Lady of Spirit, A (13 page)

“In on what?” Lizzie asked.

“Never mind!” Both men turned on her with a simultaneous exclamation.

“Gentlemen, we will change the subject,” Grandmother said in quelling tones. “Claude, if you distress your grandfather in this manner again, you will be taking your dinner in your room henceforth.”

“I believe I should prefer that in any case.” Claude rose and tossed his napkin down on his chair. “Good evening, Grandmother. Thank you for dinner.”

“Claude!” Grandmother half rose from her seat.

But he did not stop, and they heard his footsteps cross the hall, then a murmur. When Maggie heard the great front doors thump closed, she realized that he had gone out instead of going to his room.

The breaded plaice waited, untouched, on her plate.

She should have spoken up. She would have been disgraced for a couple of days, but at least she would have had the pleasure of going with Claude to … wherever he was going.

The Lady was right. Doing the right thing really wasn’t easy.

With a sigh, Maggie picked up her fork.

Maggie had fallen asleep after the massive clock in the hall had bonged ten times, but by the time it bonged once, she had already awakened and was pulling on her raiding rig.

“Are you really going?” Lizzie murmured sleepily from her side of the bed. “It’s cold.”

“It won’t be once you have your rig on. Are you coming?”

Lizzie groaned and pulled the quilts over her head. After a moment of motionless contemplation, she flung them back and got up, making a big production of shivering until she was buttoned into her black waistcoat and blouse, and had fastened her skirts up for freedom of movement.

Swiftly, the two of them braided back their hair. “It’s at moments like this that I wish I’d finished making that lightning pistol,” Maggie said. It still lay upon Lewis’s work bench at Wilton Crescent, where it was doing no one any good at all.

“Why, if we are only going to watch the cliffs, would you need a lightning pistol?”

“It never hurts to be prepared.”

“Prepared for potatoes and ale,” Lizzie grumbled, but all the same, she made sure they both had a moonglobe as they slipped downstairs and out the side entrance, where the staff came and went.

“Do you suppose Claude ever came home?” Maggie asked as they ran through the cook’s sweet-scented herb garden and out through the garden wall on the west side. It took a little longer to cross the expanse of grass and trees to the cliff-top, but she was not willing to risk going out through the rose garden under the watchful eye of their grandparents’ windows, which could be open.

“I never heard him come in—but since the men are in the other wing, we wouldn’t have, would we? Don’t worry, Mags, he probably went to a tavern to drown his sorrows and then out to
Victory
to sleep it off.”

The sea heaved against the foot of the cliff, still restless after the storm. The clouds were being chased inland by the wind, scudding across the face of the moon as though embarrassed to be caught in the light.

“If you were a boatload of potatoes, where would you land?” Maggie asked, not really expecting an answer. It seemed obvious—the tiny harbor formed where the cluster of stone houses tumbled to the sea. Where the red lights had come from someone’s window or roof. “If I were not doing it in daylight, in Penzance harbor like a respectable person, there is really only one safe place on this headland.” She pointed in the direction of the granite rock, a quarter mile or so away. “We’d better get on shank’s mare. It must be nearly two.”

“You know what?” Lizzie said thoughtfully, “If I were bringing in contraband potatoes, I’d land them in the
sawan
. Wouldn’t you?”

“The Seacombe
sawan
?” As if there were any other improved caves along here with landings specifically built to accommodate a large cargo—and a rising tide. “I am clearly out of the habit of thinking like a street sparrow or a confidence man. Unlike present company.”

“But you have to admit it is a reasonable possibility. However, we can only go and look at one thing—not both, unless we split up. We must choose.”

“The tide hasn’t turned yet. If it is the
sawan
, the door will be mostly under water—those potatoes could only get in on a raft or a rowboat.”

“Maybe they’ve come and gone,” Lizzie said. “Maybe the ‘two o’clock’ was high tide, and they had to do their business before then. Or maybe—”

She stopped abruptly when Maggie grabbed her sleeve. “Lizzie, what is that?” Maggie pulled her down behind a tumble of weathered rock, and peered over it.

“What? I can’t see anything. Ouch, you’re pinching my shoulder.”

“Lizzie,
the sea is boiling
.”

Wide-eyed, the two of them leaned on the rough, lichen-covered rocks, Maggie’s breath catching in her throat in sheer amazement. For the sea, which had been breaking in perfectly normal waves on the rocks a moment ago, seemed to be heaving into a dome fifty feet across, coming up out of the deep with such inexorable force that seawater slid down the face of it in crashing waterfalls and torrents, foam leaping back into the air to form a mist above it.

And now it rose and rose and they could see below it an elliptical body made of glass and metal, intricately worked in seams and waves to direct the water past its hull and increase its speed. Facing them, encased in a metal housing worked in the shapes of waves and curves, a huge bubble of glass emerged from the water, which sheeted over its roundness and plummeted straight down into the deep, frothing and hissing.

Inside, lit by an eerie yellowish-green light, several men worked the controls. Others ran to and fro working levers, and standing in the front was a figure with its hands clasped behind its back, as if he were too important to do the job of operating the thing. He merely watched as the whole enormous contraption freed itself of the ocean’s grasp, water streaming off its sides in great torrents. Finally, its internal systems seemed to stabilize it and it bobbed on the surface like a duck in a child’s bath, the heaviest part of its body still submerged to who knew what depth.

It looked for all the world like an airship, with its parts put on in the wrong places. An airship that traveled under the water.

Where it could not be detected.

Maggie’s chest felt tight, and she sucked in a lungful of air with a gasp. She had completely forgotten to breathe.

“What … is it?” Lizzie managed to whisper.

“I do not know,” Maggie whispered back. “What are they doing here?”

“Not landing potatoes, I’ll wager.”

“Come on. Let’s go down the cliff path and see what they’re doing.”

“Are you mad? They’re not exactly the Royal Aeronautics Corps on maneuvers—people with honest intentions don’t go swimming about at night in undersea dirigibles!”

“Exactly why we have to know what they’re doing. We need to be able to tell Grandfather and the authorities.”

“Maggie—”

“Come on!”

Maggie did not know what drove her across to the western side of the headland and down the cliff path. A sense of loyalty to the family that had shown her none? Did she wish to prove herself worthy by putting herself at risk for the Seacombe name? Or was she simply feeling angry and reckless and not one whit concerned about what her grandparents thought? She was going to have an adventure and they could just—just stick their heads in a bucket!

She heard Lizzie slipping and swearing along the path behind her, and waited a moment for her to catch up. “We are going to be in so much trouble,” Lizzie panted.

“I’m in trouble anyway. Claude is, too. Why shouldn’t you be?”

“Yes, I was feeling a bit left out. Careful—the earth there has fallen away.”

Maggie stepped around the notch in the path, and they zigzagged down until the soil thinned and they were clambering over solid rock. She could hear the waves lashing the beach now, the sea still not recovered from the dirigible’s intrusion. The noise of it covered any sounds they might have made as they inched around the rocks, their boots sinking into the damp sand where the tide had just begun to turn.

Someone shouted behind them, and Lizzie grabbed Maggie, pulling her back into a crevice. They pressed themselves flat as a rowing boat propelled by a large man dressed in a fisherman’s jersey shot across the waves from the direction of the stone houses.

“The last number on the paper that pigeon brought,” Maggie whispered. “Six. I wonder if that’s the number of men they need to unload whatever it is they’re bringing?”

“But they haven’t got six,” Lizzie whispered back. “There’s only him.”

“They haven’t got the message, either. If that’s what it was, none of them know what the other is expecting.”

“I still think it was a grocer’s order.”

“We’ll soon see, I hope.”

They edged around the cliff face and saw that the dirigible had navigated its way closer to shore. It was not as deep in the draft as she’d thought, Maggie saw now. In fact, if the navigation gondola had been under it instead of on its nose, it would be similar in shape to the Rangers’ B-30 ship from which they had escaped in Santa Fe when they were children—slender and fast like a sea creature.

They heard the grinding of machinery, and the dirigible gave a great belch of steam. A hatch opened under the navigation deck, and out of it issued what Maggie could only describe as large glass and metal bubbles—three of them, hooked together like train cars, the lead vessel the only one with an engine and steered by men inside working wheels and levers. They grumbled through the water, wallowing slightly as though weighted down.

The
sawan
gaped black in the cliff face, the head space gradually increasing as the tide went out, and lamps came on in the front of the bubbles to illuminate their way. Through the arch they went, and disappeared within.

Maggie turned to her cous—sis—to Lizzie, her mind struggling to find meaning in a sight so completely new. “What do you make of it?” she said at last.

“That’s a lot of engineering for potatoes,” Lizzie said in her practical way, her fascinated gaze taking it all in. “What is in those—that—goodness, I don’t even know what to call them. The metal coracles. What are they landing on Seacombe property?”

“We aren’t going to find out unless we get in there—and we can’t do it from here without swimming.”

“We shall have to approach from the inside—from the cellar.”

“Lizzie, there isn’t time for us to climb back up, gain the house, steal the key from poor Nancarrow, and go down that stair.”

“Why not? If that message is connected with this landing—and we must believe it is—it will take them some time to unload a thousand kilos of … whatever.”

Before Maggie could reply, the man in the rowboat hailed the
sawan
. “Halloo the boats!” he shouted. “What are you doing here?”

“How many times we got to tell you, these ain’t boats?” came a drawl they had only heard on the far side of the Atlantic, in the Americas. “and these here are the chaloops, known to regular folks as jolly-boats. Get it right, fer gosh sakes.”
Neptune’s Maid
is a naveer soo-maran

Navire sous-marin
, Maggie translated automatically. Undersea ship. And
chaloupes
—jolly-boats—smaller boats that ferried people and things between shore and their larger host. Logical, if not very illuminating.

But very French. Why were French ships bringing cargo to the Seacombe beach? To avoid the harbor tariffs? For an operation this size, harbor tariffs would be nothing. What on earth was going on?

“If it’s in water, it’s a boat,” retorted the man at the oars. “What I want to know is, why weren’t we told?”

“You signaled. We came. That’s all I know. You got a problem, you talk to the boss.”

“But we’re not prepared!” the oarsman shouted, clearly frustrated. “How much is there?”

“Four hunnert fifty of good Kintuck bourbon and whiskey, and a thousand of china, tinned goods, Texican cigarillos, and cotton cloth.”

The air practically blistered as the Cornishman swore, and Maggie could see Lizzie committing a new word or two to memory for later use.

“You fools, if I row back and roust the men, there won’t be time for a proper job before the tide goes out!”

“What’s tide mean to us?” came the voice. “We’re below the tide—and we’ve worked on the beach before if we had to. Them chaloops got land wheels if we need ’em. Hurry up, then, we haven’t got all night. And by the bye, if you’d use a steam-powered craft you wouldn’t have to work so hard.”

The sound of laughter came out of the
sawan
as, cursing, the oarsman flailed one oar and brought his rowing boat around, then hauled on them both to take him skimming back toward the hamlet.

“We can’t go any closer,” Lizzie said, “and with more coming, it will only get more dangerous if we are discovered. We must go up to the house and wake Grandfather. At least we know what they’re bringing in, so we’ll have facts to present to him and the magistrate.”

“Lizzie—did you notice something about that conversation?”

“Besides the fact that at least one of those men is from the Americas?”

“Yes, besides that. Did you notice that they made no attempt at secrecy whatever? Once they were in the bay, out of sight of Penzance, the thing surfaced, and neither of those men lowered their voices. Why do they not fear discovery?”

Lizzie stepped out of the concealing darkness of the cliff face and leaned out enough for one eye to take in the proceedings. “Because they have permission to be here?” She turned back. “But surely our grandparents would not give it. They could not.”

Maggie’s mind was moving so fast that it was an effort to speak. Or maybe it was just that she did not know the effect her words would have on Lizzie. “Let us review the facts. A message comes notifying an unknown party of a certain cargo. A cargo matching weight and content is landed in a place that supposedly has not been used in decades. Claude notices that the books indicate a company much less solvent than is generally believed, and our grandfather flies into a rage. Yet our grandparents live in a style that only a much greater income could support.”

“There must be another explanation for that. Grandmother could have an income of her own.”

“If so, then why did Grandfather not give it? Why did he turn the argument on poor Claude to the point that he fled—Claude, whom I have never seen with anything but a smile on his face?”

Lizzie was silenced. Then— “The china,” she finally said.

Maggie made the connection in a flash. “With a dogwood pattern—a tree that is known to grow only in the Fifteen Colonies. And Grandfather’s drink of choice?”

“Kintuck bourbon. One can smell the stuff across the room.”

Maggie began to feel distinctly ill. “I am very much afraid that the conclusion is inevitable: Our grandparents are somehow involved in smuggling goods on French ships—goods from the Americas, at that. Which, as everyone knows, are forbidden to enter the country by order of Her Majesty except aboard Count von Zeppelin’s cargo airships.”

“Oh, Maggie. What are we going to do?”

If only she knew. If only the Lady were here to take charge. If only they’d never come to Cornwall and met these people!