Home From The Sea

by Keegan, Mel

  “He did. And it healed, likely as not because I was so young.” Jim gave the offending limb a glare. “A month later I got out of bed, put my weight on it and fainted dead on the floor. Six months later we knew, my father and me, I’d never walk right without a surgeon. So he brought one in to examine me.” His face hardened as the ten year old memories scalded him raw.

  “He hurt you,” Toby said quietly.

  “He … hurt me.” Jim looked into the fire. “He probed the wound with some kind of thing, and told us the bone had splintered and I was full of these hedgehog spines. They had to come out, if I was going to walk right again – but he couldn’t guarantee not to do so much harm, he’d be taking the leg right off me, above the line of the old wound. So my father paid him at the door and told him we’d send for him when we were ready to have me butchered.”

  “And needless to say, you never sent for him.” Toby’s brows rose. “I can’t say I blame you. But still … you should be careful, Jim.”

  “You mean, don’t hurt myself on account of a gypsy girl?”

  “She wasn’t a gypsy. She was Spanish,” Toby said too quickly, and then seemed to stop himself and seal his lips.

  But Jim had heard, and if he had been a cat his ears would have swiveled around. “You knew her.”

  “I’m afraid to say, I did.” Toby’s voice was heavy with regret. “Her name was Marguerite.”

  He would say no more but at once Jim sensed the restlessness in him and, sure enough, a moment later Toby took his hands away and stood. The leg was warm and relaxed now – rose red, and the skin had taken up the oil. Jim took his weight on his good leg, yanked up his britches buttoned them swiftly, all the while frowning at Toby.

  “You’re not going to tell me who she was, are you?”

  The wide, bony shoulders lifted in an expressive shrug. “Just a girl.”

  “A Spanish girl.”

  “As I said.”

  “Your girl?” Jim asked as a curious thread of foreboding stitched through him. Damnit, had she been his wife –?

  “Mine?” Now Toby chuckled once more. “Not mine! But yes, I knew her, and where she goes, trouble won’t be far behind.”

  “She was a bad sort?” Jim hazarded as he fetched mugs and the thick, syrupy coffee left in the pan from breakfast. “A whore?”

  “Just a trollop,” Toby said with some generosity. “Not her fault, poor lass. When you come from the gutters of any city, orphaned at the age of twelve, it’s often a good trick to avoid landing in some brothel or other. Marguerite stayed out of the whorehouses, but she was always traipsing after a man. If you know what I mean by traipsing.”

  “I can imagine.” Jim thrust a mug of coffee at him. “So, what kind of trouble could she bring to The Raven?”

  Toby’s teeth worried at his lip for a moment. “It wouldn’t come from Margie herself, so much as the company she keeps. Kept.” He gestured vaguely with the mug, took a swig of the strong, sweet coffee and made a face. “Good Christ, you could dip sheep in this!” He reached for the blackened tea kettle, tipped half the coffee back into the pan and topped the remainder off with water.

  “And I’m supposed to be on the lookout for trouble?” Jim demanded.

  “Perhaps.” Toby seemed genuinely uncertain, and met Jim’s eyes levelly. “It’s just luck I got here when I did.”

  A snort of mocking laughter ambushed Jim. “And you’re going to save me from some fate worse than death, are you?”

  The mockery was pointed, but he was not at all sure who was being mocked by it, Toby or himself. The balladsinger only chuckled. “Well, now … I might be able to turn a foul wind into a fair sailing breeze.”

  “Meaning?” Jim dropped his voice as Toby stepped closer.

  “Meaning, Margie adds up to trouble,” Toby said thoughtfully, “but it doesn’t have to involve you.”

  “But it involves you?” Jim’s voice dropped again. “You’re a puzzle, Toby Trelane.”

  Unexpectedly, the wide blue eyes glittered with amusement. “Now, why do you say that? Because I knew a poor Spanish girl who was so down on her luck, she was begging for pennies for medicine?”

  “That, and … the rest of you.” Jim cocked his head at the man. “Balladsinger, traveler – not a sailor, but you often talk like one. You know the prayers for the dead, in the old language. You tell stories about men who love men. Who the hell are you? Where are you from?”

  For a moment Toby seemed to hesitate and then he said, amused, “I was born in London, but my parents were from Tavistock. They’re both dead now. I’ve a sister, but I wouldn’t know how to find her. I grew up in Plymouth, went to school in Warminster. You could say I’m from lots of places, and call none of them home.” His eyes danced as they studied Jim.

  And for one moment Jim was so sure he saw invitation in them, he had lifted his right hand and placed it on Toby’s chest before he was even aware of what he was doing. The gesture was done before he could stop himself, and in the next split second he actually waited for Toby to jump back and perhaps even lash out.

  Instead, Toby’s left hand covered Jim’s, holding it there on his chest, and the moment stretched on and on, a year long, as Jim felt the old familiar jolt of excitement which always thrilled through him when like recognized like. Warmth flushed outward from his belly, reaching his cheeks as well as points much further south, and he watched Toby’s lips curve into a smile.

  Oh, yes, like knew like. The moment could have been a flash of summer lightning. Jim could almost taste Toby’s kiss on his own mouth when footsteps raced up to the kitchen door, and it was Jim himself who jumped back with a scant second to spare before little Danny Flynn dove in.

  Breathless, clutching a stitch in his side, he flopped down on the stool Jim had recently vacated. “I found the doctor,” he panted. “Right behind us, ’e is – ’e were saddlin’ up a nag when I left ’im, and ’e were comin’ right ’ere, no stops.”

  “That’s well run, Danny,” Jim said ruefully, sharing a glance with Toby. “Now, you take a pastry and an apple, and then be off home. Mind you don’t spend your largesse all at once!”

  It would be toffee and liquorice, he guessed. Boys were always the same. Danny would spend his penny one farthing at a time and hide in the hedgeback to eat his sweets, where his many siblings would not see and want to share. The boy grabbed a wedge of pie and an old apple from the crate in the corner, and rushed out as fast as he had rushed in.

  “He’s a good lad,” Toby observed.

  “He is.” Jim forgot the child at once, and was intent on Toby. “Well, now.”

  “Well, now, indeed,” Toby agreed, and licked his lips, a tiny giveaway gesture. “I knew I was right about you.”

  “But you never want to speak, not till you’re sure,” Jim added.

  “Because the consequences can be dire,” Toby finished, and shadows chased swiftly across his face before he could hide them.

  Jim’s humor sobered fast. “Damnit, you’ve been caught?”

  “Me?” Toby’s face shuttered. For several moments he did not speak, and when he did, it was in an odd tone. “It takes a terrible fool to have to learn by his own mistakes, Master Fairley. One learns not to be quite so stupid.”

  Which told Jim everything, and nothing. “A couple of lads were flogged for the sin of fornication just last year, at the assizes,” he said bitterly. “You soon discover how to be careful.”

  “You do.” Toby was listening. “I hear a horse.”

  “That would be John Hardesty, as good as his word.” Jim set down his cup. “We’ve brought him out here on a wild goose chase. I’ll go and tell him it’s too late. You might have a word with Marcus Stiles, the undertaker, so at least they know what name to write in the parish record book. A name is better than nothing.”

  “Marguerite Fergo,” Toby said sadly, “age 22, or 23, lately of the city of Corunna. May she rest in peace on this foreign shore.”

  “And what the hell was she doing
here?” Jim wondered.

  “A very good question,” Toby whispered, but although the look on his face suggested he knew exactly what the girl had been doing on the Dorset coast, he was not about to breathe a word of it.

  With a smothered curse Jim stepped out into the tavern yard, where the shadows were short and the full sun had warmed the bricks at the back of The Raven. He leaned his shoulders there, waiting to see Hardesty’s tall chestnut horse as he came around from the path.

  Moments later he called the man’s name. “John! It was good of you to come, but I’m afraid we’ve only wasted your time today. The little waif died not long ago.”

  Hardesty was a big man, thick-set – fifty, with a face tanned brown as a walnut and deeply seamed. He had spent twenty years as an army surgeon, and had a piece shot out of his shoulder to show for some battle where he had actually grabbed up a musket and fought when the hospital was overrun. With a couple of brandies under his belt he liked to show off the scar, and would shrug out his waistcoat and shirt, displaying a torso only just beginning to run to flab. He wore a well-powdered gray wig which covered a scalp that had long ago shed most of its own hair; his coat was the color of a fox and his boots were thigh-high and polished till Jim thought he could have shaved in them.

  “Wasted me time, have you?” Hardesty was hitching the gelding to one of the big iron rings set into the wall. He spoke with a Bristol accent, and gave Jim his hand. “She was just a young girl, so Joe Flynn’s lad said.”

  “A Spanish girl, according to a guest of mine who recognized her, quite by chance,” Jim said thoughtfully. “Mrs. Clitheroe said she was ill when she appeared out of the night, wanting pennies to go to the apothecary this morning. Alas, she didn’t live long enough to make it.”

  “That’s a shame, that is,” Hardesty said with genuine regret. “Will I take a look at her?”

  “It’s a bit late for a doctor’s attentions,” Jim remonstrated.

  “But we might want to be sure she didn’t die of anything catching,” Hardesty mused. “There was yellow fever on a ship that got in from points west, just three or four days ago.”

  “Yellow fever?” Jim echoed, and pointed Hardesty at the coach house. “She’s in there, waiting for the undertaker.”

  He fell into step with the doctor but hung back at the door as Hardesty went inside. The girl lay under a coach rug, decently covered now. Leave it to Edith Clitheroe to think of the niceties.

  “Is there anything you need?” Jim offered doubtfully.

  Hardesty had stooped to lift down the rug and look at the girl’s face, and he swore softly. “Poor little mite – so young and so pretty. And no, Jim, there’s nothing I need. At first glance, I’ll be buggered if I know what she died of, but it wasn’t yellow jack. Be grateful for that much.”

  “Amen.” Jim craned his neck but could see nothing.

  “She’s wearing an ugly big bruise,” Hardesty mused a moment later. “Did you get a look at it?”

  “I didn’t get close enough to her,” Jim admitted.

  “Great black bruise on the side of her neck,” the doctor told him as he set the blanket back into place. “She’d been roughed up, by the looks of her. A pound gets you a penny, she was injured in some bit of nasty business, and it just took a day or three to put her in the ground. There’ll be a man behind this, you mark my words. Women are such fragile creatures. Lay a blow on them that a man might easily weather, and it’ll be flowers in the churchyard come Sunday. Damnit, if she’d been alive, I’d have winkled the name out of her. I’d’ve been pleased to take it to the captain at the garrison, and get the man three months in Newgate Prison for beating her. Six months, if I could browbeat the judge into a moment’s decency.”

  And now it would have been a rope around the neck of the same man, for the crime of murder, Jim thought, save that the girl had taken the secret to the grave with her. The bastard would never pay the price. He had caught one glimpse of Marguerite Fergo as Hardesty held up the blanket. She had been lovely, quite pretty enough to be caught in the snare of becoming the doxie of one man after another. It was a bad life, often filled with danger, and when a girl’s looks faded with time, what would become of her? Jim sighed as Hardesty settled the rug and stepped back.

  “Well, I’ll tell Captain Dixon,” he was saying. “I’ve got to go into Exmouth anyway, tomorrow, so it’s no trouble to call in and see Roger. He has a horse he wants to show me … he knows I’m too soft hearted to let an old warhorse go to the knacker’s yard for the sake of a few shillings and a feed in my paddocks.”

  “Sorry to have brought you out,” Jim began.

  But Hardesty would hear none of it. “It’s a glorious April day, and a good stretch of the legs. Though, I wouldn’t say no to a pint of ale and a piece of last night’s treacle pudding, if you’re offering.”

  Jim beckoned him toward the kitchen. “I’m offering! And thank you, John. It’s good of you to be here for a young girl neither of us knew.”

  But Toby had known her, Jim mused, and the thought dogged him through luncheon and on into the afternoon, when Marcus Stiles arrived with his cart and a cheap pine box. Toby talked at length to the undertaker, telling all he knew of the girl, which was not really so much.

  A plain wooden marker would stand in the churchyard. It would say, ‘Marguerite Fergo of Corunna, age 23, died this 22nd day of April in the Year of Our Lord 1769.’ Stiles was writing down everything Toby could tell him, and Vicar Morley would record every word faithfully in the parish register. The girl would be interred tomorrow or the next day, and in a week the incident would be forgotten.

  Forgotten, Jim thought, by all but Toby Trelane. And Toby’s face was dark as a thundercloud as he watched Stiles’s vehicle rumble away. It was very obvious he knew a great deal more than he was saying, and a shiver assaulted Jim as he watched from the front windows of The Raven. The cart rattled off, drawn by a big black horse which walked patiently behind the undertaker, back towards Exmouth. Toby stood right in the middle of the path that followed the great sweep of the bay, watching Stiles’s vehicle out of sight as if he expected to see something. Jim could not imagine what, and not knowing troubled him.

  He listened with half an ear to Hardesty’s chatter about a racehorse, foxhunting, a fighting cock that had won him the princely sum of two guineas, and the lord of the manor, whom he would not name, who went to France to buy brandy and came back with the worst case of clap Hardesty had ever seen, despite his twenty years of treating soldiers.

  The gossip was interesting enough, but Jim could not concentrate on it, not when Toby was standing in the sun right outside the windows, with his hair shining like gold and every line in his lean young body calling to Jim with the allure of the forbidden, the delicious, the very fruit that had seduced Eve herself.

  Chapter Six

  The sky dimmed in the late afternoon, and the sea air grew chill an hour before rain began to pelt the thatch. Such weather in the evening was usually bad for business, and by five Jim had resigned himself to sharing a rum with Fred Bailey before he locked the doors early and took up the challenge of Toby Trelane.

  But at six the laborers from the nearby farms began to duck in out of the drizzle, and by half after he was seeing faces from the villages within easy walking distance. A cauldron of stew was bubbling on the kitchen fire, full of pickled pork, onions and dumplings, and farthings began to rattle into the coin box. Jim lifted a brow at Toby as he poured a fifth mug of ale in three minutes, and Toby answered with a small, flourishing bow.

  The locals were eager this evening. The same customers were back, and they had brought twenty more. On a night when Jim would usually have sat by his own hearth, watching the fire and listening to the wind in the chimney, the tavern was busy. At least for a while, the balladsinger was going to be good for business.

  Tonight he sang a Spanish tune about a young girl whose lover went to war and had not yet returned, and perhaps never would, then launched into a ribald mon
olog concerning ‘a farmer from Dorset who needed a corset, his back was all twisted and bent; along comes a lady who looks a touch shady, but has stays that’ll lace ’round the gent. Then, right up from Dover a black Irish rover arrives with a nod and a wink; says, “What a surprise, you’re a sight for sore eyes in pink corsets … might I buy you a drink?”’

  The more the rum flowed, the better his audience liked the bawdy humor, and Jim wondered how many more of these songs Toby knew. But it was the end of the story of Diego Monteras they wanted to hear. Before he could sing again they sent him pie and ale, and had him retell the first half for benefit of those who had missed it. The food was soon dispatched, and Toby pulled up the stool as he launched into the end of the adventure.

  With a familiar sense of amusement Jim settled to listen, and for half an hour Toby spoke of pirates and Spaniards, priests from hell and murderous angels, witches, ghosts, strange magic and hellhounds.

  Sir Geoffrey Gaunt took the Queen’s commission and returned to the Caribbean on the spring winds of the year following. He chased the treasure of Diego Monteras for three years – along the way, he found a haul of gold and diamonds that would have warmed the cockles of Queen Elizabeth’s notoriously avaricious heart, but he never found the treasure which Monteras and Francisco had buried.

  And in the final season before he called an end to the expedition and headed east, the letter and the fragment of map vanished. They were stolen, so went the story, and though Gaunt never knew for sure who had taken them, he suspected a merchant from Florence who had gone out to the Indies for exotic goods to please the rich Italian markets.

  There, the story of the treasure of Diego Monteras reached its end, but Jim saw a wicked glitter in Toby’s eyes and he could guess what was coming.

  “It’s still out there,” he said to his rapt audience. “The most dazzling haul of gems, beyond anything the King of Spain himself could imagine, is still out there, waiting to be discovered by a lad – perhaps even one of you in this very tavern, tonight – who can hunt down the bit of map, make sense of its clues and follow it to a bay on the landward side of an island off the east coast of the Americas.