The Smugglers (6 page)

“Make sail!” said Captain Crowe. He was grinning, his crinkled eyes barely there. “Main and foresail, jib and staysail. Lively, lads; the
Dragon
wants to go.”

Larson was left in a slump at the rail, the bight of rope still around his shoulders. Mathew and Harry went to the halyards, the captain to the sail lashings.

“Mr. Spencer, you'll tak' the wheel, if ye please,” said Crowe. “We'll go south to the end of the Sands.”

Huge and white, the sails streamed up and opened, flapping in the breeze. The anchor came aboard, and I felt us drifting back across the Downs. I spun the wheel; the
Dragon
lurched on her side. I spun it the other way, and she turned her head toward the open sea.

It was an eerie wind that the dead man brought. It touched the
Dragon
but no other ship, and we passed through the anchored fleet like a silent, drifting cloud. A rippling patch of water went with us, but all around was calm. We sailed on a reach past a big East Indiaman that sat so still, even her flag wasn't ruffled. On every ship, a line of astonished men watched us pass.

“Set the topsail,” said Captain Crowe, and–still grinning–he opened his long wooden box. “I'll even pipe ye aloft.”

And so the
Dragon
went to sea, with a skirl of pipes in a ghostly breeze. The drifting dunes of the Goodwin Sands went by to port, the shores of Kent to starboard, and I alone steered this ship, this little world of ours. The square topsail flapped and filled, and I felt the pulse of the
Dragon
through the wheel as she quickened on her way.

But soon Dasher came to take my place. “You can go,” he said. “I'll steer this thing. What's the course?”

“Running free,” said I.

“Running free,” he answered with a nod. “Straight ahead. Steady as she goes.” He wore an impish grin. “Lord love me, I like this sailor talk.”

He settled in behind the wheel, his arms poking out from his suit of corks as though from a barrel, awkwardly bent to grasp the spokes.

Suddenly he seemed disturbingly familiar. His laughter, his swaggering walk, even the words that he sometimes used made me think of the highwayman who had stopped
us in the forest. But I could see that he knew what he was doing when it came to working a ship. He looked up at the sails, then down at the compass, and with the smallest turn of the wheel he gained half a knot. The wake stretched arrow-straight behind the
Dragons's
stern.

“You can go,” he said again. “They're about to launch that little gent. That fancy friend of yours.”

“A little fancy gent,”
the highwayman had called him. I watched Dasher as he steered the ship. I said, “Have you seen that man before?”

“Don't ask me that,” he said, and laughed. “I'm a terrible one for faces. Even worse for names. I pass my veiy own mother on the street and think, 'Now, who's that Mrs. Hickenbothom?' Get along now or you'll miss the launching. The Haggis wants your help.”

Up at the bows, Captain Crowe had a swath of sailcloth spread across the fo'c's'le deck. He was down on his hands and knees, cutting out a burial shroud. His knife ripped through the cloth, and he went along behind it. At the pinrail on the weather side, Mathew and the cook were coiling halyards. Side by side, they worked with their heads down, but now and then they lifted them, and I saw the worried looks they cast across the deck.

“Ah, Mr. Spencer,” said Crowe. “Perhaps ye'11 lend a hand.”

We spread out the shroud and laid Larson upon it; we lifted him there, with the captain at his heels and me at his head. He made a sorry sight, his tiny hands and face all ghastly pale. His eyes were not quite closed; his mouthhung
open. I said, “We need a cloth. A tie to put around his head.”
¹

“Och,” said Crowe, “we'll just wrap him in the shroud.”

“No,” said I. “I'd like to do it right.”

He tore a piece of cloth into a ribbon, which he gave to me. I tied it round the dead man's chin, and when I lifted his head I discovered that the bones were all broken. I felt them grinding in my fingers.

“He didn't drown,” I said, looking up at Captain Crowe. “Someone smashed his skull.”

The captain came and prodded Larson's head. “Aye, ye might be right. Or he might have had a fall.”

“Whatever happened,” I said, “it wasn't long ago.” There was still a pinkish touch of blood in his mat of hair. “He was alive when he set out for the
Dragon.
”

Crowe shrugged. He squinted at me. “Still, we canna keep him on the ship. Ye dinna want to keep him, do ye?”

“No,” I said. To have a corpse on board was the worst of luck. “But we should tell someone about it.”

“Oh, aye,” he said. “We'll do that, Mr. Spencer.”

We folded the shroud over the body. The captain worked up from the feet, tucking and smoothing. Harry and Mathew crossed to the starboard pinrail, circling wide around the corpse, like cats past a sleeping dog. They went to work just yards away.

I didn't want to be the one to cover Larson's face; I started at his chest. And my hands, as they pressed and tugged at the cloth, felt a bulk below it, a square thing hard and stiff.

“There's something in his pockets,” I said.

“I dinna see how that could be,” said Crowe. “Dasher had a look already. Aye, and Mathew too. Didn't ye, Mathew?”

The sailor nodded, a quick and rapid gesture. He had prominent teeth, and the way his head moved made me think of a rabbit.

Captain Crowe grunted when I opened the shroud. “Och, Mr. Spencer,” said he, “I'd like to get this done then.”

I felt across Larson's wet clothes and found the thing, not within a pocket, but sewn behind the lining. The cloth was water-soaked and frayed from wear; I tore it with my fingers. And out came a little bundle, an envelope of oilskin.

“Whit's that, then?” asked Captain Crowe.

I opened the flap, and water poured out. It flowed down the side of the dead man's shroud, a rivulet tinged blue with ink. It streamed across the deck, then up, then down as the
Dragon
rolled to the south around the Goodwin Sands. The big curve of the jib threw shadows across us, and the wind ruffled cold at the papers I pulled from the pouch.

The first was a map folded in four. It was crudely drawn, and the lines had smudged near the creases, but I saw the coast of Kent and the English Channel, the entrance to the Thames. It was much like the image Captain Crowe had drawn on the table of the Baskerville, but in two places were markings in the shape of an X, and some writing was blurred beyond reading.

The second paper was a letter, but it too was badly smeared. It tore nearly in two when I tried to open it.

“What does it say?” asked Captain Crowe.

I held it out to him, but he shook his head. “I canna read,” he told me.

I flattened the page on the planks of the deck. My fingers were soon blue with ink, as the whole top third of the letter was an enormous smudge, and the rest not much better. But I read aloud the parts I could–a few words here and there.

“… have come among the Burton gang …”

“The Burton gang!” said Captain Crowe.

“… a small army … eighty men … smuggling spirits …”

“Och, that's enough,” said Crowe. “It's a lot of prattle.”

But I kept reading. “… time running out … I am attracting suspicion …” And the last sentence was nearly all in the clear. “A major run is planned for six nights after the moon is full; the contraband of sixty barrels to be brought across in the …”

“In the what?” asked Captain Crowe.

“It doesn't say,” said I. The rest was fully smudged.

I looked up from the letter to see the captain with his knife in his fist. He had come toward me across the spread-out remnants of the sailcloth, and now–at its edge–he squinted at me. The sailors, too, had stopped their work. Harry stood before me and Mathew behind, and the three made a silent tableau as the deck heaved up on a swell.

“And whit do ye mak'o this?” Crowe asked. “It seems like a lot o' daftness to me.”

“I think he came to find me,” I said. “He was fleeing from this smuggling gang, and he needed my help to get to London, maybe. He knew about the
Dragon.
”

“Och, yere as daft as the wee manny.” Crowe dug his knife into the cloth and tore away a long and narrow ribbon. This he carried back to the shrouded body, and he started binding the dead man's knees. “Put it a' back in his pockets, I say. Let him tak' his secrets to his grave.”

There was one more thing inside the pouch: a small book–a sort of ledger. It was so sodden that I had to peel the pages open one by one, like the layers of an onion.

Mathew and Hany moved closer, bending forward to see the book. Mathew sucked air through his teeth. But Captain Crowe only glanced at me. “And whit's that?” he asked.

“I don't know,” said I. It seemed to be a list, but the writing was small and blurred. It filled nearly half the book, and beyond it the pages were blank.

“This gang,” said Crowe. “This Burton gang. Ye've heard o' them before?”

“Oh, yes,” I said. It was one of the largest smuggling gangs in all of England. I remembered Father reading of it in
The Times,
ranting about the villainy. But we'd heard nothing at all of the Burton gang for perhaps a year or more.

I kept turning pages as the
Dragon
slid along in a hiss of water. Whole sections passed through my fingers in thick and gummy wads. A list of names, perhaps; nothing more than that. And I was about to close the book when, right at the back, I found a note that was not quite so blurred as all the rest.

“Look at this,” I said.

In a different, fainter ink, Larson had recorded every
detail of a smuggling run. There were dates and times; there were signals to be made and answered. Everything was included but the name of the ship and the harbor she sailed from. I read it out, and the captain listened, frowning, as he bundled up the dead man's body.

“Captain Crowe,” I said, “it's now!”

“What?” His face grew even greater wrinkles. “Speak sense,” he told me.

“Look.” I shoved the book toward him before I realized it would do no good. “The dates, the moon; this is happening now. This smuggling ship,” I said, and tapped the pages. “She left for France this very morning.”

“Och, whit good does that do ye, then?” asked Captain Crowe. “There must be a thousand craft setting sail today, frae a hundred ports o' call on a hundred leagues o' coastline.” He shook his head. “Laddie, ye're looking for a needle in a haystack.”

What he said was true, and it took the wind from my sails in an instant. The mysterious smuggler could have been anywhere at all from London round to Devon – still in port or far at sea. It could have been a full-rigged ship or a tiny fishing boat. A needle in a haystack? That would be child's play to find, compared to one unnamed craft in all of southeast England.

Captain Crowe came to his feet. He put a hand at the small of his back as he turned to me. “Ye're like a dithering bodach,” he said. “Will ye help me here, or no?” Then he glowered at Mathew and Harry. “Shove off, the pair o' ye now,” he barked. “I dinna care a hoot if the halyards are coiled; it's no a royal yacht that ye're on.”

Larson, his ashen face still uncovered, his eyes still barely open, seemed to watch me from his shroud. As the
Dragon
sailed along and Dasher steered us south, the dead man's head rocked slowly side to side, as though he shook it at me sadly in its ragged strip of sailcloth.

It wasn't mere chance that had brought him to the
Dragon.
He had come to me for help, and I felt I owed him that. I picked up the map and the letter and leapt to my feet.

“Captain Crowe,” I said, “set a course for France.”

“F
or France, ye say?” Captain Crowe stared at me with a look of utter amazement. “For France?” he said again. “Did I hear ye right?”

“Isn't the
Dragon
as fast as any ship around?” I asked. “Couldn't we sail to France before the smugglers and get the brandy that's waiting for them? Couldn't we make the signal they would make?”

I opened the book and tapped the pages. “It's only a pair of flags. The blue peter and the yellow jack. We could hoist them ourselves, Captain Crowe.”

It seemed his eyes might pop from his head. He looked at me in the same astounded way that a visitor to Bedlam would stare at the lunatics. And I heard the excitement in my voice, and blushed.

“It's foolish,” I said. “Isn't it?”

“Foolish?” said he. “Not at a', lad.”

The sun rolled out from behind the jib, and his shadow
leapt across the deck to tangle at my feet. “Aye, we'll go across,” he said. “If we crowd on sail, there's nary a ship can match the
Dragon.
We'll fill her every inch wi' tubs o' brandy.” He laughed out loud. “It's a bonny scheme,” he said. “It's a bonny, bonny scheme.”

“But then,” I said, “it's straight to London. No matter what my father told you, I want to follow my own instructions.”

A dark expression came over his face. I realized he was getting angry, very quickly. His fingers tightened into fists.

“So that's the lay o' the land, is it?” he said. “Ye sense a little profit here for yourself and your father.”

“Wait,” I said, “I-”

“Ye sail into London wi' sixty tubs o' spirits that cost ye not a farthing. Och, I see your game.” He stepped toward me, so close I felt his breath upon my face. “Weel, I'm the master and ye're a boy, and ye '11 do whit I say. Now gie me that.” He snatched away the map and the letter. Then he looked at the book in my hands and snatched that too. He ripped from its back the pages I'd shown him, and crumpled in his fist all the details of the smuggling run. The rest of the book he hurled back at me. It struck my chest and fell to the deck.

“You don't understand.” I bent down for the book, but Crowe put his foot on top of it.

“We'll go to France for the brandy,” he said. “But we'll no be taking it up to London.”

“I don't
want
to take it to London.” I had to look up at him, feeling small and childish. “I want to take the brandy right where the smugglers would. To the cross on the map.
But I'll go ashore–or someone will–and we'll have the revenue waiting. A trap, Captain Crowe. I want to set a trap.”