“Why would anyone make a fake inventory?” I asked curiously.
“For the same reason smugglers smuggled,” Horatio replied. “The reason being: money. There’s a collector’s market for everything, and items related to smugglers have become very popular over the years.” He returned the notebook to me. “I reiterate, however, that your document is almost certainly authentic. I hope the Hancocks will donate it to a museum. Once it is properly analyzed, I have no doubt that it will contribute greatly to our knowledge of the history of smuggling in Shepney.”
“Do you think it was Godfrey’s?” I asked.
“I do not,” said Horatio. “While Godfrey Shuttleworth facilitated the dark trade, he did not participate in it.”
“I wonder if it belonged to Captain Pigg?” I said, slipping the inventory into my shoulder bag.
“Most unlikely,” said Horatio. “The inventory lists contraband goods from a number of different sources. Josiah Pigg would not have recorded anyone’s cargo but his own.”
“So he was a smuggler,” I said. “I wasn’t sure. Jean Hancock referred to him as a brigand, and her daughter called him a pirate.”
“Josiah Pigg was neither a brigand nor a pirate,” said Horatio. “He was a mild-mannered fisherman who made a small fortune from the smuggling trade. He wisely retired before he ran out of luck, but the rather splendid home he bought in Shepney was wasted on him. He preferred the pub’s hearth to his own. He spent his sunset years at The King’s Ransom, telling tall tales about his maritime adventures while drinking himself into an early grave.”
“Did he drink geneva?” I asked. “If geneva is a drink. It’s included in almost every list in the inventory, but I don’t know what it is.”
Horatio knew.
“Geneva or, to give it its proper name, jenever, is the traditional liquor of the Netherlands and Belgium,” he said. “It’s an early form of gin, and it was enormously popular in eighteenth-century England. I suspect that Captain Pigg drank an astonishing quantity of jenever, though legend has it that he favored brandy.”
“One moment,” said Christopher. He’d been silent for so long that I’d almost forgotten he was there.
“Yes, Bishop Wyndham?” Horatio said in the tone of voice he must have used to encourage a shy student to speak up in class.
“While Shepney’s elevation was advantageous to the men making deals at The King’s Ransom,” Christopher said, “it would present a daunting obstacle to those transporting heavy kegs of liquor by horseback, would it not?”
“It would,” Horatio agreed, “but smugglers didn’t haul their cargo up the ridge, Bishop Wyndham. The packhorse drivers either carried on along the road through the valley or transferred their cargo to river boats at the base of the ridge. From time to time, they would store full or partial loads in the caves.”
“Caves?” I said blankly.
“Ah, yes,” said Christopher with a knowing nod, “limestone.”
“I see that you have a grasp of geology, Bishop Wyndham.” Horatio gave Christopher an approving nod before turning to address the class dunce. “Caves are a common feature of limestone formations. Shepney’s limestone ridge is riddled with them, but most are quite small. Smugglers used Shepney’s larger caves as temporary storage facilities, just as they used haystacks, church crypts, table tombs, concealed cupboards in private homes, and holes dug in sand dunes.”
“They hid their loot in table tombs?” I said, appalled. “What did they do with the remains?”
“I imagine they shoved them to one side to make room for the loot,” said Horatio, with a touch of asperity. “They regarded the sanctity of the churchyard as nothing more than good cover. By now it should come as no surprise to you that smugglers were not regular churchgoers.”
I heard only half of what he said because the phrase “good cover” had triggered a sequence of words in my mind: bus tours, ghosts, escape tunnels, caves . . . I wasn’t sure what the sequence meant, or if it meant anything, but when I put it together with the exchange I’d witnessed in the narrow passage off the high street, I began to have my suspicions.
“Are the smugglers’ caves still accessible?” I asked. “Or have they been sealed off, like the inn’s tunnels?”
“A few caves have collapsed,” said Horatio, “but none, to my knowledge, have been sealed.”
“Horatio?” Ursula sounded as frustrated as a customs officer searching The King’s Ransom. “There’s a French bloke up front. I can’t understand a word he says, but he won’t stop pestering me. Will you talk to him?”
“Bien sûr! On parle français ici,” said Horatio. “My friends, if you will excuse me, I must attend to a customer.”
“Of course you must,” said Christopher. “We’ve taken up more than enough of your valuable time.”
“Not at all,” said Horatio. “It was an honor to review Shepney’s checkered past with you and your friend, Bishop Wyndham. Please feel free to drop in for a chat whenever you’re in Shepney.” With a flash of lemon-yellow socks, he got to his feet and followed Ursula to the front of the shop.
Christopher stood as well, but I remained seated on my four-legged stool, staring intently at a bookshelf without seeing it.
“Lori?” said Christopher. “Have you another question for Horatio?”
“No,” I said, “but now that we’ve discovered the meaning behind the inn’s sign, I’ve thought of something else for us to do—something a little more interesting than milking cows.”
Nineteen
Ursula’s French bloke was none other than Monsieur Renault. As soon as I clapped eyes on the fat little Frenchman, another word popped into my head: “Marseille.” When we reached the sidewalk, I swung around to face Christopher.
“I need Kenneth Cartwright,” I said urgently. “He told me he’d be at the village hall again today, doing volunteer work. Do you think you could persuade Rebecca Hanson to let him leave early?”
“I can try.” He cocked his head to one side. “I sense that you’ve had a revelation, Lori. Would you care to share it with me?”
“Not yet,” I said. “Not until I’m sure it’s worth sharing.”
“Very well,” he said. “I shall speak with Mrs. Hanson.”
He crossed the high street. I stayed behind, pacing up and down in front of the bookstore while keeping a weather eye on the village hall. Ten minutes later, Christopher and Kenneth trotted down the stairs, the latter looking as though he’d been sprung from jail.
“Crook,” I muttered as still another word fell into place.
“Success!” Christopher announced as he and the gangly teenager stepped onto the sidewalk. “Mrs. Hanson was only too happy to release her volunteer into our care. She said it was the least she could do to repay the debt she owed us for, in her words, ‘putting up with the old rascals yesterday.’”
“Hi, Lori!” Kenneth said cheerfully. “What’s going on?”
“I need someone who knows Shepney like the back of his hand,” I said. “You told me yesterday that you hunted for bones all over the place when you were a kid. Did you ever look for them in the smugglers’ caves?”
“Lots of times.” His eyebrows shot up expectantly. “Do you want to see the caves?”
“Yes, please,” I said. “Will you take me to them?”
“Absolutely,” he replied before adding a word of caution. “We may not be able to get into them just now. Three of the big caves are close to the river. They’re probably flooded.”
“Let’s find out,” Christopher proposed.
“Is it a strenuous hike?” I asked, giving my white-haired friend a sidelong glance.
Christopher caught my glance, clucked his tongue, and rolled his eyes heavenward. He lifted one foot to display his walking shoe’s rugged sole, then pulled a slender black flashlight from his coat pocket.
“You nee
dn’t worry about my hiking skills, Lori,” he said. “As you can see, I’m an experienced rambler.”
“I’m worried about your stamina, not your skills,” I told him frankly. “You dragged your feet when we climbed the stairs last night.”
“I wasn’t fatigued,” he explained. “I was the victim of my own greed. Put simply: I overindulged during dinner. Happily, I did not make the same mistake with breakfast.”
Kenneth intervened. “It’s an easy hike, Lori. My granddad can do it, and he uses a cane.”
Christopher put an end to the debate by sweeping his hand through the air and saying, “To the caves, Kenneth!”
Kenneth bounded up the high street like a happy puppy. When he realized he’d left the old folks behind, he kindly slowed his pace to match ours, and together we turned onto Church Lane. Bill’s car looked less forlorn in the daylight than it had in the evening gloom, and St. Alfege’s shone like a faceted gem. The flint shards in its walls had gleamed in the rain, but in sunlight, they glittered.
The houses beyond the church weren’t as postcard-pretty as Finch’s golden stone cottages, but they were, like the high street’s buildings, an interesting jumble of architectural styles. As we passed a tile-roofed redbrick cottage, it wasn’t hard to imagine poor old Mrs. Dodd tottering out of it to scan the night sky for bombers, and I could easily envision Captain Pigg looking down on his neighbors from the rather splendid Tudor house across the lane.
When I heard chickens clucking and caught sight of geese eyeing me beadily from a back garden, I recalled the villagers’ willingness to shelter farm animals during the flood. Nothing prepared me, however, for the sight that met my eyes when we left the houses behind.
The village occupied only a third of Shepney’s limestone ridge. The rest of the ridge was a grassy expanse of rough, open ground. The open ground was dotted with gnarled trees and a handful of windswept bushes that looked tough enough to survive a hundred cyclones. It had also been transformed into a veritable menagerie.
The farmers and their village allies had used temporary fencing to create spacious enclosures for cows, goats, pigs, horses, donkeys, alpacas, and llamas. The sheep, on the other hand, had been given free rein to graze wherever the grass was greenest. Their owners had no reason to fear that they might wander off into parts unknown, because a broad swath of farmland surrounding the ridge resembled an inland sea.
“Sheep island,” I said dazedly, as I took in the wondrous scene. “Remember, Christopher? Horatio told us that ‘Shepney’ means ‘sheep island’ in Old English.”
“I remember,” he said, sounding equally stunned, “but I didn’t fully comprehend its meaning until now.”
“It’s like a castle with a moat,” I said.
“No, Lori,” Christopher said softly. “The ridge is an ark.”
Kenneth, who was not quite as bowled over as we were by a sight he’d seen many times before, was studying the ridge’s north slope.
“The river’s gone down a good bit since yesterday,” he informed us. “They dredged it after last year’s flood, so it can handle more water. We may be able to enter one of the caves after all. It’s higher up than the others.”
“How do we get to it?” I asked, tearing my gaze from the marvelous ark to give him my undivided attention.
“Follow me,” he replied confidently. “You’ll want to watch your step as you go downhill. It’ll be slippery where the sheep have been.”
“Thanks for the warning,” I said.
I could tell by the way Kenneth spoke that he was proud of his knowledge and pleased to have two adults he respected depend on him. I hoped our outing would show him that in the wide world beyond his village, weirdos could find a place where they were valued.
I slung my shoulder bag crosswise in preparation for the hike, then followed Kenneth as he led us to the trailhead. The trail switchbacked downhill in long sections from the ridge’s flat top to its rocky, irregular base. Christopher’s knees must have been in good shape, because he had no trouble keeping up with Kenneth and me. Even so, I wasn’t ready to give him full marks as a hiker. The descent would test his knees, I reminded myself, but the ascent would test his lungs.
As we descended, Kenneth pointed out small caves I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d tackled the trail on my own.
“You don’t want to crawl into those,” he advised, with a certainty born of experience.
“Why not?” I asked. The answer was obvious, but I wanted him to have the pleasure of giving it.
“You don’t know what might be in them,” he said. “Floods drive all sorts of animals into the caves. You wouldn’t want to come face- to-face with a badger.”
“I certainly wouldn’t,” I agreed.
The river’s roar wasn’t nearly as loud as it had been when I’d stopped on the bridge, wondering what I should do to avoid being swept off the road by the gusting wind, but it was still loud enough to make me thankful that I didn’t live near it. The road I’d chosen as my shortcut to Rye was partially submerged, and the dry spots were littered with tree branches, fence posts, and tangled piles of miscellaneous debris. I would have felt worse for the farmers whose homes were inundated had I not known of the support they would receive from their neighbors.
The lowest stretch of the trail was a waterlogged mess, so Christopher and I tagged along behind Kenneth as he scrambled across a rock-strewn slope to a point directly below the village. I had no idea where he was leading us even after he came to a halt.
“Here we are,” he said.
“Where are we?” I asked, mystified by his triumphant expression.
“A smugglers’ cave,” he replied. “The only one that won’t be knee deep in water.”
He had to take me by the shoulders and turn me in precisely the right direction before I saw the cave. I pitied the customs officers assigned to find it. The cave mouth was camouflaged by scrubby shrubs as well as a fold in the hillside, and it was smaller than I’d anticipated, at least six inches shorter than I was, and no more than three feet across. Horatio Best would have been hard pressed to squeeze himself through it. Dennis Dodd would have been foolish to try.
Kenneth the proto-paleontologist pulled a flashlight from his jacket pocket. I imagined he never left home without one.
“Wait here,” he instructed us. “I’ll take a look inside to make sure it’s unoccupied.”
“What will you do if it’s occupied?” Christopher asked.
“I’ll leave,” he replied.
“Sound thinking,” said Christopher, with the faintest hint of a smile playing about his lips.
“The trick is to make a noise as you go in,” Kenneth explained. “Most animals will hide when they hear a noise.” Lit flashlight in hand, he bent low and entered the cave, calling softly, “Hello? Anyone at home? I’m not here to hurt you, and I won’t stay long.”
While we waited for him to return, I wondered what I would tell his mother if he was attacked by a badger. I hoped that convincing him to forgo tattoos would count in my favor, but it was a wan hope at best. I felt limp with relief when his very young face came into view, unmarred by tooth or claw.
“It’s all right,” he said. “You can come in.”
I drew my earthquake survival flashlight from my pocket, and Christopher drew his black flashlight from his. We switched them on simultaneously, but he motioned for me to enter the cave ahead of him. If I hadn’t known him to be a gentleman, I might have suspected him of being a coward.
A musty smell and the squelch of mud beneath my boots indicated that the rising river had reached the cave, though its waters had since drained away. I quickly discovered that I could stand upright, and that Kenneth, the tallest of us, had plenty of headroom. The cave wasn’t a cathedral-like cavern, but its diminutive entrance belied its size.
The patch of daylight falling through the cave mouth lo
oked like an illuminated welcome mat, but the rest of the cave was drenched in a darkness that made our flashlight beams seem like searchlights. When Kenneth began to describe the cave’s features with the help of his flashlight, I felt as if I were in a primitive planetarium.
“Chisel marks,” he said, shining his light on a row of deep gouges in the limestone ceiling. “Smugglers enlarged the cave by hand to make more room for their stashes.” The beam slid sideways to a black stain on the scarred ceiling. “Carbon deposits from a smuggler’s lantern.” The beam jumped to the cave mouth. “They would have hung a black curtain over the opening, to keep the lantern light from giving them away.” The beam traveled from the narrow entrance to a rockfall at the rear of the cave. “No one knows how big the cave was before the back part of it collapsed, but I’ve heard rumors that it was part of a tunnel system that ran up through the ridge to the village.”
My pulse quickened, and my mouth became so dry that I couldn’t speak. Unwittingly, Christopher spoke for me.
“Horatio Best told us that The King’s Ransom is laced with escape tunnels,” he said. “Were they part of the same system?”
“So they say,” Kenneth replied. “When I was little, I used to tap on the cave walls, hoping to locate a smugglers’ tunnel. I never found one. As far as I know, no one else has, either.”
“Perhaps they’re mythical,” Christopher suggested.
“The tunnels in The King’s Ransom are real,” Kenneth stated firmly. “James, the owner’s son, proved it to me. The previous owner, I mean, not the Hancocks.”
“Understood,” said Christopher.
Even with my brain whirling at ninety miles an hour, I was aware of the surreal scene unfolding before me. A bishop and a schoolboy, their pleasant faces transformed into grotesque masks by three wavering flashlights, stood in a dank, dark cave, calmly discussing escape tunnels once used by ruthless criminals. It wasn’t a situation I’d foreseen when Bill and I had set out for Rye.
Aunt Dimity and the King's Ransom Page 17