Endure My Heart (3 page)

Indeed he was coming, cantering along on his old gray mare. I waved at him and called, “What’s amiss, officer? Are you after smugglers?” with a wink over my shoulder at the lads.

“Two of them, Miss Anderson. Have you seen a sign of them?” he hollered back.

“Two rough-looking fellows just passed by the window a minute ago. They were headed toward the sheepwalk. If you hasten, you’ll catch them.”

“Thankee kindly,” he said, with a tip of his hat, and turned his mount in behind the school to the path where the sheep are taken to the hills, which our foolish geography book describes as the East Anglia Heights, though they are no more than gentle slopes. He would think he had turned the wrong way once he hit the sheepwalk and didn’t find them. The sheepwalk is a meandering path that runs more or less parallel to the main road by the sea, half a mile or so behind it.

I closed the door and turned to my two petty criminals. “Well now, Jemmie and Mark, I hope you’re proud of yourselves,” I said severely. “I’m sure your mother would be mightily pleased to hear you were being chased by Crites.”

Mark pulled his forelock and blushed, but Jemmie smiled in a cagey way. “It’s yourself we’re proud of, miss. I didn’t know the gentlemen had a friend in Miss Anderson.” The word “gentlemen” has no connotation of refinement here on the coast. It is a euphemism for smuggler, lest you are unaware of the term. It was natural they think the magistrate’s daughter harbor no love for them, but to tell the truth, Papa liked his nip of brandy as well as anyone, and was never harsh with them when they came before him. There was never a day when there was not a barrel of the best in our cellar at Fern Bank. And half a dozen barrels still there to scandalize Mrs. Everett! I wondered she had not been to chide me for it.

“Only a friend in need, boys. I don’t approve of your shenanigans,” I scolded, in my best schoolteacher’s voice.

“Aye, but a friend in need is a friend indeed, miss, as the old saying goes,” Jemmie replied. “We’ll not be forgetting your kindness. He nearly caught us hauling a barrel out of the ditch. We had to let him chase us, or he’d have got to routing around and found it.”

“You’d best slip away fast before Crites is back,” I told them. They scampered out the door, back down the road to retrieve the barrel, while Crites plodded along the sheepwalk. I thought very little about it. Smuggling is a crime according to the laws of the land, of course, but here at Salford it is the largest employer, and has gained a certain respectability, as any well-paying employer will do. Work was scarce, and if a husband was to have bread and meat on his table to feed the family, he resorted to smuggling.

Little real harm was done by it, in my eyes at least. People were taxed to death, and what was done with the money but pay off the debts of that expensive raft of royal dukes and their mistresses? We were generous in the extreme with our war heroes too. Wellington set up for life, but what of his “scum of the earth” soldiers, as he was kind enough to describe the men who saved England from Napoleon’s heel. They came home, mutilated, to grub for a bare existence, if they came home at all.

No, no, there is no question in my view. Smuggling is an honorable profession. Call me an anarchist if you like, but I maintain I am a Christian anarchist, and would rather be that than a heathen royalist. I always had a sneaking admiration for the gentlemen. Andrew and I used to play at it when we were children. Hidden in the middle of our spinney at Fern Bank there is a tumbledown shack called the poachers’ shack. No doubt it was well named, but in our games, it was where the gentlemen (me) hid the brandy, and the revenue officer (Andrew) got his comeuppance.

I enjoyed the game, and can well imagine the real thing must be thrilling. What a break in the dull life of a laborer, to slip over to France on a moonless night, or hide in readiness at home to receive the countraband. Had I been a man, I would certainly have joined them. But I was only a woman, so I winked at their activities and lent a hand when I could.

Then too, Officer Crites was not at all popular. The man he replaced, Officer Daggar, had been much better liked, due to his willingness to take a bribe upon occasion. Crites was a martinet. He’d have turned in his own mother. In fact, he did turn in his fiancée’s brother, which lost him a fiancée and made him a host of enemies.

My infraction of the law did not trouble my conscience unduly, though of course I knew abetting the gentlemen was a crime. I would have forgotten it by the next day if it had not been for the reward my new friends chose to bestow on me. Next morning as I went out to school, there was a shiny golden guinea sitting on the doorstep. We had had no callers the night before. No one but myself had been through that door since late yesterday afternoon. It was a payment for services rendered. Helping them caused not a twinge, but taking money for it did. I determined to purchase new books for the school with it, and did so.

Two weeks passed, bringing us to the cold, rainy, windy, disagreeable month of November. As it was a Friday and I looked forward to getting an early start on my weekend, I kept no one in that night. The animal sessions at school were well under control. Miss Aldridge had a wicked cold, and I had taken the school alone that whole week, which made the weekend loom with more pleasure even than usual, since I did not exactly like teaching for a living. There was a timid tap at the door as I put on my pelisse. I went to answer it, thinking some student had forgotten his lunch basket or books.

There stood Jemmie Hessler with his cap in his hands and a very worried frown on his youthful face. Lady sniffed and yelped at a brown bag that was slung over his shoulder. “G’day, miss,” he said, shuffling his feet. I peered down the road, but he was not followed. “Could I come in for a minute?” he asked.

We went in and sat at two little desks that buckled both of our knees, making me realize the taller of my students must spend acutely uncomfortable hours here, for I was not tall myself, and Jemmie was a small, compact, wiry fellow about my own height. “What is it, Jem?” I urged him on, curious but still eager to be home.

“It’s the stuff, miss,” he said. “Crites has tumbled to it we’re keeping it at the warehouse behind the lumber, and there’s a load in tonight. We’ve nought to do with it till it goes out Sunday night. We’ve got a tranter coming to carry it south Sunday night, but there’s two days for Crites to sniff around and find it.”

“How about the stable loft at the inn?” I asked. During Daggar's entire reign the stable loft at the inn had been used. It had been no secret you could go there any hour of the day or night with your bottle and buy any amount you wanted.

“That’s the second place he’ll look.”

“Are there no haystacks or potato graves you can use?”

“He’s on to all the old regular stunts, miss, the fuelhouses and chimmers, ricks and rainwater butts. We don’t want to divide the load up, for the tranter won’t make a dozen stops nowadays, with Crites prowling like a ghost.”

I looked at him, bewildered. “But what is it you want me to do, Jem?”

He swallowed twice and blurted it out. “We was wondering if you’d let us keep it here.”

I stared as though he were an apparition from Hades. “Here, at the school you mean? No, no, I couldn’t consider it. It is too dangerous.”

“It’s not dangerous at all. It’s the last place in the world he’d look.”

“Oh, but if he should look!”

“With the cold winter coming on, and warm clothes to be bought and all, it seems a pity…” He said no more, but looked at me with the eyes of a starving puppy. Lady, sitting at his feet, cast a similar glance at me, gently accusing.

“It smells. The children would notice it at once on Monday morning,” I said brusquely. But I thought of my schoolchildren, walking home in their threadbare garments, with that winter wind getting colder by the day.

“The smell’s no stranger to most of ‘em. They’d never notice it.”

“No, I don’t like this. Let me think.” I suggested a couple of other spots, all of which were vetoed for one reason or another. “If I were ever caught, I’d lose my job.”

“You’ll not get caught, miss,” he promised cockily.

“I have the only key, except Miss Aldridge’s. If you are seen with it, it will be known where you got it.”

“Nay, miss. It’ll only be known you dropped your key, and the wicked gentlemen picked it up and used it. We’d never be incriminating you, and you’ve the word of the gentlemen on that.”

“No,” I said, making up my mind hastily. “I'll not give you the key, but I sometimes forget to close the back window in the teacher’s pantry. And mind you leave it open as well to get rid of the stench by Monday morning.”

He grabbed my hand, then released it hastily with a beet-like blush, while Lady barked her approval. “You’re a right one, miss,” he said, beaming broadly.

“I am a fool,” I replied. “And will be a very cold fool Monday morning with the window open all night. Never mind, go on with you. I’ll open the window before I leave. Can I give you a ride home, Jem? No—we’d better not be seen together,” I decided. Already my mind was turning devious on me.

“You’re awake on all suits, miss. We’ll be frowning daggers at each other anytime we meet, but we thank ye kindly.”

He went off home on foot, and I let him get well away before I left the school myself. Being an accessory before the fact was a larger, more serious crime than merely letting on I had not seen the boys, and it bothered my conscience more. All weekend I worried about it. Worried whether they would get caught, whether they would remember to leave the window open to kill the smell, wondered whether I could trust them. But their word was as good as a bond, and on that score I was fairly easy. It was a weighty business for me.

It was weightily recompensed. On Monday morning I went early to my school to air it out if the gentlemen had neglected to do so. They had not neglected. There was no smell but the cheery, warm odor of hickory logs burning in the stove. They had been here before me, closed the windows and lit my fire for me. When I went to my desk to take out my attendance ledger, five golden guineas were placed neatly beneath it. I felt criminal indeed as I scooped them up and put them in the bottom of my reticule, carefully knotted into a handkerchief.

Never did money burn such a hole in anyone’s pocket as those five guineas burned my reticule. What was I to do with them? One guinea can be spent up and the traces covered, but to buy five guineas’ worth of new supplies for the school would be remarked upon. I put them in the bottom drawer of my bureau, hidden beneath my petticoats, and said nothing.

Andrew returned after having taken holy orders, a full-fledged minister now, but alas no more interested in the world than he had been when he left. I hesitated to intimate to him my wish that Edna remain with us, for while he scarcely notices the time of day, he does notice a strange body in the room, and dislikes it. He is one of those unsociable persons who is never so happy as when guests leave, and he can stop feeling guilty at not having paid the least attention to them while they were there. It turned out I had forgotten something that had apparently been on my brother’s mind since the moment he left. It was the organ, sitting new, shiny and unplayed in the gallery of the church.

“Well, as you have Miss Halka to bear you company, Mab, I think I shall just run up to the loft and see how the organ is liking the nasty cold weather.”

I don’t know how the organ liked it, but it did not deter Andrew from spending his every spare second in the loft. Eerie squeals and squeaks resounded from the walls of the church, sounding at times like an infant howling, at other times like caterwauling. Another time the tones were lower, like a foghorn or an angry boar. Then he decided he needed lessons, and for three consecutive evenings he sat beside me at the piano in our living room, learning the most basic rudiments of reading music. The nature of his organ work changed after that, the trick now being for Edna and myself to try to figure out what “tune” he was playing. But it was all well worthwhile, for it was a perfect excuse for Edna to go on living with us. Andrew suggested it himself after a couple of hints.

Two weeks later, Millie Hessler, a sweet little six-year-old sister of Jemmie and Mark, toddled up to me before leaving school. Dame Aldridge was back, so that there was little privacy. “Jemmie says to tell you it’s going to be a hot night, and you should leave the window open,” she said, with a smile of pure innocence that sent a shiver down my spine. They needed the school again!

“What’s that you say, Millie?” Dame Aldridge asked, coming up behind us.

Before the child should utter her senseless-sounding message again, I patted her head and said, “Very well, dear. I understand.”

“He said to be sure you don’t forget,” she added, then mercifully walked away.

“What’s all this about?” my employer asked.

“Mrs. Hessler wants me to stop off on the way home. Mark wants to study more arithmetic on his own, and I offered to give him a book.”

“Hmph,” she said. “He’ll be wanting to figure out how much profit he’s made on his smuggling, the bounder. We should encourage the ex-students, to be sure, but you don’t want to have much to do with that lot, Mabel. They are not our sort.”

Miss Aldridge had her own gig. I remained behind a little in case she should take the idea of going to the Hesslers’ with me. I required privacy with Jem. He was at home, and looked astonished to see me. “You shouldn’t have come, miss!” he exclaimed.

“Jemmie, this won’t do. Dame Aldridge is back at school now. If she notices the fire on Monday morning and sees the money...”

“We’ll slip back at six Monday morning and close the window, and not light the fire. The place will he aired out by then, and as to the money, you can take it now.”

“No, I don’t want any money.”

“Don’t be daft, miss. Why should you not? Lord Aiken takes his share.”

I could not have been more surprised had he said Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister. Lord Aiken was an earl, an extremely wealthy and influential gentleman who associated with ministers and bishops. “Very well, I will,” I said, and was handed my golden guineas.