"Mr. Holt," he said, briskly. "We're sailing through the night. I want the men stone sober and full ready, with all arms prepared and dry. I want the four-pounders set, two with round shot two with small. And I want every man on watch to keep a lookout. Tell Taylor and his mate I will not have her raised by Mr. Gunning's men!"
John Gunning's big slack face formed an easy smile, then he turned back to the con. The wind was still hard from the west, and Biter was plunging into the backs of waves now she'd cleared the shelter of the land a piece. Where once she had been lightly canvased for congested waters, she now had just enough for offshore work. As darkness fell, Gunning would take more in, no doubt. You could not plunge through the coastal blackness like a blind racehorse.
"Aye aye sir," said Samuel, smartly. "I see the free trade's out in force, though. Might it not be fun to pick off one or two of them?"
The height of insolence, to make suggestions to a captain unsolicited, but Holt pitched it as a joke, and Kaye harrumphed appreciation. The pair of them gazed off towards the north Kent shore, and William followed suit. While all around were dropping sail, even coasting boats and barges, he saw other vessels, under sail and oar, heading outward from the mud banks and the beaches. Free trade was smuggling, where he came from, but what this signified he could not imagine.
"We'll leave that to the scum who are paid for it," Kaye replied. "Why should we help out the Customs? In any way, you drink brandy, don't you? How much do you suppose you'd pay for it if we stuck our oar in there?"
Dismissed, the two of them went forward to set on the men. When they were barely out of earshot Sam chuckled.
"In any way," he mimicked, 'how much information do you suppose we'd get about incoming ships stuffed with prime seamen, homeward bound? We see through you, bold Mr. Kaye, don't doubt it!"
William did not though, nor could he sort out the implications. But the leading boats from shoreward were ranging alongside the biggest of the anchored ships, and quite clearly anything unloaded to be shipped ashore would be contraband, for the Customs boats were not in evidence this far downriver, nor were the merchants' lighters that were paid to do the job.
"What, are they smugglers?" he said. "I thought they worked across to France or the Low Countries. It is rather blatant, is it not? What do they deal in?"
"Around here? Why, anything that turns to cash. Prisoners from the Medway hulks or Sheerness, sometimes. Then spices from the Orient or the Carib, sugar, tea, fine silks, playing cards, gin from the Dutch, French brandy, wine. They do long hauls if they have to, but this work is easier, as you may see. Just row or sail out from Seasalter or the foreland beaches, and barter it from over side Most simple!"
"And can we really not prevent them? Or take them for the Press?
It can be done, for I have ... they have no special privilege, do they,
smugglers?"
They were at a hatchway, and this talk had to stop. From the con John Gunning was ordering his men to brace the yards round, as the helmsman hauled his wind. The Biter heeled on the new slant, and the breeze struck colder from the larboard beam, laced with lumps of spray. What light was left was draining fast, and the North Sea lay ahead of them.
"I'd hang them all, not press them," Samuel said, "but it is not our job. You heard the captain we must leave it to what he terms the Customs scum. On some ships it is not unheard of to put the hammer on them, but on this one ... Ahoy there! Mr. Taylor! Hands below! Rouse out on deck there, lively! There is work to do!"
He turned to William with a wry look.
"There are reasons we don't understand, friend, are there not?" he added. "Not just slackness, neither. Reasons well beyond. Now let me introduce you to our four-pounders. Unless the moon breaks through, this night will be as dark as pitch. And they are mighty dangerous little things."
Fifteen
It was a farmer's boy who found the corpse of Warren, and it took some days to filter back to Sir Peter Maybold, who had . set the searchers on. Before he had been called to Langham Lodge the Surveyor General had been aware he had a mystery on his hands, but after his luncheon with Sir Arthur his minions had come to know with no uncertainty that two men were missing, two important men, two men who must be found. The Customs services in Hampshire and West Sussex, in Portsmouth, Poole, Southampton and the Wight, were galvanised as they had rarely been before, and their networks of informers pitched to a level of extreme activity, with bright gold as stimulus.
The first, and basic, information came in very quickly. Two men of mystery had been noted first at Liphook, then near Horndean, then had been sighted in an Emsworth tavern, on the Sussex border. The collector at Portchester, Adam Price, was told by his best spy that the men were smugglers, who had been travelling the area recruiting oarsmen for a pair of fast galleys being built near Lymington that could cross the Channel into Normandy in eight hours flat, outrunning all pursuit. At Hamble it was a certainty that they were French, but speaking English just like Sussex men, and were seeking passage home for them and eighty others (or eight, or thirty-five), or were setting up a free trade operation and wanted English partners. The Isle of Wight collector, Will Slaughter, had firm reports that they were agents of the Paris government, attempting to recruit pilots from the smuggling fraternity for a proposed invasion force. All reports agreed, though, that some time before, the men had disappeared, shipped out, gone back from whence they came. All reports, similarly, were bare of any names. They had been seen all over, it appeared. But were known by nobody.
In his offices at the Customs House, Sir Peter had studied this intelligence, and felt his choler rise. Although he had ruled it inadmissible for the collectors and their people to let out any hint that the missing men were Customs officers, he guessed that that was known, and was the reason for the silence and their deaths. No -he caught himself at that thought not necessarily their deaths. They had been gone some weeks, but ... but what? Sir Peter sat back, and held his paunch, which was uncomfortable from last night's meat and drinking. He had no idea as to who would have found out Charles Warren and Charles Yorke's true professions, or why, once they had done so, they would have spirited them away so utterly completely. Customs officers got killed from time to time, that was the danger of the job, accepted. But dead bodies lay around, and rotted, and got rooted out by dogs or, more usually, weren't hidden to begin with. Where was the benefit, indeed, in killing these two? If they'd found something that deserved it and Warren was the man to find things out, no argument to that well then, what was it that deserved their disappearance?
Sir Peter's mind then wandered off, as it was prone to, to the body of his wife Laetitia, and who was using it. His office window overlooked the Thames, which was dull and busy, a bass note to the drabness of his mood. Impatiently, he clawed back to the subject at his hand, shouting to his clerk to come in and take a letter down that instant. A senior man in Hampshire had suggested that a woman called Ma Foster, a denizen of Liberty Wood, near the hamlet of World's End, might know something, and might be persuadable to tell. Trouble was, she was old and stubborn, the recipient of all sorts of confidences from the local free trade men, for whom she ran a browning factory, known about but not closed down because it was a rendezvous and information source. This senior suggested Adam Price to do the job, because he was held to be more heartless than the generality, and Ma Foster was as tight as any grave. To his annoyance, Sir Peter Maybold had been left to make the last decision, and now he made it. The woman had lived comfortable in illegality for long enough. She would speak, or they would shut her factory down.