They shifted about apologetically. ‘We didn’t recognize the carriage or pair, sir. Tain’t usual to see a strange carriage hereabouts travellin’ as late as this …’
‘This carriage belongs to Miss Howard,’ Turnbull said briefly. ‘Miss Howard is the granddaughter of Spencer Blake, and is now living at Blake’s Reach. I’m sure you’ll recognize it in future and give Miss Howard any assistance she may need.’
The lantern went high again. Two hats were pulled off sheepishly, as they ducked in semblance of awkward bows. ‘To be sure, Miss Howard …’ and, ‘Welcome to the Marsh, Mistress … I remember your mother. Most folk on the Marsh remember her.’
As they drove on again, Jane could hear Robert’s tongue click disapprovingly; he shook his head.
‘No wonder smuggling has such an easy time of it when they’re the sort who go into the Revenue service … the pay’s wretched, and most of the time they know they’re against hopeless odds. I imagine in their place I’d stick to the alehouse, too.’
‘Do you think the Dragoons will come?’ she said faintly.
‘In time, I suppose. Then they’ll argue and finally decide where they’ll go and look for the lugger. And by this time everyone in the ale-house knows their plans, and I’m certain the smugglers do as well.’
‘You think so?’
‘Almost certain ‒ most people on the Marsh would rather hinder a Revenue man than help him, and they can pass the word along with greater speed than you’d believe. This game is hundreds of years old, Jane, and so far the smugglers have managed to stay ahead of the Revenue.’
She licked her lips, feeling the sweat break all over her body. She thought of Paul gathering his men quietly to await the lugger, watching and cursing the moon. She imagined the forms of men stumbling in the darkness under the weight of brandy casks, and then the faint jingle of harness as the soldiers rode, with the moon striking on their muskets. Robert was certain that the word had been passed along ‒ but had it been passed? If the cargo was captured she was not only penniless, but in debt, condemned to fighting a hopeless battle against the ruin of Blake’s Reach, and with it, herself. And for Paul it was the end of the dream of escape. Did he know that? ‒ did he know?
She looked across at Robert. ‘How do you know so much of what goes on on the Marsh ‒ those Revenue men, you knew them, didn’t you? And the Captain of Dragoons … and everyone else, I think.’
He shrugged. ‘I have time to know them, Jane. I’ve been here for many years, and many people have come to me in trouble. But it’s not only those who sit in my office I know.
‘I like to ride, and a man alone out here on the Marsh observes a great deal, and makes many acquaintances ‒ some of them strange ones. I see a labourer’s wife with a swollen belly, and pretty soon I can lean over the garden gate and admire the new baby ‒ and maybe I have some toy for it to play with. I travel constantly between these towns all over the fringe of the Marsh, and I eat where my fancy takes me ‒ I don’t care whether it’s The Wool Pack with Johnson’s best wine, or bread and cheese at an ale-house. People know that a man without wife or child of his own can spare time for them and their problems. They know there’s nothing waiting for me in Rye but a housekeeper who daren’t open her mouth against the irregular hours I keep. And if the dinner she cooks is spoiled, then it’s spoiled ‒ and as long as I pay for it, I’m the one who’ll say how it’s to be disposed of.’
‘A free man …’ Jane murmured.
He shrugged. ‘As free as man can be … and as empty.’
After that they sat through the miles to Blake’s Reach and did not speak, each completely wrapped in thoughts that were their own, and not to be shared. The heavy clouds crept slowly on the horizon; sometimes a light wisp darkened the moon. The willows along the dykes swayed and sighed. Out on the Marsh somewhere a dog howled. At Appledore the elms were stiff against the moon; the scents of summer were in the air, the heavy smell of flowers, and sweat, and dry crops in the fields. For Jane, the scene was touched with melancholy, a strange static feeling of deadness before some momentous action. She found herself at times holding her breath; it would have been a comfort, she thought, to reach out and touch Robert’s hand, but she did not. Mostly she thought about Paul. If the lugger they talked of was the Dolphin, Paul was a few miles from here, and in danger. Perhaps it was danger he knew of, and had deliberately counted and calculated the risk. She considered all the other nights he had been in danger, and realized that only this one seemed real to her; always before it had been an anonymous, unknown danger in which she could not share. Now she had seen the Dolphin, lovely and built for a purpose; she had seen the village where the boats would land. Danger now had a shape, an identity, and a place.
She was frightened, badly frightened ‒ and for the moment, quite helpless. The carriage turned up the hill to Blake’s Reach.
Robert lingered to share a glass of wine with her. They sat in Spencer’s sitting-room ‒ altered now, somewhat, neater, but still his room, a frowning place. It was while she sat twisting the glass, drinking little, that the idea came to her. She wondered why she had not thought of it before, and then knew how strongly Paul’s wishes had rested on her. The feel of life began to flow through her again, a tingling in her veins, a heightened sense of time passing.
She shifted impatiently in her seat.
Robert looked at her, and then rose. ‘Yes, Jane ‒ I’ll go now. I’m quite well aware that for the past five minutes I’ve not been here at all as far as you knew or cared.’
Then suddenly he leaned over and kissed her fully on the mouth, a firm, hard kiss with no tenderness in it.
‘I can kiss you now because it doesn’t matter to you. When you slip off into your own thoughts, Jane, don’t forget that I’m a man, and you are a very desirable woman.’
Then he turned and left her.
III
When Robert left her, Jane sat for some moments, even though each minute was important to her. She pressed her fingers to her lips feeling Robert’s hard, angry kiss again. There wasn’t time to think of all he had meant to convey in the kiss and his words, but she felt ashamed, and sad that he should have had to say these things to her. Then she rose, trying to pull her wits about her, and called to Patrick.
‘Is Kate in bed?’
‘Ay, she is ‒ and snorin’ fit to shake the rafters.’
‘Good! ‒ then …’ She broke off. ‘Patrick, pay attention to everything I have to say, and remember it! First of all, I think the Revenue men have caught up with Paul Fletcher. They’ve got wind of a cargo coming in to-night, and I’m certain Paul is landing it. I have to warn him. I have to go to him.’
A look of horror froze on Patrick’s features. ‘Blessed saints, you might get caught yourself!’
‘Not with Blonde Bess.’ She moved closer to him. ‘I have to go! … I’ve put five hundred pounds of Robert Turnbull’s money in that cargo, and I’ve no thought to see the man I love dragged off to prison.’ She gripped his arm. ‘Patrick, this night is everything for us ‒ you, as well as myself. If it comes off we stay at Blake’s Reach, we start to live, with real gold jingling in our pockets, and no bills unpaid. If we lose, we’re worse off than we’ve ever been, and I’ve no skill at a card table.’
‘Mistress, dear,’ he said in a low tone, ‘I’ll not have you expose yourself like this. I’ll go, Mistress ‒ I’ll take the message.’
She shook her head. ‘You don’t know the Marsh well enough ‒ you’d be lost, and might be captured. You don’t know the place where they’re bringing the cargo ashore. It would be madness, and a waste for you to go. Now, quickly, saddle up Blonde Bess!’
A pleading frown came to his face. ‘Mistress, just stop a little. If you go there ‒ to wherever the landing is ‒ you’ll be in danger you haven’t looked to yet. You’ll be seen by more than Mr. Fletcher. Some of the men will see you, even dark as it is. There aren’t many ladies hereabouts that ride alone on the Marsh, and they’ll start t
o guess. Would you have it known among a gang of smugglers that you were one of them?’
‘I am one of them,’ she said soberly, ‘and to-night I’ll earn my place there ‒ but they won’t know it! I’m going to wear your breeches and shirt, Patrick, and bind my hair up. With any luck they’ll never see me in the light, and they’ll never know who the strange boy was.’
He shook his head. ‘And if the dawn comes, Mistress ‒ what then?’
‘I’ll plan for that when the time comes. If I’m not back here when the house starts stirring, you’re to tell Kate I’m indisposed, and lying abed, and be sure you leave a window open for me at the front of the house …’ She ran her hand distractedly across her forehead. ‘Heaven help me, there’s a hundred details … you’ll have to think your way around them if anything goes wrong.’ Then she gripped his arm. ‘Wish me luck, Patrick ‒ and I’ll be lying safe abed by the time the sun touches our roof.’
He saddled Blonde Bess, and watched her go, cold and sick with fear for her. She had looked surprisingly slight in his old breeches and stockings, and the shirt with the sleeves rolled to the elbows. Her hair was bound up in a cloth in the way sailors wore it, and she had darkened her face and hands with soot from the chimney. Over all that she had wrapped the ragged cloak Kate wore outdoors in the yard in bad weather. Only the tips of her boots showed beneath it. When she was finished she looked a fearful sight; she didn’t in any way, he thought, resemble her mother now. Now she looked like some sexless spawn of the London gutter, an evil and desperate creature for whom he could feel no love. Miserably he saw her disappear into the darkness.
***
She headed towards Barham-in-the-Marsh riding astride on Jed’s saddle. It was a relief to feel the strong rhythm of Blonde Bess’s frame under her, to know the time of inaction was past. She wasn’t sure that she would find Paul or the Dolphin at Barham, but it was nearer than Langley. At the back of her mind was the question of what she would do if Barham was deserted ‒ Langley lay somewhere over beyond Dymchurch; she had never seen it, and never been there. There was also the thought that Langley was much nearer to Folkestone, and that perhaps the Dragoons were already there. She touched her heels smartly to Bess’s sides.
She rode with head bent, making the best pace she dared on those roads. The clouds had moved up from the horizon; heavy drifts blotted out the moon intermittently.
‘Paul will welcome it,’ she muttered, watching the faint light on the road ahead fade as a cloud with a heavy underside of rain moved across it … ‘But it could mean a broken neck for me!’
She pushed on, surprised to feel her body cold, although the wind did not seem strong. The road that forked to Rye was left behind, and vaguely, in short spells of moonlight, she could see the tower of Lydd church ahead.
‘Move, Bess! … move, sweetheart!’ she whispered, leaning low to the mare’s ear.
Lydd was silent and shuttered, the church dark behind the screen of elms. She listened fearfully to the clatter Bess’s hoofs made against the cobbles; she urged Bess to greater speed to carry them away from the menace of those still houses. They were free of the town at last, and Barham lay ahead. Soon she caught the smell of the sea, the smell and tang that conveyed a sense and a memory of Paul to her; soon she would hear it ‒ and hearing it remember that for Paul it was the sound of freedom. As her straining ears caught the vague, distant murmur, a new thought came. Abruptly she slowed Bess to a walk.
If the Dolphin lay off Barham and Paul intended to unload it here, there would be look-outs posted. It was possible that there would be a road-barrier, or if warning of the Dragoons had reached Paul, there might even be a trip wire stretched across the road. The thought of what it could do to Bess’s legs frightened her; she slipped down and took the bridle to lead the mare.
The deep quiet remained unbroken; there were no lights and nothing seemed to move in the town ahead. The thickening clouds parted for a moment She scrambled up on a stony dune to get a vantage point from which she might catch a glimpse of the Dolphin. Briefly she saw the empty expanse of the moonlit Channel, before the clouds closed up once more. It was then she heard the sound she had been waiting for ‒ the crunch of heavy boots against the hard ground.
Except for that one sound they were silent ‒ and speedy. Bess’s reins were pulled from her hand at the same moment that a strong pair of arms pinioned her own. Her short cry was stifled by a hand clapped over her mouth ‒ a hand that had the ageless smell of the sea worn into it. She could feel them looming above her in the darkness; there were two of them, and a third who held Bess. She knew then the first moment of true fear that night. There seemed nothing that would stop the blow that would knock her unconscious so that they could bind her wrists and ankles with ease and speed.
She took the only way of saving herself. Wriggling desperately, she half turned so that the free hand of the man who held her encountered the full roundness of her breasts under Patrick’s thin shirt He paused in only an instant’s hesitation; then he ripped the shirt open to the waist and she felt the calloused palms explore her bare skin.
She heard his swift intake of breath. ‘Fer Christ’s sake … Hold it, Tim! Bring the lantern!’
The man who held Bess brought out a lantern from the folds of his cloak. Three sides of the glass were blackened, so that the light could be cut off by holding the fourth side against his body.
‘’Ere! You feel this ’ere, Tim!’ And then another hand was on her, a hand that after a second of surprise, began to fondle her with rough eagerness, so that even in her fear she felt her nipples rise and harden.
‘’Old the lantern up! … No! ‒ turn it away from the sea, y’ fool!’
They lifted the lantern cautiously, and she felt the cloth pulled off her head. Her hair fell heavily about her shoulder. ‘A girl! Fer Christ’s sake! ‒ a girl!’
‘Well, watdidya think, with them two poinin’ at yer. Or meby y’ was thinkin’ t’ look further. Meby down here …’
He put his hand on the belt Jane had hitched around Patrick’s trousers.
‘Cut it out, y’ fool. This ain’t no whorehouse ‒ this ’ere’s business.’
‘I wouldn’t mind doin’ a bit o’ business with this one right now. I’ll be bound she wouldn’t be unwillin’ too long. Not from wot I felt … and these red-heads get wild.’
‘Shut yer mouth! We don’t even know ’oo she is ‒ or wat she’s doin’ ’ere.’
‘Well, ask ’er! Take yet big paw away, an’ ask ’er!’
He removed his hand from her mouth, though he still held both her arms tightly behind her back.
‘Co’mon, now. Spit it out! ‒ whyarya ’ere?’
She took a deep breath and pitched her voice to the slower sing-song tone heard in the kitchen of The Feathers.
‘Take yer filthy big mitts off o’ me, and take me to Paul Fletcher. I’ll ’ave a thing or two t’ say about the way the men he hires do their jobs, y’ no-good bunch o’ slobs …’ She followed it with a string of obscenities that the stable-hands at The Feathers would have admired.
‘’Ere! You shut yer mouth, y’ filthy little bitch. ’Oo says we can take y’ to Paul Fletcher! ’E ain’t ’ereabouts!’
‘Aw, come orf it,’ she said. ‘I know ’e’s ’ere, an’ I’ve got a message t’ deliver to ’im!’
‘’Oo sent y’?’
She had her answer ready. ‘Adam Thomas ‒ y’ know Adam Thomas, of Appledore!’
‘Then y’ ain’t speakin’ the truth! Adam Thomas ain’t been in these parts fer months past.’
‘D’ya think I don’t know that! I’m a cousin o’ his ‒ Liza Thomas’s me name. I live beyond the Marsh, up towards Tenterden a bit, and when ’e cleared out a few months back, I took a notion t’ go with ’im. We been in London ‒ together. An’ now Adam’s all fixed to slip across the Channel to Roscoff as an agent for a gentleman as I won’t mention now. ’E and me ‒ we’re goin’ together. An’ ’e picked up this information, and
I’m carryin’ it t’ Paul Fletcher. An’ y’ll kindly get out o’ me way, or Mr. Fletcher’ll likely pin yer ears back when ’e knows what I’ve t’ tell ’im.’
She looked at them challengingly, daring them to defy her confidence. They looked uncertainly from one to the other, then she felt the grip on her arms slacken.
‘There! That’s more like it!’ she said, looking at the circle of wary faces. She drew the shirt back across her bosom, fumbling for the missing buttons.
‘An’ y’ can just lower that lantern now, because y’ve all looked y’er fill. That sight’s only for those as ’as gold to jingle in their pockets. An’ if y’ll just lead me now to Mr. Fletcher, I’ll say nothin’ more about what y’ done t’ me.’
They exchanged glances. ‘Well, can’t do no ’arm ‒ an’ she’s better under our eye than lettin’ ’er go …’
‘Seems fishy t’me. Ain’t never ’eard of Adam Thomas an’ Paul Fletcher gettin’ together …’
‘An’ why should y’!’ she retorted. ‘Since when ’as Mr. Paul Fletcher taken to discussin’ his affairs with the likes o’ you three?’ She wrapped her cloak about her. ‘Come now ‒ git movin’. I’m not a patient woman, as y’ll find out if y’ delay me any longer.’
Mistrustful, sullen, they yielded then. ‘Well ‒ com’on, then! Tim, y’d best stay to keep look-out, and we’ll take the girl and the ’orse along.’
They moved in single file. The man with the lantern was first; it was held low, and its beam carefully directed away from the sea. Jane was next, and the second man followed her closely, leading Bess. Without a word they entered the outskirts of the village, past the small shuttered cottages, and the single inn. The white shingle was in sight now, gleaming faintly as the small waves lapped it. She had expected that they would go straight towards the beach, but instead the leading man turned aside abruptly to follow a white pebble path that wound through tall grass. The high building that loomed suddenly in the darkness she recognized as the square towered church Paul had pointed out from the sand dunes. They ignored the great main door, and followed the path to the side of the building. Then the man in the lead started down a flight of stone steps that led to the crypt. She guessed that it also led to the entrance to the tower.
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