The Smugglers (11 page)

The
Dragon
shuddered at the peak of her roll. She started back, and the sea came soaring up toward us. And Crowe stepped closer to the side.

“Stop!” I cried. “I've got the book. I've got Larson's book!”

He hesitated. The deck dipped down toward the sea and slowly rose again. “Ye're grasping at straws,” he said. But in his eyes I saw a doubt.

“You'll never find that book,” I said. “But someone will. A week from now-a month from now–it will surely come to light. And they'll hang you then, and all your gang. They'll bind your arms and put a noose around your neck, and – ”

“Shut up!” roared Captain Crowe.

My words had found their mark. He rubbed his big fists across his cheeks, smearing the dead man's blood. I felt as though I'd planted a bomb down in the depths of the ship and armed it with a slow match.

“It's all written in the book,” I said. “The names of every smuggler.” I spoke quickly, blurting it out. “Harry saw it. Ask him if he didn't.”

Crowe stared at me with his glowering eyes. There was a glimmer there I'd never seen before–a hint of fear, I thought.

“Whit's he blethering about?” he asked.

“It's true,” said Harry. “He's got the book; you gived it to him, Captain, sir. And full of names it is, Captain Crowe. I seen it for myself.”

“Where is it, then?” asked Crowe. He cast me down to the scuppers, half against the rail. His enormous hand spread across my chest, and he held me to the deck. “Where is it?” he asked again.

“Somewhere safe,” I told him. “I hid it down below.”

“Ye hid it?” He barked a horrid laugh. “Weel, ye're got your wits about ye, I'll grant ye that. And now ye're going to go and fetch it.” Then he added with a sneer, “If ye please,
Mister
Spencer.”

“Why?” I asked. “So you can throw it with me over the side?”

I saw the veins pulsing in his neck, his teeth grinding hard together as a flash of anger burned through his fingers and into my arm. Then he shook himself, and his grip relaxed.

He said, “No one's going to hurt ye.”

I feared him most of all in this mask of calm. “Listen, John,” he said. “Give me the manny's book, and when we've got the barrels ashore, we'll go along to London. Your father gets his ship and cargo, he gets his profit–and a little more perhaps; aye, a little more–and that's the end o' the matter. No harm to no one.”

With his narrow, folded eyes, his rows of teeth showing in a ghastly smile, he looked like a grinning snake. “No harm to no one,” he said again.

“All right,” I told him. It seemed I had no choice. “I'll give you the book.”

“Fine.” He let me go. He stared at me and frowned. “Well, fetch it, then.”

“Not yet,” said I. “When we get to London, when we're tied to Father's dock,
then
you get the book. But not before.”

I heard Dasher laugh. “A deadlock,” he said. “A lovely dilemma.”

Captain Crowe drew out his knife and flicked it open. “Then I'll have to cut ye into pieces,” he said calmly. “Your fingers and your toes, then your ears and eyes and lips. And what's left o' ye will tell me where it is, a' right.”

“I won't,” I said, though I feared the quaver in my voice gave away the lie.

“Oh, ye will,” said he. Crowe took my hand and slapped it on the rail. He pressed the knife against the knuckle of my little finger. The blade rocked across my skin. “Tell me, son,” he said. “Where is it?”

In the silver of his knife, I saw two hugely staring eyes, horror-struck: my own face reflecting back at me. I saw the blade cut through the skin and the blood ooze out with a shocking, awful redness. And worst of all was Captain Crowe, hunched above me, calmly slicing through my finger.
That
was the thing that brought a scream to my lips. Captain Crowe was smiling.

“You bloodthirsty pirate!” shouted Dasher. He came in a whirl across the deck and kicked the knife from the captain's hand. It flew off the rail and went spinning into the fog, glistening like a fallen star. “I'm not going to watch you
cut up a boy. Not a lad and a shipmate. I'm not going to stand for that.”

“Och, I'd never hae done it,” said Captain Crowe. He had turned in an instant into a madman, in an instant back again. Now he stood and brushed his trouser knees. “You didna have to kick awa' my best knife, Dasher. That was my favorite knife.”

“Just leave him to think,” said Dasher. “He'll see the sense in the end.” Then he went to the wheel and brought the
Dragon
back to her course. “Steady as she goes,” he said. “By and large, that is.”

Captain Crowe tugged at his jacket; he straightened his cravat. “Harry, come with me,” he said, and the two went down below.

The
Dragon
sailed on, north toward England, through a fog that grew thick and then thin. I put my finger to my mouth and sucked away the blood, watching Dasher at the wheel, his jaunty self again. I hated to see him happy there, as though he had no other care at all, and hated even more to hear him start to sing.

“Stop that,” I said.

He looked wounded.

“You're a dog in a doublet,” I said.

He laughed. “What a thing to say! Didn't I save your bacon there? Didn't I risk my life and limb – ”

“You knew it all along!” I cried. “As soon as you saw that cutter you knew she was a revenue ship. There
is
no other smuggler, and there never was. It's the
Dragon
that Larson wrote about. Right from the start it was the
Dragon
that was going to France.”

“That's true enough,” said Dasher. He grinned at the binnacle, then cocked up his chin and shook his hair. He had caught his own reflection in the compass glass.

“You must think me young and foolish,” I said.

“Not at all,” said Dasher, staring straight ahead. “You're too quick by half, and that's your trouble.”

I didn't feel clever at all. The truth, I saw, had been right in front of me from the very first day. “Captain Crowe told me that Father had sent him new orders,” I said. “But he can't read, can he? He told me that when I opened Larson's pouch.”

“Are you still bleeding?” asked Dasher.

I looked at my finger. “No,” said I.

Only then did he look toward me. “What's done is done,” he said. “There's no comfort in a misery. But if you'd kept to yourself and asked no questions, we'd be running into Dover with the spirits, then on to London with the wool. You'd be going home the hero, and guineas richer for your troubles.”

“Is that the way you planned it? You and Captain Crowe?”

“More me than him,” said Dasher, beaming proudly. “He's a madman, Captain Haggis is. I'm the one what does the thinking for him. A fortnight to take the
Dragon
round to London? Why, that was plenty of time, I told him, to make a run to France and back. And then that Larson chap, that little gent, stumbled on it, didn't he? Lord knows how, but he did.”

“And you killed him for it,” I said.

“Not I!” Dasher shook his head. “There was no one more
surprised than I to see him swimming through the Downs, dead as a doornail. But he was mucking about in a smuggling gang, so it's no wonder he got himself killed. They all do, those who interfere”

“Like me?” I asked.

“Not if you watch your step,”said Dasher. “Not if you give us the book.”

It kept coming back to that waterlogged book and the pages of Larson's notes.
“The dead man's secrets,”
a sailor had called them.
“See you keep them safe.”
I dreaded what might happen if I had no secrets left to keep.

“There's no hurry,” said Dasher. “There's no rush. But you won't see London again until the Haggis has that book. And that's a fact, my friend.”

He said all this with a cheerful smile that I found more unnerving than all the captain's rage. I picked myself up and wandered away, but Dasher called after me. “Where are you going?”

“Wherever I please,” said I.

The fog was not as thick as it had been, and I knew he was watching as I went down the companionway. I heard a thumping up forward, and smiled to myself at the thought of the captain – or Harry, perhaps – searching for a book that wouldn't be found. Then I hurried through the schooner, back toward the stern. I opened the door of my little cabin … and found it all in ruin. The thin mattress had been pulled from my bunk, my sea bag torn open across it. My ledgers were strewn to the deck, kicked in a heap to the corner. Even my quill had been plucked from its pot and cast across the cabin.

Someone had gone through the room in a rage. But I found a small pleasure in the sadness of the place. No one would search there again.

My tinderbox lay behind the door. A candle–broken in the middle–was wedged behind the bunk. I shoved them in my pockets and went out to the narrow, tilting passageway.

To reach the lazarette, I had to pass the captain's cabin. The door was ajar, held by a hook and eye, and in the motion of the
Dragon
it rattled open and shut, with a sound like shaken bones. Through the gap I saw the captain, standing at a porthole. As I had seen him once before, he was talking to no one at all. Or talking to the ship. He touched the porthole gently, as he would a woman's face. So intent was he on this that I crept past without him seeing or hearing, and made my way to the lazarette.

The steering ropes were looser than before, and they filled the space with an eerie, almost human crying. The massive tiller groaned from side to side. I lit my candle and planted it with molten wax on the tiller and not the deck. The room still smelled of oil, and the planks were slick where my lantern had broken, what seemed like days before but was really only yesterday.

The candle, swinging with the tiller, made grotesquely whirling shadows. The ballast stones rumbled with a sound that made me think of ancient tombs. I sorted through the stack, growing more and more frantic the deeper I went. As I reached the timbers at the bottom, darkly stained with water, I knew the truth.

Larson's book was gone.

W
e came out of the fog a mile from shore, and the cliffs of Dover loomed ahead, huge and white, glowing in the sun. Along them lay a coil of smoke, a twisted rope woven from fires at the base and the brink.

“That's the signal,” said Dasher. “The revenue knows we're coming.”

Crowe wasn't half as calm. “Hard alee!” he shouted, and I watched the cliffs racing sideways past the bowsprit. The
Dragon
turned toward the sea. And again the fog enveloped us.

We sailed to the south for an hour or more, and then to the west. I'd lost all sense of where we were by the time the
Dragon
hove to at Crowe's command. The sails were lowered, and we drifted in the fog.

I sat on the capstan, mulling over my dilemma. If Crowe had the book, he wouldn't wait very long to settle the score
between us. At every creak of wood, at every sound I heard, I expected Crowe to come out of the fog. And then I heard the hatch slide open. Footsteps came along the deck, and a man emerged from the gray.

“Lord love me,” he said, “I've never eaten a soup any thicker than this.”

It was Dasher. I felt almost happy to see him and shifted over to give him room on the capstan. He sat at my side and lit a pipe, and I watched the smoke swirl away to mix with the fog.

“How long will we wait here?” I asked.

“Until it's good and dark,” said Dasher.

“And then what?”

“We'll try the other place, of course. And if the revenue's there as well …”

From below us came a thump, and then another, muffled by the wood.

Dasher stamped his feet on the deck. He lowered his head and shouted at the planks, “Give it up, you old Haggis!” Then he grinned. “He's looking everywhere for that dead man's book.”

He crossed his legs and calmly smoked. Under his breath, he hummed his sad little song.

I stared at him as thoughts spun through my mind. Who had the book if it wasn't Crowe? Was it Dasher himself? Or was the book still among the ballast stones, so deep in the darkness that I'd somehow overlooked it?

“Did you search for it?” I asked him.

“Me?” He shook his head. “I'm not the one who wants it.
Soon as we've got these barrels unloaded, I'm rid of this blasted boat.”

“You're going ashore?”

“Like a shot.” He swung out his arm with a squeaking of corks and pointed high to the west. “It's over the hills and home for old Dasher. Home to the hearth and the missus. And then, my friend, I'd say you're on your own.”

It seemed to me I was on my own already. But Dasher meant this well, and for a moment he leaned so close toward me I felt the corks against my ribs. “Listen,” he said. “Make a run for it. When you get your chance, slip away.”

“I can't swim,” I told him.

“Who can?” he asked. “No, you wait for the boats, you see. They'll come in a fleet, in a regular navy. And if you're quick about it, you can make off with one.”

“And what will become of the
Dragon?”

Dasher shrugged. “The Haggis will do what he has to do. He'll take her out and sink her. But it will break his heart to see her go.”

I snorted. “He has no heart.”

“He does for the
Dragon,”
said Dasher. “And if he has to sink her, he'll kill you for it.” Then he told me a story as we drifted there, as the fog grew dark around us.

The
Dragon
had been built as a privateer, and Turner Crowe was the man to sail her, though he wasn't much older than I at the time. The shipwrights made her fast and sleek; armed with a dozen guns, she was set loose to prey like a wolf on the flocks of French ships. But on the day she was launched, there was an accident, and Crowe's own
child was crushed below the ship. “Like a smear of jam,” said Dasher. “That's what he looked like. A smear of straw-berry jam.”

I remembered Larson telling me that. Or at least, in his mysterious way, he had hinted of it.
“Death she'll bring you, and I'll promise you that. It's the way of a ship that wad christened with blood.”

“In the
Dragon,”
said Dasher, “Crowe rounded the Horn and sailed to the Indies. He filled the holds from the battered, smoking wrecks of merchantmen. And he came home a wealthy young man; he bought the
Dragon
for himself.”