“I can’t promise,” Penhallow says, “but I’ll do my best for him.”
“You’re a fool, Pen,” says Merryn, who doesn’t suffer them gladly. She’s right, of course; if the Revenue won’t be bought, there’s nothing to be done for the boy save a clean shirt before the Assizes. After that he’ll be in other hands.
Nonetheless. Penhallow walks through the cobbled streets of the town, thumbs hooked in her pockets, and for all the good it will do, puts the fear of the Lord in the boy’s gaoler. The elderly village constable is susceptible to Penhallow’s name—Pen is its only bearer at present, and shoulders its whole weight accordingly—but it’s more than his job’s worth to interfere with the due process of the Law. (Pen can hear the initial capital.) And then she’s getting dispirited, and the sun is over the yardarm. She steps inside the Crooked Arms and finds it unoccupied, save for a gentleman with fine braid around his cuffs and ruffles on his shirt, wearing boots Pen can see her face in. He’s peering into a half-pint tankard as though it offends him.
And also: Trevelyan. Hands clasped, pensive. Pen rarely sees her by daylight and thinks: she looks tired. Not that Pen isn’t the same way, having got to her bed as the sun was coming up and out of it again for Goody Nanskevel. “About Jackie,” she says.
“The boy.” Trevelyan looks up at her. “Apprehended in an illicit endeavour in the full sight of the Revenue. You’ve come to beg for his life?”
Pen blinks. Penhallow, like the town: with its weight and dignity. “To request that his mother might see him. I don’t beg.”
“No.” Trevelyan seems startled by herself, as though coming out of a dream. “No, of course not. I apologise, Penhallow.”
An apology from an officer of the Crown. Pen stares at her in mute amazement, as Trevelyan gets up and strides out with spurs jangling, resolutely on her way to God knows where. When she’s gone, the man dressed in rich cloth comes up to Pen.
“I don’t believe I’ve had the pleasure, ah, Miss—”
“Penhallow. Just Penhallow.”
The man nods. “I’d thought to speak with you. About, ah, smuggling. In these parts.”
Pen resists the urge to hush his mouth with her fist and ask if he were born in a barn. “I fear you must be confusing me with someone else, sir,” she says politely. “That was the Revenue officer just leaving.”
“I hear she made an arrest last night,” the man says. “A young lad with a bottle of something he shouldn’t have had. I doubt he’ll hang.” He waves a hand. “Not in Kernow, not with a jury of his peers. But would you want to take the risk?”
Pen starts paying attention. “Who are you, to speak to me so?”
His fingers uncurl and a seal clinks on the bar in front of him. It’s made of dull metal, the engraving worn to nothing by centuries. Pen has seen things like it in her father’s books.
“My name is Deveraux,” the man says. “Perhaps you’d care to take a walk, Miss Penhallow.”
“Just Penhallow,” Pen says irritably. But she follows him out to the harbour edge out of curiosity more than anything.
“Lovely part of the world, this.” Deveraux gestures around him with the beer mug, which he’s apparently appropriated from the pub. The sun is dazzling, the fishing boats lining up on their return. “Wouldn’t do the ride down again, for God’s love. Bruises weren’t the worst of it. Tell me something, Miss Penhallow. What do you know of magic?”
“Less than most,” Pen says briskly. “We don’t hold with it here.”
“You can’t hold with it here,” Deveraux says. “All the better. If I had a package I needed out of the country in a hurry. If it were—dangerous. If, in the wrong hands, it might cause more plagues than just peacocks.”
News does travel fast, Pen thinks sourly. Damn the boy, anyway.
“The tunnels,” Deveraux prompts, after a while. “The ones beneath the beach. You know your way around, I’m sure.”
“That’s as well as may be,” Pen says. “For all I know you’re a travelling charlatan.”
He isn’t. Not with the seal of the King’s messengers, with the same ancient insignia that marks Trevelyan’s collar. But Pen’s stubborn. (Too stubborn. Merryn despairs. Will you ever know the love of a good woman, Pen, and you almost forty.)
Deveraux glances at her, then pours his tankard out into the harbour. He leans down, fills it again with brine, tosses his seal into it as though it weren’t worth cut rubies, and hands the tankard to Pen. “Drink.”
“I see the ride from London addled your brain as well as your arse,” Pen observes.
“Drink,” Deveraux says again, and Pen shrugs; one may as well indulge the touched. She dips her head to the brine, and then stills, a shiver passing through her sinews—it’s fresh water.
(Speaking of those touched: When magic began to pass from Kernow, it was said to be the reckoning that was due to her. Inhabited time out of mind by intemperate, wilful, pagan-fey people, finally brought low by a righteous God—but it turned out they were the first, not the only. Magic is leaving everywhere on an island, everywhere bruised by the sea. A king’s seal is an old, great, powerful thing, but a last thing. Its like will not be seen here again.)
“I hope that will suffice for my credentials,” Deveraux says. “To business, then. I have something that needs to be kept safe overnight, then rowed out on tomorrow’s tide. Something powerful, you understand. Not to be pried upon, not to be tampered with. If it gets clear away, so does your lad. Agreed?”
He pours the fresh water back into the harbour as he says it, each droplet a separate jewel. It will be a shame, Pen thinks, if this is the last Cornish springtime that Jackie will ever see.
“Tonight,” she says. “An hour before sundown, the headland north-northwest. I’ll leave a light. Don’t be late.”
Deveraux holds out a hand and they shake on it. He ambles off into the town once the bargain is concluded but Pen lingers where she is, contemplative in the sunshine, with the taste of clear water still crisp in her mouth.
“A king’s man in the tunnels!” Merryn splutters, overturns her ink, and spends the next two watch bells rewriting the day’s correspondence, swearing at Pen every minute of the time. The ship in harbour—Caernarfon, for once going about her legitimate business—puts out on the evening ebb and Penhallow sets out towards the cove.
Deveraux and his men arrive promptly on their hour and waste no time in unloading their bundle. Whatever precious magical artefact it may be, it’s unremarkable in its sailcloth wrapping, about the size of a fisherman’s trail net and secured by long ties. They handle it with ruthless care, not letting it touch the rock walls of the tunnels and stepping on Pen’s feet if they must to avoid it. Pen’s uncomfortable enough already. A king’s man in the tunnels. Merryn wasn’t wrong to spit piss and vinegar, and Pen’s father is like to be spinning in his grave.
(A taciturn, rigorous man, Pen’s father, who went out by nights as Pen does, and accorded the smuggler’s trade its due solemnity. He would have made the same promises to Goody Nanskevel. Pen is comforted by the thought.)
After ten minutes of shuffling through the tunnels, with Deveraux bringing up the rear, they come to the parting of the ways. One passage leads through to the sea-caves beneath the cove, where the crates are brought in and stowed. The other is the left-hand path, the one Pen’s girls and boys never take. It leads deeper underground, the route marked only in glimmers of phosphorescence.