by Jude Knight
The Raven’s Lady
Jude Knight
Copyright 2015 Judith Anne Knighton writing as Jude Knight
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means without the prior written consent of the author.
Dedication
To Crystal Cox, for whom I wrote this story. Thank you for inspiring these characters and this story line
Crystal won the story at the launch party for my novel Farewell to Kindness. She was promised a made-to-order story of 2000 to 5000 words, written for her, and printed at CreateSpace.
Made-to-order stories work like this. The winner gives me three characters or objects, and a trope. I write the story any way I like, but it needs to include the three choices and be an interpretation of the trope. I retain copyright (and may use the story later either as it is or amended), but the winner gets a printed copy despatched from CreateSpace within three weeks of the party and sole use of the story for one month after delivery. (Delivery speed depends where in the world the winner happens to be.)
Here’s the specification I worked to:
A lady smuggler , an investigating hero,and a loud pet raven . The trope would be her helping the people in her neglected village. I even thought the villain could be the main smuggler .
She is only doing it because her cousin does not care about the tiny estate and the people who live there.
Cover image: The Smugglers, 1792, George Morland
In the past eight years, Felix Maddox had spent more hours staking out suspects than he ever wished to remember. He couldn’t count the number of nights he’d spent awake, knowing he’d go into battle the next morning. He had even been imprisoned for six months.
This evening as a guest in what should be his own home was probably not the most interminable he had ever suffered through. At this moment, though, it certainly felt like it.
The lady he was supposedly here to consider as a wife was pretty enough, he supposed, if one liked milk-and-water misses who never looked up from their plates, and who answered every conversational sally with a monosyllable or a giggle.
She had sadly changed from the lively child he remembered. But that was long ago, almost another life. She was nine, and he was fourteen, the last time they parted.
The only interesting thing about her now, as far as he could see, was the raven she kept as a pet. He remembered the raven, too. He’d been the one to rescue the half-fledged bird from a cat, but Joselyn Bellingham was the one who tended it, fed it, and captured its affection.
He’d been startled when the raven flew in the library window that afternoon, fixed him with a knowing eye, then marched out the door and along the hall, to tap at the door of Miss Bellingham’s sitting room until she opened and let it in.
Now, though, at dinner, any sign of originality was absent. And as for his cousin, the fat oaf who had inherited the viscountcy when Felix was reported dead, the man’s conversation was all on-dits about people Felix didn’t know and off-colour jokes that were inappropriate in front of a lady, and not even funny.
Miss Bellingham rose to leave the gentlemen to their port, and Felix forced his face into a pleasant smile as he prepared to get fat Cyril even drunker and pump him for any knowledge he had of the Black Fox, the smuggler Felix had been sent to investigate.
A waste of time, in his opinion. Cyril couldn’t organise a bunfight in a baker’s shop. The condition of the lands and buildings on the estates of Maddox Grange showed the man was a total incompetent.
Felix couldn’t blame Cyril for thinking he was the viscount. Felix had decided to stay dead to more easily find the traitors who had given him up to the French. The released prisoner, Frederick Matthews, was no threat to them until all of a sudden they were behind bars. Then Colonel Webster, one of Castlereagh’s men, had approached him and said the identity he had painstakingly created could be used to help England win the war.
He’d stayed in that identity even after Napoleon was exiled to Elba, sure the emperor would not accept his defeat. The right decision, as it turned out—but Waterloo had finished Napoleon’s ambitions forever, and he was now home to claim his own; just this one last job for Webster to complete.
Felix had nothing against smugglers who simply sought to make a living, but he hated with a passion the type Webster was after; those who had smuggled French spies onto English soil. And the Black Fox—the smuggler leader on the patch of coast that belonged to Maddox Grange—was, by all accounts, the worst of the worst.
“So what did you think of her? Nice tits, eh?” Cyril made cupping movements under his own not inconsiderable dugs.
Felix resisted the urge to punch the fool. “She’s very quiet,” he said.
“Yes, that’s an advantage, don’t you think,” Cyril agreed. “Who wants a chattering woman? And she’s a good housekeeper, don’t you know? And used to living in the country, so you could just leave her at your estate—you did say you had an estate, Matthews?”
“Yes, I have an estate.” After the meeting with Webster, he’d been sitting at his club considering his options when Cyril Maddox came in with a group of cronies. That wasn’t so surprising. The Maddoxes had been members of Brookes since it opened. He hadn’t recognised Cyril; he hadn’t seen him since they were boys. But the group sat right behind him, and he’d soon realised that the supposed viscount was talking about raising money by selling Felix’s childhood friend.
“Does Miss Bellingham have a fortune, Maddox?” one of the others asked. “I’m not interested in a chit without a fortune.”
“A competence, rather. In trust till she turns 25 or marries,” Cyril said. “If she had a fortune, Peckridge, I’d be marrying her myself! But 2,000 pounds, gents! That’s worth an investment of 500, surely? And she’ll have control of it herself in less than three years. A sin against nature, that is.”
“22? That’s pretty old! What’s wrong with her? Secondhand, is she?” The others all sniggered.
Cyril was indignant, more on behalf of his sale than in defence of Miss Bellingham. Felix was indignant enough on that cause for both of them. He remembered Jocelyn Bellingham; remembered her well. She was Cyril’s cousin, not his; the daughter of Cyril’s mother’s sister, left to her aunt’s care after the death of her parents, “and as shy and modest a lady as you could wish to find,” Cyril proclaimed.
Even if he hadn’t had his mission, Felix might have spoken up at that point, for the sake of the child he remembered. As it was, he introduced himself (as Frederick Matthews), apologised for overhearing, and announced that he was interested in 2000 pounds and would be willing to consider taking a wife. It worked, and here he was, drinking his own port, in his own house, and listening to cousin Cyril describing a lady in terms that made him see red.
Suddenly, he could stand it no longer. His investigation into the Black Fox would have to wait for tomorrow. “I’m tired, Maddox,” he said. “I think I’ll turn in.”
But when Felix got to the room assigned to him—one of the guest rooms on the west frontage of the house—he couldn’t sleep. Perhaps a stroll in the woods: scene of many a childhood game when he and his widowed mother lived here with his grandfather. And a slightly older Felix often stole out on a night such as this, when the moon was nearly full, to trap game in the woods, or just to watch animals living their secret lives while the world slept.
No sooner thought than done; he let himself down from the window and was soon slipping into the shadows under the trees. As he had so many times before, he chose a trunk to lean against, stilled his movements, and slowed his breathing to wait for what the night had to show him.
There was a fox, trotting purposefully along the path. An owl swept by on silent wings. Two deer stepped daintily out of
the undergrowth, then startled as they caught the fox scent and leapt backward again, crashing away into the deeper shadows.
No. Not the fox. Someone was coming from the house. Without moving a muscle, he prepared for action. A figure. But not large enough to be Cyril. The hope that he could clear this whole matter up this first night died, but his curiosity remained. Where was the lad going? For the person hurrying along the path was no more than a boy, surely; short and slender, with a youthful gait.
On an impulse, Felix followed, using all his woodcraft to stay silent and undetected, but still keep within sight of the boy.
They took the fork leading down to the cliffs. Below on the beach, clear in the moonlight, people milled around several rowboats in the surf. He’d found the smugglers after all! No legitimate cargo would be unloaded on a remote beach in the middle of the night.
The boy took the path down the cliff face, but Felix would be seen if he followed. He concealed himself in a rocky outcrop, where he could watch both the beach and the path from the village. If the smugglers planned to take the cargo inland tonight, that was the most likely direction for whatever transport they had arranged.
As time wore on, however, it became clear that the cargo was being stored in the old cave complex Felix used to explore as a child, before his mother married again and took him away. Good. He could bring a troop to watch until the smugglers came to retrieve the goods, and catch them all.
Oddly, the boy Felix had followed seemed to be directing the whole enterprise, people appeared to be coming to him for orders, and several times Felix saw him run into the surf to catch someone by the arm and redirect them.
The rowing boats went back for another load, and the night was beginning to lighten in the east before the last of them had its cargo removed and put back out into the waves.
Below, the smugglers began to slip away singly and in small groups.
Something odd struck Felix about the faces that looked up at the cliff before beginning to climb the path. No beards or mustaches. Not even the shadows one would expect on at least some of them after a day’s growth. His mind took a while to interpret what his eyes were telling him. Women. Every smuggler he could see was a woman.
He looked again at the boy, shaking his head to dislodge the wild thought. No. Not Miss Bellingham. That milk-and-water miss could not possibly be a smuggler. The boy—or the woman, in fact—could be anyone in the house, or could easily have come from one of the farms beyond the house. But he was definitely a she. As the light strengthened, the way she moved, and the curves inside the breeches she wore, became more and more obvious.
Then the raven swooped down to land on the beach beside her, and removed all doubt. Miss Bellingham’s pet cawed at her, a loud raven alarm call, and she looked anxiously up at the cliff. A few quick orders to the remaining women on the beach, and they all scattered, some heading for the path and some for the narrow way around the cliffs that had been uncovered as the tide fell.
Now what did he do? He stiffened his shoulders. Woman she may be, but smuggler she certainly was. He would do his duty, of course. Even though once, long ago, she had been Joselyn, the girl child who dogged his footsteps and whom he would have died to protect.
Miss Bellingham led a few other women up the cliff face, and stopped to speak with them a few paces from where Felix hid. The raven swooped in to join them.
“It will be enough, Matilda,” she was saying. “The money we raise will pay your rental and that of the other tenants and keep cousin Cyril from casting you out.”
“For another quarter, miss,” the woman addressed as Matilda said dolefully. “We canna keep doing this here smuggling though. If’n the Black Fox catches us, or the excise, we’ll all hang.”
Miss Bellingham nodded, her brows drawn anxiously together. “By next quarter, perhaps I will have thought of something else.”
“Master Felix had no business dying in foreign parts,” Matilda declared.
“I do not suppose he did it on purpose,” Miss Bellingham said. Was it just his imagination, or did her tone sound wistful?
“If’n he’d lived, tha’ could have wed him,” another woman suggested. Felix recognised her; she was a servant at the grange. “Tha’ always said he promised to come back and wed thee.”
“He was 14, Betsy. Even if he was alive, he would have long forgotten a few words said in haste when his mother took him away.”
“Mayhap you should marry that man your cousin brought home,” Betsy said.
Miss Bellingham gave an inelegant snort. “If I were inclined to marry, and I am not, I would certainly not marry anyone who was friends with cousin Cyril.”
“He’s a well-enough looking young man,” Betsy insisted, “and polite, too.”
“He is prepared to pay my cousin in order to get his hands on my trust fund. In any case, I do not think he wishes to marry me any more.”
“Only for that you’ve gone out of your way to discourage him,” Betsy said.
Miss Bellingham giggled. “I just listened to everything Cyril said he liked, and did the opposite.”
Why, the little minx. Certainly, Miss Milk-and-Water was unrecognisable in the laughing maiden he could see before him. He had told Cyril he preferred women with opinions, who could think for themselves and hold an intelligent conversation. He might have added that he wanted to wed a lady who put the welfare of his tenants ahead of her own, as this delightfully grownup Joselyn clearly did.
The women were splitting up, Miss Bellingham and Betsy taking the wood path, followed by the raven, and the other women heading along the clifftop to the village. He watched them out of sight, but stayed where he was. He had a lot to think about. Miss Bellingham was clearly not the Black Fox, even if she was a smuggler. And she was far more the Joselyn of his memories than he had believed.
The sound of shifting rocks attracted his attention.
Two men emerged from another rocky outcrop some distance down the cliff, and walked up to the junction of the two paths, talking as they came. One was cousin Cyril, the other a dark burly man who walked with the distinctive roll of a sailor.
“It’s my cousin, I tell you,” Cyril insisted. “That damnable bird follows her everywhere.”
“I don’t care who it is,” said his companion. “She’s on my patch, and I’ll have her cargo and I’ll kill anyone who gets in my way, and so I will.”
“Look here, Fox!” Cyril was clearly alarmed. “You can’t kill my cousin. I’ve got a man up at the house who’s willing to pay good money to marry her.”
The Black Fox, for it must be he, looked interested. “How much is the wench worth?”
“2000 pound. And this Matthews is willing to stump up 500 to have the rest free and clear.”
“2000, eh? That’d go a long way to sweetening your exile!” The Fox laughed. “Worth more dead than alive, I’d say.”
Cyril shook his head. “She’s made a will leaving the lot to her sister’s children. Not that the brats need it. They’re wealthy orphans; inherited a packet when their parents died. I need her alive, I tell you.”
“You could marry her yourself.”
Cyril shook his head. “I tried that. She won’t have a bar of it. And I’ve no wish for a wife anyway.”
“Drug her, marry her, and then kill her before you run,” the Fox advised.
For a moment, Cyril looked interested, but then he shook his head. “Too complicated. I couldn’t have the bans called. Even if I could wait—and the real Viscount Maddox could turn up at any time—no-one here would believe she was willing. I’m just lucky that I heard two men discussing his unexpected survival, and his petition to the courts to be recognised as viscount. It has given me a little warning to sell off everything I can lay my hands on. Once the courts notify me, I’ll not be able to touch a penny.”
“A special licence?”
“Expensive. And chancy—she could still refuse me at the church. No; getting this Matthews to court her is the best plan.”
“Or...” The Fox fell silent, clearly thinking deeply.
“Or?” Cyril prompted.
“I could buy her off you. I’ll pay 400 pound, mind, and not a penny more! But I’ll be able to sell her to the Barbary pirates, a fair-haired virgin like that. She is a virgin, I suppose?”
Cyril nodded, eagerly.
“Yes,” the Fox continued. “It’s only fair, the trouble she’s caused me, taking cargoes on my patch. Yes, and I’ll take my pick of the other women she had with her.” He grinned, an evil leer that made Felix shiver. “Some to sell, and some to use on the way.”
“450,” Cyril said, “and you have a bargain. What’s the plan, then?”
The two men moved out of earshot, still talking. Felix hurried after them as soon as they’d cleared the open ground and gone into the trees, but they had horses tied in a small clearing, and he caught up only to see them ride away.
Time to return to the house, then, Felix thought. And past time for a little conversation with the lady smuggler.
When Felix got back to the house, he could not find Miss Bellingham. However, he found the servant, Betsy.
“Tell Miss Bellingham, please, that I heard her cousin Cyril and the Black Fox plotting against her, and I need to see her now. I’ll wait in the library.”
After a shocked moment, Betsy hurried upstairs, and a few minutes later, Miss Bellingham entered the room.
She’d clearly been interrupted before she could complete her change. She’d put on a dress, but her hair was caught back in a long plait that brushed her rump as she walked. Betsy came in at her shoulder, and their glares were identical.
“Mr Matthews? What’s this about my cousin?”
“Not Matthews,” Felix told her. “My name isn’t Matthews. I was sent here to investigate the Black Fox for the Crown. I followed you last night, and I saw you bringing in your cargo.”