man. Indeed, I almost believed it. And this is your plan? A grab for power and money with no compassion at all for your own family? Am I part of that? Is this”—he gestured around himself, while reordering his clothes with the other hand—“merely a way in which you can steal me from them too? I will go back now. Take me back to the mainland at once.”

  The perplexity and hurt that had been on Tomas’s face when he began this speech had turned into a frozen and steely affront by the time he had finished. Even in Perry’s first flood of horror and betrayal, he would have welcomed an explanation, or better still, to be soothed and spoken to persuasively until he could put his suspicions down. But Tomas offered neither of those things, and Perry was not yet willing to ask.

  “This is what you choose to believe of me, is it?” Tomas rose and began to dress himself in jerky, aggressive movements. “Fuck you, then.”

  They sailed home seething, without saying a word.

  Cut to the bone by Perry’s sudden turn, Tomas’s fury drove him to his door like a lash across his shoulders. But when he shut the heavy wood behind him, his defiance ebbed enough to show him despair beneath it. He staggered to a chair in the hall with a sense that something had broken in his back and he could no longer stand. His legs weighed a ton each, his shoulders supported the pillars of the sky. He hardly knew what to make of this feeling, never having had it before, and might have gone to his mother with it, but that she seemed to have gone out and taken Iskander with her.

  Tomas repeated Perry’s words in his head, trying to rekindle his anger. Anger was what he was familiar with—the kind that put a spring in his step and stirred him to further efforts—not this. He should not be flattened by Perry’s distrust, as though the man had pulled the whole earth out from beneath him and left him in the abyss.

  This was not supposed to have happened—whatever this was, this sucking despondency. This was not the plan. Perry was to have become infatuated with him. Perry was to have found his own heart incapable of enduring a life in which Tomas did not hold pride of place. Tomas was to have enjoyed his admiration and used his new malleability to thwart the bloody Quicks’ attempts to ruin Tomas’s life.

  Yes, I wanted to steal you from them. Why not? I know how to value you better. We could have been kings of this town together, safe, wealthy, respected by all.

  Heartbreak veered back into fury like a treacherous wind. But I didn’t steal you. I treated with you honestly, and see now what that gets me! Fine. Sod your caveats and your scruples. I’m going to do this, and I’m going to do it this instant. I don’t need your approval!

  He threw himself to his feet and stormed upstairs, to go through his father’s papers. Peder had been a highly sought-after lawyer in his later years, and one of the upstairs bedrooms had been repurposed as a study. Tomas had helped his father make the shelves and cabinets that lined the room, and even with the prospect of finding the marriage certificate, he had not yet been able to make himself deface his father’s room with the thoroughness necessary for the job.

  Now, however, he needed somewhere to vent his spleen or it would burst, and it didn’t worsen his misery significantly to pull out and riffle through all the folders of briefs and evidence, all the letters in his father’s handwriting, the very shape of which—a year ago—would have made him want to weep.

  He made a fire in the grate, and went through every folder, burning what was no longer relevant, assembling a smaller pile of paperwork to be wrapped in oiled paper and stored in the attic. When a bookshelf was cleared, he comforted himself by smashing it into pieces with a hammer, relishing in the splintering blows as though he could pulverise this sense of loss, anger, and need into pieces so small they could be safely ignored.

  How dare he? I don’t mind being thought a smuggler and a criminal, for that is what
I am, but for him to think me false? Why would I trifle with him when the rumour of it could lose me all my support in this town? I put myself into his hands, and he—

  What was so special about Perry anyway? Other than the darkness of his eyes and the richness of his skin? Other than his stupid impulsiveness and an honour that Tomas admired. Perhaps it was that one knew where one stood with Perry. Even when he tried insincerity, the truth of his passions was clear as a window. Honest and trustworthy . . .

  And apparently thinks himself better than me.

  That thought had Tomas turning to the bureau. He tipped out the drawers, the tray of quills, scattering the sad glass bottles of dried ink and clumped sand. He pulled out every paper rolled up and forced into the pigeonholes and scanned them with a hasty eye before flinging them onto the flames in disgust. Never what he wanted! Nothing ever was.

  There was nothing special about the bureau—a thrice hand-me-down bought from a junk dealer. Even if there had been, Tomas might not have stopped, the bar in his hand alive and his fury moving through him like a lightning strike. The pain in his hands and shoulders was like brandy—made him cough and flame up alike, wild and all the more satisfied for the knowledge that it would hurt later.

  He smashed in his father’s desk as though it was a ghost of grief, and as the writing slope separated from the drawers beneath, a shallow, secret cubby was revealed.

  Tomas’s seething emotions lurched as though he had run into a sandbank—a sensation of hitting unexpected resistance, a sudden halt that threatened to break his back, and then settling into a new and wary shape. There was a document folded into the compartment, and he feared it with an unexpected fear.

  He sidled up to the paper with his hand outstretched as though it might bite. Was it . . .? Was it really . . .?

  Tomas drew it out, unfolded it. The heavy black letters were solid and harsh before his eyes, but it still took him three attempts to read them. Certified copy of an entry of marriage— and yes. There they were. Lieutenant Thomas Justinian Quick to Mary Chantrey of this parish.

  Sitting down hard on the remnants of the desk, he struggled not to clench his fists and wrinkle this miraculous survivor. God, it was true! Not that he had disbelieved his father’s words, but having the proof at his fingertips was different.

  Very different. He would have expected to feel a purer joy, a greater vindication, but his bleak mood combined with this victory to turn it into a burden. I could destroy them now. Utterly. But Perry would never forgive it.

  Why should I care what he forgives?

  But he did. And he could not—God forgive him—go forward from this discovery without sounding Perry out first, without making sure with absolute certainty that he might be losing more than he gained by it.

  He would talk to Perry first. When his nerves had had time to calm, and his thoughts to settle. Tomorrow, maybe. They would talk, and then he would see.

  The following day, as if reflecting Perry’s mood, the weather took a turn for the worse. The wind picked up, but blew steadily shoreward, trapping even the nimble fishing boats in the harbour, while a rolling blanket of dirty-grey cloud closed over the sky and took away the special vibrancy of light and colour that gave Porthkennack’s cramped streets and nautical litter their unusual charm.

  Trapped beneath the cloud, the summer’s heat was sweaty, feverish. Or perhaps that was Perry’s undecided mind, which tossed and fretted as if it had an ague of its own.

  I am beginning to think I am too soft for this work, he wrote to his mother. Their first exchange of letters had contained only pleasantries and the transmission of his address, but now he needed someone to talk to who was not embroiled in this whole affair. I had every intention of doing whatever needed to be done to establish myself as a great man in this town. A man of justice and probity, certainly, but also of power.

  He dipped his quill in his inkwell. After he had spared Mary Castille, the gossip network of the town must have been hard at work, for two days later, his landlord had casually mentioned he had a larger, windowed room, available for the same price as Perry’s old coffin-like cabin. There was still barely room to straighten his legs or elbows, but a tiny writing desk and chest could be squeezed in, and in the daytime there was all the light he could wish.

  But I found myself moved by the plight of the poorest people in my new community, and the example of France teaches us the wisdom of mercy, of equity, lest those who are left with no other recourse rise up and destroy their oppressors.

  He pressed the heels of his hands into his eyes, and massage his aching jaw with his thumbs. Which of these two categories did Tomas fall into? If it was true that his birthright had been taken from him, didn’t he have every reason to want it back? If he found his paperwork and used it to utterly humiliate and ruin his cousins, was that not exactly what they deserved?

  Yet are not the great also human, also to be pitied? he wrote, feeling odd about the concept. But Damaris would not have known when she wed the admiral that her marriage was invalid. Her children and her grandchildren were not to blame for their progenitor’s faults. They were proud people, and the shame would destroy them. Who would wed Constance if it was known she was the daughter of a bastard? No wonder she was not sleeping—this threat could undo her whole life.

  The words Why can we not simply help one another? formed on the end of his pen, but he heard how childish and despairing they sounded and did not write them down.

  There had been something in Tomas’s demeanour from the start that proclaimed him harsh, sharp, even ruthless, and Perry could not deny that he had found it attractive, reined in as it was by Tomas’s Wesleyan faith. It had been exciting to think of the man as someone who could, by nature, be a monster, but who was choosing not to be.

  If he did go through with this plan, though? Ruined a family, when he himself had everything a man might need already? It would not be illegal, certainly, but it would be cruel beyond what Perry was willing to accept. It would give the lie to what Perry had begun to find was his sustaining belief that Tomas was, underneath it all, a good man.

  And if Tomas put himself in charge of all the Quick’s businesses, made himself the magistrate, stepped into every possession and duty he had stripped from Lazarus, and used them to further his smuggling career, like a pirate lord of old?

  Perry moved the pressure from his jaw to the bridge of his nose, where a headache was building that almost matched the aching throb in his chest—the one that might be a heart attack, or might just be grief. If that was Tomas’s plan, then Perry would be forced once again to become the man’s enemy. Sometime over the last month, imperceptibly, his pursuit of Tomas as a villain had become a courtship. They had become allies, then lovers. But all that would have to end if Tomas came into the Quicks’ power.

  If he did, would he not give you everything you wanted? Position, money, respectability, power to change the world for the better?

  Tomas might—he might give all that to Perry as a great man gifts his mistress with jewels and estates. And Perry’s pride utterly revolted at achieving his ends by such a method. He would shape his fate by his own hands, or not at all.

  A knock on his door interrupted a train of thoughts he had already grubbied with repetition. He capped the inkwell and covered the letter with a sheet of blotting paper and a smooth stone he had picked up in the harbour to serve as a paperweight, and opened the door to the landlord.

  “Message for you, sir.” The landlord handed him a scrap of newspaper with the words Talk to me scrawled on it in pencil. “Mr. Tomas brought it himself. I told him you weren’t having visitors, and he give me this and walked off, but—”

  The landlord narrowed his eyes. Perry felt his newfound status tremble beneath him. Perhaps this was the point at which he would be moved back into his old room or thrown out altogether.

  “You and ’im have a falling out, sir?”

  “We never had a falling in,” Perry lied without thinking, only to have his con
science and his heart rebuke him in such a deep inward welling of darkness that it took him a long moment to realize that the sky, too, had dimmed, and the distant kettledrum roar was the sound of approaching thunder.

  The flags on the customs warehouse were visible from here, streaming out south southwest so strongly they looked as though someone had taken a flatiron to them, starched them rigid. A well-handled ship might just slip from Constantine Bay and run unscathed past Land’s End, but any vessel coming from Wales or Ireland, or even the great port of Liverpool, would have to pass Bloody Mary first. The night was drawing in and a storm stood out to sea. Wrecking weather at last.

  Abruptly he wished he could talk to Tomas, could allow Tomas to persuade away his dilemma and his scruples. Could at least give the man the chance to explain himself that he probably deserved.

  “But if he comes again later this evening, you may tell him that I am going up to the cliffs—to the spot he pointed out. If he will not join me there, then I will speak with him tomorrow noon at his house.”

  Once the landlord had gone, Perry threw on a sea cloak with a deep hood against the inevitable rain. He buckled on his sword and thrust a brace of pistols into his waistband, powder and shot and chalk in his pockets, and then he ran down the back stairs of the inn and stepped out into an evening of cold drizzle.

  Already the light was fading. Remembering his partner’s offer of backup, he called on Jowan, but the man had gone over to Boscastle to visit his eldest daughter, and Perry did not trust any of the other customs men enough to consider them.

  This is fortunate, he told himself, a fortunate opportunity for you to face your lingering fears and overcome them. But it didn’t feel anything of the sort as he strode out for the cliffs with his cloak flaring behind him, and a dark lantern lit but shuttered in his hand.