The Smugglers (7 page)

His face began to soften, and the redness swiftly left it, the way a bit of metal cools when it's taken from a forge. I pointed at Larson. “He had no one else to turn to; I have to do this. Or I have to try. And when it's done, I want to take the
Dragon
home.” I stared up at Captain Crowe, and already he was smiling. “That's all I meant,” I said.

“Weel, it's a' for ye to say, Mr. Spencer. Ye're the owner's son.” At last he lifted his boot from the deck. And with a gesture that I was sure was meant to be kindly, he nudged the book toward me with his toe. “She's your own ship, more or less,” he said. “And I'm just a lowly sailor.”

I didn't know how to reply. A moment before, he was the master and I a boy. One moment he was livid with anger, and the next he was doing all he could to please me.

“It's best to take the proper course,” he continued as he helped me up with a tug on my collar. His smile had become a grin. “And if good King George thinks it fit to say a little 'thank ye' wi' a purse full o' guineas, then it's a' the better. But it's no for that I'll do it.”

He was a scoundrel, I thought. It was
just
for that he'd do it.

“And now,” he said happily, “let's get your friend over the side.”

I put the book back in the envelope and shoved it in my pocket. We went back to the dreary task of wrapping Larson in his shroud. But Captain Crowe seemed more cheerful than he ever had, as though a tremendous burden had
been taken from him. He laughed, and he tweaked the dead man's cheek before he covered up that poor white face. Then the body lay between us like a big cocoon, and the captain sent me down to fetch a weight. “A ballast stone,” he said. “And mind ye get one big enough.”

I fetched a lantern and went right to the depths of the ship, where water, brown and fetid, slurped among the timbers. I went through the darkness in a circle of light, frightening cockroaches into shelter, hearing the groans and creaks of the hull as it worked. The places where I had to go were small and cramped, and I slithered through them as the lantern made the shadows zoom and tilt.

And someone came behind me.

When I stopped, he was silent. When I moved, so did he. I heard a faint creaking of wood as he crept up, closing the distance. He was quiet as a cat. And suddenly I felt a hand touch my shoulder. I cried out, startled, as he pushed me down against the hull.

“You're in danger, boy,” said he.

I tried to lift myself, to turn and see him, but the sailor held me down.

“Watch yourself,” he said. “There's one aboard who'll kill you.”

“Who?”

For a moment I only heard him breathing. He said, “The one who seems least likely.”

“But who?” I asked again.

He pressed harder on my shoulder. “He'll want the dead man's secrets. See you keep them safe.”

“Who are you?” I asked.

“A man you never saw.” And then the hand was gone.

I struggled around and raised my lantern. But the sailor had vanished so quickly there was nothing to see but shadows. It was as though he had never come at all. Yet some-how I could
feel
him in the damp air, and for a long, long time I stayed still, listening and watching. But only shadows moved; only wood and water made a sound. And finally I carried on, down toward the stern.

I made my way to the lazarette, to a gloomy place below the wheel, where the tiller–as big as a ceiling beam–shook and rattled as it swung to turn the rudder post. The steering lines were badly slack, and they squealed through the blocks with the sound of frightened pigs. It was there I found a pile of stones, worn smooth and round, and began to take one from the top.

The tiller swung; the lines creaked. I heard the rush of water and the squawking of the gulls. I thought of Dasher just a deck away, above me at the wheel. It didn't seem possible that he meant me any harm, but …
“The one who seems least likely.”
I felt as though a dreadful curse had been placed upon me, that the man I would come to trust would be the one to harm me. But who? And why?

“He'll want the dead man's secrets.”

With shaking hands and a racing heart, I took Larson's pouch from my pocket, and the little book from that.

I set the lantern on the deck and knelt beside it as it rocked on its bottom with a little tick of metal. I opened the book and turned it to catch the glow from the flame. Water had left the writing indistinct, but I could see that it held a list of names – of smugglers, I supposed. Some were blurred
and others not, and all were copied by the water backward onto the page before. Here and there was one so clear that it leapt out at me: Richard Harks, miller; Gordon Burns, apothecary. Somewhere in the book would be a name I knew, but the list was set down in no order, and most entries I couldn't read at all. The lamp rocked beside me:
tick, tick, tick.

Then, suddenly, it stopped. A grinding, groaning crack of wood echoed through the ship. I heard footsteps above me. Two people, or three; it was hard to tell. And suddenly the room tilted up and sent me flying across the deck.

I crashed against the hull and saw the lantern teeter on its side, then tumble down toward me. Glass shattered. Oil poured out. The wick flared and guttered. And I threw myself forward, smothering the tiny glow before the oil could catch and the whole ship go up in flames.

The tiller rumbled to the side and back; the lines that held it screamed. With a lurch, the deck came level.

I was left in almost utter darkness. Only tiny slits of light slipped past the cheeks of the rudder. And with them came the sound of the gulls, a screeching that unnerved me. Crouched in that space with the book in my hand, I was seized with a sudden fear that the man who meant me harm would find me with it there. I shoved the book, in its envelope, down among the ballast stones, deep within the pile. I took a stone into my shaking grasp and fumbled with it back the way I'd come.

Captain Crowe was waiting at the companionway. He took the stone, and I went behind him along the deck.
Dasher stood at the wheel, but I saw no sign of Mathew or Harry.

“Ye get lost down there?” asked Crowe over his shoulder.

“My lantern broke,” I told him.

He grunted. “We touched the Sands. They're shirting, see.”

He worked the stone into the shroud, down by Larson's feet, then bound it there with strips of sail. For a seaman he did a slovenly job, but Crowe was a lazy man with rope and lashings, and every line he touched was left in a terrible tangle. When he finished, the shroud looked like the work of a spider, with its tattered threads flying in tresses. “Tak' the head,” he told me, and we heaved the body up to the bulwark and held it there as the
Dragon
gently rolled.

“We commit this body to the deep,” said Captain Crowe. “May he rest in peace.” Then he gave a shove, and Larson tumbled from the rail, down toward the sea. The stone hit the hull with a thump, and I heard the
shush
of the cloth as it scraped along the planking. The bundle hit the water, and spray came up, icy cold.

We stared down from the rail, side by side. Captain Crowe, his hands braced, leaned far from the ship to stare aft down the hull. “It's no a bad way to go,” said he. “I'd rather that than – ” He stopped, and he leaned farther from the rail, until I thought he might topple right over the side. “By the saints,” he whispered.

Against the planks, by the mainmast shrouds, Larson floated to the surface. Scraps of cloth billowed in twisted
strands from his fingers and his arms, as though he had frantically torn himself loose from the shroud. The band I'd tied around his chin was the only thing still in place, and it gave his face an awful, tight-lipped smile.

He went bumping down the side and in below the counter, tapping at the hull as the
Dragon
surged on past him.

With Captain Crowe behind me, I ran toward the stern, past Dasher at the wheel, who shouted out, “What's the matter? What's gone wrong?”

Larson floated in the
Dragon
's wake, tossing about in the foam from the counter. We saw his head and then his heels, his arms and legs together. We saw his hands reach up and flounder at the surface, and we saw his face as he somer-saulted after us, the eyes wide open in a look that seemed like horror.

Even Dasher came to watch, and without him at the wheel, the
Dragon
wavered along on her course, and the wake stretched back in lazy curves. But no matter how the ship turned, Larson followed close behind, trapped in the swirl of water like a stick at the base of a falls.

“I don't like this,” said Dasher. “I don't care for this at all.”

“More canvas!” cried the captain. “Set the staysail. Main topsail too.” He whirled round and looked forward up the deck. The wheel turned left and right, snubbing up against the loop of line that Dasher had thrown across the king spoke. “We'll see how fast a dead man swims.”

Again I took the wheel. Dasher shouted for the others, and they tumbled together from the fo'c's'le. They seemed a
furtive, scuttling pair, content to lie in darkness until they were called, the way the ghost of Drake was said to wait for the beating of a drum. One of them had come to me in the shadows, but I had no idea which it was, and neither gave a sign.

The wind rose from astern. It caught the sails and cracked them open, and I felt the
Dragon
rushing forward. Her deck aslant, her rigging taut and humming, she raced for France with a roar of water.

And the dead man came behind her.

I
n half a gale of wind, the
Dragon
left the land astern. She plunged along with too much sail but couldn't outrun the corpse. Trapped by the flow of water, spun by whirls and eddies, it followed in the churning foam. And the gulls came down in crowds.

I could hear them as I steered the schooner south, and I saw their shadows fly across the deck and the mass of sails. But not once did I look back; the clamor of their voices as they pecked upon the corpse was bad enough.

“I'll tak' the wheel,” said Captain Crowe when the sails were set and drawing. I gave up my place, and we stood together on a slanted deck as the ship leaned far to starboard. The gulls clustered all round us, and the captain flinched whenever one came close.

“Gives me the frights,” said he. “A dead man off the stern.”

In his hands, the spokes looked thin as pencils. He
wrenched them hard and sent the
Dragon
on a weaving course. Then he took a glance behind him, but only that.

Dasher, in his bulging vest of corks, stood right at the stern with a boat hook in his hands. He jabbed it down toward the water, then flailed it through the air, beating at the seagulls that circled round him.

“It's worse for him,” said Captain Crowe. “It haunts him, things like this. Poor Dasher gets the willies in an awful way, an' he's got no heart for seeing things harmed.”

“Do you know him well?” I asked with more than idle curiosity.

Crowe stiffened at the wheel. It was just a tiny gesture, in his shoulders and his hands. “Whit are ye driving at?” he asked, and I heard impatience in his voice.

“The highwayman,” I said. “The man who shot my father. He was a little bit like Dasher.”

“Like Dasher?” said Crowe. He laughed. “There's no one like Dasher but Dasher hisself.”

I told him all about that night on the lonely road. How
someone
had shot at my father, and how Larson had chased him off.

“He talked the way Dasher talks,” I said. “He moved the same and laughed the same.”

“Och, I canna see it,” said Captain Crowe. “Dasher alone in the forest? In the darkness, no less? I don't think so, lad. Years I've known Dasher, and, och, he hasna got it in him.”

“But the way he talks …”

“Och, he's
a'
talk,” said Crowe. “Talk an' bluster, no more than that. He lives in a wee cottage wi' his wife and seven bairns. Every one an angel.”

He was telling the truth, I could see, as far as he knew it. If Dasher really was the highwayman, there would be no one more surprised than Turner Crowe.

“Ye see those corks he wears?” asked he. “When Dasher was just a lad, he all but drowned. He slipped under a box that he carried, and it pinned him like a beetle to the mud. When they fished him out, he was near as dead as that corpse back there, and afeared o' the sea ever since.” He motioned with his thumb. “That's oor Dasher: scared o' the water, scared by the wind, and fit to be tied at the sight o' his shadow.”

“Then why's he a sailor?” I asked.

“Dasher?” The captain laughed. “Dasher's no sailor.”

So he wasn't a highwayman, and he wasn't a sailor. “Then what is he?” I asked.

“Why, he's Dasher,” said Captain Crowe. Apparently he thought this explained it all. He wrenched the wheel again, and the
Dragon
turned so sharply that the mainsail boom buried its tip in the sea.

On the stern, Dasher soared above me as the schooner heeled and dipped her bow. His legs apart, his hair in tangles, he slashed at the gulls with his boat hook. For a moment he looked like a knight, a fantastic knight who jousted with clouds and birds. Then the
Dragon
turned the other way and Dasher dropped below me until there was only the sea behind him, speckled with whitecaps. And out of the froth of the wake came Larson's hands as he cartwheeled along behind us.

“Is he still there?” asked Captain Crowe.

“Yes,” I said.

“Seven knots” he said, and turned his hands around the spokes. “She's making seven knots or more.” To the stern he looked, and then to the bow again. “Mathew thinks it's you,” he said. “And what Mathew thinks, so thinks Harry. They say ye're a troll. Ye're bewitched.”

“Your lashings came loose,” I told him pointedly. “That's the only reason he's floating back there.”

“Ye're mad,” said Crowe. “It's a sign, ye see. He's waiting for another.”

“Who?”

“The dead man!” shouted Captain Crowe. “He follows the ship because another will join him.”