The Smugglers (5 page)

“Captain Crowe?” said I, pointing to the sailors. “Who is that man?”

“Eh?” he asked. “Which man's that?”

“The one with all the corks.”

“Och, that's only Tommy Dusker.” The captain laughed. “They call him Dasher.”

It was a good name for him. His hair was loose and flowing, not tarred in the usual fashion. He had a thin little mustache, side-whiskers, and teeth that sparkled like polished stones. He moved his legs with graceful ease, yet from the waist up he was ungainly as an elephant.

“I've sailed wi' him before,” said Captain Crowe. “He's a good man.”

“Why does he wear those corks?”

“Dasher's afraid of the water,” said Crowe.

I couldn't believe it. “A sailor afraid of the water?”

“Aye. It's odd, isn't it?”

That was all he would say. Suddenly there was a task that needed his attention, and I didn't see him again until evening, when the
Dragon
was ready to sail.

We took the lashings from the sails, and hauled aloft the canvas. With creaks and groans the
Dragon
came to life, as though the sails were wings she spread, on bony spars stretched toward the clouds. The wind became her breath, and she sighed as she started down the river, free from land at last. She shivered with her eagerness to get upon the sea.

The setting sun behind us, we rode the tide past wharves and warehouses, past the landsmen who stopped and stood to watch us go. But the wind was faint, and it vanished with the sun. And when the tide, turning to the flood, threatened to carry us back again, we dropped our anchor in the Downs to wait for wind and weather.

I stood on the afterdeck and watched the sea go dark. Well to the west, I noticed whitecaps where there was no wind. When Captain Crowe came up, a wooden box in his hand, I pointed to the surf and asked him what it meant.

“That's the Goodwin Sands,” said he, with only the briefest of glances. “It's the tide running over the Sands that ye're seeing.”

I leaned on the rail and stared at the water as it surged and broke. Then humps appeared, some dark, some shining where the last of the sun touched the sand. They looked like the backs of enormous serpents, and I found it strange to think they were moving even now, as though alive, shifting with the tide. I thought of the thirteen ships that had gone aground, the hundreds of men who had been lost. And, in the twilight, I heard their wailing.

It started faintly at first, then rose to an awful screech–a keening and a droning that sent shivers up my back. But when I turned around, I laughed.

Captain Crowe had his bagpipes out. The wooden box was empty on the deck, and in his arms he held this thing, like a streamered, five-horned beast he was killing in his hands. His eyes for once were wide, his cheeks puffed out, his face the brightest red. He started walking with the pipes, and the wailing turned to a tune.

The crew came up from the fo'c's'le and sat in a knot by the capstan. Dasher was in the middle, looking as fat as a carnival man in his strange suit of corks. I saw the flare of tinder sparks, and then the cheerful glow of pipe bowls. Crowe's music rose through the rigging and swirled across the sea. It was sad music that filled me with a yearning to be among the men at the bow, just a sailor and nothing more.

The tune ended and another began. It was fast and merry, and Dasher stood up to dance. His hands at his hips, now at his back, he jigged upon the capstan. He leapt and
twirled, he kicked his legs, and the others clapped to see him. He was at once graceful and grotesque.

I wondered if Dasher had always been afraid of the sea. Down the length of the ship, he was just a bobbing figure who seemed to feel only joy at the prospect of our adventure. Yes, the
Dragon
was a happy ship, I thought, and the voyage would be all too short. But on both accounts I was wrong.

In the morning we sat becalmed. The sun was huge and bright, and there was not a breath of wind. Yet out beyond the Sands I saw the sails of trading ships and frigates scuttling to and fro. Some were making for the river, yet they came pressed by a breeze that did not reach us.

“What's wrong with the wind?” I asked the captain. “Do you think you could whistle one up?”

“Och, it's no the wind,” said Crowe. “It's the
Dragon.
He touched her rail with his hand. “She's waiting on something, I think. She's biding her time, ye see.”

Through a long afternoon the ships came into the Downs. The wind chased them in and left them there, sails hanging slack from the yards. In a flock, they rode the tide as far as they could, then anchored when it turned against them. And in the evening there was a ring of ships around us, all of them waiting, every one of them lying head to the tide, patient as sheep in a pasture.

I took my supper alone, in a seat still warm from another's body, in the sound of laughter from the fo'c's'le. The food was cold, my dish speckled with the dried lumps of someone else's dinner, and I went rather dolefully to my
cramped little quarters at the bow of the schooner, thinking I might write a note to my father.

I gathered my paper, pen, and bottle of ink and started up to the deck to sit in the evening sun. But I never finished the journey.

At the end of the corridor the captain's door stood ajar. And through the gap I saw him there, seated on his bunk and staring at the porthole. His fingers touched at the
Dragon's
hull, stroking the curve of a massive rib. And though I could see that no one else was there, Captain Crowe was talking. His voice was far too soft to let me hear the words, but he wasn't praying, I was sure of that. He wasn't talking to himself. All I could imagine was that he was talking to the ship.

Seeing him there, hearing the murmur of his voice, made me think of a time when I was young, when my mother became ill and took to what would be her deathbed. Father would go to her and close the door, and I would hear him talking in that same sad voice that came to me now through the captain's door.

I didn't disturb the man. I went back to my cabin and penned my little note as the tide burbled past the planking at my elbow. Then Captain Crowe went clomping up on deck, and soon after, I put down my quill and followed him.

The sun was setting over Kent. The captain's shadow warped across the deck as he fiddled with his wooden box, taking out his bagpipes. The shadow lengthened when he stood, and spiked with the shape of his drones.

At the first sound of the pipes, the crew came to sit at the capstan, and it was as though the day had not existed at all.
Soon Dasher was dancing, his wild hair flying, his corks bouncing. And I stood by myself at the rail as the captain paced, as the crew laughed and clapped and smoked. To see it made me lonesome, and, thinking I might join the men, I started forward, past the mainmast, past the cabin. But when I reached the foremast, one of them looked up. There was a nudging of elbows, and all as one the trio went below, down to the gloom of the fo'c's'le. The last was Dasher, who had to jam himself through the hatchway.

The music stopped then, and Captain Crowe called out to me, down half the length of the
Dragon.
“Mr. Spencer, come aft, if ye please.”

The bagpipes were still under his arm, the long horns of the drones hanging down. The bag wheezed softly, as though he had almost–but not quite–strangled the life out of it.

“Ye're not one o' the crew,” he said. There was no anger in his voice, and he turned as I came up, to walk beside me along the rail. “Ye'11 find it's a lonely life sometimes, being a part o' the afterguard. But good or bad, that's the way it is.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. I knew the cook was called Harry and that he was the biggest of the three, a dim-looking man with arms as thick as my legs. And the thin pole of a man was called Mathew, but that was all I knew. I had spoken only once with Dasher, and not at all with either of the others.

“Ye'11 get used to it. Ye'11 get to like it, even.” With each step the captain took, the bagpipes groaned beneath his arm. “When the
Dragon
thinks the time has come, we'll make our offing. Then a quick call at t'other place, and it's on to London. More or less.”

“What other place?” I asked.

Captain Crowe stopped walking. “Didn't your father tell you, then?”

“Tell me what?”

He frowned. “Och, the man was affy busy.”

Captain Crowe knelt on the deck. He put his bagpipes down and stretched them along his wooden box. “We've got another cargo waiting for us. We're to pick it up and …” He shook his head. “Yer father should have telt ye this. We're to fill the holds – ”

“No,” said I. “That isn't right.”

“Aye, it is,” he insisted. The bagpipes squealed and shouted as he shoved them in the box. “Living on the
Dragon
the way ye were, I suppose ye never got his orders.”

“But I wasn't on the
Dragon
at first,” I said. “I stayed at an inn, and he sent me instructions there.” I felt through my pockets, searching for the letter.

“Och, those are the old orders.” He closed the box; he snapped the latches shut. “The new orders came to the Baskerville. And they say what I'm telling ye now.”

Crowe came to his feet, and he was taller than me by only inches. Yet for a moment I felt almost fearful, for I heard in his voice that old hint of anger.
“Don't cross him,”
Dasher had said.

But he didn't get angry. He sighed, and smiled, and said, “But o' course, it's no for me to say. If ye want to tak' this wool to London, Mr. Spencer, then who am I to argue?” He gazed toward the masthead, and his fingers stroked his chin. “It isna me who'll have to answer to your father.”

I stared at him and wondered what I should do. Had
Father, in his rush, changed his plans and then forgotten to tell me? Or had he sent a second letter that never reached me on the
Dragon?

It was past all understanding. Maybe Captain Crowe had the old orders and
I
the new ones. No matter what I did, I might turn up in London with the wrong cargo. And through my foolishness, Father might lose a fortune.

I carried these thoughts up and down the deck. I felt them weighing upon me as though they were bricks instead of mere ideas. I almost wished that Captain Crowe would
order
me to take this new direction.

But he only stood and watched me pace. Now and then he asked, “Well?” or “What's it going to be?”

But in the end, the choice was neither mine nor his to make. For a message came, carried on the river, borne by a thing that would forever give me nightmares.

I
t was just a speck in the falling tide, a dot of black floating in the river. It came out of a mist that hugged the land, out from the night to the dawn.

It was I who saw it first; I thought it was a coconut. And I watched it curiously, to see if it might pass close beside us. Then suddenly I saw the arms, just below the water, the fingers white as pastry. They were moving, but barely so, like the tentacles of a jellyfish. The speck was a head, and it turned from black to white as the face lifted up, and then to black again as all but his hair disappeared. Startled, I called for Captain Crowe.

He came up half dressed, his clothes awry, fastening first the big cravat around his neck. He took a glance down to the water, then led me to the bows, and we stood above the great carved dragon as the tide rippled past below us.

“Ah,” said Captain Crowe. “This will be what the old
Dragons
been a-waiting for.”

The man came weaving on the current. First to the left, then to the right, but always toward the
Dragon.
He came around the stern of an anchored ship, around the bow of another. Then he bumped against the dragon's mouth, and his arms spread wide across the wood, as though he meant to hold it. He floated there, on his stomach, his face within the water.

“He's dying,” I said.

“He's dead already,” said Captain Crowe. “But we'd better bring him up. It seems he's come to find us.”

Mathew scrambled up and rigged a tackle from the forestay. I went down, right to the very mouth of the wooden dragon, and held the man by the collar. His hand swirled away from the hull and brushed against my wrist. His touch was so cold, so clammy, that I knew I held a dead man. Then my skin revolted at the thought of this, and I shook so badly that his head bobbed up and down. But a bight of rope was lowered for me, and I passed it around his shoulders. “Haul away,” I said, and climbed to the deck.

The sailors pulled, the corpse came up; they pulled again, and he rose some more. He seemed to dance and shake, climbing from the water like a puppet from a stage. His chin rested on his chest, and his hair hung down to hide his face. And then he dangled above the rail, a figure in gray with buckled shoes, and the water fell from him in splashes on the deck.

“Och, he's a wee manny,” said Captain Crowe. “Just a wee little manny.” He reached out and lifted the chin and I gasped.

“Larson,” I said. The gentleman from the carriage. He
had promised to find me, I remembered. He had told me to watch for him.
“I think I'm a dead man,”
he'd said.
“Now or later, I'm a goner,”

“You know him, then?” asked Captain Crowe.

“I met him once,” said I.

Then Dasher spoke behind me. He said, “Throw him back.” He laughed, and I thought I'd heard that laugh before. “He seems to like his swimming,” Dasher said. “He's doing so well at it, he might be in Devon in a day or two.”

“Stow it!” roared Captain Crowe. It was the first time in two days I'd heard him shout. “We'll heave him aboard, and when we're out at sea we'll bury him.” He saw me watching, and he tried to smile. “A proper burial,” he added.

Poor little Larson was swung inboard and lowered to the deck. And the instant his shoes touched the planks, the wind came up. It wasn't strong, but it was fair. It carried a smell of muddy earth, in a strange and chilling coldness, and the
Dragon
tugged against her anchor like a horse against its harness.