Read The Blighted Cliffs Online
Authors: Edwin Thomas
The
disappointment in my voice was genuine enough, though not at the
missed battle.
'No,'
Bingham agreed. 'Still, we must work with what the good Lord and Sir
Lawrence give us. Let's see what these scoundrels were about.'
We
walked down to the boat. It looked smaller than the one I had seen on
my first night in Dover, and although it was loaded with casks, it
seemed there was plenty of room for more.
'Did
we interrupt them in the middle of their task?' I wondered.
'No.'
Bingham was definite. 'I watched the lugger from the moment she
started signalling, and set off our fire the moment her boat landed.
There were only these two with it, and they hadn't a chance to do
anything.' He kicked a barrel that lay on the sand.
'This
was the first one off.'
'Please,
sir.' One of the smugglers, his arms pinned behind his back by a
burly corporal, began to plead in a high-pitched voice. 'We ain't
done nothin' wrong.'
'Really?'
Bingham looked at him disdainfully. 'And this?' He kicked the cask
again.
'Ballast,
sir. Our ship 'ad a leak, an' we 'ad to offload it.'
'Ballast,
you say? We shall see. Sergeant!'
Another
of the redcoats came forward, pulling a worm-iron from a pouch on his
belt. He stepped across the barrel so that he straddled it, twisted
the iron into the bung, then heaved backward, popping it out like a
cork.
Bingham
held a pewter cup to the edge of the hole, and rolled the cask over
so that liquid splashed out. 'Let's see what sort of vintage ballast
your ship carried,' he said, raising the cup. 'Your very good
health.'
He
took a gulp, choked, and almost immediately spewed it straight back
out, covering the impassive sergeant in a fine spray.
'Too
strong for you?' I asked jovially.
'You
may taste for yourself,' retorted Bingham, wiping his mouth on his
sleeve.
He
handed me the cup, and I sniffed it warily: I knew from experience
that the spirits in Dover's hostelries were strong enough, and could
imagine in what concentration they must be shipped. But this clear
liquid did not smell of alcohol, it smelled - salty? And it tasted...
I
saw Bingham grinning as I too spat out the foul liquid. 'Seawater,'
I
gasped.
'Precisely.'
The humour was gone from his voice again.
'Why
would anyone risk their lives trying to land salt water in the dark?'
It seemed the height of lunacy - unless our exalted new government
had put a tax on the oceans themselves.
'It
were ballast,' our prisoner repeated. 'We 'ad to offload it.'
'We'll
see about that,' muttered Bingham grimly. 'I wonder what we'll find
in the hold of your ship.'
A
sentry's challenge interrupted him, and I looked out to see another
boat floating a little way off beach. 'Ahoy,' called a voice I
recognized
as Ducker's. 'We searched their lugger - nothin' aboard.
Must've
got it all ashore.'
'Damn!'
Bingham's face was red with anger. 'All they brought here was
sea-water. We've been had, Jerrold - a proper fool's errand.
We'll
have to let go the entire crew, ashore and afloat.'
'What
about the other men on the beach?' I asked, growing ever more
confused.
Bingham
frowned. 'Which men? There was no-one here but my company, until
these two bastards turned up.'
'Oh.'
I struggled with my thoughts. 'But before they brought the salt water
ashore, they were signalling to someone from the lugger.'
Bingham
considered this. 'Well?' he snapped, turning to the prisoners. 'Who
were you signalling to?'
One
of them still hung his head and seemed too petrified to speak; the
other looked up with big, round eyes. 'Signallin', sir? We ....
wasn't signallin' no-one. Just twin' to get the ballast up, we was.
We 'ad to offload it, see?'
That
more or less ended the affair; with no evidence and no crime, what
else could we do? Under a cloud of invective, Bingham let the two
captives return to their freed lugger, then began the long march back
to Dover. I guessed it would be a cold and bitter plod. Ducker took
the news back to Crawley, which was as well, for I later discovered
he took some persuading that I was not at fault in this debacle. I
followed in my own jollyboat, whose crew, I noted, had watched the
whole business crouched safely behind her hull. Dawn was lining the
horizon before we were ready to weigh anchor again.
'Back
to port, sir?' I asked Crawley, as our sails cracked taut in the
wind. The night's excitement had kept me well awake, but now I felt a
painful shortage of sleep, and I did not think a hammock would be
sufficient cure.
'No.'
Crawley still fumed at the waste of the night's work: no prisoners,
no prizes, no glory- nothing but a laughingstock alien a sail back
into Dover. 'We will stay on patrol for a few days. If Cunningham was
right, there may yet be some action to be had. If not, then at least
it might keep you out of trouble, Lieutenant.'
'Yes,
sir.'
Anything
that would keep me out of Cunningham's path was bound to be a
benefit, but I was conscious that the days before my uncle's
ultimatum were beginning to slip past all too rapidly. And had a
curious - and quite unexpected - yearning to see Isobel again.
'Get
below and get some sleep.' Crawley looked at the edge of the sail.
'We'll follow this wind a few miles further, on to the Downs. Let the
admiral see that I do not squander my command all the time.' He
paused. 'Tomorrow, perhaps, I will send you to do some Swiss
fishing.'
7
'WHY
SWISS? SURELY THERE CANNOT BE MILCH FISHING IN THE cantons?' I let my
hand dangle over the side of the jollyboat, enjoying the remove from
Orestes
.
We had come back up the coast that morning, after the futility of the
night's adventures, and had now passed east of Dover. The great bulk
of the South Foreland rose on our left, while ahead of us lay the
busy Downs anchorage, where scores of sails of all sizes waited for a
fair wind to speed them off. Behind us, in open water,
Orestes
was spending the afternoon exercising her guns.
Ducker
looked at me from the opposite side of the boat, one arm gently
guiding the tiller. 'Swiss cos we're fishing for geneva.'
Geneva?
'Aye,
sir. When the owlers reckons they might get caught, they ropes their
kegs together an' drops 'em overboard. Got a weight at either end, so
they stays there 'til the coast's clear, when they comes back an'
fetches 'em up.'
'Extraordinary.
But how can they be sure of finding them?'
'Easy.'
Ducker grinned. 'Same as us. You takes one o' these' – he held
up a long arrowhead with two rows of broad flukes sticking from its
shaft, and a rope spliced around the ring in its end - 'an' drags it
behind while you rows over the spot 'til it catches on the casks;
then you hauls in your catch.' He dropped the hook over the stern of
the boat and began paying out the line behind it.
'Marvellous.
But surely the seabed is hardly littered with tubs of gin waiting to
be found. We must have some idea of where we're looking.'
'Sometimes.
If we're lucky, an' if we seen 'em dropping it.'
'But
have we seen anyone acting suspiciously near here?'
'No.
But the cap'n reckoned the owlers you saw a few nights back might
'ave left somethin'.'
I
stared back at the land, at the sepulchral cliffs looming in the hazy
sunlight, and shivered. They might be the great rampart of our
island, or whatever other nonsense that poet had written, but to me
they were horribly forbidding. I turned back to Ducker.
'So
have you ever caught anything in this fashion?'
It
seemed improbable, though I supposed no more futile than anything
else I'd seen of the war on smuggling. We might as well have asked
for voluntary contributions to the customs fund and left a box on the
quay for all the good we were doing.
'Once,
sir. 'Bout a year back.'
'And
how many years have you spent trying?'
Ducker
scratched his chin. 'Four, I reckon. Came 'ere recoverin' from a
wound I took in the Indies, an' never got ordered to move on.' He
nodded slowly. 'Four years, four cap'ns. Cap'n 'uckle - 'e died
quick; then there was Cap'n Beattie: married an earl's daughter an'
never came back; then Cap'n Ramsay, who nabbed Cal Drake; an' now
Cap'n Crawley.'
'Who
would doubtless very much like to have something other than seabirds
to shoot at.' Another cannon fired from
Orestes'
deck. They had been at it all afternoon, a constant rumble in the
background.
'How
did he come to be sent here?'
Ducker
stiffened. 'I reckon that's 'is business, if 'e wants to tell you or
no.'
'Of
course.' I thought back to his list - something else had tugged at my
attention. 'But Captain Ramsay, you say he caught Cal Drake?'
‘
Aye,
sir.’
It
must have been the fifth time I had heard that name, and I determined
to get at the story behind it.
'Who
was Cal Drake, Ducker?'
The
quartermaster was temporarily distracted with the line: it had jerked
taut, and must have snagged something down below. He gave it a firm
heave, and my expectation receded as quickly as it had risen when the
line went loose again.
'Seaweed,'
said Ducker. 'Just strong enough to keep you guessin'.'
'But
about Cal Drake ...'
Ducker
let out the line again. 'Not a lot to say. 'E was a local lad.
Started out a fisherman, an' realized 'e could catch a lot bigger
fish on the other side o' the Channel, smugglin' brandy to England
an' news to France. Some say 'e met Boney 'imself, back when 'e was
bent on invasion an' wanted pilots for 'is fleet. But whatever the
truth o' that, Drake 'ad 'is own fleet - two-score luggers at least,
runnin' a regular ferry every night. 'Ad the 'ole town o' Dover in
'is pocket. Near to 'alf the men you'd see 'ad scars on their cheeks
where Drake cut 'em for talkin' what they shouldn't, and there wasn't
a man you could say "Cal Drake" to that wouldn't run a mile
less 'e wound up face down in the tide.'
That
set me thinking, for I had my own interest in people who wound up
face down in the tide - or close to it, at least.
'But
Ramsay hunted him down?'
'Aye.
Drove 'is ship inshore an' wrecked 'im one night.' There was a
distant look in Ducker's eyes now. 'We followed 'em in with the
boats, fought 'em all over the rocks, through the surf an' up the
cliff. Cut down 'all the crew, but Drake reached the top an' started
inland, “look the dragoons three days to corner 'im, but they
finally found 'im stashed up in the
Queen
Anne's He
ad,
an' dragged 'im back to Dover. Where Cunngham anged ‘m. Best
thing e ever did.'