Taking Liberties (22 page)

As the coach proceeded, it passed a gateway into a cornfield where men and women were harvesting. The man on the ox cart waved at them.

‘Inquisitive damn hayseeds,' Makepeace said.

‘I don't think that was curiosity,' Beasley said, slowly. ‘We're going into smuggling territory, don't forget. That was an inspection. We were tried but not found wanting.'

‘Me heart was in me mouth,' fluttered Dell. ‘Suppose if he thought I was a customs man in disguise?'

‘Oh,' said Makepeace, ‘was
that
it?' They had passed through a Babbs Cove sentry point. It was disturbing to discover a countryside in league with its law-breakers, and yet, if one were about to break the law oneself, also somewhat comforting; it suggested efficiency. ‘I wonder what Farmer Hayseed would've done if he thought we
were
spies for the Excise.'

‘At best, his wain would have stayed where it was.'

‘And at worst?'

There was a reflective silence. They had strayed into an immense and primitive landscape almost impossible to police. The law doesn't run here, she thought. It might crawl, but it doesn't run. We're at risk. Anything can happen.

At the same time, she felt her wits honing themselves; there was something bracing about going beyond the pale. ‘Smugglers, eh?' she said. ‘Be like old times.' Virtually the entire clientele of the Roaring Meg had lived by smuggling in a Boston where avoiding British excise duty was a patriotic duty. If Devon smugglers were anything like her old customers, she was on home ground.

The deep anticipatory breath she took in was of sea air. The coach had stopped.

They got out, stiffly. As the crow flew, Babbs Cove was less than ten miles from Plymouth; as the road went it had taken them nearly three hours.

‘Oh,' said Makepeace and Philippa, softly.

‘Will you look at that now?' Dell said.

Some giant had cut into the coastline as if taking himself a wedge of cheese. At the thin end, little stone houses balanced themselves on higgledy-piggledy shelves of rock above a slipway running down to sand that widened into a fan before disappearing under the water of a small bay. A couple of small fishing smacks, upended on the slipway and obviously in need of repair, argued that the rest of Babbs Cove's fishing fleet was out at sea.

The wedge's sides were red, fissured, protective headlands, the one on the right dominated by a large and weatherbeaten house, its closed shutters making it sightless to one of the loveliest views in Devon.

‘T'Gallants, do you think?' said Beasley.

‘Must be.'

‘Shall we go up?'

‘Let's explore first.' Makepeace believed in reconnaissance.

There was no one about, though from a clifftop came a series of high-pitched whistles issued by human lips. ‘I think we're being announced,' Beasley said.

They walked along a stony track past houses, the gardens festooned with fishing nets and lobster-pots, where doors stood open to show nobody inside them.

Rock pools at the edges of the cliffs winked in the sun and, with the sparkling stone of the cottages, it was as if they had stumbled across some shiny curled-up creature that was asleep.

The eastward headland sloped steeply backwards in a sheepspotted glide of grass and gorse until it joined the track as a mere hump, dividing the first cove from another, this one smaller and with a groyne at its entrance. And this one had a large boat on its beach, suspended in a wheeled cradle. And people.

They'd been expected. Women and children, with old men among them, had been busy careening the boat and were now still, staring in their direction. Makepeace's instinct was to put her hands up and shout, ‘We're friends,' but suspected it would be superfluous. If whoever had whistled their arrival to these people hadn't thought them harmless they wouldn't have got this far. Nevertheless, suspicion came at them over the beach like a wave.

She and the others followed Beasley across the sand towards a man walking to greet them.

‘A'ternoon.' He could have been the brother of the farmer who'd stopped their coach on the hill: the same barn-door breadth of shoulder, the same apparently simple round red face. But this was Neptune's version: his massive legs were trousered and ended in bare, horny feet; somebody had managed to find enough wool to knit him a tunic, now salt-stained; and there were dank ribbons on his straw hat. Instead of grain and sweat, he smelled of barnacles and sweat.

‘We've come from Mr Spettigue,' John Beasley told him.

‘Oh-ar.' He might never have heard the name.

‘We're looking for Jan Gurney.'

‘And what do ee want with he, my 'andsome?'

‘We want him to export some goods for us,' Beasley said, sticking carefully to Spettigue's script. ‘Perishable goods.'

‘Oh-ar.'

‘
Perishable
goods,' Makepeace repeated with emphasis. It was the password, their bona fides; it should have led to a relaxation of the tension that was beginning to weight the air.

It didn't. The giant went on being simple and there was lazy movement as the people round the boat began to drift towards them, slowly, as if they had nothing better to do, but gradually forming an enclosure around her and the others. They were mainly women, but the careening scrapers in their hands were nastily suggestive.

‘Brought the Excise with ee, have ee?' the man said suddenly. He lifted his voice into a shout: ‘How far off now, Jack?'

A cry came back, thin but audible. ‘Thirty minute, I reckon. 'Tis the Admiral's barge, Jan. Still on our headin'.'

Dear Lord, their presence had coincided with a sighting of a naval boat. No wonder they hadn't been welcomed; to people as suspicious as these the two events had seemed connected. The ring tightened around them, like a stockade.

‘Nothing to do with us,' Makepeace told them, gabbling. ‘We came by road. I wouldn't bring the Revenue on anybody, I was a smuggler myself once.'

Gurney rocked back on his heels in exaggerated horror. ‘Chaps, the lady's callin' us smugglers. That's right hurtful, that is. Why's she a-doing that, I wonder?'

Makepeace could have given him several reasons. She pointed to the cradled vessel. ‘That bowsprit for a start,' she said. ‘That's a smugglers' bowsprit. And she's got a tubrail inboard. We used tubs. And lobster-pots.'

He squinted down at her. ‘Where was that then?'

‘Boston. In America. I used to get my sugar from a cutter just like that one.'

‘Americy?' said Jan Gurney. ‘Deary, deary me, chaps. We got ourselves an American.'

An old man in the crowd said: ‘Small wonder we'm at war with the buggers.'

There was a general snuffle of amusement and Makepeace knew it would be all right.

‘What do ee want with us, then?' Gurney said.

‘I want to get a friend of mine over to France. Mr Spettigue said as you might take him. For a price, of course.'

‘Did he now? An' oo
is
this friend, if I might be so bold?'

‘Another American. Will you take him or not?' They were demanding a great deal of trust from her and giving precious little in return.

‘Escaper?'

She nodded reluctantly.

‘Have to think about that then, won't us? We ain't in the exportin' business.'

She was getting cross and desperate. ‘Well, while you're thinking about it, we're going to look at that house back there. It's for sale and I'm considering buying it.' He could put
that
in his pipe.

‘Spettigue say you could buy it?'

‘He did,' Beasley said. ‘Temporary measure. For storing perishable goods.'

The giant seemed to make up his mind and again blasted their ears with a shout: ‘How far now, Jack?'

The faint reply from the headland said: ‘Twenty, twenty-five minutes, I reckon.'

‘Keep working, chaps, get her done fast.' The cordon around the coach party returned to the boat to resume the work on its bottom.

‘And cover that bloody bowsprit,' Gurney called after them before turning to Makepeace. ‘Got the keys?'

‘Yes.'

He set off across the sand and they followed him.

Makepeace discovered that sweat was trickling down between her breasts, and not just because it was a hot day. The encounter could have gone either way. If it had gone the wrong way . . . the crowd of still-faced women coming closer and closer wasn't an event she'd like to relive.

Beasley trudged along at her side, taking off his hat and wiping his forehead with a shaking hand. ‘Phew!'

She nodded.

His eyes on Gurney's back, he muttered: ‘What about the bloody bowsprit?'

‘The length,' she said. ‘Almost as long as the hull and that's illegal—leastways it was in Boston and I reckon it's the same here. You can cram enough sail on a jib like that to show the Revenue a clean pair of heels.'

‘No wonder they're worried about the navy heading this way.'

Makepeace wasn't so sure. Unless the crew of the approaching craft intended to search the village—and the lookout on the headland had said it was a naval vessel, not Revenue—it might not see the cutter at all.

She looked back; this bay was considerably smaller and more hidden than the one around which the village clustered and from which its smacks went back and forth on the legal business of fishing. It was as if Babbs Cove proper had a drawing room in which it could innocently receive visitors, while the back room, the cove they were leaving, was kept for more nefarious activity. Certainly it could only be used by those who knew its waters well; its entrance between the groyne and the opposite cliff was narrow. As good as a postern, she thought. Rocks poked up round black heads, like unmoving seals in the swirls of an ebbing tide. Nobody, unless they'd been born to it, could get a vessel through there. Whatever else the men of Babbs Cove were, they were fine seamen.

She quickened her step to catch up with Gurney to test her theory. ‘Leaving yourself open with that cutter on the beach, ain't you? If there's customs men coming, they'll take her as a prize.'

He just said: ‘The
Lark
needed 'er backside seeing to.' He strode on, adding over his shoulder: ‘Like all females from time to time.'

They went through the village, past an inn with surprisingly large stabling on their right where Sanders was watering the coach horses at a trough. The door of the inn itself was shut, as were its windows.

Just after the inn the track divided, one branch becoming the lane down which they had approached the village, the other turning westward to become a bridge leading towards the clifftop and the house above. Beneath the bridge a stream emerged from a reed bed and plunged energetically over rock to the beach.

Plenty of good water, Makepeace thought. Even in this driest of summers the whole village was beset by rivulets. If the house suits, I might keep it. Bring the girls in the summer.

Now a lane again, the way became cobbled as it led steeply upwards. They passed under an arch and into a courtyard. And stopped.

There was silence apart from the call of seagulls.

‘Holy Hokey,' Makepeace said at last. ‘That's not a house, it's a tomb.'

‘It's horrible,' Philippa said, used to the modernity of America.

‘I t'ink it's grand,' Dervorgilla said.

Beasley said nothing.

Here was bleakness and, worse, medieval bleakness looming above them as if the place was still expecting to repel attack by roving marauders from the Wars of the Roses. It repelled Makepeace immediately.

A flight of steps led up to an arched and heavy front door. What in any other house would be the ground floor remained an undercroft—with barred arrow slits instead of windows.

T'Gallants was not just unwelcoming, it was hostile.

‘Let's hope it's going cheap,' Makepeace said. ‘Who'd want to live here?'

‘Thought Spettigue were,' Gurney told her. ‘Said he didn't want strangers in. Give us the keys.'

He led the way across the weedy, cobbled courtyard, past a mounting block and an elaborate water trough, climbed the steps and inserted a key in the escutcheoned lock. As he opened the door he called out: ‘ 'Tis all right, Mrs Green. 'Tis only me, with some people Mr Spettigue sent.' To Beasley, he said: ‘Caretaker. She don't like visitors, don't Ma Green.'

‘Does she get any?'

Gurney handed the keys back to Makepeace and they passed into a screen passage, very dark. Dell squeaked as a figure slid round behind them, shut the front door through which they'd come and locked it, making everything darker, before disappearing again.

‘This way.' They could just see Gurney's pale straw hat and followed it. He opened another door, one of two vast leaves, and at once they were in light. Space and light. A vast room of white stone, beautiful in its way with its elaborately fan-vaulted ceiling and two great windows, but too big, too cold, too grim, like the rest of the house. The only furniture was an enormous black-oak chair, like a throne, standing against the wall to the left of a fireplace that could have stabled a pony.

‘Will you look at the view now,' said Dell, brightly. She stood by a long oriel window, on the opposite side to the fireplace, which commanded the courtyard and an outlook across the bridge to the village.

‘Look at this 'un,' Gurney said from the front of the room where sun came in through the four lights of a vast window, sending coloured shafts onto the stone-flagged floor from a strip of coats of arms in stained glass. ‘This 'un's the wreckers' window.'