Revenge of the Barbary Ghost (25 page)

Pamela noticed her, and called out, “Anne!” and held out one hand.

Anne approached, and her friend took her hand and tucked it into the crook of her arm, as if she felt the need for solace and support. But her conversation with the captain was apparently amicable. He, a ruddy-faced sailor with a pipe in his hand, eyed Anne, but did not speak.

“Captain Micklethwaite, my friend knows everything,” Pam said, then added, hastily, as the gentleman showed signs of alarm, “but not from me! She guessed much and heard more, and knows all, now. But she would never do a thing to harm me, and I trust her.” Pam turned to Anne. “The captain was just telling me that he has arranged one more large landing. He knows I wish to get out of this difficult business, and has agreed to help me retire from the trade. Lord Brag will have one last hurrah.” The ghost of a smile flicked across her face.

“When?” Anne asked, examining the man, wondering if this fellow had killed both Pam’s fiancé and her brother. If she had suspected that, surely she would not be doing business with him, but for all her worldliness, Pam was sometimes too impetuous and trusting. There was more than one kind of naiveté in the world.

“Not sure what night,” he said.

“We must not trust Puddicombe now, the captain agrees. He has proved to be treacherous. In the past we would have informed him of our plans so that he could ignore our landings, or on occasion appear to try to catch us, only to be turned back by Marcus’s explosive apparition.” Her voice caught when she said her brother’s name.

Anne watched for any sign of consciousness on the captain’s part, but he was solemn and unmoved. And yet … there was something about him that nagged at her, something she felt rather than saw.

“But I’m not using me own boats, Miss St. James.” He glanced at Anne, but continued. “I’ve told all an’ sundry that me two boats is busy with a couple o’ lawful runs to Ireland and up north, an’ I’ve hired a boat from a fellow in Bristol, one ’oo understand the business and can keep his mouth shut. The goods is coming from the low countries, due here in these waters ’bout now. Me friend’s boat is coming down tomorrow, an’ we’ll then figure tides and time, an’ unload.” He clamped his pipe between his teeth and rubbed his hands together.

A few more words were exchanged, then Micklethwaite left.

“Are you sure this is wise, Pam?” Anne said, watching him disappear around the corner of the house. “Men have died. It is a lethal and terrible business you are in.”

“But it is the only way I can earn enough for Edward and I to live in a decent manner. I will not let my boy starve, nor suffer and want in his life!”

“Look,” Anne said, turning to her friend and clutching her shoulders in her hands, “I know how you feel about making your own way, but I would gladly give you enough money, whatever you would make from this landing, to quit now!”

Pam stiffened. “If you do not wish to help, then say so now, Anne, but do not suggest giving me charity another time.” Her pale face was set in a grim expression, and she folded her arms over her chest.

Stymied, Anne gritted her teeth, not sure how to proceed, but knowing that to press harder was to offend Pam deeply. For two close siblings, Pam and Marcus could not have different characters. Though Anne admired Pam’s independence, she would have preferred a touch of the cynical greed that characterized Marcus in his worst moments. She sighed, and capitulated. “You
know
I’ll help, Pam.”

Pamela, tears in her eyes, smiled through them. “This is to bring me a lot of money, Anne, more than you could possibly give me anyway, even if I were so cowardly and mercenary as to take your excessively kind offer. I know the risks and I’m willing to take them. It is a lot of goods, so much that Micklethwaite suggested, and I agreed, we must use the cave passage.”

“The
cave
passage? What do you mean?”

“Just you wait until after dinner, and I’ll show you!”

The Quintrells finally departed and dinner—overcooked mutton,
again
, accompanied by delicious biscuits baked by Lolly—was consumed. Anne waited impatiently until her companion nodded over her stitching in the parlor. The older lady finally excused herself and went up to bed.

Pam and Anne lit lanterns, and Pam led the way downstairs to the cold cellar.

“I’ve been down here, Pam,” Anne said, her voice echoing in the stone cellar. “I found Marcus’s workshop. He has a complete store of gunpowder and fireworks chemicals.”

“You know what he was like,” Pam said, her voice trembling. “He could never resist a magician’s trick, or a sorcerer’s chemistry. Playing at the Barbary Ghost and having a reason to make smoke bombs and fireworks was a joy for him.”

“I certainly didn’t find any tunnel while I explored.”

“Just wait!”

They threaded through the warren of small rooms to what Anne thought must be the very end of the cellar, the last room she had discovered. A dusty old carpet hung against the back wall. Pam pulled it back to reveal a locked door.

She toyed with the padlock and talked nonstop, her nerves clearly stretched almost to breaking. “The authorities are very much up in arms right now. Last month a smuggler’s shallop, the
Happy-Go-Lucky
, fired on a revenue lugger off the south shore of Cornwall, at Mount’s Bay. The fools!” she cried, clattering the lock, the sound echoing through the confined space. “Firing on the prevention men only made them a target! Most of the crew were taken into custody, to Pendennis Castle, but escaped.”

“Escaped?”

Pam smiled, the expression fleeting across her lips like a shadow. “Oh, I don’t think that is any coincidence, my dear Anne, that so many were able to escape from such a fortress. I’ve told you, bribery infects the highest offices of this land, and the revenue service is especially polluted. At every point in our country where money is collected, the men doing the collecting watch the gold pass through their hands and they become avaricious. Thank goodness, for my sake!” she said, with another brief smile at her friend. “I cannot imagine the escape from Pendennis was effected without some help from men in positions of trust. Cross their palms with silver or gold and you can get anything.”

Anne was silent, wondering what this had to do with anything.

Pam set her lantern aside on a pile of wooden crates, took a key off her chatelaine and put it to the lock. “Anyway, it is my feeling that until they get those scoundrels—the escaped
Happy-Go-Lucky
crew—the revenue service will not commit a cutter or any sea support to
this
coast. This last landing should be safe from seafaring intervention. Then I’ll be out of it. We’ve been too busy here, and I feel certain that the excise office will investigate Puddicombe’s failings soon. Micklethwaite can do whatever he wants, find another partner or retire.”

She grunted, having trouble with the lock. “The authorities
must
suspect Puddicombe, for he is clumsy in his machinations,” she continued, bending down and peering at the lock more closely. She then fitted the key straight in and turned it. “I think they will replace him soon, and they’ll move in some sea support to try to clean up this area. I will be long gone, my lease given up and moved, with Edward, to somewhere safe and snug, across the ocean to Canada!”

“Pam, your fiancé … how did he die?”

She turned, her breath caught in her throat. “An excise man’s bullet. I was living in rooms in St. Ives at the time and was not here, of course. Anne, it was terrible! Micklethwaite himself carried his body up to this house, he told me, but it was too late.”

Cold with foreboding, Anne said, “Are you sure it was a revenue bullet, and not one of Micklethwaite’s?”

“He’d have no cause, Anne!” Pam said, pulling the heavy padlock off the latch and setting it down on the stone floor. The flickering light of the lantern showed her expression, a willful one of defiance. “It was an accident, pure and simple. It had to be! Puddicombe’s men were having to make a show of their work. They caught some other smugglers the next night. Poor Bernard; he was just in the wrong spot.”

Anne held her tongue, unconvinced, as she followed Pam down the tunnel, stepping carefully as the tunnel narrowed. She shivered, but followed her friend until they came to another padlocked door.

Pam took another key off her chatelaine and fit it to the lock of that door. When she opened it, the sudden rush of cold salty air set Anne back on her heels, and the increase in sound, a weird echoing of the crashing waves, made her clap her free hand over one ear. Pam laughed. “This is how it will be done!”

Anne held up her lantern and followed her friend down the tunnel, which widened into a cavern.

“We’ll not go all the way tonight; I can feel that the wind is up, and the tide, too. The water at high tide doesn’t quite reach this cavern, but if waves wash in, it doesn’t affect goods stored in the tunnel, as long as we bring them far enough along. If you felt it as we walked, the tunnel descends toward the sea, slightly.”

“I noticed. Is the whole tunnel man-made?” Anne asked, putting out her free hand to touch the rough wall, holding up her lantern and gazing around.

“Not all, just from the cellar of Cliff House to that door we just passed. This part to the beach is natural cave and passage, a deep fissure in the rock that was lengthened by some long-ago smuggler into a tunnel to Cliff House. We land the goods on the beach below—this cavern comes out on the rock face down about fifty yards from the crevice Marcus used for his Barbary Ghost trick—then the goods will be moved along this tunnel until we get them to the other side of the door. We lock it securely, and the goods are safe. The next few nights, we move the goods out, through the house.”

“What about Mrs. Quintrell and Lynn … and Alice?”

“No one in Cornwall notices things they should not. It is the way here.”

“Risky, Pam, very risky. Too many eyes and ears.”

“This is how we effected the smuggling until you came to stay with us,” Pam said, defiance in her voice.

“And spoiled your plan.” Anne was stricken by a sudden thought. “If I had not come to stay with you suddenly, and without warning, St. James would not have died! He wouldn’t have been on the beach and would not have met his awful fate.”

“Anne, it was
not
your doing, for I believe it would have happened just the same, no matter what,” Pam replied, a catch in her voice. She took Anne’s arm and squeezed it to her. “God had his hand in this. Edward and I will leave England now, with no ties to bind me. I’ll take him to Canada, and there he can become anything he wishes. I have been suffocated in this societal prison, without my baby! But I don’t know if I could ever have left England if Marcus had lived.”

“Pam, Marcus said he helped you because your penury was his fault, and he had to make up for it. What did he mean?”

She sighed. “I suppose it doesn’t hurt to speak of it now. St. James speculated with our family money, the bit that we had, and lost almost all of it.”

They retreated back the way they had come, and Pam locked the tunnel door. They went back to the cellar and Pam locked that door too, pulling the dusty carpet down over the door, concealing it completely. She moved her lantern, setting it up on a high shelf that held preserved jars of fruit and vegetables. She then put both hands on Anne’s shoulders. “I need your help for this,” she said, a great seriousness on her ghostly pale face.

“For what?”

“I should not ask, but you said you wanted to help. The night we do this, will you come down from this end and unlock the door and direct the dispersal of the goods in the tunnel, while I am outside on the beach, directing the landing?”

Anne’s stomach convulsed, and she hesitated. It was wrong, she thought, to go against the government, but more than that, it was dangerous. Not even her father’s position could get her out of trouble if she was caught, and she would bring untold shame to her family.

“I have no one else to turn to now that Marcus is gone.” Pam’s eyes welled with tears. “And no one else I trust, as I trust you.”

“I’ll do it,” Anne said, putting aside her doubts and surrendering to an overwhelming need to help her friend.

Pam, weeping, handed her the padlock keys. “Thank you, thank you,” she said, throwing her arms around her friend and hugging her close.

Later, Anne sat at the window in her room, frayed nerves not allowing her to sleep. Irusan stretched out on her lap, flexing his claws and hooking them into her skirt fabric over and over. Mary had come in and gone out several times, tidying, cleaning, arranging, but finally she crept in and sat down on the edge of Anne’s bed, saying, “Milady, you’ll no deceive me. Something is wrong.”

“There are a lot of things wrong.” She trusted Mary utterly, and told her what she was planning to do to help Pamela.

As could have been expected, her maid protested vociferously. “That’s madness! I’ll no stand by and let you cast your lot in with thieves an’ cutthroats!”

“Shush!” Anne said, casting a worried glance at the door. “I’ve not given Lolly enough wine tonight that she’s sleeping soundly. I’m saving that for when I need her to be somnolent.”

“At least let me help, milady!” Mary said, her voice clogged with emotion.

“This time, you must
not
help me,” Anne said, using a tone she seldom took with her maid. “I’ll lock you in, if need be. Mary, you have a son. If we were caught, I wouldn’t be able to protect you. You’re a servant and a Catholic; how do you think you would be treated? When do you think you would next see your son?” she scolded. “I’d never forgive myself if you and Robbie were parted.”

Mary hung her head, but did not protest again. Finally, after a few minutes’ silence, she raised her face. “Then at least tell Lord Darkefell. Let
him
help you,” she pleaded. “He’d do anything for you, milady.”

Anne sighed, wondering if that was true. Would he do something so dishonest, so unlawful? Would he put himself at so much risk? It didn’t matter, she would never let him, for he, too, had people depending upon him. If he died, his brother John would take over the title, and John had no head for all of the business required of a marquess. Innocent lives would suffer.