Contraband Hearts Read online

  He was a homely child with large ears and a red, puckered birthmark, or burn, across one cheek that swept up his forehead into a patch of lost hair. When he craned his head around to snarl at Perry, it was a little like being menaced by a gargoyle. “That’s not true,” he gasped. “I done it. It was me on my own. She didn’t know it was there.”

  He was a gargoyle with a noble heart, though, trying to take all the blame so his stepmother and his family would not suffer. Perry’s insides tried to strangle him at the thought.

  In London he had searched ships for hidden compartments, and when he found them, he had faced only grown men who knew they were guilty, who faced the courts as an occupational hazard. It had not been within his knowledge or concern what the money raised from smuggling had been used to achieve. He had supposed it was done out of greed and shiftlessness—the unwillingness to get an honest job.

  But here, in this town where so many folk were barely scraping by, it all looked very different. If he threw the boy in jail, he would be a monster. If he took Mary in, a dozen orphans would be left starving, and he would be a monster.

  “They’ll buy this place from under me.” Mary spoke coaxingly, as if she could see Perry wavering. One hand gently stroked her boy’s head. “The Quicks’ve been after this pub for years. I can’t expect no mercy in court—he’ll use it as a way to get rid of me. My childer’ll be packed off back to the poorhouse, or to America. I can’t . . .” Tears came to her eyes. “I can’t abide the thought of—”

  So this was what they meant, the people of the town, when they said that Tomas was an honest man, even though they all knew he was a smuggler. As Jowan had said, here was the choice stark before Perry now, between the law and the dictates of his conscience. Anger struck at his spine like a snake. The law should protect people. It should not be the thing they needed protection from.

  “I . . .”

  To some extent the decision was made for him. He could not turn either of them in. Faced with that possibility, he simply could not. But what to do instead? He shut the accusing box, surprised by how small it was, when it felt like a fulcrum on which his entire world balanced. “I . . . found the box in . . .” Where? Where could he have found this that would not incriminate anyone in particular? “A mine shaft?”

  A hand landed on his back as if in congratulations and made him all but start out of his skin, though it was only Jowan, grinning like a new moon. “There’s a whole load of them little caves down along Big Guns Cove where you might find something and not know who’d put it there. I’ll show you ’em.”

  He patted Perry again, which was reassuring now Perry knew it was coming. “Don’t fret, lad. You done right. Knew you had a heart in you somewhere.”

  Mary let go of her child, shooed him out of the room as though to get him away before Perry could change his mind. She had been weeping for some time, silently, her face quite still, but the tears welling and descending in ruler-straight lines to drip from her chin. Now she raised her apron to her face and wiped them dry, sniffing. There was still a hint of mistrust in her gaze as she fixed it on Perry, as if trying to work out whether he would ask more for his silence than she was willing to pay. “I can’t thank you—”

  “Don’t,” he interrupted. “Just . . . obey the law in future. Don’t put me in this position again.”

  She gave a watery laugh, making him conscious of how desperate he had sounded, both of them raw in this moment where society’s expectations had failed them both. “I won’t,” she said, almost certainly agreeing only to greater caution in future. “But I were going to say that I heard you wanted news of the wreckers. By way of thanks, I had one of them new bully boys in last night—the ones that wear the cormorant feathers. I dursn’t tell you who it was, on pain of my life, but I will tell you this: go up to the Merope Rocks. Look between the one known as the Lizard Stone and the one known as Bloody Mary on a night of storms, and you’ll see for yourself.”

  Infuriatingly, after this hint, the weather set in so fine that the ships in the harbour were becalmed, and it was not worth rowing them out to the open sea for there was no breeze to be caught there either. Since this at least meant that Barnabas would not be shuffled on board and sailed out of Perry’s jurisdiction, he managed to be patient as day after day passed with no action.

  During this time, he made his rounds with Jowan and finally paid attention to what the man said, learning the unwritten rules of the town—who should be let alone because their lives were hard enough anyway, and who were fair game. They were not all sob stories. One cartel and two independent entrepreneurs were as professional and as avaricious as Perry’s adversaries in London, and he took great pleasure in finding and emptying their stores and thwarting the beatings he attracted in return.

  It gave him great pleasure too to find that Jowan’s good opinion of him spread by degrees to the other customs men, until he could go into the office and be sure to receive a chorus of mornings rather than a murder of glares.

  None of this completely drowned out the voice that accused him of having been corrupted, of having lost his honour and his honesty, but it let him walk the town mostly unaccosted, and grow familiar with its oily, fishy streets, growing protective of it as though it were his own possession.

  He was still unsettled in his inner self, aware that he was now avoiding investigating Tomas Quick’s enterprises for fear of having to precipitately make a decision about Tomas that he would have to live with for the rest of his life, when a little black page boy stopped him in the doorway of the Seven Stars.

  The boy was about nine-ish, an extravagant figure with madeup eyes, dressed in a brazen-orange silk suit. A white turban on his head was secured by a carnelian brooch from which the eyes of three peacock feathers protruded. Under the astonished gazes of the passersby, the boy seemed very solemn and uncomfortable, and his eyes went wide and perhaps wistful when he saw Perry. “You’re Mr. Dean? Mrs. Quick sent me to tell you that you must come and wait upon her at once. It’s urgent, and I am to say that you are not to delay a moment, or she will be displeased.”

  “And what will she do if she is?” Perry asked, wishing there was time for him to return to his lodgings to smarten up—he had got into the habit of wearing a kerchief over his hair instead of his wig, saving his full formality for Sundays. But he was aware that his reluctance ran deeper than clothes. A summons to his esteemed colleague’s house should be an honour, if not a delight, but instead it came with a dirty flood of guilt and dread.

  “She will not feed me, sir. And she will not allow the girls in the kitchen to go home after dinner. And we will all be very sad and uncomfortable.”

  “What’s your name, young man?”

  “Elijah, sir.”

  The child’s perfect diction and adult manner of speaking was charming. “Well then, Elijah, lead on.” Perry began with a smile, following the small figure onto the path to the Quicks’ mansion. But over the course of the walk, his face fell. Damaris kept the boy as a page? He had seen this in London; ladies kept “exotic” children as some combination of fashion accessory and lapdog. In that light, Damaris’s sending him to fetch Perry began to feel like an insult. See, I do not regard you as a colleague at all, but as an ornament and a possession. Now come at my call like a good dog.

  In mental turmoil as he had been for two weeks now, he feared he was being unjust, seeing slights that were not meant, but returning to the salmon-pink room was like walking into a dock. Once more, the whole family was there, this time with the addition of a fair-haired young man in a mint-green suit, who was, by his strong personal resemblance to Constance, probably her brother, Clement. The young people sat by the window, Clement reading, Constance stitching a sampler. Damaris was rigid as whalebone on her throne-like chaise, and Lazarus greeted Perry standing, and as his mother spoke he began to pace.

  “We shouldn’t have had to call you here, Mr. Dean,” Damaris began. She was today wearing a sack dress of gold silk that toned decorativ
ely with Elijah’s suit when he came and sat on a stool by her feet. “It has been almost a month. I should have hoped you would have results by now. What are you doing to get rid of this pirate we asked you to hang?”

  Treacherously, Perry’s lips chose that moment to tingle with the memory of Tomas’s kiss. In this stuffy room, the thought of Tomas was a bracing chill, a sense of light and sharpness, like the lemon in the icing of a lemon cake that prevented it from cloying.

  This was not an appropriate answer, but he licked his lips anyway. “I am having some difficulty in finding any evidence against him, ma’am. The townsfolk speak well of him. He is a benefactor of his church, a philanthropist, and as far as I’ve seen, a very public-spirited gentleman.”

  “‘Gentleman’!” Lazarus scoffed. “As if. He is the son of a common tar and an ex-concubine. You have a strange idea of what constitutes a gentleman. Though perhaps I should not be surprised about that.”

  Perry’s wish to stay on good terms with the rich and powerful of the county took a hammer blow at this, but he told himself that a certain amount of restraint, of humility, was always going to be necessary if he was to succeed in becoming rich and powerful himself. “You are correct, of course,” technically. “The man’s birth is nothing to boast of. But his efforts on behalf of the town seem sincere. Only the other day he approached me himself—though he knew I was investigating him—to let me know there were wreckers abroad. I turned my attention to investigating the wreckers because—”

  “It is not your job to stop wreckers.” Lazarus’s tight voice made whispers of guilt race along Perry’s backbone. Why exactly was he here defending Tomas when he, too, believed—no, knew—that Tomas was as guilty as Lazarus said? “It is your job to stop smugglers, and this one in particular. The man’s suborned you! I might have known.”

  It was true, but also unjust, inhuman. “Any man of sensibility would recoil from the idea of wreckers, sir. Are you not appalled at the great loss of life? It is murder on a grand scale, and surely far more heinous than—”

  “Keep your voice down, goddamn it!” Lazarus bellowed, making little Elijah flinch. “My daughter is delicate. I will not have you discussing such matters in her presence. You will distress her.”

  Automatically, Perry turned to regard the young lady. Her gold ringlets, gleaming in the light of the window, were almost the same colour as the polished telescope that lay beside her. She wore green today to match her brother, and its tint gave her a sickly look, bruising the bags under her eyes.

  He was quite ready to pity her, but then she raised her head and fixed him with a glare so cold it was like being speared by an icicle. He’d rarely encountered such venom in a gaze, and wondered what he could have done to merit it. Did the loss of life distress her so much she hated Perry for mentioning it? Or was he just getting in the way of her small concerns and she could find no empathy in herself for the larger world outside her doors?

  “Forgive me,” he gave in, weakened by second thoughts, keen now only to escape the room. “I will endeavour to do better in future.”

  “See that you do.”

  Thus reminded to do his duty and arrest Tomas, Perry’s first action should not have been to pay him a social call. He wrestled with the compulsion for a whole night before yielding to its inevitability and walking down to the pretty harbour-mouth cottage where his victim-cum-ally lived.

  This was a fine day, and the washing in the garden gave the place an air of a naval fleet setting out to sea, belling like sails in the brisk wind. He noted that the marigolds by the water butt had been augmented with several sawn-down barrels planted with herbs and flowers, blue and white, that made the white walls and blue door even more appealing. When he knocked, it was Iskander who answered, besom broom in his hands and an air of pride that must have something to do with facing the outer world, however briefly.

  Perry was uncomfortably aware that he didn’t know how to say Where is Tomas? in any language the boy understood, but before he could open his mouth and try anyway, Tomas came hurrying down the stairs, adjusting the knot of his cravat.

  “I saw you through the window,” he said, beaming like the sun, and Perry had to catch his breath because when he was away he forgot the exact lightning-crackle intensity of Tomas’s movement: lithe, precise but not delicate, making the hair rise all over Perry’s body from a foot away.

  Seeing Perry approach, had Tomas run upstairs to throw on better clothes? Because today he had put aside the long trousers and boots of his sailing gear and donned a dark-blue suit that made his bright hair shine like a flame. It, too, had been dressed neatly, caught up in a long clubbed plait.

  Perry dropped his gaze, and yes, there were the cuffs of tight breeches, and silver buttons, and then the long, slender curve of his calves outlined by silk stockings. Such legs!

  Tomas’s smile turned smug, catlike, and Perry snapped shut his open mouth. “I have a hint on the wreckers. Explain to me which is the Lizard Stone, and which Bloody Mary,” he said in an abrupt tone more suitable for an argument.

  “I’ll show you.” Tomas snagged a tricorn from the hooks on the vestibule wall. “I have just completed repairs on my jolly-boat, and I wanted to take her out. What do you say to a short voyage down the coast? We can buy some bread and fish in town and make it an outing.”

  “I’m meant to be at work,” Perry grumbled, though it was obvious to them both that he was not going to say no.

  “Well, this is work.” Tomas grinned. “No reason why it should not be an excursion too.”

  “What’s happening with the boy Iskander?” Perry asked, as they strolled together into the bakery and forewent bread and fish in favour of pasties with meat at one end and apple at the other. “He seems much at home. Did you free him only to have him become your servant?”

  Tomas laughed, tucking the wrapped pasties into his bag. “He fears his people would not take him back, gelded as he is. While he works up the courage to make the trial anyway, he seems to be growing ever more content in my own home. There’s even talk of him opening a milliner’s. I would lend him enough to make a start in that business if that was his wish, but at present my mother insists he is to be allowed to regain his nerve in peace and not hurried into decisions for which he is not yet ready.”

  He rolled his eyes, the picture of a man nobly surrendering to the whims of women. “I do what she asks—it’s easier.”

  “Do you think . . .” Even with the persistent awareness of Tomas’s presence like the warmth of a small sun on his side, it was a balm to Perry’s troubled mind to be able to walk and talk with him. The degree of ease Perry felt in his presence should be frightening, if he allowed himself to think of it, so he did not think of it, just basked. “Do you think we’ve already failed Barnabas? They will have sold him away by now, surely?”

  Tomas’s smile faltered. By now they had reached his jolly-boat, barely floating on a foot of water at the bottom of the cliff steps. He placed the food bag into it gently and, stepping in, held out a hand to Perry as though to stabilise him as he hopped across. It was a long, narrow hand just as Tomas was a long, narrow man, and the palm when Perry took it was rough, but accepting its steadying strength was like the first breath at the end of a fever, the first moment when one knew everything was going to turn out well.

  “What else is there for us to do but to carry on hoping for news, being ready to act if it should come?” Tomas shrugged in something less than despair, resignation, perhaps. When Perry settled on the coil of rope in the bow of the boat, Tomas raised the sail and, with halyard in one hand and tiller in the other, coaxed her to whisper forward out of the bay. “I admit I have never met a tougher nut to crack than this new organization. The locals are running scared. No one will speak up, not even in private—or when they do, they know very little themselves. Against such an anonymous force as this, what is there to do but hope and wait? A chance will come or it will not—and if it doesn’t, we cannot blame ourselves for that.”
r />   So easily you, too, wash your hands of responsibility, Perry thought, with a whole-body chill as though he was still in that cave cell, but the thought was unfair, and burnt away in the almost celestial flood of sunlight on water through which they passed, the sea chuckling beneath the hull.

  Since he had been looking out to sea—trying to spot the Swift—when he had sailed these waters on the Vigilant, it was new, and instructive, to see the coastline from this angle. The myriad dark flecks were caves in which contraband could be hidden, if one manoeuvred carefully enough past the rocks showing beneath the surface as mounds of creamy spume. At the very top of the cliffs, the coast path was visible, running in and out of sight like a grass snake, and when they rounded the headland, a white glimmer and a point of brilliant reflection was all that could be seen of the Quicks’ house: the admiral’s telescope in the window.

  About a nautical mile further on, they came upon a grouping of small islands rising from the sea like pillars. The first and the last were the largest, wide enough to have soil on their summits and grass or trees growing from their sides. Tomas lowered his sail and shipped his oars, rowing cautiously up to the first. At a closer examination, Perry could see the ladderlike steps in its side, a ringbolt secured to the rock at its base.

  He caught the ring as they approached, and Tomas passed him the painter to tie them up.

  “This is the Lizard Stone,” Tomas said, slinging the bag across his chest and clambering onto its slimy black shore. After steadying himself for a moment, he began climbing up the precipitous stairs, and Perry had no option but to follow. “The other large one is Bloody Mary. She’s the one foundering ships generally strike first. I wouldn’t like to try tying up to her, not even rowing.”

  Curious, Perry examined the stretch of coastline between the two. But from here, nothing stood out to him. He would have to return on foot and look at it more closely now he knew which it was. He returned his attention to the ascent, which was essential—for a stretch he needed to hold on with hands as well as feet.