Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  By the time he reached the Lizard, the wind was lashing water against his face like tiny arrows. A grey blur atop the promontory caught his eye—something white went whirling away like a great cartwheel. He stopped to frown up at the disturbance, and a moment’s peering through the rain resolved into the sight of Constance Quick clutching her straw hat to her head with one hand, and an easel and paint box with the other. The whirling thing must have been her canvas.

  She wore a stylish riding habit, the wide skirts of which were streaming in the wind as relentlessly as the flags on the customs house, catching on the bag of supplies by her feet and billowing out like sails. Surprising that she didn’t blow away. Perry snorted. It was foolish of her to try to paint a sunset on a day when the weather had been so set for misery that even he—a landsman—had been able to tell it was going to be filthy.

  Yet she’d grown up here. Why had she not been able to tell?

  As he watched, lightning ripped through the sky with a sound like tearing linen. His heart leaped and thundered. Hand on her hat, Constance was looking at him, her gaze as piercingly cold as it had been in the pink room. It pricked at him, like it was significant, but he set the feeling aside when the shocking blue-white light revealed a sliver of void behind a holly tree in the cliff barely a man’s height up from the path. A cave mouth! One that he had passed beneath a dozen times, not knowing it was there.

  Hands on the roots of the tree, he hauled and scrambled himself up. The long line of the cave mouth was bigger from close up, and he wiggled himself into it shoulder first, and found that barely a step inside it widened into a veritable passage.

  Putting his hood down, baring his chilly neck to the cave’s damp cold, he slid open the shutter on his lantern, took the chalk from his pocket, and marked the wall with a large E and an arrow pointing in the direction he would go. He was not going to lose his way again. Nor did he need to be taught a lesson twice.

  Feeling accomplished, he walked on into the hill. Where the path split, he chose always the larger passage, and marked each intersection as he passed. He had hoped to listen for any signs of activity, but several of these passages seemed to lead to the sea, and its angry roar, cut through again and again with the crack and boom of distant thunder and lightning, made even his own footsteps hard to hear.

  After almost half an hour of this, he began to doubt that there was anything here to discover after all. What if it was a natural cave, inhabited only by bats? What if he was chasing phantasms?

  A deep-green glint in the gloom shone out at ankle level. Perry hunkered down to see what it was. Only a glass buoy in a tangle of old net, but it meant someone had been down here. Something human used this place for good or ill.

  He went to straighten up, and a cold circle pressed against the back of his neck, sending a shock of anger and terror down his back like a snowball shoved down a warm coat.

  “Don’t move or I shoot.” A young man’s voice, hoarse as though he had breathed in smoke and burned his throat.

  Perry stilled, except for the roiling of the humiliation in his gut. In God’s name, not again!

  He eased himself onto one knee, turning his head just enough to discern the youth behind him. Long legs skinny in seaboots, the shape of his body swamped beneath a wide coat, and his face invisible behind a kerchief, the boy looked and sounded like a lightweight. A sudden spring to knock the gun away, a fist to the jaw, and Perry could turn these tables easily enough.

  He exhaled with nervous relief, gathered himself to leap, and the boy’s off hand came round with . . . Perry froze again in astonishment. It was a metal tube with a plunger—a syringe, such as might be used for giving an enema. When it was jabbed into the side of his throat, he was bemused by what was happening. Could you do that? Could you press a liquid into a person’s body through the skin?

  The answer seemed to be yes, though it hurt and bruised as it went in. But why?

  A little drunk and dizzy-calm, forgetting altogether that there was a gun pressed against his spine, he lifted a hand to try to bat the tube away. Hilariously, his hand didn’t seem to work as he expected, though it mattered not, because a most delicious drowsiness was weighing on his eyes. Suddenly all he really wanted to do was to lie down and rest. He toppled forward, his misbehaving hands encountering wet cave dirt.

  Something about that sensation tried to send a spike of panic through him, tried to wake him up, but it wasn’t strong enough.

  He closed his eyes. A little sleep could do him no harm.

  Infuriated with being turned away at Perry’s door—having to beg for an audience, no less—Tomas took a long route home across the moor to feel the wind on his face. It tugged fiercely at the loops of his hair bow and chilled his cheek. A cannon blast of a wind, south southeast, that would stretch the sailsmanship of his crew to their limits but, if it could be caught, would be like harnessing the gulls and flying.

  He felt the call of the Swift’s tiny deck. Yes, why not? If he went out in this, it would take him a week just to get back home. Time to think.

  He touched the marriage certificate, which he had taken to carrying in his inner pocket, pressing urgently against his heart. The mysterious reluctance, which had prevented him from finding it before, now seemed determined to stop him from using it. He was aware that the desire to sail away for a week or so was merely another attempt of his mind to delay his plans, sabotage his own revenge, but that did not make the desire to avoid the decision go away.

  Now that it was within his grasp, his vengeance felt uglier than it had when it had only been a matter of imagination. Quite aside from the fact that Perry might never talk to him again, a part of Tomas’s heart was telling him the money and status he would earn by it would sour many a friendship, would change his reputation from one of honesty to one of cruelty.

  How much did he care?

  Shaking his head to try to clear it, he took another deep breath of the racing wind. It tugged him as always. A trip to France might give him time to settle on a course of action. Outwitting the French coastguards, particularly if there was a fight—the boom of cannon and the greasy salty smell of lit powder—that would lift his spirits.

  Perhaps, after an absence, Perry would come to find him for a change. Perhaps, if he did, Tomas would cut him off, refuse to speak to him. Let him feel the proof that Tomas didn’t need him either.

  I was fine before he arrived in Porthkennack. I will be fine again without him.

  Yet Tomas’s thoughts still turned to Hector—to how whole he had felt those years they had spent together. When it had been the two of them against the world instead of Tomas alone? That had been a blessing no money could buy, and one for which he would give up a great deal.

  Still without a true decision made, he began the long task of rounding up his crew to put to sea.

  When he delivered himself to Anne Lusmoore’s cottage, Anne was out. So he sent her youngest brother to tell her to meet him at the Swift as soon as possible, and then, having a household of small children to hand and no desire to criss-cross the town himself, he gave them all farthings and sent one to each of the other members of his crew, telling them to assemble on board with provisions and money, and to come urgently, for it was a rescue.

  That done, he stood in the cottage’s rose be-wound porch for a moment, watching the harbour and the sky. As the sun set, a hazy golden light had gathered beneath the murky clouds, and against it, a large rowing boat pulling out into the open sea looked like a laborious beetle on a marigold. The humped backs of the rowers were black in silhouette before the falling sun, and the tarp between them was snugly tucked over a shape . . . the shape of an unconscious body.

  Tomas stiffened. Barnabas! And as he did, a three-masted brig sailed out from the cover of the headland—the storm light filling its sails with arcs of lemon. The rowing boat coupled onto its chains. But now, with the bulk of the brig between himself and the sun, he couldn’t see what was handed up the side.

  He didn
’t need to see. Somehow he just knew.

  Starting forward, he began to run toward the Swift. They could still do it. These merchant ships were always short-handed, and therefore slow. And damn him if he was going to let anyone else get away from him today.

  “Mr. Quick,” a boy called to him as he emerged onto the street. “I been looking for you for hours. Message from Mr. Dean.”

  Oh. Oh! The heaviness under which he had been labouring fell off as his spine unbroke, his stomach doing something extraordinary and almost nauseating in relief. He tried not to let it show. “Yes?”

  “He says he’s going up to the cliffs—to the spot you told him about. He wants you to join him there, but if you can’t, he’ll speak with you tomorrow noon at your house.”

  So turning him away at the door had been a temporary rejection! A spat even—an invitation to do more next time? Tomas’s natural self-assuredness rolled back over him in a spring tide of joy and he grinned so hard his cheeks ached. His inclination was—of course—to rush to Perry’s side. Why would the man go after wreckers without taking a party? Did he still think he was invulnerable?

  But if Tomas walked up to the cliffs now, he would be abandoning Barnabas to his fate.

  The memory of that abject cell recurred to him, Perry as a captive—how strong he had seemed, and yet how he had shivered afterward, undermined. You love him, you should go to him, Tomas’s instincts told him, but he had spent a lifetime tempering his instincts with reason. If I love him, I will trust him to know how to do his job, because if I go to him now, Barnabas will be beyond saving when I return.

  “I’ll meet him tomorrow, then,” he said and flicked the boy a penny as he passed.

  “Mate, wake up! Wake up, I need you.”

  Perry’s head was full of a drowsiness so thick it clung like glue, but these words penetrated it, along with a pain in his wrist—very cold—that he really wanted to go away.

  He tried to roll over. The world swayed beneath him, rough and white, with a smell of tar and paint.

  Somewhere too close to his head, a scuffling noise made him think of rats—there had been rats in the dockyard flat where his family lived when he was an infant, and he sometimes dreamed of them running over his face in the night. If he lay still too long, they would gnaw him.

  Groaning, he forced his eyes open just as a bare heel slammed down within an inch of his nose. A thud and “unh” of impact above him; a shing and rattle as what sounded like a metal chain was snapped across a wooden surface; and full awareness came back to Perry in a volcanic eruption.

  The pain in his wrist was the pain of an iron shackle. Even now, a sailor was hammering a ring bolt at the end of it into a wooden floor. No—not a floor, because the world continued to rock. The lantern above him, which hung from a wooden ceiling held up by crooked knees of oak, creaked as it swung through a regular circle that swept shadows and lights over painted wooden walls that wept with steady trickles of water.

  This was the belly of a ship, and he was being chained to the deck.

  Outrage had him on his feet in seconds. He grabbed the chain with his other hand and pulled with all his might. The hammering process must have only just begun, because he could feel the bolt wobble and give. Another desperate wrench and it tore out. He grabbed it so he could use it as a whip and raised his head to meet the eyes of the man with the hammer—a scrawny creature, wrinkled and tanned as any sailor, with pale-grey eyes that in the lantern light seemed not to have an iris at all—a pinpoint of black on an all-white background. Creepy.

  Seeing Perry straighten up, free, this man raised both hands and backed away toward the hatch into the next deck. Glue still clung at Perry’s thoughts. There was something important he should—

  “Don’t let ’im get out,” said the voice which had woken him—a deep voice with an accent that reminded Perry of his mother’s. “Hop to it, cap’n, before ’e brings ’em all down on us.”

  Perry had no experience with a whip, but he had thrown enough hawsers to know what to do with a length of rope. He snapped the chain out in a slithering hissing arc. The sailor stepped back, but the final links snarled in his braces, turning him into its spiral, wrapping him like a constricting snake. Perry yanked and the man came stumbling into his space. The sailor’s mouth opened—he was going to yell, bring reinforcements—so Perry got one arm around his neck and clamped the other hand over his mouth and nose, pressing harder through the panicked flailing until the man’s body went limp against his own.

  Then he lowered it to the deck, shoved its own neckerchief in its mouth and tied its arms behind it with its own belt. Only then did he turn to see who had spoken behind him.

  It had not been above a month ago, but so much had changed in himself in that time that he felt jerked into ancient history by the sight of Barnabas Okesi, still in the white duck trousers and ochre pea jacket in which he’d been captured. Alive! Very much alive, in fact, with his own jailer dangling from his capable hands and a light in his eyes, turned loose in his own element.

  “I’ve been looking for you for so long,” Perry gasped out. His head was clearing by the second, but he had to say this. Barnabas deserved to know. “To rescue you, I mean.”

  Barnabas grinned and trussed up his own captive as impersonally as if he were bailing cargo. “Well, mate, I hope you got a plan from here on, because I’m winging it.”

  Distressingly, Perry’s first thought was of Tomas. Had he received the innkeeper’s message? Had he come in time to see Perry being carried off? Would he— Something spasmed in his gut like a sob and he had to grind his teeth to keep it in. Would Tomas even care anymore, after Perry had discarded him like a used washrag once they were done?

  The thought that Tomas might be sailing after this ship in his speedy cutter, ready to throw open every cage and deliver Perry to the light a second time was probably nothing more than wishful thinking. Unneeded too. Perry was not incapable—he would rescue himself.

  “They saw four men come down,” he said, working this out aloud. “They expect two to return.” He shuffled off his coat, untied his prisoner enough to strip the jacket and trousers from him. “At a distance, if we’re wearing their sailors’ clothes, they might think—”

  “Little coal-black ain’t we?”

  Perry jammed the sailor’s wide tricorn on his head, then retied him and dragged him to where a stack of barrels towered, lashed together against the roll of the sea. “Is there no flour?”

  Barnabas actually laughed. “I tell you what there will be—paint. White paint for the cabins. Hold on.” He helped Perry wedge their captives in among the barrels, then darted into the bows, returning with a container of white paint. They thinned it with the seawater trickling through the walls and daubed their hands and faces.

  Barnabas’s face was disconcerting, his coverage uneven and the effect more of a walking corpse than of a healthy white man. “It’ll only pass at a distance,” Perry concluded. “But it might give us time enough to get to a boat.”

  They had taken Perry’s pistols and his sword, and then had made a cursory search of his pockets, taking all the balls of powder they could find, but one pocket had a hole in it, and when he felt around inside, he discovered several balls of gunpowder had slipped into the inner lining. He tried to press this on Barnabas, because he had sworn to protect the man and it was the only weapon he had to give, but Barnabas shook his head. “I’ve no gun to put it in, and if I’m hauling out a boat—they’re going to see that, you know. Craning a boat over the gunwale is hard to hide. We should just throw ourselves over. Swim for it.”

  Though chained for a second time, Perry still believed he could turn this situation around on his own. He could change the very world by his own efforts, and it was his duty to do so. He squeezed the gunpowder tight in his hand, consumed with the desire to blow something up. But Barnabas had a point and every right to look after himself. “You go if you can.” Perry nodded. “But I want the logbook first. I want evidence
to get these people arrested, so they can’t do this again. Make as much noise as you can when you go over—draw them away from the cabin for me, and I will come after when I have it.”

  “You think anyone’s ever going to listen to the likes of us?” Barnabas’s scepticism suited him. Even drippingly pallid as he was, he seemed the best kind of British tar—active, intelligent, resourceful.

  They should. But Perry said, “No. No, I don’t. That’s why I want irrefutable documentary evidence.”

  He heard what he had said with a clench around the lungs that felt like despair—so he had already accepted, had he, that the Quicks would never listen to him, that they saw him as Lord Petersfield’s exotic pet as Elijah was Damaris’s. Very well then, Perry would stop pulling his punches on their behalf.

  “Heh.” Barnabas shrugged and held out his hand. “Give me the gunpowder after all. I know what to do.”

  Climbing the companionways, Barnabas behind him, Perry hinged open the hatch as silently as he could and emerged into the shadowy warmth of the lower deck. This, too, was lit only by a pair of lanterns, barely bright enough to delineate the hammocks swinging like huge peasecods fore and aft. A black metal galley by the main mast still gave out a pleasant heat as the hands of the sea rocked the sleepers side to side. Fate was on Perry’s side, it seemed—it was dark outside, giving them much less chance of being spotted at once.

  Up again then, and out onto the sparsely populated deck of a merchant ship. A figure at the wheel was illuminated by the binnacle lamps, and a black shape, lumpen against the sky, was a lookout on the top yard of the main mast. Voices and smoke drifted from the sail crew, who had settled themselves onto their coiled ropes and were talking with the slow, lazy cadence of folk unmoored from past and future, swept along by a steady breeze through the warmth of a summer night.

  Perry and Barnabas leaned on the rail on the other side of the capstan from the crew. “The captain will be in his cabin asleep.” Barnabas nodded in its direction, where a faint yellow light shone through the slats of its door. “I’ll draw him out. You dash in. Then you’re on your own.”