Taking Liberties. Diana Norman

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СКАЧАТЬ well. The Dowager bowed and made another move to leave but now it was Captain Nicholls who barred her path.

      ‘T’Gallants?’ he asked abruptly. ‘You’re going to live at Babbs Cove?’

      The Inquisition would have had better manners. ‘I don’t know, Captain Nicholls. Whether I do or not is a matter of concern only to myself.’

      ‘No, it isn’t.’ He darted his sentences, each as unornamented as his dress, and stared after them into her face, as if to make sure they arrived at their destination before he began another. Somewhere along the line he had discarded the Devonshire accent but his eyes were his mother’s. ‘I must have your permission to search the house before you take possession.’

      ‘Indeed?’ He was mad; they were both mad.

      ‘Yes. I’ve tried before. The caretaker refuses to let my men in.’

      Was this lunacy or total lack of social grace? Either would hamper his rise in his profession, yet, if his mother were telling the truth, the title of comptroller suggested fairly high authority. She suspected obsessive efficiency.

      Then she thought: Caretaker?

      He jerked out the next sentence. ‘And the local magistrate refuses me a warrant.’

      There was something childlike in his confession to being thwarted; in anyone else it might have been endearing but nobody, ever, would find this man endearing.

      She did not like him; she did not like his mother. Most certainly, she did not want him rootling in her house, whether she occupied it or not. ‘If a magistrate refuses his warrant, I fear I must withhold mine,’ she said and moved away.

      Again he blocked her, presumably to argue, but she was rescued by Admiral Edgcumbe. ‘What’s this? What’s this? We leave business at the door, Nicholls, along with our swords.’

      ‘That gentleman appears to want to search my house,’ she said as they walked off.

      ‘He would. Recently been made comptroller for the area. New broom sweepin’ clean. Typical blasted Customs. Hard worker, though, always looking for hidden contraband.’

      ‘Really? Does he think there is some at T’Gallants?’

      ‘There probably is,’ the Admiral told her.

      ‘Really?’ She was shocked.

      ‘Oh yes,’ the Admiral said, without concern. ‘Smuggling’s the local industry round here. Fishing and smuggling, the two are synonymous.’ He patted her hand. ‘No need to worry, Diana, your Devonshire smuggler’s a rogue but not a dangerous rogue. And he’ll be facing a hard time now that Nicholls has been appointed to catch him. A regular ferret, our Nicholls. And out for glory. If he can sweep the coast of smuggling, he’ll be well rewarded.’

      He sounded regretful. Diana thought he showed extraordinary laxity to a trade she knew by hearsay to be ugly; the Fortescues in Kent, with whom she’d stayed occasionally, gave blood-chilling accounts of smuggling gangs torturing and killing Revenue men sent to round them up. Not, she remembered, that such murders had prevented Lady Fortescue serving tea on which no duty had been paid.

      ‘That’s Kent,’ Admiral Edgcumbe said dismissively when she mentioned it. ‘East of England villains. Ugly. Different again from your Devonian or even your Cornish lads. Your West of England smuggler’s a fine seaman, d’ye see? Has to sail further to fetch his goods from France.’

      The Dowager failed to see how good seamanship necessarily denoted good character, nor how an admiral presently engaged in a war with France could tolerate with such apparent charity fellow-countrymen who traded with the enemy. But Lord Edgcumbe appeared to regard the supply of cheap brandy, Hollands and tobacco as necessary to the country’s morale.

      That used to be Aymer’s attitude, the Dowager remembered – until he’d became a minister in His Majesty’s Government and discovered by how much the Treasury was being welched.

      His Majesty’s Exchequer had estimated that duty, standing at four shillings per pound, was collected annually on 650,000 pounds of tea. Less happily, it also estimated that the nation’s annual consumption of tea was at least 1,500,000 pounds and therefore it was losing nearly three million pounds in uncollected revenue. As for brandy, smugglers could provide it at five shillings a gallon (and make a handsome profit for themselves while doing so) which left honest wine merchants and publicans with the choice of staying honest and paying for legal brandy at eight shillings a gallon or going out of business.

      From then on Aymer had advocated drawing and quartering for offenders against the Revenue.

      At supper – the second of the night; how these people ate – she found herself surrounded by a blue and gold coronal of naval officers who, spurred by the story of Nicholls’s attempt to search her house, were a-brim with tales of smugglers and smuggling.

      She looked covertly towards their wives, who had formed a separate nosegay of their own, to see if they minded. She must be careful; if she was to settle in this area, she must not outrage its female society. Already she had refused all invitations to dance and was emitting no signals saying she wished to flirt, which she did not. Aymer had knocked such playfulness out of her very early on.

      Admiral Edgcumbe, she knew, was merely paying her the attention due to an esteemed guest by a kindly host. The others? Well, she was new on stage and, despite her listlessness and the grey dreariness of her dress, still not totally repulsive.

      Her main concern was Captain Luscombe who’d proved most eager to bring her an ice from the supper table, which, since he had been introduced to her as the officer in charge of Millbay Prison, she had graciously allowed him to do. But as the good captain was a fat fiftyish bachelor, susceptible, as she’d learned from Lady Edgcumbe, to anything in petticoats, she didn’t think the ladies of Plymouth would begrudge her this minor conquest.

      The glance reassured her; the women were serene, they saw her as no threat. Perhaps jealousy was an emotion naval wives could not afford, or was reserved for the unknown women their husbands encountered in other ports. The Admiral and his cronies were being allowed to entertain a newcomer with tales the ladies had heard many times before, while Lady Edgcumbe and her cronies indulged in more interesting local gossip. Satisfied, the Dowager inclined her ear to stories related with affectionate shakes of the head more usually awarded to naughty children.

      It was a relief that Babbs Cove was not the centre of them.

      Babbs Cove? Probably did its share but no more than any other village nearby – that privilege was reserved for Cawsand along the coast in Cornwall, what a smugglin’ nest, its fishermen more familiar with brandy and lace than fish, bold, cunnin’ ruffians that they were. Courageous, though; bitter work to sail to and fro from Roscoff and Cherbourg in winter, got to hand it to ’em. And its women just as audacious …

      ‘Remember old Granny Gymmer? Crossed the sands regularly carrying bottles of Hollands wrapped in a child’s shawl and when the Revenue complimented her on such a nice quiet baby, had the nerve to say: “Ah, but I reckon her do have plenty of spirit in her.”’

      Amused, Diana asked: ‘Why then does Captain Nicholls not devote all his searches to Cawsand if it is so notorious, rather than Babbs Cove?’

      ‘Well, you know these fellows who come СКАЧАТЬ