Penhallow Amid Passing Things
It is said that in the lands over the ocean, where birds rise from their own ashes and cats sing like larks, the court magicians can create twelve wondrous enchantments over breakfast and no one thinks anything of it. Nothing like England, where magical things fade like sun-bleached cloth, and nothing at all like this miserable Kernow, where the sea flows in all the moth-eaten holes and resets everything to true north. Nothing here but the unadorned real, for now and—perhaps—for all time.
Penhallow and the scholar Merryn–the wits and pedantry of the operation, respectively–have been arguing about this all the way from the wreck of the Leander, though their oars clank softly, and their voices are pitched as not to carry over the water. Merryn thinks the English magicians will find the trick of it again someday, so they might once again cast something extraordinary even on these godforsaken shores. Never, says Penhallow. The sea will give up her dead before she allows enchantment at her edges.
“And it’s just as well,” she adds. “We don’t have need of it. We want for nothing.”
In the broadside of this outrageous opinion Merryn is mustering return fire when the lights flash over the headland. Two fast blinks, then two slow: hurry, hurry.
“Quickly!” Penhallow calls to the flotilla ahead; she and Merryn are the rear guard. “Out and unload!”
They’re on the shore now, pulling up the boats. Hurry, but handle carefully: this is all precious stuff, potions and packages, rum bottles, fine lace. Leander went down with no loss of life three days past and what’s left is decidedly salvage.
Over the hill, silver tack jingles, and a horse picks up speed at the prick of spurs. This is Newlyn Trevelyan, who rides for the Crown. An austere figure, Trevelyan; a precise speaker, a born horsewoman; no home or hearth fire that anyone knows of. “Saltwater for blood,” say the villagers along the coast, hissing through their teeth, but that’s nothing untoward in this place where all souls sing of the sea. Trevelyan has grey eyes and ice in her marrow and is so much the living embodiment of His Majesty’s Inland Revenue that there are those who wonder if she can be human at all.
(She is. Penhallow knows. More on that later.)
Hurry!
Now it’s just potion jars left—green, pink, and red. Decorations for fancy folk’s parties, Pen thinks with disdain; not like the real enchantments that Merryn prays will someday return to Kernow. If one of the jars cracks, they’ll be awash in glittery nothings—peacocks, elephants and birds-of-paradise.
Which is not a consummation devoutly to be wished with Trevelyan on the other side of the hill. “Careful!” Pen calls, still low but carrying. “Jackie, Ram Das! Into the tunnels!”
Her voice echoes. The coast beneath the town–also Penhallow; Pen was named for it—is as delicate a lacework as anything they smuggle from France, friable rock riddled with passageways at the mercy of the sea’s ebb and flow. Pen’s men and women who know their way through the darkness are waiting just within the entrances. Jackie hefts the crates with enthusiasm—this is his first time out under a smuggler’s moon—and the unseen watchers take them from him. By dawn the cove and most of the tunnels will be underwater, and the boxes stowed safe in the farthest caverns, to be retrieved when the tide falls again.
“Quickly,” Penhallow calls again, not to chide, but time is not on their side. “No, Jackie, lad. Right, not left.”
The left-hand path runs deep underground and then deep under the water. The wind sings inside those passageways with nothing to raise it, and the shadows whisper in long-forgotten cants. Penhallow doesn’t believe in the fairy folk, but she’s a sensible creature. All her girls and boys march sharp right.
Another flash of the lights: three rapid blinks, then the long one.
One more agonising minute, and the crates are all unloaded, the boats beached and secured. “Tomorrow,” Ram Das says, and ducks away, his footsteps the last to disappear into the earth. Jackie lingers – Pen promised his mum she’d see him right to his doorstep – and she and Merryn snuff out the lanterns just as Trevelyan crests the hill. She pauses, her straight-backed-profile a sharp cut-out in the moonlight, then moves on. No lights on the beach; none on the wreck. The hoofbeats fade away in a soft, regular rhythm.
Pen lets out a breath and leads the way to where the ponies are tethered. It’s a squelch of a journey – as ever in this thrice-damned damp Kernow – but a job well-done. The Leander went down with a cargo bound for the New World. Those little enchantment bottles cross the Atlantic with the benefit of European cachet, but they’ll fetch a pretty price here right enough and the whole town will eat well in consequence.
(Pen has read most of the books of her family’s inheritance, but would have to ask Merryn how to pronounce ‘cachet’.)
“There you are, lad,” Pen says, to Jackie. “First time out, and you did just fine. Didn’t I tell you?”
Jackie gives her an amiable smile, lets her clap him on the back. And then the bottle falls out of his sleeve and cracks on the hard ground.
Peacocks. Green, glittering, glorious with light, visible a mile off. Fucking peacocks.
“Scatter!” Pen yelps. She and Merryn run and duck together, slotting themselves into the long ridge of gorse. She reaches for Jackie, misses grabbing his arm, but he’s close behind. No doubt he’d thought to sneak the bottle home and impress a girl with it. Pen swears silently at the idiocy of youth and keeps her head down.
But perhaps it’s no harm done, after all. The little enchantment fades to nothingness, leaving just a faint sparkle in the air. The empty bottle rolls away, and Jackie’s almost under cover. Pen sighs with relief, then realises it’s too late.
Trevelyan halts and dismounts in a single movement. She’s done years of heavy work on this stretch of coast, brought in naval men from Plymouth and unravelled smuggler operations like spun silk. But this isn’t a case where she needs to expend any significant effort. She picks up the empty bottle, inspects its Leander cargo label and its lack of excise mark. Jackie, who froze in place at the sight of her, is standing there with his mouth open like a codfish.
“Name, boy,” Trevelyan says.
“Jackie.”
Trevelyan merely stares at him.
“Nanskevel,” the lad says. Penhallow shifts forwards, so as to see better. Charging in wholesale would likely just get herself and Merryn arrested in turn, and she’ll need her freedom as well as all her guile to get him off this charge. Smuggling in these parts is a hanging offence, but it’s taking a while for the gravity of Jackie’s situation to descend upon him. His affable face strains from the effort of exerting his intelligence.
Trevelyan considers, then hoists the boy into the saddle with her. He squeaks but has the blessed wits not to try and catch Pen’s eye. She lurks beneath the bushes and is grateful for that small mercy, and the hoofbeats fade again.
When the coast is clear Merryn spits into the gorse, and disturbs one final peacock, which struts off into the darkness. “Time was,” she says, “when the Revenue would stay bought.”
Pen remembers. They could have had the boy home for his breakfast.
But no one’s tried to buy off Trevelyan and lived to speak of it. They trudge on towards the horses.
In the morning Pen gets a visit from Goodwife Nanskevel, Jackie’s mother: a chattering, silly woman, who takes in washing and lodgers, and cries for the fall of every sparrow. “He’s just a boy,” she says, wiping her eyes with her apron. “Just seventeen. Just foolish. Pen, if you could do something for him, if you could say a word in the officer’s ear—”