Contraband Hearts

by Alex Beecroft

  Tomas had been to jail twice before, waiting for trials at which he’d been acquitted. With his mother and many friends in the town willing to feed him, it had not been too uncomfortable an experience, but he would rather avoid it if he could. The thought that Lazarus might have found evidence against him would not stick—he’d been careful. He knew no one in town would ever speak against him. It would be fine, especially with the blackmail material in the pocket of his coat. He would hate to use that and incur Perry’s wrath. But rather than see either of them die? He would burn the world down rather than that.

  Their appearance at the Quicks’ door caused it to be shut in their faces while the muffled sound of an argument inside faded through the grey stone walls, which were now beginning to be blotched with lichen. Tomas touched the paper beneath his arm and counted the windows, estimating the tax on this mansion that might still be his if he chose it.

  “They weren’t expecting this, sir,” Perry noted dryly to Gwynn. “Expected you to hop to their will unquestioning, like their servant.”

  If he was aware he might be talking about himself, if he was hurt that his erstwhile protector had thrown him off without even looking him in the face, he didn’t show it, but Tomas wondered if this latest betrayal had yet made a dent in his mercy.

  A burst of shrieking inside the door—a woman’s high voice pitched in fury—and a moment later it was opened by a servant girl with tears dripping into her fichu and her bonnet askew as if she had tried to clutch at her hair.

  Damaris stood behind her, in a gown of ivory embroidered with peach roses, a peach stomacher and petticoat picking up the theme, yet failing to conceal her air of almost military command. Her steel-grey hair was scraped back plainly beneath a rabbit-eared cap, the delicacy of which did not soften her harsh face. “Well, don’t stand there,” she addressed Mr. Gwynn. “Bring them in.”

  The cost of the curtains in the very pink drawing room might have fed the poor of Porthkennack for a month, but that was not what Tomas noticed first. For the Quick family was drawn up in a circle as though they were watching a play, and at the focus of their regard stood Hedrek Negus, brown and hairy and incongruous like a bear that had wandered in from the street.

  Negus put up his bristly chin and met Tomas’s astonished gaze with a smirk. “’Tis the man himself.”

  It felt like he had swallowed his own stomach, everything within turning inside out and falling into itself. His feet went cold as though they remembered that wet morning when he had put a razor to Negus’s throat because he had been impatient and too angry for niceties.

  “I see you know what this is about.” Negus’s smile broadened. The world gave a sickening lurch and fell out from under Tomas’s feet. I thought you forgave me. You spoke so reasonably. We parted as friends.

  “Bloke put a knife to my throat, told me not to say anything or I was dead,” Negus told the room at large—Lazarus and Damaris in their arm chairs, Clement and Constance on the sofa, a matching pair in periwinkle blue. “But that’s why I’m ready to talk. I don’t take to being threatened by young upstarts in front of my own door.”

  Of course, he might have spoken softly because I had a knife in my hand, yet resented it later, as I would have done, Tomas acknowledged, recovering swiftly now the surprise was past. Yet if this too is a battle, I am not unarmed.

  “As you see.” Lazarus cleared his throat. He sat in his chair much as though he were sitting for a portrait emphasizing his casual power, apparently relaxed, one leg tucked beneath the seat, one outstretched. One hand on his hip, the other resting on the arm of the chair. But both hands were in fists. “We have finally found someone willing to testify against you, Tomas. It will give me the greatest of pleasures to sentence you to hang.”

  “Sir!” Perry objected, “I investigated—”

  “You investigated this ruffian as I asked, and you ended up working for him. I know.” Lazarus’s expression of disgust was so extreme it was possible to see the gums in his snarl. “You cast back my trust in my face. I have never known such a betrayal. I will be having words with Lord Petersfield about the quality of the young men he takes under his wing. He need not think I will spare you for his sake. One law for all—you will hang next to your seducer to drive home the moral.”

  “That is not what I was about to say,” Perry insisted, drawing himself up to his full, impressive height. He turned to Mr. Gwynn. “Sir, in investigating Mr. Tomas Quick, I discovered instead a smuggling ring run by Clement Quick. This accusation is but a ploy to divert your attention from—”

  “Clement?” Damaris exclaimed, effortlessly riding over Perry’s words. “What nonsense is this? The man would say anything to—”

  Gwynn cleared his massive throat, jowls wobbling. “Ma’am,” he said ponderously. “Mr. Dean is many things, but in my experience, dishonest is not one of them.” He held out a hand to Perry. “Do you have proof? Everyone accusing each other—proof is what we need.”

  The radiance of Perry’s grin felt like the sun kneading the aches out of Tomas’s shoulders. He relaxed into it, feeling rescued.

  “I do, sir.” Perry reached into his shirt and drew out a letter and the Rosalinde’s manifest. “This is from a ship that left Porthkennack yesterday. You will see that it took on board a large amount of tea and brandy at prices that cannot be legal and was destined for the Scilly Isles. I don’t need to tell you, sir, that all there is in the Scilly Isles is a smuggler’s marketplace. These items are being traded in the name of C. Quick, and have been signed for.”

  “A signature can be forged,” Damaris insisted, clutching the arms of her chair as though she intended to rise.

  Tomas examined Clement narrowly, hoping to see guilt, but Clement’s obvious puzzlement was not reassuring. Tomas’s anger might sometimes take him too far, but he read people well enough to say Clement looked like an innocent man.

  “In addition,” Perry went on, official still, like a man used to giving evidence in court. “You’ll see that C. Quick attempted to sell ‘two negroes’ into slavery. That was myself, sir, and a freeborn English sailor named Barnabas Okesi, who left on the coach to London this morning, but could be subpoenaed to return and give evidence if needed. That is the kidnap and sale of an officer of the customs service, sir.”

  Gwynn’s round face hardened. “So it is,” he said darkly while his men muttered behind his back.

  “Forgery again,” Damaris insisted. “It is a tissue of malice, no more.”

  Beside Clement, his sister had put her head down sharply, her gaze apparently fixed on her hands. Her nails were remarkably short for a woman’s, Tomas noted, registering the twitch of her skirts as she drew her foot beneath her hem.

  “When I was captured,” Perry went on, a note of enjoyment entering his voice, as though he could feel how the room swayed to his side, “I was attacked from behind with some form of poison in a sharp tube.” He folded down his collar to display a bull’s-eye of a bruise around the red gape of what resembled a huge insect bite. “I was able to turn and see my attacker for a moment before I swooned. They wore a mask, but the eyes, the blond hair, the slender frame—these things I am prepared to swear to. It was Clement.”

  “You say this was last night?” Lazarus leaned forward as though breaking himself out of a cocoon of ice. “Clement was here all night. We had a party of friends over to play whist. They will attest it. Now if perhaps we could drop this nonsense and get back to—”

  “‘C. Quick’ is Constance,” Tomas said, speaking it out loud even as he realized it. Her shoulders twitched and her back straightened, but she did not look up, which now seemed to Tomas as though she was hiding her face. “Of course. See how similar they are in height and colouring, and the shape of their eyes.”

  “It’s preposterous to think that a young woman—” Mr. Gwynn began, his tone much less convinced than his words.

  “Anne Lusmoore works for me as a pilot, sir,” Tomas cut in. “When she’s dressed for the sea, she
’s often mistaken for a young lad—and she is as hardy and enterprising as one.”

  “I did see Constance on the cliff when I approached the cave where I was assaulted,” Perry offered in the voice of someone for whom it is all coming together. “She had a large painting bag with her. If she had trousers on beneath her skirt, it would have been a moment’s work to throw off the skirt, throw on a fisherman’s coat and hat, and then who would suspect her of being a wealthy heiress?”

  At last, Constance raised her head. Her face was livid white and her eyes furious. “I was painting,” she said, chilly as an iceberg.

  “On that stretch of path between the Lizard and Bloody Mary,” Tomas said as the scales fell from his own eyes also. “Even though the light had already gone. On an evening with a storm out to sea.”

  She looked so demure, golden ringlets by her cheeks, her dress the pale blue of a winter sky, and her eyes full of killing cold. By contrast, Tomas felt himself go up in flame. “What else did you have in that bag? A lantern? One light, that’s what I saw the night the Kittywake foundered. One light, high up on the cliff exactly where you claim to have been painting. My God, you Lucifer! The wrecker is you.”

  “How dare you!” Lazarus leapt to his feet and took two steps forward before he seemed to remember that violence was beneath him. “Gwynn!” he turned to address the supervisor. “Pay no attention to this slander. The both of them are lying. Dean has a heart as black as his skin, and the bastard is as cursed as one can expect from one of his get. I insist that you take them to prison immediately. I will deal with them in court.”

  “Hold your horses and let me have my last laugh.” Negus plopped himself down on the unlit hearth and picked at his teeth with a fingernail. “Still here, ain’t I?” He gave Tomas a smug smile. “Like the shadow of your sins. You accusing them. Them accusing you. This’ll run and run, this will. If you get out of it with your neck, that’s still your fortune eaten up in lawyers’ fees. You’re done, mate.”

  Tomas’s anger and his victory sucked back out of him like a retreating tide, leaving a barren and salty mud of dread. Because Negus was right. This counter-accusation might take Lazarus off the bench, but he would only be replaced by a crony of his, eager for revenge. Negus knew a great deal about Tomas’s business over the years. With his help, a honest prosecutor might yet make something stick, and a dishonest one would not baulk about taking Perry down beside Tomas.

  Ruin weighed down his limbs and his spirits with dragging darkness. For a long moment all he could do was breathe and fight the despair.

  Mr. Gwynn fidgeted with the ends of his cravat, exchanging reluctant glances with his men. Jowan Ede was red as a blood moon. “After I just got him broke in right.”

  “Wait.” Damaris’s voice fell into the atmosphere of clinging doubt like an anchor—heavy, barbed. “This pointed tube of poison? Was it a device that would be easily thrown away?”

  Perry frowned up at her, perhaps wondering what her game was. “It seemed a specialist thing—expensive. A little like a brass spyglass. She used it as if she had used it many times before.”

  “Then, gentlemen.” Damaris folded her hands against her stomacher, back straight as a fire poker. “I suggest you search my granddaughter’s room.”

  “Grandma!” Constance burst out, and Lazarus at the same time cried “Mother!” But Gwynn nodded, and his escort hurried to the stairs that led up to the private rooms.

  “I have lived all my life in an unflinching adherence to the law and to the bounds of public decency,” Damaris declaimed. “My honour is unswerving, and I will not bend it even for my grandchildren. If Constance has done this, she will not hide behind me.”

  The old woman’s face was bloodless, her lips pressed thin, but the rubies on her fingers trembled like settling embers, for somewhere under her armour of pride, she was shaking.

  A reluctant admiration for her kindled in Tomas’s breast. She, too, was honest, then, though her honesty was terrible.

  Clement pulled a cigarillo from a silver pocket case and attempted to light it from a candle on the mantel. His hands were more noticeably shaking than his grandmother’s, and he choked when he tried to inhale. Constance, by contrast, had walked over to open a window. She looked sick, but her hand was still toying with the drawstring of her skirt, ready, perhaps, to shuck it off and climb through to freedom. Lazarus had his head in his hands like a child hiding from a thunderstorm, his knee bouncing under his elbow.

  Bloody Hellfire, Tomas realized. I have no need to ruin this family. They are achieving that all by themselves. He yearned to reach out to Perry and hold his hand while they waited. To somehow be able to say to him, Perhaps I do understand your mercy after all. But that was not permitted to either of them. So he simply edged sideways until his shoulder brushed Perry’s and took what comfort he could from that touch.

  A rattle of leather heels on the oak staircase, and Jowan burst in, carrying a glossy teak box opened to reveal a polished brass tube and plunger with a hollow metal spike on the end and two ampules of fluid beside it. One empty.

  Swift as a jack out of a box, Constance dropped her skirts and scrambled out of the window. Tomas heard her feet crunch down in the gravel outside and take off in a sprint. After a moment of stunned silence, Jowan and his colleague followed, but they were already too late. She would be over the cliff and into the caves at any moment, and they would not find her there.

  Silence fell in the wake of their sudden scrambling departure. Lazarus’s foot tapping stopped like the watch of a dead man. “We are ruined,” he groaned. “My daughter a wrecker! A pirate! I shall be the laughing stock of the bench. I shall never show my face in public again.”

  He lifted a glittering gaze to Tomas, dry eyed but full of an anger that Tomas recognised as akin to his own. “Are you happy now, Mr. Quick? You cannot possibly bring our name into more disrepute, so you may as well keep it now. Keep it. I care not.”

  Tomas’s skin prickled as a great emotion he could not name moved beneath it. He plunged his hand into his pocket and touched his father’s marriage certificate, folded lengthways like a lawyer’s brief. Now was the time. He could say I do not need your permission, sir, but you will oblige me by moving out of my house at once. But now Perry’s compassion was at work in him too. He watched Damaris watch him—she was iron haired, iron hard, a terrible old woman. But was he the kind of man who could use the day of her grandchild’s disgrace to tell her that all her life she had been living in sin with the admiral, that her son was a bastard and her future was one of ridicule and litigation? He had no doubt that she would fight for the last penny of her personal fortune, rather than let it pass to him, but her money and the admiral’s had been entwined for decades. Unpicking exactly what she was owed would take many an appearance in court, brazening out the public ruin of her virtue. What would Tomas’s mother say if he put her through that?

  He turned to Lazarus, feeling the balance of the room rock beneath his hand, needing a delicate touch. Pity in him felt like fishhooks in the gut, and he didn’t like it at all. “Do you still intend to kill me? And this upright gentleman, Mr. Dean, who has done nothing but be honest with you? Would you destroy him too?”

  “I would see you both hang,” said Lazarus, wearily. “But now is not the time for me to anger Lord Petersfield, nor to invite further calumny amongst the rabble of the town, who have an inexplicable liking for you, Tomas. The joy of this hunt has rather gone out for me.”

  “Hm!” From the hearth, Negus huffed a startling laugh. “Slippery bastard,” he said, grinning at Tomas. “Well then, I don’t mind. Had my revenge looking at your face, young man. Though you may want to apologize to me—to stop it happening again.”

  “Wait.” Mr. Gwynn took off hat and wig and rubbed a large handkerchief over his perspiring face and pate. “Hedrek, are you saying you were willing to bear false witness against Mr. Tomas here on account of a personal quarrel? Because that’s a crime too.”

  “I am
not.” Negus laughed. “I’m saying I’ve had my fun, all’s fair, and I’m going home now. The whole lot of these Quicks is loony as a full moon, and the further away I get from them, the better I be.”

  Suiting his actions to his words, he strode across the room, jerked the door open—revealing the housekeeper caught with her ear to the planks—shouldered past her, and was gone. The old reprobate probably never meant to go through with it at all, Tomas realized, with a rising sense of joy and relief. Probably knew I would never cut his throat either, but wanted me to feel the threat. A fondness of Hedrek’s mere existence came over him like respect. He was going to apologize. That was a man who it would be well to be friends with in future.

  This sense that difficult people were somehow irreplaceable and invaluable made him sigh, the tension going out of his shoulders as he returned his gaze to Damaris. Lazarus was bent over himself, crushed, and at some point Clement—like the ornamental ghost he was—had left the room without anyone really noticing. But Damaris was upright and cold as ever, facing the future of shunning and mockery like an icebreaker facing a berg. Tomas could respect that too.

  “Would it comfort you if I changed my name?” he asked, more gently than he had ever spoken to her before. “I am not ashamed that my father chose to call himself by his mother’s surname . . .”

  He was halfway through the sentence before the weight of it caught him up. Was he really saying farewell to the revenge of a lifetime just because he felt sorry for her? Sorry for her for being caught up in a doom that was none of his doing? Perhaps if she had been a better parent, a better grandparent, Constance would not have grown up thinking she was entitled to murder sailors for profit.

  Again, his hand strayed to his pocket, but before he could touch the parchment, Perry’s hand was on his back, in between his shoulder blades like a congratulation. This mercy, though it would cost him a great house and a fortune, would gain him the man he loved. After that, it was easy to shove the certificate back down, unused, and finish, “So if it would take some of the sting from this bleak day for you, I am prepared to call myself Tomas Chantry from now on, if you ask it from me one more time.”