The Smugglers Page 6

  “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.”

  It was the first I had heard of that sailors' tale, and it gave me a shiver of fear. There were only five of us aboard the Dragon.

  “Off wi'ye,” said Crowe. “Let me be alone.”

  I went right to the eyes of the ship, then out to the bowsprit, and I sat astride to ride it, in the finest spot there was to watch the seas go by. I leaned forward until my chest touched the spar; I wrapped my arms around it and stared at the water foaming through the dragon's mouth.

  The wooden jaws rose and fell. They seemed to bite at the waves, to chew them into froth. The head vanished altogether, then leapt from the sea, straining water through the teeth. The yellow eyes shone fierce with spray as the enormous head reared up, then plunged again. And in the sounds of the water, the dragon seemed to roar and breathe.

  I watched the sun go down from there. I saw the sky turn pink and red, and I was filled with an awful doubt. “You will come directly to London,” my father had written, but I was rushing off in the other direction. If I went to Crowe and said, “Turn the ship around,” what would he do? Was he the one the sailor had warned me about, or was it Dasher? “The one least likely, ”the man had said. But surely it couldn't be Mathew or Harry. What reason would they have to harm me? And in that very thought, I realized it could be anyone at all.

  At nightfall we left the corpse behind. It fell away slowly, farther and farther astern, and the gulls went with it, until they were all we could see–a ball of wheeling birds flashing in the twilight.

  Captain Crowe called me aft and gave me the wheel. The wind rose, and rose again, until every sheet and halyard, every brace and guy, was strained as tight as an iron rod. The clouds came streaming in behind us, and there was no moon that night, no glow of stars. I stood my trick at the wheel in the faint light of the binnacle box, on a deck that heaved and quivered. The waves seemed to wait, then leap up at us as we came, shattering on the bow with a shock that I felt through the rudder and the spokes in my hands. It was all I could do to keep the Dragon anywhere near her course.

  But we never touched the sails; we never did a thing to ease her passage, though the wind was ever rising. And when the helm became too much for me, Dasher lent a hand. On the leeward side, he had to press the spokes as I pulled them up, and we worked the wheel like a seesaw.

  “What a night” said he. “What a blooming night. I must have rats in me attic to be out in a wind like this.”

  “Why are you here?” I asked.

  “Why's anyone anywhere? That's the question.” He was taller than me by head and shoulders, but the slant of the deck put our faces almost level. “It's money, my friend. Silver and gold.”

  “I want to hear SLiver jingle,” the highwayman had said. “Silver and gold.”

  “It's why you're here yourself,” said Dasher. “It's why the dead man's where he is and why I'm here beside you. The world's a bit of clockwork, and money is the pendulum, the weight that keeps it ticking. Why, it was money shot your father.”

  “What?” I said. “How do you know that?”

  Dasher shrugged. “That's what I hear. That's what the Haggis told me.”

  “He did?” I asked, surprised and not a little angry. So Captain Crowe had gone straight to Dasher with my story.

  “Now, don't get angry,” Dasher said. “He asked me was I there, that was all.”

  His whiskers shivered in the wind, and his grin was bright as lanterns. Whenever he moved, the corks on his jerkin squeaked like old hinges.

  “I told him that I might have been. I'm not saying I was, but I might have been. Oh, I'm a terror, John. From Romney Marsh to Ramsgate they know the name of Dashing Tommy Dusker.”

  He spoke the words in a fiery way, then shook his head to set his hair a-flying. In the glow of the binnacle light, his eyes sparkled like lavender jewels.

  “You might have heard of me in London,” he said.

  “No,” I said. “I haven't.”

  His grin faded into a look of sadness. “Well, you will,” he said. “There'll come a day you'll hear of me. They might have to hang me first, but hear of me you will. They'll speak my name in every corner of the empire. In the colonies and Trinidad they'll say, 'Sure I know of Tommy Dusker.' And in the next
breath, 'But who's the king, you say?

  He raised his head then and watched the mainsail luff. His eyes seemed far away. And I could see in that look that Dasher was a harmless soul, full of talk and fancies.

  He pressed on the wheel as the Dragon thundered through a wave. “He's all right now, isn't he?” Dasher asked.

  “Who?” I said.

  “Your father.”

  “Yes,” I said. “He's fine.”

  Still Dasher didn't look toward me. He nodded. “That's good, then.”

  The wind blew hard but steady, and on we ran across the Channel. The glint that came from the binnacle box was the only light in all the world, as though the Dragon were a magical thing that carried the sun from dark to dawn. From a distance, I thought, the schooner would look like a spark racing through the night. But somewhere around us, I remembered, another ship was plunging along on the same course, heading for the same little port and the same cargo of contraband.

  What if she got there before us? I wondered. We might go sailing in and find that our cargo had vanished. What would Captain Crowe say if I'd brought him all this way for nothing?

  And then a worse thought occurred to me. What if the smugglers didn't get there before us? What if they arrived to find us there already?

  Chapter 9

  THE HOME OF NIGHTMARES

  That year was one of peace between England and France, but for most of my life the countries had been at war, and I had grown up to fear the French as bogeymen and savages. In the shadows below my childhood bed, in the frosted patterns of the windows, it hadn't been beasts that lurked, nor ghosts, nor spirits, but cruel and sneering Frenchmen.

  And so it was with trepidation that I watched the shore loom closer and saw it turn from black to gray as the night became the dawn. A streak of white etched across the darkness became a line of surf, and behind it were only shadows. This was France, the home of all my nightmares, and it stretched ahead and off to port, a low and rolling land that looked very much like Kent.

  The wind that had driven us straight from the Downs began to ease at daybreak, as though its task were done. No longer was the Dragon pressed to her rails in the sea, flinging herself from wave to wave. She moved along like a stately thing, and I stood my last watch alone at the wheel until Captain Crowe sent me away.

  He brought the signal flags, a bright little bundle of blue and white and yellow. “Hoist these,” he said. “Then off with ye, lad. I know these waters well, and I'll tak' her in myself.”

  It was the oddest pair of flags that a ship had ever flown, one a sign of entering a port, and one a sign of leaving. Captain Crowe watched as I pulled them up the halyard and then remarked, with a dry wit, “They won't know if we're coming or going.”

  The blue peter above, the yellow jack below, they fluttered in the failing wind. I thought again of Father and hoped he would approve of what I'd done. The Dragon, for all intents, was now a smuggler, and I alone had set her to that business. France lay right before us, and the Dragon plowed toward it.

  I went back to my place at the eyes of the ship, feeling in some foolish way that the farther forward I was, the sooner I would get there. Below me, the carved dragon took the seas in its teeth and gnashed them into foam. And I watched the land go by, a league to port–little squares of houses, the different greens of field and forest. All the sea was ours, and whatever strange ship it was that shared our voyage, she was nowhere to be seen.

  The land came slowly closer, as though it spread itself toward us. Then we passed a rocky cape, and it seemed to open like a door, to show a village in a bay behind it, a harbor for the Dragon.

  Dasher went shouting through the ship, and up came Mathew and Harry. We struck the topsails and then the foresail as we came behind the headland. There, in the shelter of the cape, the sea went suddenly smooth, the wind turned light and fitful. And under main and jib we went in spurts and dashes, through a flock of fishing boats that floated on their moorings, past a little brig and a tiny English ketch.

  I heard a squeak, and Dasher came beside me, bulging with his corks. “That's the Dover Girl,” said he, pointing to the ketch. “A fine old smuggler. Here for tea, no doubt. Tea and pilchards.”

  She floated so low in the water that her scuppers were nearly awash. Then we passed to leeward of her, through a stench of rotten fish. It was so thick that I could almost see the odor wafting from her hatches.

  “She'd best be on her way,” I said.

  Dasher laughed. “Oh, she'll wait another day at least. It might be a hot one.”

  “But the fish,” I said. “They won't be worth a ha'penny then.”

  “Of course they won't,” said Dasher. “But they'll cover the smell of the tea. If you were a revenue man, would you shovel your way through that?”

  I had never heard of this trick of the smugglers. “How do you know that?” I asked.

  “You live in Kent, you hear the talk,” he said. Then, again, his rakish grin appeared. “And of course I've done it, eh? What about that? Oh, I've led the king's cutters on many a fine chase. Had them running in circles out in the Channel, like a lot of dogs with their tongues hanging out. The revenue? Oh, they live in dread of Dashing Tommy Dusker.”

  “I'm sure they do,” said I, just as sure they didn't.

  He strutted like a peacock. “You're a lucky lad to be sailing with me. The stories you'll have for your father!” He slapped me on the shoulder, then pointed across the bay. “Now, that other one,” he said. “That brig there.”

  “She looks too small to carry anything,” I said.

  “False bottoms,” said he, with a wink. “They'll load her when the tide is out. Stuff her full of barrels that you'd have to be a fish to see.”

  “And then beach her on the other side to get them out again.”

  “Why, yes,” he said. “Oh, you're quick, you are. Born to this, I think.”

  I should have been angry, but Dasher's comment – oddly–left me feeling proud. Certainly Father gave me small praise, and I suppose it was merely pleasant to hear Dasher's words, no matter how ill meant they were. I leaned against the rail, feeling inflated and light, as we sailed across the harbor.

  On the southern shore, the buildings rose above a quay. They were tall and thin – so narrow that the row of them might have been squashed together in a giant's vise. Built from brick of different colors, from wood and stone, they seemed to tilt and lean, like tramps in tattered clothes once too often patched.

  Crowe steered us toward a wharf crowded with piles of barrels, with stacks of bales and boxes. Cranes and hoists stood among them, their slender arms held high and crossed in every way. Wagons came and went, drawn by plodding horses. And in the bustle, like a rock that the tide flows around, was a small old man, frail and dressed in rags. From his nose and ears grew clumps of white hair. He watched us from the barrels, on a perch among the stacks, now leaning forward and now back, now holding his hands to his head like blinkers.

  We glided toward the quay. The old man stood up on the barrels. “Turner Crowe!” he shouted, and his voice was strange and otherworldly. It was a haunting voice. “Turner Crowe,” he said again. “Do you remember me, you butcher?”

  Crowe's head snapped round. “By the saints!” he breathed.

  “You didn't kill us all,” the old man wailed. “There's one alive. There's one to tell the tale.” Then down he got and scuttled off, moving like an old white beetle in among the wagons and the bundles.

  “Wait!” shouted Crowe. His face was bloodless. “Heave to, ye old bodach!” His hands shook at the spokes so hard, the rudder rattled.

  I looked at Dasher. “Who was that?”

  “Don't know,” said he. And then, suddenly, “I have to get forward. Stand by to lower the jib; strike the halyard; get a lashing on.” And off he went, with a flick of his hair, leaving me alone at the rail.

  The quay was slung with enormous fenders of woven rope. But Captain Crowe brought the Dragon alongside so perfectly t
hat they made no sound at all. If they'd been eggs, he wouldn't even have cracked them.

  Crowe called me to the wheel, then took my arm in his fist. “Ye're to watch for that white-haired man. Watch for him, hear? And if ye see him, ye fetch me.”

  “Who is he?” I asked.

  His hand tightened fiercely. “Do ye have to question everything I say? I've telt ye to watch for him, and that's a' ye need to know.”

  “Yes, sir,” I said. I was used to his anger; again I saw it engulf him completely, then vanish in a moment.

  “Good lad,” he said, and smiled. “Ye're a credit to the ship, and I'll be telling your father as much.”

  Already the Dragon was tied to the wharf, her bowsprit overhanging the quay. Mathew and Harry broke open the hatches and dropped down to the hold. Then the cargo came across, barrel after barrel. Two and three at once, hung in slings of net, they were swung across and lowered through the hatches. The Frenchmen worked with a fever that I'd never seen at any dock in London.

  Captain Crowe watched it from the rail, his head swinging back and forth to follow the path of the barrels. When a sling came loose and the nest of barrels lurched, then caught, he bellowed at the men who worked the hoist. He spoke, much to my surprise, in French, though his accent was abysmal.

  “Prenez garde there!” he shouted. “En douce, ye Froggy bastards.” And he stomped up and down the deck, muttering as he tugged at the white cravat around his neck.

  I was deeply troubled to see him at a business he clearly knew well. I had imagined we would load our cargo amid suspicion and secrecy, without a word being said. But Captain Crowe was no stranger to these Frenchmen.

  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.