The Smugglers (18 page)

Wherever there are borders, there are smugglers to cross them, making money by avoiding the taxes and the duties paid by honest people. Smuggling is an old profession, even older than the word itself. Three hundred years ago, the men who carried tobacco, tea, and silk across the English Channel were known as smuckelers. They smuckeled their cargos into England with little danger of arrest or punishment.

In those days the “free trade” was done very much in the open, and many coastal villages owned and outfitted small fleets of boats that shuttled back and forth across the Channel. So great was the gain, and so small the danger, that smuggling grew to a gigantic industry.

Around the beginning of the eighteenth century, the government of England took steps to stop the smugglers. Preventive forces were established, first on land and then at sea. Penalties became harsher. And smuggling changed to a deadly business.

At the time this story is set, the start of the nineteenth century, a smuggling run would draw farmhands from their fields, blacksmiths from their forges, and bakers from their ovens. They would show up for a night of work and go back to their jobs in the daylight. At dawn the farmer might find
his horse with muddied hooves, but there would be a keg of brandy left beside the stable door. And he would take his payment and look the other way; the smuggling gangs were known for their violence, and it was better not to cross them.

The English poet Rudyard Kipling wrote about that in his haunting “A Smuggler's Song,” in which a parent warns a child not to listen to the noises of the night and tells her to “watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!”

But smuggling was going through a change at this time. The large masses of men who did their work by force were being replaced by smaller groups who used trickery instead. Some of their schemes sound more like fiction than fact: hollow masts stuffed with tea; tobacco woven to look like ropes, then laid among the real cables in the ship's dark locker; weighted barrels that could be sunk offshore and harvested later by little fishing smacks; floating barrels painted to look like innocent buoys. As Dasher describes it for John, the smugglers sometimes buried their cargos under reeking loads of rotten fish, or fitted out their boats with elaborate and secret compartments. The smuggler
Good Intent
had a pipe that ran from her deck right through her hull, so that a raft of barrels could be tied to a rope and hauled tight against her bottom. Silk was stuffed inside the skins of hams. The smugglers themselves might carry packets of tea under their capes or inside their petticoat trousers.

Most of these devices came along well after the time of Dasher and Captain Crowe. But they are part of the history now, part of the folklore, and I believe I might be forgiven for smuggling them into the story.

It is true that smugglers carried spies in the war between England and France. Napoleon himself admitted it: “Most of the information I received from England came through the smugglers. They are people who have courage and the ability to do anything for money.”

And that is something that's still true today, when smugglers are more likely to carry drugs than tea. Small boats sailing down the coasts of Central and South America are sometimes warned to stay well offshore and to keep their boats darkened in the night. And if a boat goes by at enormous speed or a voice hails you from the darkness, the wisest thing to do is still to turn and watch the wall as the gentlemen go by.

Books about smugglers can be found in nearly every library and bookstore. A good one to look for is
Smugglers' Britain,
by the English writer Richard Piatt. And for fiction, try
Moonfleet,
an old story by John Meade Falkner that scared my father as a boy and then scared me, and is now scaring his grandchildren at my brother's home in Ontario, very far from the sea.

Many of my favorite parts of
The Smugglers
spring from the efforts of other people. Captain Crowe's more colorful comments were spoken first by my mother, who gave me–in my infancy–a thick Highland brogue that I'm sometimes told has not completely disappeared. Dasher's most eloquent phrases, and most of the research material, came from my father, who was born in an English inn with a timbered parlor that I can only imagine was much like the Baskerville. Young John's father comes teetering out of my first novel and into this one on a walking stick thanks to the inspiration of Kristin Miller, who has shared my life for a dozen years. The head of the smuggling gang appears with his sword and his fancy clothes through the suggestions of Lauri Hornik, who edited this book as carefully and thoughtfully as she did
The Wreckers.
The stern chase across the Channel occurs through the research of librarian Kathleen Larkin, who finds answers for me to the most obscure of questions. And the whole story exists partly because of the encouragement of my agent, Jane Jordan Browne, to whom I owe an awful lot.

Thanks for
The Smugglers
also go to Bruce Wishart, who plundered his library to answer many questions; to Barry
White, who trekked around London looking for charts of the Goodwin Sands; and to Richard Hunn, who described for me the Kentish coast that he knew from his boyhood.

And, finally, I have to thank everyone who has told me that he or she has read and enjoyed
The Wreckers,
but most of all my nephews and my nieces. They turned a sailboat into a madhouse for a summer voyage in search of whales. And for the pleasure they brought me, and the inspiration to carry on, I have dedicated this book to them.

John Spencer's adventures conclude

in
The Buccaneers.

Turn the page for a sample chapter

from that exciting companion novel.

A Dell Yearling Book

Excerpt from
The Buccaneers
by Iain Lawrence

Copyright © 2001 by Iain Lawrence

Published by Dell Yearling

an imprint of

Random House Children's Books

a division of Random House, Inc.

1540 Broadway

New York, New York 10036

All rights reserved

T
HE
L
IFEBOAT

I
was steering the
Dragon
when the lifeboat came into view.

It appeared ahead, a tattered sail on a sea that blazed with the evening sun. Its canvas bleached to white, its hull bearded with weeds, it looked as ancient as Moses. But it drove into the teeth of the trade winds, beating toward a land so distant that there might have been no land at all.

I felt a shiver to see such a tiny craft in such an endless waste of sea and sky. We were twenty-one days out of England, a thousand miles from any shore. But even our schooner–a little world for the eight of us aboard – seemed almost too small for the ocean.

“Sail!” I shouted, and turned the wheel. “Sail ho!”

The
Dragon
leaned under her press of canvas. With a boom and a shudder she swallowed a wave in the huge carved mouth of her figurehead. Men stirred from the
deck, rising to tend the sails, and the sounds of stomping feet and squealing rope brought Captain Butterfield up from below.

The sun glinted through his graying hair and onto the pink of his scalp as he stooped through the companionway. “What's the matter, John?” he asked.

“A boat, sir.” I pointed forward.

He'd brought his spyglass, and he aimed it at the distant lifeboat.

“How many people?” I asked.

He took a moment to answer. “None,” he said.

“That's impossible,” I told him.

He lowered the glass, wiped his eye, and looked again. The long lens stayed perfectly still as his arms and his knees bent with the roll of the ship. Then he brought it down and shook his head. “Look for yourself.”

He traded the glass for the wheel, and it was all I could do to keep that glass aimed at the lifeboat. But I had to agree: there seemed to be no one aboard.

“Can we fire a gun?” I asked.

“Good thinking, John.” He shouted for the gunner. “Mr. Abbey! A signal, please.”

For the first time in our voyage, I was glad we had our four little guns and the little man who worked them, as strange as he was. He stripped the crisp tarpaulin jacket from the nearest cannon, and had it ready to fire so quickly that I realized only then that he'd kept it loaded all the way from London.

A cloud of smoke barked from the gun. The
Dragon
shook from stem to stern, and the lifeboat flew from the
circle of sea in my spyglass. Then I found it again, and there was a man staring at me, peering past the edge of the sail. He had been sitting to leeward, with that tattered rag of a sail as a shelter from the spray and sun.

“There, he's seen us,” I shouted.

“And look!” cried Captain Butterfield. “Good heavens, he's turning away.”

It was true. The man had put up the helm of his little boat and it now spun toward the south. As we watched, he eased the sheets and ducked his head as the sail billowed out above him. Then off he went, fleeing as fast as he could from the only bit of help that he had in all the world.

“Confound him,” said Butterfield. “Is he mad?”

I thought he must have been. I saw his head looking back, turning on shoulders as broad as a bull's. Then, just as quickly, he put his helm over again, and came racing toward us.

“Heave to!” shouted Butterfield. “Best we let the devil come to us.”

We turned the
Dragon
into the wind and lashed her wheel. She lay almost dead in the water, scudding sideways as the swells rolled underneath her. The captain and I–like every man aboard – stood by the rail and watched that lifeboat crawl up to weather.

Its paint long gone, its seams plugged by scraps of cloth, it looked like a feast for the sea worms. Tangles of weeds trailed in its wake; water slopped in its bilge. But the man who sailed it was bronzed and strong, as though he'd set out just the day before to sail across an ocean.
An enormous sea chest of polished wood was jammed between the thwarts.

He brought his boat alongside, cast off his sheet, and dropped the tiller. Then he hoisted that great box onto his shoulder and climbed up to the deck of the
Dragon.

“Help him below,” said Butterfield. “Give him a meal and a hammock.”

“Aye, sir,” I said.

The men scattered as I went forward, the hands to the sails, Abbey to his gun. Only the stranger was left, sitting astride his chest and looking very much at home. His hair was tarred in a pigtail, and though his skin was deeply tanned, his eyes were a very clear blue.

“Where have you come from?” I asked.

“From the sea,” he said. And that was all. He came to his feet, towering above me, and glanced up at the topsail, aft to the stern–everywhere but down at his boat, which wallowed in the swells as we left it behind.

I bent to take the man's sea chest, the finest one I'd ever seen. The rope beckets–the handles–were so elaborately knotted that months of work must have passed in their making. The wood glowed with its warm finish of oil. But I grunted at the weight of it. Though stronger than most boys of seventeen, I couldn't hope to lift that enormous box.

The stranger laughed and put it up to his shoulder again. The sound that came from inside it–a rumbling and a clinking–made me think that coins and jewels were nested there. Then he followed me down to the
fo'c's'le, where I hung a hammock that he climbed into without a word of thanks.

“Would you like some food?” I asked. “Some water?”

He shook his head, his eyes already closed. In another moment he was sound asleep, swinging in the canvas as though in the great cocoon of some enormous insect.

I found a blanket and covered him, then went up to help Mr. Abbey secure the gun. We stretched the tarpaulin jacket in place and lashed it down.

“There you go,” said Abbey, stroking at the cloth, smoothing it over the muzzle. “You rest awhile.” He had a habit of talking to his guns, and it always unnerved me. “That will keep you dry, my handsome little man-eater,” he said.

He loved his guns, but I despised them. Their weight made the
Dragon
roll badly at times, and only batter through waves she would have hurdled without them. But my father had insisted on arming the
Dragon,
and whether or not to carry guns was the only decision he hadn't left to me. “You're going to the Indies,” he'd said. “There's pirates in the Indies.”

I laughed now, to think of that. What a dreadful place the West Indies had seemed from the way Father had described them. He'd filled the waters with sharks and wood-eating worms, the sky with hurricanes that blew all the year round, and the islands with swarms of cannibals. “Yes, cannibals,” he'd said. “They cook you alive, or so I've heard. They shrink your head to the size of a walnut.”

But his fear of pirates had been the greatest of all, and he'd paid a fortune for the little four-pounders that sat on the deck, two to a side, with their muzzles pointing over the rail. Then, true to form, he'd found a bargain in the gunner. “Same wages as an ordinary seaman,” he'd boasted. “Yet the man was serving in the navy before you were born.” So great was Father's love of bargains that he overlooked Mr. Abbey's years, his oddness, even the glass marble fitted in place of his left eye, in a head as round as a cannonball.

That marble gleamed crimson now, as Abbey looked up from the lashings. The sun was turning red, staining the sails. It lit a blaze right across the horizon, scattering embers of light on the sea.

“I don't like the looks of him,” he said.

“Who?” I asked.

“That fellow from the lifeboat. Where did he come from and where was he bound?”

“I'm sure I don't know, Mr. Abbey,” I said.

“Why was he sailing into the wind?” Abbey tilted his head. “I'd ask him that, if I were you, Mr. Spencer. I'd ask him why he was tacking east when he might have run to the west, where the land was closer.”

“Perhaps you'll ask him yourself,” I said. Then I turned away and stood at the rail.

“Count on it, Mr. Spencer.”

Ididn't care very much for the gunner. He still sported the rags of his old naval uniform, and seemed to think that his faded gold braid and his little brass buttons made him equal to an admiral.

“I'll ask him this as well,”he said, coming up to my side. “I'll ask him what he carries in that bureau of his.”

I laughed. The stranger's sea chest was enormous, but not quite as big as a bureau.

“I think he's a Jonah, maybe,” said Abbey.

“That's absurd,” I said.

“Is it? Does he look like a man who's been adrift for weeks?”

“Perhaps he hasn't been,” I said.

Abbey grunted. “But his boat has.”

I wouldn't admit it to Abbey, but I'd had the same thought. The boat had grown weak, but the man was still strong.

“Try it,” said Abbey. “Get into a boat and drift out there. In a matter of days, the sun turns you into a cinder. In a fortnight it makes a mummy of you, dry as old leather.” He spat into the sea. “A man outlive his boat? Not a chance!”

His one good eye was closed, yet he stared straight at me with the reflected sunset glaring in his glass marble. It was a most disturbing thing, as though he could actually see with some kind of fiery vision.

“Look in his sea chest,” said Abbey. “If he's a Jonah, he'll carry his curses in there.”

“That's enough!” I said.

Abbey cackled. He turned his head and looked down at the sea. The water seethed below us, and the
Dragon
churned on toward the west. She rushed down a wave, rose on the face of the next. The sun flared once more and disappeared. And Mr. Abbey gasped.

He reached out and clutched my arm. “Did you see that?” he cried.

“What?” I asked.

“Right there!” he shouted. “You must have seen it.” He stretched over the rail, staring straight down at the sea, then aft along the hull. He squeezed shivers of pain into my arm. “Tell me you did.”

“See what?” I asked again.

“A coffin,” he cried. “It looked like a coffin all nailed together, the lid swinging open.” He stared at me with utter horror. “Tell me you saw it.”

I tried to shake him off, but his fingers held me like talons. “I saw no such thing,” I said.

“Then I'm doomed!” He let me go and slumped at the rail. “I'm finished. We all are, maybe.”

“No one's doomed,” said I.

His glass eye burned. “Oh, we are, young Mr. Spencer. There's a Jonah come aboard.”