Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  “All right.” Perry held out a hand, and they shook solemnly. “Good luck.”

  Cautiously, yet trying to act as though he had every right to stroll the decks at night, Perry slid up the quarterdeck ladder and approached the cabin. How long he had been held unconscious he didn’t know, but the storm had passed and the clouds were breaking overhead, enough to allow a silver-blue wash of moonlight through. He flattened himself into the nearest shadow and watched as Barnabas rolled, easy and confident as you pleased, up to the bow signal gun. There he bent and began to cast off the ropes that tied it to the ship’s side.

  When he hauled it back, the rumble of its wooden wheels against the deck planks made the gossiping crewmen fall silent. Nothing further seemed to happen for a long time, Barnabas hugging the cannon’s muzzle, taking out the tompion and shoving the powder down.

  The crew had just relaxed and begun to chat once more when the cannon roared to life, springing back on its chains with a boom and twang as though a giant had released his crossbow. The very ship shuddered under Perry, and a tongue of flame three yards long spat out from the bow like the display of an annoyed dragon.

  “What!” someone cried in the cabin. “What the hell!”

  Already the ship’s sailors were on their feet, running toward the gun. The cabin door flung open, and the captain ran out in his nightgown and cap. “Who is responsible for this?”

  Perry slipped into the cabin as soon as the captain’s back was turned, but the answer was still audible, even as he shuffled through the papers on the desk for the cargo manifest. “Don’t know, sir. It gone off by itself. There weren’t no one here. There ain’t no one here now.”

  Barnabas must have jumped the moment he lit the fuse, letting the roar of the gun cover up the splash as he entered the water. Clever.

  But now it was Perry’s turn. He caught a glimpse of the words two male slaves, on a piece of parchment tucked into a logbook, snatched it out, and looked around the cabin for something to fold it into, to waterproof it for the time he spent swimming . . .

  They’d be coming back now, if only so the captain could dress before he ordered an examination of the ship. Quickly! Quickly—he needed to be quick.

  There, in an open footlocker, the tight-woven waxed linen sack of the post was visible. Perry snatched it, emptied out letters and parcels with shaking hands. Come on. Come on.

  He wrapped his purloined list into this covering and shoved it into his shirt, where it lay invisibly beneath his waistcoat, tight to his skin.

  Movement outside. He ran to the cabin windows, intending to climb out, fling himself from the stern, where the splash would be hidden in the turbulence of the wake.

  But the windows would not open. He ran his hands around them, looking for catches, only to cut his finger open on the head of a nail. They had been nailed into their frames—nailed shut, as effective as prison bars. Shit.

  A voice outside was answered by another. The door rattled and began to open. Perry ran for the curtain around the hole in the deck that was the captain’s personal head, but he had barely got a hand on it when the captain burst back inside, two sailors with marlin spikes behind him, and behind them, a man cradling a rifle to his chest with the kind of easy confidence that boasted he could split a hair at night while drunk, and would be delighted for the opportunity to show it.

  Shit, Perry took hold once more of the length of chain he had tucked into his pocket. He should have taken Barnabas’s advice, should have been long gone, but damn him, damn all of them, he was not going back into the hold without a fight. They would have to kill him first.

  All Tomas’s crew bar Temperance Smith were already at the Swift when Tomas jogged up, and Smith arrived bare minutes later, when they were heaving the cutter out into deeper water. Tomas leaped aboard as soon as he might, and yelled at his sail crew to work faster as the sheets tumbled slowly down. Trusting him to know when an action was truly urgent, they put their backs into hauling the ropes, and within another five minutes, the Swift was gulling up the bay toward the open sea.

  But already the light had slipped from citrine to smoky. The trim brig with all her sails set was no longer in sight, even through a spyglass, and if Tomas did not guess her course correctly, she might slip away from him in the night and in the morning be miles away, beyond his reach.

  What route would they take? Where were they going? To America, to deliver Barnabas to the Quicks’ plantation? To Africa to take on more captives so they might deliver a hold full? Or to the Scilly Isles, where illegal cargoes of every sort were traded with impunity? He had no way to guess, and if he got it wrong . . .

  It was already dark. Now they would be looking only for stern lanterns and the light of the cabin. Tomas bit his cheek, trying to think.

  Take a single captive halfway across the world? Not worth it. They will be going somewhere as close as possible where they can trade him on.

  “Set a course for the Scilly Isles,” he said, running up the ratlines to the top of the main mast for a better look out. “And keep your eyes peeled for lights. If God is with us, we will free that poor man tonight.”

  “Aye, sir,” said Anne, bending over her charts. A moment later she called out a change of course, and he felt the clipper respond beneath him, the heel over of the masts, the tension of the rigging. But the last dregs of sunlight had slipped from the sky now, and the stars barely glimmered on the choppy waves. Darkness enclosed him from one horizon to the next.

  Some of his unaccustomed flatness returned. The taste of failure, that was what it must be. He hated it.

  “I can’t see anything,” Bob Ede called from the bows. “Maybe ’e’s doused ’is lights? Does he know we’re—”

  And a glorious plume of red-and-gold flame tore out of a distant cannon, visible in the pitch as the lightning had been visible in the storm. “There!” Tomas called, focusing his glass. Yes, now he could just pick out the dim illumination of a single lantern on the brig’s deck, and some kind of scuffle going on in front of the cabin. Could that be Barnabas himself, putting up a fight? Tomas’s hopes soared. “A gold sovereign for every man on the crew if you can get us there in under a minute,” he cried, and slid down to go pick up the ropes at the bow.

  The brig’s lookout must have been asleep, or distracted by the altercation on deck, for the Swift whispered up to her unseen. Tomas tied them to the anchor chain—for the rowing boat still trailed behind the main chains—and in whispered conference told Bob and Sully to stay on board, holding her ready to fly at his word.

  “This is a rescue not a vendetta,” he told the others. “I don’t deny they probably don’t deserve to live, but we deserve not to kill—”

  “All right, my lover,” said Temperance testily. “Not like you don’t tell us this every time. Let’s go.”

  Tomas huffed at the insubordination, but jammed down his hat, tightened his kerchief about his face as a mask, and nodded. “Let’s.”

  Silently, more like pirates than smugglers, his crew eased up the anchor chain and rolled over the gunwales onto the deck, the sound of their bare feet hitting it camouflaged by the din of a brawl.

  A shhhnk of metal. Someone screamed. Tomas shrugged the fish-priest down his sleeve into his hand and weighed its reassuring heaviness to calm his nerves. Fanning out, keeping to the shadows, he and his crew stalked up behind the fighters.

  Was that Barnabas in the centre? There was something familiar about the way he moved, but his face was a livid, melted white that made him look like a pond demon. He was fighting the crew of the ship with a length of chain wielded like a whip, the prodigious swings of it knocking his assailants off their feet, sweeping them into one another, continuously jostling the aim of the man with the rifle.

  It was magnificent, seeing him there alone against these dogs, but the longer it went on, the more chance for him to fail. Tomas made a cutting gesture to his crew, and they pounced out of the shadows together.

  The rifleman was Tomas’s,
and the angle at which his face was snugged up to his gun’s stock turned his temple perfectly into range. Tomas brought his bludgeon down with a crack. The man’s finger tightened.

  Tomas held his breath, but then the rifleman slackened, the gun fell from his nerveless fingers, and he thudded to the deck, followed by half a dozen sailors and a man in a nightgown.

  In the sudden silence, Barnabas Okesi let his chain-whip furl at his feet in a rattle of links. He straightened up, and the garish white paint of his mask resolved all at once into a face that Tomas knew.

  With a shock of retrospective terror, he appreciated how much more he would have suffered if he had known this beforehand. “Perry? What the hell?”

  Perry gave a startled gasp of a laugh and buried his face in his hands for a long moment. Tomas recognised the signs of a man reordering his mind, coming back to himself after the extremities of battle. And what a warrior he was! Tomas fancied himself with a knife, but he would never have been able to keep half a dozen men at bay all by himself with nothing more than a length of chain.

  “Sir.” Anne plucked at his sleeve, interrupting his swell of pride on Perry’s behalf. “We should get them into the cabin before anyone else comes up on deck and sees ’em lying.”

  He nodded, and they dragged the sailors into the captain’s cabin, tying their arms behind them and gagging them with strips torn from their shirts. Perry went at once to the captain’s nightstand, where a jug of water hung on a gimballed shelf. Hands shaking, he poured it into the basin and washed the strange tint off his face, though shades of it lingered in his hair, making him look older, distinguished.

  Tomas handed him one of the captain’s shirts to dry off with, and when their fingertips brushed as it passed between them, a flash of galvanic energy leapt at the point. This time when Tomas smiled, Perry returned it, his gaze heating by degrees into a warmth Tomas could not afford his crew to see.

  “Did you find Barnabas?” Perry asked, dropping his gaze as soon as Tomas frowned.

  “Find him? He’s not aboard?”

  Perry shook his head and began opening drawers in the cabin’s great table. Pulling out an eating knife, he tried to lever open the shackle on his wrist. “He jumped, less than quarter of an hour ago. I fear for him trying to swim to shore in the night, on this coast.”

  Something with the same root as indignation rose up in Tomas then, filling him with a fire that was similar to his own rage. He went to kick the unconscious form of the rifleman, and Perry grasped him and stopped him.

  “Bastard deserves a kicking,” Tomas protested. “If he drove a good man to jump to his death. If he put that ugly thing—” he nodded at the shackle “—on you. If more of these devils got what they deserved, then maybe they’d think twice.”

  “Or maybe they’d hang you too!” Perry shouted it in his face, as always as thankful for a rescue as Tomas would have been himself—in other words, not at all. He didn’t blame the man for that. No one wanted to feel indebted, obliged. “This is an act of piracy you’re committing here. Or have you forgotten that?”

  The accusation startled Tomas into a laugh, wrong-footing his righteous wrath. “Then I suppose you’d better arrest me,” he said, grinning. This bickering felt like old and well-worn territory now, like flirtation.

  It brightened Perry’s face too. “I might be able to overlook it this once. There is a rowing boat attached to the anchor chain. Can you have one of your people take it out and begin to search for—”

  “Anne,” Tomas called—she would know the tides around here best, where a man might be swept, and she would need someone to row while she watched, “and Dennis, go now and look for our lost sailor. Temperance, Alan, you stay here as witnesses. Abdul to the wheel and the rest of you to the sails. Make sure we don’t founder while we’re talking this out.”

  A brief flurry of movement and the cabin emptied until there was almost elbow room, though it was still hard to step on a foot of floor not occupied by unconscious sailors. Though he had asked for them, Tomas begrudged the two of his men who remained. He wanted to hug Perry, or at the very least inquire if hugging would ever be allowed again. But it wasn’t the time for working out his personal relationships so he stifled the impulse and only gazed at Perry with perhaps more pleasure than was strictly wise.

  “You’re the official,” he said. “Is there anything else we should do before we get you out of here?”

  “Did any of them see your faces? Can you be identified?” Perry asked, and Tomas pressed the scarlet cloth of his neckerchief into his cheeks, covering the delighted smile beneath it. Was this Perry thinking about how to protect him in court? Bless him! This was exactly the sort of cooperation he had been longing for.

  Well, his prick stirred in his breeches at the memory of Perry’s thighs beneath him, the strong hands around his waist, not the only kind of cooperation, but this was the foundation that would make the other possible. “Not at all. They didn’t see us coming and we knocked them out from behind. If we go now, that’s all they’ll know. They can’t go to court with that.”

  “Then we should go before they wake. Give me five minutes to search—”

  “I’ll search with you,” Tomas interrupted, already turning to the litter of documents on the table. “Temperance and Alan, we won’t be needing you after all. Get back to the boat and make her ready to sail at a moment’s notice.”

  He kept his head down over the logbooks as his men left, hearing the thin cabin door snick shut behind them. Then he glanced up and found Perry watching him, a thoughtful look in his eye.

  “I didn’t know if you’d come after me,” Perry said, his voice soft and intimate now he had no audience. “After I rejected you. I hoped, but . . .” He bowed his head briefly before meeting Tomas’s eye again, unapologetically. “I knew we had to rescue ourselves. I couldn’t count on anything.”

  Tomas would have liked to have claimed this as a rescue, as a proof of his high moral character, but neither of them liked to be manipulated, and he respected that in Perry. The scheme of holding any relationship between them over Perry’s head, forcing him to act to Tomas’s advantage, had been a passing one, and it was long over. He snorted. “In plain truth, Perry, I didn’t come after you. I got your note even as I was watching what I thought was Barnabas being smuggled off shore. I knew you could handle yourself, so I chose to go to him. If I’d known you were outmatched, I would have—”

  “You would have ridden down to the Lizard Stone, and we would both have been lost.”

  Perry’s smile was precious to Tomas; it spoke of forgiveness, a way back, but his eyes still retained a certain wariness that told Tomas not to push his luck.

  “The Lord was with me, then,” he said and awkwardly looked away, pushing the crew manifest away from the crabbed lists of a lading tally; it was a record of the cargo—where it had been bought from and at what price, where it was destined for, and at what price it should be sold.

  A moment of soft silence passed as Tomas turned the pages of this journal, looking for any entry that referred to the captives, and Perry sorted through the many letters lying loose over the books. The sea outside had settled into regular swells, lulling as the rocking of a cradle. The tied-up crew breathed around his ankles, reassuring him he had not yet become a murderer, and the sight of Perry’s profile, solemnly intent in the pursuit of justice, even though his person had been traded like so much cattle, made him wonder if perhaps he shouldn’t give up the smuggling life altogether, so they would never have occasion to quarrel again.

  Somehow when he opened his mouth to say this, what came out was “You know, I could set this ship on fire if you wanted. If you want them all to burn, just say the word.”

  Perry gave a quiet laugh, and whispered, as if it were an endearment, “You are so full of bullshit. I’ve no doubt you are as gentle a pirate as you are a smuggler.”

  “Indeed, for I am no smuggler.” Tomas laughed.

  Perry rolled his eyes. Fondly,
it seemed. “I mean . . . I thoroughly approve of this act of piracy. I am convinced that sometimes the world is so arranged that one must break the law to prevent an evil thing. And I would like to believe that this is the extent of your wrongdoing—that you are a good man whose goodness is not constrained by the courts, but is no less good for all that.”

  Tomas managed to catch Perry’s hand across the table, though groaning by his feet told him there was no time for long speeches. “I hope so indeed,” he said, and felt the darkness that had dogged him since Perry had fled from his embrace lift from his shoulders. If another man had quarrelled with him as Perry had, he would have demanded an apology, an explanation, but Perry needed to give him nothing. He regained Tomas’s affections just by standing in the same room.

  Perry pulled the record book out from under his hand, even as the captain began to chew his drool-soaked gag. They had drawn his nightcap down until it covered his eyes, but once he regained enough thought to scrape his face down the deck, he would certainly dislodge it and see them.

  “Come on.” Tomas tossed one of the captain’s knives onto the floor next to the man so he would be able to cut himself free as soon as they had left. Then he tugged at Perry’s wrist. “Time to go.”

  With a deep hiss of breath, Perry went rigid under his hand, and Tomas knew the man had found something. “What?”

  “Clement,” Perry gasped, and said nothing more for a long heartbeat while Tomas gawped at him and tried to work out why he was commenting on Tomas’s clemency now.

  After a moment, as Tomas continued to gape at him in incomprehension, Perry huffed and slammed the book down in front of him, his finger underneath a specific entry.

  Two adult male negroes, both healthy, one educated, suitable for overseer duties, bought from C. Quick for ninety guineas.

  Pencilled in the right-hand column, perhaps for Mr. Jeremy Quick in Antigua, if they survive the journey.