Smuggler's Moon (6 page)

“Now, that’s both good and bad,” continued Constable Perkins, ”my point being that a man an’t got much choice
here in Kent for honest employment. There used to be iron smelting done here, but that’s gone up north, and the wool weaving that was done here, that’s moved up north, too, to those big mills where it’s all done by power loom. So the result is you got to work doing old-fashioned farm labor for seven or eight shillings a week, and at best that’s just seasonal work. That’s
honest
employment I’m talking about.”

“And for those who would sully their hands with
dishonest
employment—what choice have they?”

“Just one other, and that be the owling trade.”

“The owling trade?” repeated Sir John. ”What, praytell, is the owling trade?”

“That is what others might call the smuggling trade. Out here it’s the owling trade.”

“Whatever for?”

“Oh, in truth, Sir John, your guess would be as good as my own. All I can say is that owls fly by night, and that’s when the smugglers conduct their business, as well. And let me tell you, sir, it can be a very profitable business, too. Instead of the seven or so shillings a farm worker might make in a week, he’ll get ten shillings in a single night.”

“Would that be ten shillings every night?”

“No sir, that an’t the way it works. It an’t every night that you go out, but when there’s a boat coming in from France, the word goes round that men are needed down on the beach, and half the town turns out to unload what’s been brought across.”

“So it’s that way, is it?” said Sir John. ”And how often might this great crowd be needed on the beach?”

“Oh, no less than once a week, nor more than three times.”

“Then an average of two?”

“I suppose so, yes sir.”

A teasing smile twitched at the corners of Sir John’s mouth. ”It strikes me that you know a good deal about this … owling trade, as you call it.”

”You could say that, sir.” And there was a similar air of playfulness in Mr. Perkins’s response.

“Could it be you have had some direct personal experience of all this?”

“Oh, it could be indeed,” said the constable. ”Yet I always figured you knew all that and took me in the Bow Street Runners anyways.”

“Well, I’d heard a few rumors, but I put no great stock in them. It was your army record interested me far more.”

“Glad to hear it, sir.”

“Tell me, Perkins, could your direct personal experience of the owling trade have had some relation to your later experience in the grenadiers?”

“It could. It did.”

I had been watching the two men carefully, greatly enjoying the game they played between them. Clarissa, equally fascinated, seemed nevertheless to be somewhat confused by what passed between them. Were they teasing, or were they in earnest?

“There is a tale to tell there, Sir John,” said Mr. Perkins.

“Then tell it by all means,” said the magistrate. ”And you may rest assured that naught in the telling will be held against you.”

“Ah well, in that case, I’ll not hold back further.” And with a wink at me and a nod to Clarissa, he began his story. ”I was a lad about the age of Jeremy here, doing farm labor for a family by the name of Griggs. It wasn’t quite year-round labor, for I was not paid in the winter when there was naught for me to do. Still, the Griggses were decent people, and they’d given me a place to sleep behind the kitchen and kept me fed through the winter, so it was
almost
year-round. I was orphaned by then, and this was the best I could do for myself at that time in my life. I was reconciled to it.

“There was a Griggs daughter about my own age I used to dote upon, and I had saved up a bit to buy her a Christmas gift. So one Saturday in December I walked into Deal
bright and early and found a locket and chain of silver which I thought just right for her. The problem was, y’see, I didn’t have the price of it, though I’d been laying a bit aside each month for just this purpose. It was just that I’d not laid enough aside—and so back into the store window it went.

“I was fair crushed, so I was, and so I took myself over to an inn in High Street right there in the middle of town to have an ale so as to console myself. Whilst I was there, I fell to talking with a young fellow a bit older than I was. I told him what brought me into Deal and how disappointed I was to be caught short.

“ ‘Well,’ says he, ‘I know how you can earn enough in a night to buy any locket and chain in Deal.’

“ ‘How’s that?’ says I. ‘Is it legal? Is it respectable?’

“ ‘Well, it may not be legal,’ says he, ‘but in this town it’s work that’s damn near respectable. There’s a lugger coming in tonight just filled with Christmas dainties for the lords and ladies of London.’

“I’d no idea what he meant. Finally, with him dropping hints and me trying hard to understand, it come to me that it all had to do with smuggling, that a ship was coming in from France loaded with items of the sort that would be very popular with those in London who had money enough to pay for them. Men would be needed to unload the cargo from the longboats and pack them onto horses and into wagons. It was the offer of a job.

“My newfound employer, whose name was Dick Dickens, told me to be there at the inn at closing time and we’d be right on the hour and the minute to meet the lugger. Well, I was there right enough and went down with Dickens and a whole gang of men to the beach. It was all work once we got there. Once the boats started to ply back and forth from the ship to the shore, it was just a matter of getting them unloaded and the goods transferred to the wagons. We worked fast, for Dick Dickens or one or two others
who were in charge were always about telling us to pick up the pace, that it would soon be morning. As it proved out, we was well paid, as promised, but that didn’t mean we didn’t work for it. Strangest thing was, it didn’t
seem
like we was breaking the law at all—just working hard.

“By dawn the last wagon was gone, and the ship out there off the beach had weighed anchor and was sailing away on the tide. That was when we was paid off. I could scarce believe it when Dick Dickens counted out ten shillings into my hand. He told me I’d earned it, and that I was a good worker, and he wanted to know would I be able to work next time a lugger came across. I told him I would, and we worked out a way he could let me know when I’d be needed. So from then on I was working down on the beach one or two nights a week.

“So for certain sure this wasn’t the sort of winter I’d expected. The way it had been I was happy just having a place to sleep and something to eat each day, but now of a sudden, I was making more money than ever I had in my life. Well, of course I went a bit daft. Instead of the silver locket and chain, I gave the Griggs girl one of gold for Christmas. Naturally, her ma and pa must have wondered where I got the money to pay for it, but they said nothing. And I bought myself a new suit of clothes, though where I supposed I would wear those new duds, I have no idea.

“And through all this, the work on the beach continued. The luggers made the run from France whenever the weather permitted. As it improved, the ships would be coming over often—or so I supposed. I saw, looking ahead to the coming of spring, that I would soon have to make a decision. Was I to continue in the owling trade, or was I to return to my life as a farmhand? How could I, after all, leave the Griggses after they had kept me all winter long? Well, I was saved from that choice by what seemed to me at the time a dreadful circumstance, but was surely a blessing in disguise. I was caught in a raid on the beach carried
out by the excisemen together with the Deal constables. Just why I, or Dick Dickens, or any of them, thought this sort of thing on the beach could go on without getting the notice of the excisemen and the magistrate I’ll never know. Or maybe Dickens and those shadowy men behind him thought their bribes had purchased a free hand to operate indefinitely. Or maybe, as Dickens told me on a jail visit, it was all just a misunderstanding. Anyway, this raid looked specially bad, for an exciseman was shot and killed by one of the wagon drivers, an evil old ne’er-do-well named Rufus Tucker. When I heard the sound of that shot, I took off running—and went right into the arms of a constable. Others were better than I was at getting away. In fact, most were, but because a man had been killed, there could be no question of getting off with a fine and jail time. The five of us who went before the magistrate—Rufus Tucker was one—could all have been sent on to Old Bailey, judged guilty, and hanged on the next hanging day. But as it happened, only one was executed, and that was Tucker. The remaining four, not one of us over twenty-five, were given the opportunity to enlist in the Army, and given the chance, we took the King’s shilling. The year was 1758, you see, and replacements were needed for those lost in the American colonies in the war against the French. Well, you see the result: Here I am, a veteran of campaigns in the Ohio Valley and Canada, alive and healthy, though missing an arm. Yet that—as you, Sir John, and you, Jeremy, well know—was lost later in the Grub Street campaign.”

Sir John, who had been squirming a bit during the last sentence or two of Mr. Perkins’s tale, banged upon the ceiling of the coach with his stick, signaling thus to the driver for a stop.

“A good story, well told,” said Sir John to the constable. ”But I fear I must interrupt now and make for the bushes. Pray God this will be the last such stop on this journey.”

The coach came at last to a complete halt. He jumped
down to the road below, and I followed with the latest issue of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in hand.

“Do you see a likely place, Jeremy?”

“Over this way, sir,” said I, taking him by the arm. (Only in emergencies did he permit this.) I led him off the road to a copse of trees with sufficient undergrowth to provide a blind.

“Paper?”

I put the magazine in his hand.

“You may leave me now, Jeremy. I shall call you when I need you.”

And so leave him I did. There was no arguing with him at such times as these. Insofar as he was able, he maintained his privacy in spite of his blindness.

Returning to the coach, I found Clarissa and Mr. Perkins had taken this opportunity to loosen the knots in their limbs. As I approached, I saw that their attention was wholly taken by something down the road and just out of my sight. The driver and coachman seemed also to be staring off into the near distance. Once I reached them, I saw that the object of their interest was a kind of large cage suspended over the road from the strongest limb of a stout old oak tree. Inside that cage was a skeleton which, as if in some grotesque All-Hallow’s-Eve masquerade, was dressed in a tattered, dusty, and faded suit of clothes. I had heard of such before, though never before had I seen one.

“They call it a gibbet,” said Mr. Perkins, thus informing Clarissa. ” ‘Twas thought a terrible disgrace amongst condemned men to know their bodies would be put on display in such a way.”

“As indeed it should have been,” said the coachman. ”Dead or no, who would want the corbies peckin’ out his eyes or pullin’ off his nose?”

“Gibbets used to be common as flies on a carcass,” said the driver. ”Seemed there was one decorating every cross-road
from one end of England to another. Don’t see them so much anymore.”

Clarissa, quite unruffled by the gruesome sight, stared thoughtfully at the gibbet and its contents. ”Who do you suppose it was?” She asked it most indifferently, as if she were merely wondering aloud.

Yet Mr. Perkins took her idle query most seriously. ”Why, I don’t know,” said he, pondering, rubbing his chin. But then did his eyes come alight of a sudden. ”Or perhaps I do,” said he to her. Then did he call up to the driver of the coach: ”How far are we from Deal?”

“Not far at all,” said the driver. ”I should not doubt we will see it take shape when the road next climbs a hill.”

“In that case, I would give a good wager that yonder hangs all that is left of Rufus Tucker.”

“The one you were talking about? The one who killed the exciseman?” I had not seen Clarissa so animated since her first meeting with Samuel Johnson.

“The very same, miss, for I know very well that there was no such body on display before I left here. And I now remember running into a lad from Deal whilst I was in Aldershot waiting transfer to another regiment. He told me old Rufus’s body had been shipped back to Deal for display purposes. The idea was that he was to hang there to warn all against shooting excisemen.”

“Imagine!” sighed Clarissa. ”That could be Rufus Tucker.”

“JEREMY!”

That was Sir John’s bellow from across the road. Quite unmistakable it was, though not near so fierce as I may make it seem, writ so in capital letters. It was loud enough, nevertheless, to suggest to me that he might be in distress. Adding to that, he was not where I had left him. I looked uneasily about but he was nowhere to be seen.

“Jeremy!”

Another bellow, somewhat more impatient, rose from a
spot a bit behind me. I hastened to the place and found Sir John lying disheveled and somewhat disappointed with himself at the dusty bottom of the deep ditch which ran along that side of the road.

“Is that you, Jeremy?”

“It is, Sir John. Are you hurt?”

“No, no, though my pride is a bit bruised. I fear I must ask you for a hand up.”

That I gladly offered him. I tugged hard, and up he came. Yet though on his feet, he still required help in scrambling up the crumbling wall of the ditch to the road. I pushed—though that did no good at all. But then, as I bent low from the road level to grasp one of Sir John’s hands, I found a helper beside me—none other than Mr. Perkins. The constable gave his only hand to the magistrate, and we two hauled him up.

“Who is that helping poor Jeremy? Is it you, Constable Perkins?”

“It is, Sir John.”

“Ah well, I should have called earlier for Jeremy to lead me back but I heard your voices, and I thought I could simply walk to the sound of them. But I misstepped, lost my balance, and fell to the bottom of that … what would you call it? A ditch?”