Revenge of the Barbary Ghost (15 page)

She did wonder, briefly, if she had become too attached to the thrill of stealing about in the dark, and making discoveries. It was one of the terribly unladylike characteristics for which her mother and grandmother would surely condemn her, if they only knew. She sent them a smirking grin in her mind;
let
them condemn her. She would never go back to living as they thought appropriate.

At the cliff’s edge she concealed herself behind a barricade of brush that she had composed earlier in the day, when no one was watching, and extinguished her lantern. The night was quiet but for the hushed wash of waves on the beach. It was so dark only the faintest differentiations told her where the tree was on the precipice.

But her ears told her when someone else approached, swishing through the lush grass. She could faintly see the outline of a man, moving slowly. He cautiously felt his way along the cliff, until he was well beyond the tree where the rigging was mounted, then he appeared to kneel, and Anne could hear a faint, rhythmic scrape of sound; it seemed, to her, that he was pulling something up from the cliff with a rope.

Excitement built in her stomach. Tonight she would learn the secret; who was the ghost, and how did he perform his magic?

Her hearing, sharpened by the darkness, picked up the faint scrape of a flint being struck, and a tiny pinpoint of light sparked, then leaped into a flame; it just as quickly disappeared, except for a faint halo of light. An enclosed lamp, perhaps?

In rapid succession she translated sounds; the huff of a man working hard, the squeak of a pulley, the creak of a tree branch bearing weight. She came out of her blind and crept forward, toward the tree, then to the cliff edge. She peeked over, and there was her Barbary Ghost, but to her astonishment, since the ghost did not have his beard affixed yet, she recognized him even from above.

“St. James!” she cried out.

Marcus St. James looked up at her and by the light of his veiled lamp, she saw the almost closed eye, and the bruises and cut lip.

“Anne,” he muttered. “What the devil are you doing out here?”

“So
you
are the Barbary Ghost! I should have known.” She fell back, holding her sides and laughing. She clapped her hand over her mouth, intent on staying silent.

Over the lip of the cliff rose St. James, pulling on his rope and pulley mechanism. He grasped the cliff edge with one hand and held up the lantern with the other, steadying himself where he dangled. “Don’t give me away, Anne, please!”

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” she said, delighted to see that the scoundrel was her ghost.

“Do you swear it?” he begged. “That reflection you saw this afternoon was a signal to do my act tonight. I must move into place and be ready to give those idiot excise men the fight of their lives.” With a wicked grin, warped by his swollen chin, he added, “I have a new explosive I’ve worked on. Stole some powder from the regiment battery. It ought to scare the religion into those cowards.”

She sobered and crept closer to him along the grassy cliff edge. “St. James,” she muttered, “if you are caught it could mean hanging, to be aiding the smugglers as you do.”

“I know,” he said. “But it is only for a time or two more.”

“Are you getting paid?” she whispered.

“Of course. The money is for Pamela,” he said. “I can’t let the dear girl exist in penury, when it’s all my fault.”

“What do you mean,
your fault
,” Anne asked, but he shook his head and swung away from the cliff, sticking his beard on haphazardly. She assumed he was reacting to some signal from below, for just then a rowboat splashed to shore, and shadowy figures set to work unloading and moving the goods.

***

Darkefell hung back in the shadows, watching Johnny go to work with the others, transferring ankers of gin or rum from the deep hull of a rowboat up the beach to a waiting dray. There was one fellow, a smaller man, who appeared to be in charge, and he directed them all with the wave of his cutlass and gruffly shouted instructions. A second rowboat slid into shore, and he waved some waiting men to pull it higher, and start unloading.

Had the excise men heard of this night’s landing? Would they be raided?

And then it began. The hoot of an owl, a shout, and men came rushing down the cut, and this time, though they looked up and saw the Barbary pirate go into his elaborate act, fear of the “ghost” did nothing to deter the revenue men. But the smuggling gang leader valiantly directed his “army” just as well as any military man. He sent the strongest, stoutest fellows into pitched battle, and they wielded their weapons, mostly just cudgels and poles.

And Johnny Quintrell was in the middle of it all! No cudgel would protect him from an excise officer’s musket. Darkefell would not let poor Joseph lose his only consolation in life, his son, not if he could do a single thing about it!

Shouts, and turmoil, guns flashing, explosions rocketing around them from the Barbary Ghost, presumably, for that specter was clearly visible at times, and at others concealed by smoke and bursts of fire, a cannon shot from a lugger out at sea: it all contributed to the tumult on the wet sand. Darkefell darted through the crowd, sliding on seaweed, choking on smoke from the gunpowder, buffeted and bashed by the men scrambling with the ankers over their shoulders. The huge draft horse whinnied and reared at the commotion, the dray toppling sideways in the gloom. A man cried out in pain, perhaps hit by a musket ball or the slashing hooves of the terrified beast. Every time the flash of gunpowder lit the air, Darkefell used the light to find his way.

And there was Johnny, standing like a perfect target among the seething crowd, his expression one of petrified indecision. Darkefell dashed to him and seized him, but the boy struggled and cried out.

“Shut up,” Darkefell growled in his ear, “and come with me to safety. I’ll not let you die, Johnny; I’m your friend, whether you want one or not.”

“Milord,” the young fellow whispered. “What’s a’goin’ on? We was supposed to be safe tonight, perfectly safe. An’ … an’ I saw some feller—I think it were Mr. Puddicombe up on the rise—an’ he was shootin’ at the
ghost
. Why was he shootin’ at the ghost? I don’t understand.”

“Never mind any of that,” grunted Darkefell. “Let’s get you out of here!”

After that the boy didn’t struggle and followed eagerly enough, shedding the ankers of liquid strapped to his bulky shoulders. Not willing to implicate the inhabitants of Cliff House, Darkefell pulled the younger man away, up the cut, in the shadowed lip of the cliff, and away from the St. James house, but it plagued him; how did whoever performed the Barbary Ghost stunt manage to do so from so close to the home, unless … was it with the knowledge of the owners, or even Pamela, who rented the house? Was she receiving money to turn a blind eye? It was something he would need to take up with Anne the next day, for he would not allow her to stay in a place of such danger.

***

Anne scurried back from the cliff edge as the firefight broke out. St. James was an experienced military man, and could look after himself, but she had to admit she was frightened. She hoped that St. James, seeing it as a losing battle, would abandon his post. As she retreated, she spotted St. James, without his pirate beard and part of his costume, hunched over and running, tripping and stumbling, toward her.

“Get back to the house and go upstairs,” he grunted, gasping for breath. “Things have gone badly. Not even my ghost frightened the excise men away this time.”

“What are you going to do?” she asked.

“I’m coming in, in a few minutes; I just want to get … to be sure no one is hurt.”

She guessed that he must know some of the participants, and honored his care for his comrades. “All right,” she said. She had no wish to get a musket ball in her shoulder or any other place, so she went in. She stayed awake a long time, but when she heard someone creeping down the hall and went to see who it was, thinking it was St. James, it was just Pamela.

“What are you doing up, Pam?” Anne asked.

“I woke up; had a bad dream, I think,” she said, one shaky hand to her forehead.

“You look feverish,” Anne said, putting one hand to Pam’s forehead and feeling it damp with perspiration.

“I’m not feeling well. Something awoke me and I couldn’t get back to sleep,” she said. “I was just going down to the kitchen to get a glass of buttermilk from the larder to settle my stomach.”

“Let me get it for you.” Anne was relieved when Pamela agreed with no demur. It must have been the clash below on the beach that awoke her, but Anne did not want Pamela to catch her brother coming in, for she wasn’t completely sure Pam knew about St. James’s nocturnal occupation.

Anne took her friend the buttermilk, then returned to her own room, but even though she wanted to see St. James when he came in, she was exhausted and couldn’t keep her eyes open. She fell fast asleep and didn’t hear another thing.

Nine

Darkefell had successfully returned to the Barbary Ghost Inn with Johnny Quintrell, and sent him to bed, telling him they’d talk in the morning. Osei, who was, of course, awake and waiting in one of their cramped pair of rooms, heard the whole story.

“So the Barbary Ghost made an appearance,” Osei said, as he knelt to help Darkefell off with his boots.

The marquess leaned back on his elbows on the bed, while his secretary pulled on the stubborn footwear. “I begin to wonder how this can happen without the knowledge of Miss Pamela St. James, at the very least.”

“You speculate that the lady may receive some recompense for turning a blind eye to the ghostly ‘haunting’?”

“Perhaps,” Darkefell answered, grimly, removing his jacket and pulling his shirt off over his head. He handed the apparel to Osei and scratched his bare chest, then smoothed the wiry chest hair down. “Or perhaps the brother and sister are even more deeply involved.”

“From what I have heard, in the talk around this inn, nearly everyone in these parts is involved in some way with the smugglers. Farmers will loan horses or equipment, drays, wagons, for if they do not, they will find their barns vandalized or their livestock dead.”

“And many more do it for the goods they may receive as payment,” Darkefell speculated. “What else have you heard? And why do they speak so openly in front of you, when they hush the moment I enter a room?”

The younger man smiled, slyly, an unusual expression for him, solemn as he usually was. “These people at the inn
may
have the impression that I, a simple savage, do not understand them, or perhaps that my faculties are not … acute.”

Darkefell grinned and pulled off his breeches, tossing them to his secretary. “You, my friend, are a trickster, a Loki, a mountebank!”

“I take exception to that characterization, my lord,” Osei said, returning to his customary gravity, and presenting his employer with a nightshirt. “I have had to become many things since coming to this country, some of them not natural to me, but I am not responsible if people make assumptions without reference to reality.”

“The person responsible for the Barbary Ghost would agree with you, for once you see beyond the frightening appearance, it really is just a magician’s trickery you witness. What else have you heard?”

Osei sat, while Darkefell performed his evening ablutions, and talked. The suspected smuggler was a local man, Micklethwaite, and he owned not one, but two ships, a lugger and a cutter. He kept them both busy and professed to be a legitimate importer of goods from the Low Countries: cheese, lace, fabric, chocolate, coffee and other goods, upon which he paid the excise. No tampering with goods, either by using false-bottomed barrels or dried-out tobacco, had tainted his day-to-day performance as a shipper.

Some shippers attempted to avoid paying excise taxes by using specially constructed barrels with false bottoms; while the top contents were merely water for sailors, sections at the side were illegally shipped brandy. Or they dried the tobacco they carried, which meant that the tax they paid was on a lighter weight. When the tobacco was sold, though, it was rehydrated to give a higher weight. It was a game with ever-changing rules. However, cheating the taxation officers with such ruses was a different and less dangerous game than evading tax by smuggling goods.

So Micklethwaite had avoided any taint of cheating so far, but it was becoming more widely suspected that he smuggled. He transported goods from Ireland with his smaller ship, it was claimed, and occasionally hired out his services to ferry furnishings or other items, but there was a lot of time between legitimate shipments. That was when he apparently plied his smuggling trade, accepting, it was suspected, loads of goods from larger Dutch and French ships, which he would then sell or trade to English buyers. He was either, Osei said, extraordinarily lucky in never being caught, despite gossip about his role in the trade, or he was paying the right people to turn a blind eye.

“Including the local excise officer, Puddicombe? I’ve heard the man complaining loudly that the crown has not seen fit to give him aid from the Light Dragoons at St. Ives, those gallants so ably represented by that lot at the regimental assembly the other night.”

“However,” Osei said, leaning forward, lamplight gleaming in his spectacles, “Mr. Puddicombe was offered some men by the last colonel of the Light Dragoons, but he took offense, saying he and his local fellows could do the job better than any vain captain.”

“Interesting.” Darkefell then told Osei about his evening’s adventures and his rescue of young Johnny Quintrell. “I’ll speak to him in the morning and try to get him to see it would be better to help the crown than end up in a pitched battle with the excise men, and have his life’s blood drain onto the sand. As much as we suspected Puddicombe of complicity in the free trade, I would not guess that from last night. Unless I am mistaken, that represented a new fervor in the revenue men’s attempts to shut down the St. Wyllow smuggling gang. Why now? Why is he trying so hard to catch them now, when at least two other times he and his men were forced back by nothing more than smoke and gunpowder?”