Kasey Michaels - [Redgraves 02] (15 page)

“It doesn’t matter. It would take a cannon to put a large enough hole in that man,” she told him, doing her best not to look back toward the shoreline. Not that she feared being transformed into a pillar of salt, but because she didn’t want to see Jacko’s smile again. “What on earth were you thinking, Simon? You all but accused him of being a Bonaparte sympathizer and, as naturally follows, a smuggler working with France. Thank God he wasn’t— I mean, he wasn’t, was he? Either way, I’m not quite certain what a water wagon is, but I think you might want to climb onto one.”

“Nonsense, Kate. You should be congratulating yourself on a brilliant stroke of inspiration, coming here today. We just made a friend, hopefully an ally.”

Kate tried to speak, but was too flustered to say more than, “A friend? You swore you didn’t hit your head yesterday!”

“Jacko and I understand each other. Now, tell me what you saw.”

There were ways to kill this man, there had to be. Because he was driving her insane!

“I saw seven cottages. I’ve seen them before because they’ve been there for as long as I can remember. Gideon leases them to fishermen, I’m fairly certain of that, or at least to people who want to live there for whatever reason they— Stop smiling! I know I’m saying smugglers could be living in those cottages. They certainly have before. Nearly everyone along the coast either smuggles or in some way assists the smugglers. Everyone knows that.”

“So everyone knows everything, but nobody speaks of any of it. That’s almost poetic. Anything else?”

“Anything else,” Kate mused as they walked their horses along a path leading back up to the very bottom of the West Run. She rather liked being tested this way; it was as if he valued her insights. “Yes. We were being ignored by the residents, which was clear enough. Even as we were being watched. Maude, the poor woman, was the only one out-of-doors and caught unawares when we arrived, or we wouldn’t have seen her, or Jacko, for that matter. Which, by the way, would have suited me to a cow’s thumb. The man makes my skin crawl.”

“He’s no smuggler, Kate. There’s a lot of things he is and was, I’m sure of that, and we’re probably safer not knowing, but he was here today for the same reason we were. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say the Society has been careless. As you said, everyone knows everything, and tells nothing. But word will travel irregardless, in certain circles. I’d like to meet his employer, he could be of help to us.”

“You must be joking. He’s bound to be even worse than Jacko, and that man would slit your throat as much as smile at you. Wouldn’t he?”

“I don’t think it would trouble him much, no. But only because a namby-pamby like me might get in his way as he goes about his business. Are you worried about me, Kate?”

“Naturally I’m worried—but not about you. It’s just that I’d have to explain to Valentine and Gideon why you ended up stuffed headfirst down a well when we were supposed to be hunting the journals, not smugglers.”

“I’ll leave them a note absolving you,” Simon said maddeningly. “Now, you observed nothing else? Really, Kate, you disappoint me.”

She sighed in exasperation. “I wasn’t finished. The beach is a mix of sand and shingle, except where the shingle appears to be more concentrated and somehow extended all the way up to the rear of the last cottage, I mean on the side that seems to end at the rocks, not the hill that borders the other side. It seems natural enough, I suppose, unless you’re really looking. I imagine it would be easier to unload boats onto the shingle rather than to have the landsmen—they’re called landsmen—have to slip and slide on wet sand and loose rocks.”

“And?” he prompted, making her long to choke him.

“And there’s precious little place for a tunnel, which could only go so far in any event because it eventually would have had to be dug uphill, and nobody digs a tunnel uphill because it would be too difficult to move the goods uphill. Plus, to dig so deep as to keep the floor flat? Not around here, because the ground is too soft to have so much of it overhead, or at least that’s what I’ve been told— And we saw what happened in the greenhouse,” she said, hating to admit that part of the thing. Discovering a tunnel would have been quite a feather in her cap.

“Very good. Keep going.
And?
”

She cudgeled her brain for something else to say. “And the cottages, all of them, sit too near the shore to consider them having cellars where contraband or people or whatever could be hidden until the landsmen could move everything inland. They may sometimes land a few boats here, but the sort of landing, the scope of it we’ve been thinking of, would have to be somewhere else. The area simply isn’t right.” She looked over at him, wincing as she repeated the word: “Right?”

“And?”

Now she was really angry. “There is no more
and.
There can’t be. Dare to send over a hundred men and pack animals up this hill and across the West Run, and it wouldn’t be long before you were discovered and taken to Dover to be measured for your hanging chains. Head toward Hythe, tunneling beneath the hill, and there’s too much civilization about. More and more cottages, and then the straggling beginnings of the town. Head the other way, and there’s all that rock. Rocks. Because they’re all just loose rocks and boulders piled on top of each other, everywhere. It’s as if every rock and stone and pebble found on the West Run, thousands and thousands of them, was lugged or dragged to the top of the funnel, and then allowed to roll down to the shore. For all we know, the Romans did it, or the gods.”

“You see the layout of this land as a funnel? The
gods?
And you say you aren’t romantical.”

Kate shot him a look that would have felled a lesser man.

“We’ll continue,” he said jovially, clearly pleased with himself and his grand idea, whatever that was. “You forgot to mention the considerable number of cleared trees, or at least their stumps, although they’re long rotted and gone. I think we could call that seeming outcropping nothing more than a large, some would say immense, sort of stone midden. A dumping ground. To the unobservant eye, that is.”

“Meaning mine? You’re right, I don’t see the point of all of this,” she admitted reluctantly.

“Then aren’t you lucky I’m here, to show off my brilliance,” he answered with a wink, again proving he was impervious to her most threatening stares.

“You’ll pay for that, Simon Ravenbill. I don’t know when, I don’t know how, but then again, neither do you. Think about that.”

They’d made it back to the tree on the hill, and without further comment Simon suggested they stop for a while before continuing on to the Manor.

“We’ve nothing to drink,” she reminded him as he helped her dismount and lifted the lid of the basket.

“That’s all right.” He foraged inside for two apples. “Want one?”

“I suppose so,” she said wearily, and then had to quickly catch the thing when he tossed it to her. “No end the gentleman, aren’t you,
Commander?
” she asked, rubbing the apple on her sleeve.

“So I’ve been accused, yes. Now, tell me what you see when you look back down toward the coastline. On shore, Kate.”

“Will you ever be done being cryptic? I’m weary of answering your questions. Clearly there’s nothing to see except the roofs and chimneys of the cottages, the hill running down to our left, your so-called
middens
on the right.”

“Correct. And, standing down on the beach, looking up here, all that could really be seen, as far as I could calculate when I was very slyly and surreptitiously checking—and making certain Jacko could see me slyly and surreptitiously checking—would be the very tops of these trees. Which means it’s safe to leave the horses here and go see the full extent of the midden from the top down, as I don’t think Jacko is the climbing sort.”

“You’re being annoying—again. Are you going to tell me why, or merely quiz me on what we find? Because, obviously, what’s on the other side of the midden, as you call it,
is
the other side of the midden.”

Simon tied up the horses and took her hand. “You’ll forgive me if I still want to see for myself. You saw the way the shingle seems to be more prevalent there, correct? But what if, rather than leading to the last cottage and some cellar or small cave, it led to the rocks?”

“Sideways along the coastline?” Kate held on to Simon’s coattails as they carefully made their way parallel to the shore for some minutes. The scenery never changed. There were loose rocks here and there, entirely too many prickly windblown bushes and a few stunted trees with most of their growth on one side. Ahead of and behind them; all around them. The area was less than hospitable, and no one would ever think to go strolling here unless some wandering sheep got itself stuck in the brambles or they were Simon Ravenbill, whose brilliance she was seriously beginning to reconsider.

Below them was a river of boulders; small ones, larger ones, many of them piled on top of each other, everywhere she looked. “Why would anyone dig a cave or tunnel sideways along the shore?”

And then Simon stopped, pulling her down with him behind a rotting tree trunk. He pointed to something in the distance, nearly at the shoreline. “Jacko,” she whispered, her heart pounding as she watched the man climb onto the seat of a small cart.

Simon nodded. “It would seem our sailor, like many others long committed to the sea, isn’t fond of riding. Rather than risk losing a wheel driving the rig around the outcropping of rocks, he very logically leaves it on this side, and reaches the cottage via the narrow beach. It certainly gives him a good explanation for why he’s so free to move about the area, although I’m sure he’s already raised some suspicion. Clever. Damn, I wish I had my glass. Now carefully watch where he’s going, and how.”

Wasn’t it strange, Kate thought, looking down this side of the hill, to the seeming unending field of rocks. She was looking down on a giant’s playground, her romantical side told her. They certainly made a mess with their toys, her more pragmatic side whispered in her ear.

Was this still Redgrave property? She imagined so. Yet it wasn’t at all welcoming. It had no beach at all, no safe landing place for boats. It was rocks to the shoreline; rocks, rocks, rocks. Where did Jacko think he was going? There was no way a cart and horse could thread through the jumble of rocks.

“Wait a moment, this is interesting,” she whispered. She was surprised to suddenly realize a narrow track threaded through the maze of boulders, the twisting, turning route Jacko was now traveling. “All right,” she said after Jacko and his cart had disappeared beyond another out-of-place small mountain of rocks and stone. At some point the track undoubtedly joined with another one, and then another, as he headed toward Dymchurch and Romney Marsh. “It’s your turn. What do you see?”

“If I wasn’t searching out anything in particular? I see, as I’m convinced you do, as well, a stretch of shoreline not suitable for landing boats. We saw the track leading toward Hythe, thanks to a more forgiving coastline beyond the hill in that direction. But I would imagine most would think the few cottages in the cove were the end of the line for a while. At least as far as constructing cottages in the area, or smuggling, when it seems much more logical to unload closer to Hythe, or sail on to Romney Marsh and land the boats there. Yet it’s all right here, under our noses, as Jacko has just so politely pointed out to us. The strange thing, Kate, is I never would have looked, never felt the least suspicion, if it weren’t for Jacko being here today. I wonder how he and his employer found it.”

“Found what? Are you saying someone dug a tunnel through all those rocks?”

“Not precisely. I’m saying some someones, obviously more than a few stout someones,
built
it. Hundreds of the boulders were probably already there, but they’ve had help in being piled that high. I’d hazard the barrier conceals thirty to forty feet of tunnel, or even some sort of crude lodging for patrols and the like. This area didn’t have its start as a midden, Kate. It was a sort of seaside fort, a crude, early version of a battlement. Brilliant in its day, too, but long abandoned. The tunnel, barracks, whatever, would also open onto the maze constructed out of all those rocks and boulders. Defensive, for the Romans. Since then, perfectly set up for smugglers. The largest haul could be stored there until the following night, then transported inland. If the water guard is in pursuit, sow the crop, sacrifice the boats and the tunnel is their escape hatch to the maze.”

“Sow the crop, as in tie the kegs together and lower them into the water and retrieve them later? And here I was, politely explaining smuggling terms to you. You could have told me.”

“I enjoyed the lessons. But I somehow doubt this area is known for what it was to many people at all. In fact, it may be known only to the Society, used only by the Society.”

Kate had to agree. “Because it’s only from up here, ruining our clothing with burrs and in danger of sliding down this near cliff, looking down at the beach, that we can see a pattern to it all.”

“Again, thanks to our new friend. Very, very clever, and if I’m right, more than a thousand years old. A lot can happen in a thousand years, Kate. The entire shoreline may have changed shape. What we’re seeing today may have been another half mile inland back then, for all we know. What was once a raw structure was worn by time and wind and storms until it became seamless with the landscape, and to the casual eye, useless. I’m going down there. But first I’m taking you home.”

She was still looking down at the so-called maze, mentally retracing Jacko’s path through the boulders. Had Roman soldiers, with their gleaming breastplates and metal helmets, once marched along the same route? Had there been campfires down there, possibly a few stone buildings long since destroyed? The man-made tunnel perhaps employed as a stable for their horses in inclement weather, or used to store grain and firewood? Yes. Yes, she could see it. Well, mostly.

Belatedly, her mind translated Simon’s last words to her. “Home? You are not!”

“Kate, don’t fight me on this, because you won’t win.”