by Carola Dunn
“How odious! Tavy, do not stand here talking, we must save poor James! What shall we do?”
Except for occasional chuckles, the men had stopped laughing. The smugglers were listening to Sir Tristram’s assurance of Mr Wynn’s innocence, at least as far as their suspicions were concerned. He was being as tactful as possible about the real reason for James’s presence in the chapel, but inevitably they guessed the truth. Dan Small winked at Julia, to her fury.
“Pay un no mind, missy,” advised the Yorkshireman kindly, enveloping the girls in a cloud of rum fumes. “Us’ll fish thy lover out, never fear.” He turned to Octavia. “Us be right good rescuers, bain’t we, missy?”
“We plumb fergot as the lieutenant ‘ad other good reasons for comin’ ‘ere, miss,” added Dan Small, with an apologetic wave of his hook.
Octavia flushed at Julia’s astonished look. She had never mentioned that the sailors who had rescued her from the waters of the Plymouth Sound had been smugglers, and she had forgotten that they had witnessed Mr Cardin’s impassioned promise to wait for her.
“They seem to be acquainted with you as well as with Sir Tristram,” Julia said acidly.
One of the respectable-looking seamen reminded Dan Small that they had come to see the captain.
“Us brung un some do’s,” he added.
Sir Tristram persuaded them that it was not safe to approach his hiding place in daylight, but as the tide would not turn till after midnight, they might come back after dark.
“Jack is much improved,” he assured them, “but one arm is very weak. I doubt he’ll go to sea again.”
“Captain Day would be dead,” Octavia interrupted, “if Mr Wynn, who is stuck down there in the mud, had not doctored him. Do let us go to his aid.”
Julia, who had been listening in mounting astonishment and indignation, snorted in a sadly unladylike manner.
“I do not care to know about your havey-cavey goings-on,” she said coldly, “but since you are all too busy discussing Captain Day’s health, I shall doubtless find someone at the quay to assist me.” She turned on her heel and set off down the path, then spoiled the effect by running back to call down to James a promise of prompt rescue.
Sir Tristram glanced down the cliff, and such an expression of unholy glee entered his eyes that Octavia was afraid he would start laughing again. She pinched him.
“Come on!” she hissed. “We cannot let her go alone.”
They all headed back down the path towards the quay. Fortunately Julia’s notion of a rapid walk was much more ladylike than her snort, since Octavia was unable to manage more than a strolling pace. Sir Tristram strode ahead; the four sailors ambled behind, in no great hurry to deliver their victim from his predicament.
When Julia and Octavia reached the quay, Sir Tristram was explaining the situation to the fishermen, and to a crowd of amused wharf and farm labourers who had come out of the alehouse.
The salmon fishers shook their heads. It was nearly low tide; the boats, shallow-draughted as they were, could not be launched for an hour or two, and if they could, it would be impossible to row in close enough to the gentleman to pull him out.
The seamen refused to allow that a mere river could stop them. As soon as rivalry entered the picture, they were full of zeal for the rescue. Their boat, the Seamew’s gig, was resting on mud but there was water still at the end of one dock, which had recently been dredged. Enlisting a couple of the sturdiest wharfmen, they pulled it bodily from the riverbed and lowered it again in a couple of feet of water.
The fishermen, meanwhile, not to be outdone, had put on their thigh-boots and waded ankle-deep into the mud to push their dory riverward. Julia ran along the quay, insisting that she must go too, and Octavia, with a tired shrug, followed her. She would have preferred to sit and watch the whole affair, but thought it best not to let her cousin go alone.
Three of the smugglers had climbed into the gig, and its keel was touching bottom. Nonetheless, the Yorkshireman swung the girls into it, followed them, and pushed off hard with a boathook. They slithered into deeper water. The fishing dory came after them, with Sir Tristram, resigned, sitting in the bow.
The tide was slack. Rowing against the Tamar’s current, the gig with four oarsmen soon outdistanced the dory. They swung round the grassy curve and the cliff came in sight. At its foot, helpless as a fly in a spider’s web, James Wynn lay patiently in his sticky trap some twenty feet from the water’s edge.
“He does not seen interested in escaping,” observed Octavia. “I expect he is rehearsing his next article in his head.”
“James!” cried Julia.
At the sound of her voice, he raised his head a little, then lifted his arm to wave. This gesture pushed his upper body downwards, so he quickly lowered it again.
The fishermen came up beside the smugglers, oarsmen sculling gently to keep their place.
“Un be too var to reach wi’ the boathook,” confirmed one of the fishers with gloomy satisfaction. “Be a tidy while afore tide’ll be up enow.”
“Can none of you throw a rope’s end accurately enough to reach him?” Sir Tristram demanded irritably of the smugglers. “Fine sailors you are! Jack Day would be ashamed of you.”
Octavia thought this somewhat unfair to the Yorkshireman and Dan Small. The missing eye of the one must impair his aim and the missing hand of the other make it difficult to throw at all. However, one of the others found a small coil of rope in the bilge and stood up, preparing to toss one end.
“Wynn, we shall throw a rope to you,” called Sir Tristram. “You had best cover your face, but be ready to seize it.”
It took four attempts, and James’s antics had sunk him several inches deeper before he had a secure hold on his lifeline. The fishermen were shaking their heads and hiding grins, but they said nothing as the smugglers began to haul on the rope.
With a gurgling swish he came free. He slid smoothly across the mud towards the gig, and the gig slid smoothly towards him through the water until the keel slid smoothly into the mud and stopped.
Dan Small cursed and tried to push off with the boat-hook. It sank into bottomless ooze. He had to stick his hook hand into one of the benches and pull with all the strength of his overdeveloped right arm to retrieve it. The others philosophically ignored the chortles of the river boatmen. They dragged James up to the side of their stranded craft and lifted him in.
Julia embraced him, filth and all.
He was shivering in the blustery wind, but apparently quite unaware of the ridiculous spectacle he had made of himself. He had an innate dignity, or perhaps, thought Octavia, an innate lack of dignity, which protected him from self-consciousness. He thanked the smugglers for rescuing him, without the least suggestion that they had been responsible for his problem in the first place.
“Now we shall pull them off,” said Sir Tristram to his crew.
The old man took up his oars. The other two looked doubtful and shook their heads.
“Tide’ll float ‘em in a while,” one of them pointed out.
“There is still half an hour till low tide!” The baronet was clearly growing impatient with the whole business. “Go in closer and take their rope, then row downstream. They cannot possibly pull you onto the mud with them.”
“Pray do bring us off!” pleaded Octavia. “Mr Wynn is chilled to the bone and must not wait for the tide.”
“Fer missy’s zake,” urged old Ned Poldhu.
The two younger fishermen gave in and soon both boats were heading back to the quay.
The Edgcumbe Arms, being only an alehouse as the landlady apologetically explained, could not provide better than an attic chamber for Mr Wynn. To this she promised to bear her own tin bathtub and plenty of hot water. Octavia with difficulty persuaded Julia to leave her beloved to the landlady’s ministrations. It was past time to change for dinner and Julia herself was sadly in need of a bath.
They left Sir Tristram talking to the smugglers and walked wearily up the
drive.
They all arrived at the dinner table several minutes after the gong had sounded. Lady Langston accepted their apologies and excuses with unruffled calm.
“You will not make a habit of it, I know,” she said. “I have received a communication from Lord Edgcumbe. He brings a party here again the day after tomorrow and it will not do to be late for dinner while he is here. Fortunately Mrs Pengarth returned this afternoon, in time to make all the arrangements."
Julia looked as if Mrs Pengarth’s return brought her no comfort. With their host and his guests about the place it would be difficult or impossible to continue her meetings with James.
Octavia saw her distress and squeezed her hand. “Do not worry,” she whispered, “I have an idea. I will tell you after dinner.”
“There is a great deal you must tell me!” Julia whispered back.
Miss Crosby frowning her disapproval of this furtive exchange, they both sat up straight and applied themselves to their plates.
Sir Tristram was distrait. He several times answered Lady Langston at random and ate what he was offered without his usual wholehearted enjoyment. When the ladies withdrew he did not go with them as was his custom, but asked Raeburn to bring the brandy.
The girls went to the spinet, where under cover of Julia’s idle strumming Octavia explained her idea.
“James shall come the day after tomorrow to stay here!” she declared. “Only think, Lord Edgcumbe will suppose him a guest of my aunt, and she will believe he is a member of that party! I am certain she does not recall his name, for she told me so weeks ago and I made sure not to mention it."
“Tavy! Do you really think it is possible? I am so afraid he is going to be ill after what happened today, but if he was here I could nurse him.”
“You will have to be careful. You must pretend to be strangers."
“At least he will be better off here than at that tavern or in the chapel. But when I asked you to post that letter in Plymouth you were unwilling to help us. Why have you changed your mind?”
Octavia pictured James lying on his back in the mud. Julia had not seen him as either ridiculous or pitiable, though he could scarcely have appeared to his beloved in less gallant guise.
“I have come to the conclusion that you will suit very well,” she said. “We shall endeavour to convince your mama that he is an eligible gentleman, and then we shall go to work on your papa. After all, he cannot keep you here forever, and when you are back in London you may discover to him that James is to inherit land. Do you suppose you might persuade James to give up the excesses of rhetoric? Sir Tristram said that his views are actually perfectly acceptable when stripped of flowery verbiage.”
“I shall try!” Julia assured her grimly. “When we are married he may go back to his sonorous periods. But I fear Papa will never accept him as long as Sir Tristram continues to seek my hand.”
Octavia did not want to think about Sir Tristram. “Let me tell you about Captain Day,” she proposed.
“Yes, do! What is all this mystery that has been going on under my nose? It is monstrous provoking in you not to have let me into the secret!”
“It was not our secret. Captain Day’s life was at stake! But now the worst danger seems to have passed, so there is little risk from a slip of the tongue."
Julia was offended at the suggestion that she could not govern her tongue, but the story fascinated her.
“And he is related to Lord Edgcumbe!” she marvelled. “Well, if the earl is to introduce the captain to the company without arousing suspicion, he will scarce quibble if we do the same for James!”
Sir Tristram lingered long over his brandy, and came into the drawing room only to take his leave. He told Lady Langston that he was called away on business, and begged her leave to return to Cotehele when it was finished. This she granted, though she wondered at his not proposing again to Julia before he went. Not, she thought dolefully, that she had any reason to suppose her daughter now looked on his suit with favour.
Sir Tristram next stopped by the spinet.
“I am going to London for a week or two, as I told you,” he said to Octavia. “Our friends will take me to Plymouth on the midnight tide. You will remember what you promised to do for me?”
Her gaze on her clenched hands, Octavia nodded, unable to speak. She would do her best to stop Julia and James eloping, for their own sakes as much as his.
“Another mystery?” asked Julia in disgust. “What a pair of odious wretches you are, I vow!”
Chapter 21
“We ought to have told Sir Tristram!” wailed Julia, bursting into Octavia’s bedchamber at an excessively early hour the next morning. “How shall we smuggle James into the house? There will be no chamber prepared for him and all the guests will know he did not come with them and someone is bound to say something to Mama about him which will give everything away. We do not even know at what time Lord Edgcumbe will arrive!”
Yawning, Octavia tackled the last question first.
“They must arrive no later than the hour of high tide, so all we need to do is find out when that will be.”
“The tide! I declare I have no patience with these tides! Why cannot they be the same every day?”
“It is something to do with the moon. Never mind, we shall simply ask Mrs Pengarth, and about the chamber too. She is not like to demur after what James has done for her Jack.”
“Oh, yes, I had forgot. Is not James prodigious talented? It is beyond anything! But how shall we bring him into the house?”
“Hush, Ju. Let me think. And wrap yourself in my counterpane, you are shivering.”
Julia obeyed, and curled up at the foot of the bed, watching hopefully her cousin’s thoughtful frown.
Octavia sighed. “I cannot think of any way to smuggle him in at the moment of Lord Edgcumbe’s arrival.”
“We had best consult your Captain Day. He is a smuggler, after all!”
“I shall come up with something, only I must find out exactly when they will arrive. What time is it?”
“Just after six, I think.”
“Six! Heavens, Ju, even the maids will scarce have risen! I expect Mrs Pengarth will not be up for at least an hour. No wonder I cannot think straight. Go away and let me sleep!”
After breakfast, they found Mrs Pengarth in the housekeeper’s room, directing the preparations for the house-party. She was explaining her orders to Doris, the upper housemaid, in anticipation, Octavia guessed, of her move to Picklecombe Cottage. The prospect of marrying at last the man she had loved for twenty years made her look ten years younger.
Julia announced that they wished to speak to her privately, so she sent Doris off to supervise the other maids and closed the door. Octavia explained the problem.
“My Jack’s to be in the Great Hall when they arrive, miss,” she said. “Sir Tristram brought instructions from his lordship. They’ll be taking luncheon on the river, and they’ll get to Cotehele about two o’clock.”
“Perfect!” exclaimed Octavia. “I have a plan. Listen!”
She arranged everything with Martha Pengarth, and explained to Ada and Raeburn their part as reserve troops. Then the girls walked down to the Edgcumbe Arms.
A sea mist had blown up the river and enveloped the world in dripping greyness, in Octavia’s eyes a perfect day for curling up with a book. If James had been at the chapel still she would not have stirred, but she could not let Julia visit a common tavern on her own.
The shifting mist half hid the bustle of the quayside, and muted the sounds. Farm carts appeared out of nowhere with baskets and sacks of fruit and vegetables. Wharf labourers unloaded them, ready for the barges which would soon arrive on the tide. Kiln workers refilled them with lime for the fields, and they disappeared again into nowhere.
Julia tripped into the taproom as if she owned it. A few elderly men drowsed over their pints of cider or ale in the comfortable warmth of a smouldering coal fire. The landlady bustled forward, all smiles and curtsey
s.
“Ye’ll be come to zee the gentleman, miss? He’s in my own zitting room, miss, for there ben’t no private parlour. ‘Tis not fitting, but there, beggars can’t be choosers as the zaying goes.”
“Is he well?” asked Julia anxiously.
“Bit of a cough but nowt to worrit over. Land sakes, what a shocking business! Them free-traders is getting too big for their boots, as the zaying goes, but there, there’s not a man on the water don’t have a hand in it, zaving only them as works for the ‘Zise.” She ushered them into a tiny closet of a room, where James sat by a glowing fire with his nose in a book.
He looked up at once at the sound of Julia’s voice, his face brightening. Octavia turned from their enthusiastic meeting to request a pot of tea. When she turned back decorum was restored and he was explaining that Sir Tristram had brought all his possessions from the chapel last night.
Julia unfolded the plot to smuggle him into the house. He accepted it with a placidity that suddenly reminded Octavia of Lady Langston.
They went back to the house at noon, Octavia insisting that even her aunt would not believe they had taken a picnic on such a day. After luncheon, her ladyship retired as usual to the drawing room for her forty winks, taking Matilda Crosby with her. Miss Crosby had formed the habit of taking a few stitches in my lady’s embroidery in the afternoon, leaving my lady with the pleasant impression that she had been industriously engaged in sewing and not sleeping at all. It even looked as if the roses might one day be finished.
The girls returned to the tavern, where Octavia spent the longest and most miserably insipid afternoon she could remember. She tried to concentrate on Julia and James’s conversation, so as not to dwell on Sir Tristram’s absence.
Had he gone to inform Lord Langston of James’s inheritance, thus exposing his rival’s whereabouts to the incensed father? Or had he intended his departure to warn her that she must not refine upon a casual kiss? She ought not to have as good as told him she had enjoyed it! But what had he meant with his “devil”?