On her way up to the cove Pen spots a cocked hat and wool coat, and finds it both comforting and unsettling that Trevelyan, too, was worried.
“There are naval men of many years’ service,” Trevelyan remarks, without greeting, “who might expound to you all day long of the great accuracy of their timepieces, and never think to change from London time.”
Pen smiles. The tiny beach is deserted, though a fishing boat sits ready for use, tied up just in the lee of the cove. Penhallow watches the movement of water. Trevelyan is impassive, but tapping her foot. They do not speak.
When at last the men emerge, it’s just in time, the sea a short man’s height from the roof of the tunnels. They’re damp, stained by the green-glimmer of the cave phosphorescence, rattled in their demeanour—but out of the tunnels, and this time for sure no longer Pen’s business. She starts off towards the path to the town, and only turns back because of Trevelyan’s sharp intake of breath.
The package is no longer neatly wrapped, and the men are struggling with it. It shifts in their grip, the ties unravelling. As Pen watches, the rest of the binding comes loose, and a body flops to the ground.
“God almighty,” Pen says, starts off down the beach with no notion of what she intends to do next, viscerally conscious that Trevelyan has mirrored her movement, is close by her side.
But she’s brought short, all the wind knocked out of her. Pen thuds into Trevelyan and the two of them hit the ground together, buffeted by a massive, unseen force.
The body in the wrapping is not, after all, dead. It belongs to a young man with large, dark eyes, from which a drugged fog is clearing. As he sits up, Deveraux stumbles backwards, trying to get out of the way. His men—frightened and confused, the most animation Pen’s ever seen in them—are backing away. A shimmering ripple passes through the air from the boy’s hands.
“Not party tricks,” Trevelyan mutters.
“Oh,” Pen says; it’s the lens she needed to see this clearly. Whoever he is, this boy who was being smuggled out of the country by the king’s agents, he has enough magic in him to hold Pen and Trevelyan flat on the beach, and to keep Deveraux and his men at a distance. The tide laps out away from him, in the wrong direction, against all laws of nature. With her head pressed against the sand, Pen thinks with sucking horror about the underwater ballroom—of power that can withstand the sea.
“Get away from me,” the boy says to Deveraux, in a London accent. Deveraux tries to get up again and staggers backwards, his hands to his mouth with blood showing between his fingers.
They kept the boy prisoner in the ballroom overnight, Pen understands suddenly. They will have kept him drugged all the long journey to this coast. To keep him a secret—not to be seen, not to be heard; to be smuggled in the dead of night with the Revenue’s cooperation—and to protect themselves from precisely what’s happening now. Pen imagines him waking up in the dark of the tunnels, seeing only the phosphorescence through sailcloth, and feeling himself carried like a sack of cargo.
But whatever power he has, it’s not enough. With urging from his master, one of the king’s men manages to throw something small at the boy, who doesn’t see it coming. His expression goes slack, his head tipping onto his shoulder. A poisoned dart, Pen realises. The boy slumps to the ground again and she and Trevelyan find they can stand up. Deveraux, too, is getting to his feet, apoplectic with fury. “You incompetent bumbling fools,” he’s saying to his men, “which part of unimaginably dangerous was in any respect unclear to you?”
Pen has had enough of this.
“Deveraux!” she says, the word a whip-crack so all three men turn. “What evil is this?”
Trevelyan has a hand on her arm: caution, not restraint. Pen is suddenly comforted by her presence. But she strides forwards anyway, not willing to remain a bystander.
“Miss Penhallow,” Deveraux says, oily and serene. “As I believe I stated, this is the confidential business of the Crown. It has happened to fall within your area of expertise, but the need for that expertise is finished.”
“I don’t smuggle flesh,” Pen says. Peacocks and rum bottles are a different affair. There are some things neither she nor Trevelyan will tolerate, and they are the authorities here.
“Stand aside,” Deveraux says. Pen ignores him. She kneels down by the boy, her fingers going for a pulse. She finds one, thready; she supposes the poison on the dart must have been calibrated precisely, rather than risk his life.
When Pen doesn’t move, Deveraux draws steel. With head down Pen can feel the presence of the blade at the back of her neck, and breathes calmly, deeply: she hasn’t been a smuggler for twenty years without getting herself out of scrapes like this. But there’s no need. Another shriek of metal, the stamp of a boot on Deveraux’s foot, and Trevelyan is by Pen’s side again.
“Sir,” she says, “I would not have violence within my riding.”
She pulls Pen back with her, out of reach of the blade. The boy is still slumped on the sand and Deveraux has the same contemptuous, pitying look that Pen saw before.
“Up until now there hadn’t been any need for it,” he says. “This is necessary work for a greater good, and I’d be grateful if the pair of you would cease being troublesome. I’d have expected better from the Revenue, for God’s sake.”
He’s holding them off now just by his lofty righteousness of purpose, and the menace in his stance. Behind him the men start loading the drugged boy into the boat, wrapping him up again in the bundle of blankets and sailcloth.
“This is not what I do,” Trevelyan says softly, and Deveraux ignores her as he ignored Pen, turning to the boy. Trevelyan’s dagger is still in her hand and Pen is tough, her shoulders broad enough for all the weights that she carries, but she knows they couldn’t hold their ground here for long. Not two against three.
Pen lunges forwards anyway, tries to get to the boat before they loose the ropes. Trevelyan has read her mind, mirroring her movements exactly, and Pen is comforted again by her presence.
“Trevelyan, stand down,” Deveraux says. “Whom do you serve?”
Pen looks across in alarm. Trevelyan has halted in her tracks, her hand going to the insignia on her collar.
“You were apprised as a professional courtesy,” Deveraux said. “Now stand aside.”
Trevelyan steps away, and Deveraux looks triumphant. Pen wants to kill him. She wants to deliver his carcass to the sea’s embrace, for it to scour his flesh from his bones. She darts towards the boat again, and jerks as Deveraux tries to drag her away bodily. Every instinct in Pen’s body comes into alignment. She breaks his nose.
“Fuck!” Deveraux says thickly, and now he’s spitting blood, ready for a killing blow of his own. “Will you return to Goodwife Nanskevel tonight? Will you tell her you condemned her boy, for the sake of another who was nothing to you? Will you tell her that?
“And you, Trevelyan”—this is said over Pen’s head—“will you break the oaths you swore in the King’s service? Will you refuse your orders?”
There’s no answer. Trevelyan doesn’t move. Deveraux lets go and Pen stumbles, her ears ringing, and doesn’t fall because Trevelyan steadies her. Pen barely registers it, thinking about Goody Nanskevel and her son who’s the apple of her eye, and damn him, anyway, and damn all this mess. The men finish loading the boat and settle at the oars.
“Now,” Deveraux says. The boy is deeply unconscious again, the sailcloth hiding his face. The oars dip, and Penhallow and Trevelyan are silent in the cove as the boat sets out. There’s a dark shape in the distance, a ship standing immediately offshore. In half a minute the sloshing sound is almost inaudible in the wind. The boat makes its way out towards the waiting ship, and by the way the shadows move across the lights, Pen can even make out the lowering of the ropes, the unloading of the cargo.