Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Tomas tried to pull the book back from Perry, an irrepressible need to tear the damn thing in half overtaking him. But Perry snatched it up and caught Tomas’s grabbing hand in his own. “Time to go,” he repeated, urgently, tucking the book into his shirt with his left hand and moving out to haul Tomas toward the door with the other.

  “They think I’m the—” Tomas began, incensed, only to find Perry’s hand clamped about his mouth as he was manhandled toward the Swift. The words howled out indignantly in his head nevertheless. They think I’m the disgrace to the family name?

  “Ninety guineas!” he hissed, when Perry had to let go long enough to grab the anchor chain with both hands. “That’s a fortune to a poor man, but to bloody Clement it’s a night’s gambling debts. I bet he owns waistcoats worth more than that! He’d ruin two men’s lives for pin money?”

  He broke off his rant to whistle two notes, high and shrill, that brought his crew down from the rigging and running soft footed to swarm ratlike down the chain after him. A whistle was unlucky at sea, so hopefully someone below would come to investigate before her unmanned sails foundered her.

  “Tell me you see now why I have to bring the Quicks down,” he demanded of Perry as they thudded into the waiting Swift. “Surely you must see now why they have to go?”

  But Perry was looking instead at the sodden bundle of something dark that lay in the bilges breathing like a beached porpoise. Some kind of reverse mermaid—too many legs for a man and an impenetrable octopus tangle where its face should be.

  “What the hell,” Tomas exclaimed, dropping into his boat as though it was enemy territory. “What is it now?”

  The octopus gave a further determined writhe at the sound of Tomas’s voice, and as Temperance Smith and Ben Ede cast off the rope that grappled them to the ship’s chains, Perry seized a lantern and brought it closer to the creature.

  Oh, it was two coats tangled together on top of two bodies. Even as he made this discovery, an arm emerged from the heap, its dainty hand folding the material down and revealing Anne Lusmoore’s smugly grinning face. Water cascaded from her hair over her bright eyes as she sat up, someone groaning beside her.

  “All right, Captain?” she said, her voice slurred. “I pulled ’im out of the sea like a gannet takes up a mackerel, though he didn’t know who I was and he fought me.”

  “Barnabas!” Tomas exclaimed, ready to crow with satisfaction at the success of this endeavour, but Perry got there before him, stooping to remove the second coat, though the man beneath it tried to snatch it back.

  He’d been looking for this man so long, it was a surprise to find him merely another ordinary human being—a youngish man with the weather-beaten skin of a professional sailor, stripped to his smallclothes, presumably to bear less weight as he swam. He was shivering so profoundly that it was visible to Tomas a foot away.

  Barnabas knuckled his forehead to Tomas, as a naval seaman might salute an officer. “Water’s so cold I thought I’d die.”

  “We just come back ourselves,” Dennis commented, lurching across the deck from where he’d been propped opposite them. “Anne had to go in after him. When he felt himself grappled, he panicked, I think. Leastways there was lots of splashing. By the time I got the boat alongside ’em and they rolled on board, they was both chilled to the bone, barely able to get themselves on the Swift. They fell down there, and I put the coats over ’em. Let ’em rest a bit, you know?”

  “I do know.” The strength-sapping cold of the Cornish waves was barely to be borne under full summer sunshine, let alone at night in the tail end of a storm. “But, Anne, we need you to guide us home. Go into my cabin—you’ll find dry clothes and brandy. Take whatever of each you need to be back at your post as soon as may be. Dennis? Bring out a change of clothes for Mr. Barnabas—”

  “Okesi.” Barnabas sat up, pulling the borrowed coat tighter around him. He watched Anne make her stumbling way back to the cabin, half supported by the sprightly but elderly form of Dennis, and turned a concerned expression on Tomas. “Barnabas Okesi. I didn’t realize Miss Anne was a woman. Nor did I think she was trying to rescue me at first. I thought the men from the Rosalinde had come to recapture me. I’m sorry I fought her. Will she—”

  “She’ll be fine,” Tomas reassured him. “She’s tougher than any boy, as she would be the first to insist. And you? On behalf of my entire town, I regret that you’ve been subjected to this treatment. I apologise. How are you?”

  “Better for this.” Barnabas cocked his head to one side. “Some kind of patriot are you, then? An abolitionist?”

  “I like to think ‘a decent man.’” Tomas shrugged, aware of Perry’s gaze on the side of his face like the light of a second lantern. He hoped for Perry’s approval and was tempted to show off until he knew he had it. “And in that light, I would like you to help me to take these people to court. Selling freeborn Englishmen into slavery is an abhorrent act. They should suffer for it.”

  Dennis returned with a bundle of Tomas’s clothing. Tomas spent a great deal on nondescript items, so that he would not be recognizable by his garments—giving them away the moment they became familiar. So there was always two or three changes of clothes in his locker. These were a pair of tan breeches that would not buckle around Barnabas’s calves, but seemed to fit tolerably well otherwise, with a white shirt and a quilted waistcoat whose warmth restored a healthy undertone of bronze to the man’s skin.

  As Barnabas dressed, Tomas couldn’t help but turn to Perry with a smirk, the thought of his victory—his complete and utter victory—blazing up in his veins like desire. With the evidence slipped down Perry’s shirt, the marriage certificate, and Barnabas’s testimony, he could deal the Quicks such a blow as they would never forget, and the chain on Perry’s wrist had banished some of his earlier doubts. Now Perry would want it too, surely? And if he wanted it, then Tomas wanted it all the more. I’ll give you anything, Perry, he thought, grinning. Anything you want. When I am in charge.

  “Using a man’s misfortune to bring down your own enemies is also abhorrent,” Perry glared. And oh—how could he still be this forgiving? It was admirable from a Christian point of view, but Tomas’s feral side wanted to shake him for it.

  “I am amazed you will defend them still,” he snarled, cold all at once, though already they had swung around the headland and were headed inward to gentler waters and warmer winds. “Did their kidnapping and selling you not harden your heart at all?”

  This was unfair! The admiral himself—Tomas’s grandfather—had put his father on a ship at age nine to learn a seaman’s trade, and that was all he had ever done for his true family, discarding them like a leaky boot. Every slight Tomas had suffered all his life because he was the son of a bastard recurred to him in memory. He deserved the chance to turn the tables, to lord it over them for a change. To make them understand what it felt like having to work for your living while folk sniggered behind your back about your grandmother’s virtue.

  His own doubts felt distant from him at this moment, almost as though Perry was holding them for him, freeing him to snarl and posture like the hurt beast he was.

  “It has not hardened my heart enough to make me willing to turn out a grandmother from her home,” Perry insisted. “Damaris was as much practiced upon as your grandmother. Why should she be punished because the admiral was a cad? And you—do you really want to attract the ire of all the magistrate’s cronies on your head? It is an open secret that you flaunt the law whenever it suits you. You stand on shaky ground from which to challenge the great and the good in this county. He’ll take you down, Tomas. You may push him in to drown, but he’ll drag you after him if you do.”

  “Is that a threat?” Tomas snapped, the fireworks of his invincibility fizzling out one by one, cold and disappointed. He wanted Perry, and he wanted the Quicks gone, and Perry was making it hard to achieve both.

  Perry threw the Rosalinde’s record book onto the deck with a furious snap. “It is an expr
ession of concern, you idiot! I do not wish you to get into a fight with the Quicks because I do not think you can win. At best you will ruin each other. Just for once—for once, acknowledge that you cannot get away with everything, and work in the real world as you have urged me to do. The powers that be will stand with him, not you, whatever your pieces of paper proclaim.”

  Tomas’s straw-blaze of resentment died down, but it had already been enough to leave a thin film of soot over his victorious mood. It was nice that Perry cared about him, but he could show it better by falling in line with his plans, instead of being so damned disapproving.

  “As you can see—” he turned a grimace of a smile on Barnabas, who had just finished squeezing the water from his hair and was accepting the flask of brandy from Dennis for a swig “—it’s a complicated subject, but your testimony would shed light on it. I can put you up until a trial can be arranged, if you—”

  Barnabas shook his head. “No, sir,” he said. “I’m obliged for the rescue, but I want to get back to London before the news of the wreck. I don’t want my family thinking I’m gone any longer than they have to. And like Mr. Dean says, justice ain’t really available for the likes of me. If I come home at all, that’s a victory.”

  The night’s work settled on Tomas’s shoulders in myriad small aches and pains, fatigue dropping like a shawl over him and—just for a moment—smothering his certainty. Suppose he, too, settled for what he could have; a man could be content with a loving mother and a business that kept him in everything he needed, and a love that might be even better than that which had blessed his youth. Couldn’t he?

  The crew hauled up the sails. A stir at the bow showed where two men were making her tight to the ring bolt in the rock beneath his house. The town lay sleeping beneath the faint sift of pearly moonlight, but a candle shone from his mother’s bedroom window. She often waited up to be sure he came home.

  “As you wish.” He guided them both up the path to his door. He couldn’t argue with Barnabas’s choice to go back to his own home. “Come inside until the sun rises, and we’ll put you on the morning coach.”

  He lit his bedroom fire and offered Barnabas a nightgown and the bed. Perry stood by his shoulder as he restacked the kindling, and blew gently on the catching sparks to strengthen them.

  “I suppose I’d better be back to my own lodgings,” Perry whispered, for Barnabas was tired enough to have fallen asleep the moment he’d hitched the blankets over his shoulder, and neither of them wished to wake him.

  Tomas looked up at him, the fire’s glow softly warm on his cheek. From down here, Perry was a tall pillar of solidity, even though his fingers trembled and his voice was slurred and weary. Tomas couldn’t stand to see him walk away again.

  “Stay,” he said, more like a plea than an invitation. “The room next to this is in a shambles, but this bed’s big enough for three if none of us are lively.”

  Perry huffed a little laugh and dropped down to hunker next to him. Their knees touched, and both of them gasped at the contact. I wanted to kiss you there on deck, Tomas thought. You were so magnificent. But Barnabas might not be as asleep as he seemed, and those words could not be spoken where anyone else could hear.

  “You would be a distraction that I could not overlook,” Perry murmured, reaching out to draw a finger along the line of bare skin where the cuff of Tomas’s breeches had parted from the gartered top of his stocking. The tiny touch boiled all the sea’s cold away from him. He felt the flush on his face spread all the way to his belly button.

  “Are you using my own weapons against me?” He laughed, shaky but delighted. Oh God, he’d never met another man who challenged him like this, who was as stubborn yet as teasing as himself. He had to make this work somehow. He had to. Because right now he wanted Perry more than he wanted anything else, and if getting him necessitated a shift in his own manner of doing business, he could live with that.

  “They’re weapons, are they?” Perry grinned, his whole face gilded by the fire, his hair shot through with sparks. “I knew it. You’ve been trying to conquer me this whole time.”

  Tomas shot a glance at Barnabas, who still seemed to be asleep. “Oh,” he said, “don’t try to tell me you haven’t been doing exactly the same.” He leaned closer, bringing his mouth up to Perry’s ear and relishing the way it made the other man bite his lip and crane towards him. “You have tried to give me the greater death, but I hope you will be satisfied with the little.”

  Perry’s caressing touch turned into a firm grab at the back of Tomas’s knee, the possessive jostle of it promising in its roughness. “Tomas. I’ve never thanked you for—”

  “I don’t need thanks—”

  “Shh!” Perry insisted, planting one knee so he was stable enough to bring up his other hand and place two fingers on Tomas’s lips. “I’m trying to say that I owe you too much to bring you to the gallows. That death threat should not still be lying between us.”

  I have decided to stop trying to kill you was perhaps not the most romantic thing Tomas had ever been told, but he didn’t expect romance. He didn’t even expect this. Treacherously—totally without his permission—his eyes welled with tears, and the gasp of his breath was more sob than he would have wanted. Perry’s trust seemed to both break and remake him like a hug to a friendless child. Speechless, he kissed the tips of Perry’s fingers.

  It was Perry’s turn to flinch and sneak a worried glance at the third man. He stood up, blinking the glossiness from his own eyes. “But let us not court the noose together. Not now, at least. I should go.”

  “Stay,” Tomas repeated, smiling. The lust of earlier had met his heartfelt relief and produced something brighter, larger than itself. Something that simply wanted Perry under his roof for as long as he could keep him. “Take the bed. I have some papers to look through. I’ll sleep in the morning.” When he’s gone.

  The marriage certificate crinkled under Tomas’s left arm as he waved goodbye to the nine o’clock stage with Barnabas Okesi on it. He had sat with the document in his hands in front of the fire for the rest of the night, looking between the dry brown words on the page and Perry’s face, lax and trusting, asleep in his bed.

  Perry’s words had tossed through his head all night like loose cargo tumbling through the hold in a storm. With Perry quiet, Tomas’s own doubts had returned in force, and he was bruised with them this morning, unable to get past the dread of Perry finding him unacceptably cruel.

  It was Perry’s disapproval that he feared. He would weather any other consequence—even his mother’s rebuke.

  I would weather his too, he tried to convince himself, as the dust spat up by the iron-rimmed wheels of the coach settled on the doorstep of the Hope & Anchor and whited all their window boxes as if with flour. He would come around. He would forget his ire and return to me, all the more readily once I had power of my own.

  But Perry was stubborn, and his sycophancy had not yet stretched further than his principles. If he thought he was being bought, he would dig in his heels out of mere pride, and then who knew—

  “Put your hands where I can see them. Turn around.”

  Tomas had heard the footsteps coming, of course. He had assumed they were running for the second coach. Evidently not. Lowering one hand and raising the other, palms empty, he slid his eyes sideways. Perry looked nonplussed, but not afraid, so Tomas turned slowly, still peaceful, to see who had come.

  It was Mr. Gwynn himself, Customs Supervisor of Porthkennack, Perry’s boss, with a pistol in his hand and two of his men behind him, similarly armed.

  “What can I do for you gentlemen?” Tomas asked, the slight fuzz of his sleeplessness clearing as his heart beat hard.

  “You’ve been accused of piracy, Mr. Quick,” Jowan Ede offered from his place at Gwynn’s left, his face apologetic, but his aim unwavering. “And you too, Mr. Dean. They said you robbed the customs warehouse, Tomas, and Mr. Dean helped you. In an inside job, like.”

  “Quiet!” Gwyn
n snapped, glaring at Jowan.

  Tomas didn’t know whether to be angrier on his own behalf or on Perry’s. “Oh.” He rolled his eyes. “Let me guess. Lazarus sent you. He’s grown bored of waiting for Perry to invent some nonexistent evidence against me and sent you to do it instead?”

  Gwynn’s jaw locked, and a cold glint came into his bloodshot eyes. “You know how honest I am, Tomas Quick. Just as I know the same of you. Let’s have none of your posturing now—we’ve come to the pinch.”

  “‘Posturing’?” Tomas raised his chin with a sneer. He didn’t posture. He merely said things, at times, that he would have been wiser to keep to himself. “Take me before the magistrate, then,” he said, fearless because he had the power in his breast pocket to ruin the man. “I have a document here that’ll put the fear of God into him.”

  “Tomas—” Perry cut himself off, but Tomas could assemble the whole argument from that one word: We’ve talked about this before. Don’t do it.

  Tomas fixed Perry with a stare that challenged him to save his neck from the noose in any other way.

  “Sir,” Perry responded, speaking to Gwynn with the earnest, upright look that Tomas always wanted to rumple. “You know I was engaged by Sir Lazarus to investigate the smuggling in this town. I also ask you to take us to the magistrate so I can give my report. It’s time, I think, for us all to come clean.”

  Gwynn hesitated.

  “He did say ‘arrest them,’ sir,” Jowan put in, plucking at the stained kerchief around his neck. “But he didn’t say we was to take them straight to jail. Maybe he wants us to bring ’em to him?”

  The supervisor’s face hardened still further. “He has no business arresting my men anyway,” he burst out, walking off toward the cliff path with such a stamp to his gait that it was as though he were trying to kick the earth in the face. “As if Dean weren’t the most insufferable do-gooder I’ve ever come across. Fine.”