The Smugglers (9 page)

They delighted in his bluster and collapsed in laughter when he spoke. One, a small man in enormous boots, his face nothing more than a flowing mustache, walked behind him, mocking his seaman's roll. And the others, laughing, accidentally let a barrel tumble from its sling to shatter on the bulwark. The overpowering smell of brandy covered the ship in an instant. And in the next, a score of Frenchmen threw themselves to the deck, dabbing with their fingers at a pool of spirits so potent that it had no color at all.

“I'm no paying for that!” bellowed Captain Crowe.
“Levezvous!
Back to work, ye mangy dogs. And don't forget the barley sugar; I've got to color every drap o' that.”

I felt a shiver of despair. I wished I had never come to France.

He saw me watching, and turned his anger onto me. “Whit are ye gawking at?” he said. “Ye were telt to stand a watch.”

“You're
paying
for this?” I asked.

“Ye think they give it away?” He spread a hand across his face and squeezed with thumb and fingers. And slowly the color drained from his skin. He dragged his hand across his nose, across his mouth and chin. He
scraped
away his anger.

“Look,” he said. “Use some sense, lad. Ye canna just come waltzing in and waltzing out wi' cargo.” He took my arm and bent closer; his cravat tickled my chin as he whispered
in my ear. “If they think for a moment that a' that brandy's no waiting for the
Dragon,
then the game's up right there and then.”

I shook off his arm. “They know you here,” I said. “You speak French; you knew which dock to come to.”

“Whit are ye saying?”

“Don't cross him,”
Dasher had said. But it was too late for that. I squared myself up beside him. “I think you're a smuggler, Captain Crowe.”

His mouth fell open; he gaped at me. I waited for a rage like none he'd shown before, and cringed when he raised his arm. But he didn't strike me. He only scratched his ear, and he hung his head like a repentant child. “It's true enough,” said he. “I
was
a smuggler. To my everlasting shame, I was.” He turned his back to me. “But no more, Mr. Spencer. That Burton gang the manny wrote about? I want to see it ruined. I want to see every one o' they villains hanging from a gallows.”

“Hanging?” I said. “That's not the way you talked at the Baskerville.”

“Och, that's a' it was, is talk.” He sat on the rail, and his toe scraped at the deck. “I remember when I first saw ye, your father and yourself,” he said. “At the old Baskerville, mind. I thought your father was the doubter, the one to smell the smoke where there wasna any.” He glanced up, then down again. “Yet now he trusts me wi' his ship and his very own son, but yourself, ye give me none at a.”

He seemed truthful enough, but I'd seen his acts before.

“Ye're a careful one,” said Crowe. “That's good; I like that in a man.” He fumbled at the cloth below his chin.
“Weel, look at this,” he said as he whisked away the white cravat. It was the first time I'd seen his neck, and around it was a livid welt of frightening proportions.

“They tried to hang me,” said Captain Crowe. “The smugglers did. It's whit they do to they who turn against them.”

I could see the patterns of the rope burned upon his skin, the weaving of its strands in bright and shocking red. I could imagine how tight the noose had drawn, how he must have gasped for breath.

“I've a score to settle,” said he, already covering the mark again. “And that's why I'm here, do ye see?”

“And the white-haired man?”

“He was one o' them,” said Crowe. “He'd like nothing better than to slit my throat for what I did to wreck that gang. So tak' my glass, lad–it's by the binnacle–and get yourself up to the crosstrees. Watch for him there. And mind, too, that ye watch for a sail in the offing. If that smuggler comes, she'll likely be armed to the teeth.”

I still didn't trust the man, not fully. But there was no undoing what I had done by bringing us here. So I climbed up to the crosstrees and sat with my back against the mast. Through the captain's long glass, I studied the Channel and the land around us, as the sounds of the loading–a rumble of barrels–went on below me. Once I thought I saw the white-haired man flitting over the crowded quay. Round a team of horses, past a derrick, past a wagon, he was just a movement at the corner of my eye. Then he vanished in the curve below the
Dragon
's bow, and I trained my spyglass there. But he never came out on the other side, and he
never went back again. If I had seen him at all, he had disappeared.

The sun crossed above the mast and started down before our job was finished. But at last I heard the thump of hatches slamming closed and looked down to see the men tramping from the deck. Our signal flags were lowered and our lines were cast away. And the
Dragon,
freed again, headed for the sea.

Where once we had run before the wind, now we tacked against it. Back and forth across the harbor, shore to shore, we went. At each side we rounded up and turned again. Stuffed with barrels, the
Dragon
was slow and almost sluggish. But the tide was behind her, and she beat her way from the sheltered harbor and out beyond the cape.

No longer did she rise to meet the waves. She battered through them, drenched with spray; she lunged, and tossed, and smashed a passage north toward the shores of England.

And before another dawn had risen, one of us aboard her would die upon her decks.

F
rance was wreathed in fog, twenty miles behind us, when a sail was sighted far to windward. Captain Crowe took his spyglass and climbed the mainsail hoops, “to have a squint,” said he.

Mathew and the cook were huddled at the bows. Dasher was beside me at the wheel. I kept the
Dragon
by the wind and held her steady on her course. But still the captain swung madly across the sky, clinging to the wooden bands as the schooner thrashed along. Though the wind was warm, the spray was bitterly cold, and he wore his boat cloak now to shield himself against it. The cloth flapped against his arms and streamed out behind him.

From the deck, the distant sail looked like nothing more than another whitecap among the thousands leaping in the Channel. Yet even as I watched, it grew larger, looming up from the seas, as though a swirl of spindrift had taken shape to come bearing down upon us.

“A cutter,” shouted Captain Crowe. “Coming fast. She's laid a course across our bows.”

Already I could see the curves of her headsails. She was flying toward us, down the wind.

“Come about!” roared Captain Crowe.

I spun the wheel. The
Dragon
hurled herself across the waves, and the men at the bows leapt toward the jib sheets. Captain Crowe, halfway to the crosstrees, was tossed from side to side as the mast came straight and heeled again. His cloak billowed up around his head, and he beat it down as he struggled with the spyglass.

The approaching sail grew wider.

“She'll come behind us now,” shouted Captain Crowe. He swung the spyglass from bow to stern and round again, as though he might find a place in that empty sea in which to hide a schooner.

The cutter was faster than our
Dragon,
and she slowly grew as she closed the distance. She was thirty tons or more.

Captain Crowe came down the hoops. He went straight to the weather rail. In his hands, the spyglass shrank and grew, and it made a tapping sound as the pieces slid together. “Twenty miles to France,” he said. “Twenty miles to home. Whatever we do, they devils there will run us doon like dogs.”

“Who are they?” I asked.

He gave me barely a glance. “Who do ye think?” said he.

The smugglers, of course. They had waited out the weather and found us now fleeing for home, laden with the
cargo that was theirs.
“She'll likely be armed to the teeth,”
the captain had said. And he watched her now with fear in his eyes.

“She's got the weather gauge,” he said. “Damn this wind.” He peered over the side, then off toward the cutter. “Bring her a point to leeward,” he shouted at me. “By and large, ye hear?”

Dasher grinned. “By and large. Oh, there's a lovely bit of talk.”

I spun the wheel, and the
Dragon
lurched around to take the waves farther down her side. The sails bellied full, and she hurried along, faster now by a knot or more. “By and large,” I said.

The
Dragon
thundered on across the Channel, and all of us aboard watched by turns the sea ahead and the cutter behind. I could see the power in her swollen, bulging sails, and her bowsprit, now thrusting from the sea.

“Three hours and she'll be on us,” said Captain Crowe.

Our bowsprit climbed above the waves, then dropped and rose again in a plume of silvered mist. I heard the roaring from the dragon figurehead and the thrumming of the mainsail leech, loud and steady.

The waves came tumbling down and pitched us over, and the mainsail boom slammed against the sea. The sails were spattered dark with spray, pouring water from tack and clew, as though the
Dragon
sweated from her headlong rush to England.

I could feel the weight she carried. It dragged her down and made the sea run high and thick around her counter. No longer did she gallop like a magical stallion; she'd become
a draft horse, fat and trudging, maned with spindrift.

And the cutter closed the distance.

“She goes better with a corpse behind her,” said Dasher, with a nervous laugh. “Where's a dead man when we need oner

“Stow it,” said Crowe. He stood at the weather rail, his fingers hooked like talons to the wood, his cloak tangled in the wind. He looked like a part of the ship, not moving at all as the deck rolled and plunged. He never took his eyes from the cutter.

The other two had moved to the foremast shrouds, as close to the stern as ever I'd seen them, except for their turns at the wheel. They held to the ropes and peered to windward, and again I wondered which of them had come to me in the darkness. And was the other the man I had to fear,
the one least Likely?
I studied their faces, but neither gave the slightest sign of seeing me there at all. As one man, they watched the cutter. All of us, we watched it coming closer.

Then, suddenly, Dasher started singing. His voice was rich and powerful, his song so deeply sad that I felt it beating time within my heart. On the vastness of the stormy sea, in the peril of that moment, I felt as though he sang us to our doom. The cutter came in full sight, the water splitting across her bow into tumbling streaks of foam. She heeled and straightened, dipped toward us and away, and I saw the men, thirty or more, upon her decks.

Dasher sang; he faced ahead, and the spray ran like tears along his whiskers.

At the cutter's bow, a tarpaulin mushroomed in the wind. It flew away to leeward, and a dozen men fought to bring it in. And underneath it, gleaming black, was the barrel of a cannon.

There was a cry from forward, and Mathew thrust an arm through the shrouds, pointing at the cutter. Captain Crowe seemed to tilt toward the sea as the
Dragon
rolled to windward. And Dasher sang with aching melancholy.

“Shut up, I told you!” roared Captain Crowe. He whirled round, his face red with anger. “Batten down your trap, ye hear?”

The song dwindled into nothing, and I heard again the roaring of the sea, the drumbeat of the mainsail.

“Ye great dandified noddy. Ye lummox,” bellowed Captain Crowe. He was either very angry or very, very scared. “I'm sick o'ye. I'm sick o'your larks and your airs. And I'm sick o' the sight o' they damned corks ye're aye wearing.”

The grin trembled on Dasher's lips. He tried to hold it there but couldn't, and he turned away, as though to study
the sea at the leeward rail. The
Dragon
rolled, and the tilt of the deck made me soar above him, until he seemed very small, like a little boy dressed for a childish game in his pathetic suit of corks.

“Ye're a blether,” said the captain, still ranting at Dasher. “Ye're full o' prattle and rubbish. No heart for killing, ye say. Weel, I hope to hear ye singing when ye're dancing in a noose.” Then he turned on me, his eyes like furnace doors. “And you,” he said. “I should – ”

His sentence went unfinished. A cloud of smoke jetted from the cannon's mouth, and a long moment later the sound reached us. It shook the very air; it rattled in my bones. Then the sea beyond our bowsprit erupted in a geyser, and already the tiny, distant figures were swabbing out the barrel.

“They missed,” I said.

“Och, they weren't aiming for us, ye gowk!” yelled the captain.

Dasher smiled at me. A pathetic smile. “Not yet,” he said. “But soon enough, my friend. A warning shot, was all that was. And when they tire of their little game, they'll bring the sticks down, John. Just you wait and see.”

Captain Crowe pushed me from the wheel. He took the spokes in his enormous fists and sent the
Dragon
reeling down the wind. So suddenly did he turn the ship that I barely kept my balance. Dasher didn't; he fell across the planks with a thud and squeal, as though his corks were mice that he had landed on.

We twisted through the waves, and the cutter twisted with us, coming always closer. Again we saw the cannon
fire; again we heard the awful thunder of its blast, then saw the ball land close ahead. With every puff of smoke I cringed inside, for a ball of iron weighing nine pounds or more was rushing through the air, and it seemed the gun was aimed at only me.

Captain Crowe turned his face toward the wind and sniffed. “Ye smell that?” he asked.

I shook my head.

“Fog. I dinna see it, but I smell it right enough.” He went up on his toes, squinting like a badger. “A few minutes more; that's all we need.”