The Smugglers (10 page)

“Show them a flag,” said I. “The ensign.”

He frowned. “Och, ye're daft.”

“No,” I said. “We could hoist it, and … They wouldn't shoot at the ensign, would they?”

Crowe stared at me. Then his face twisted into his old and cunning smile. “O' course,” he said. “Damn my eyes, I might have thought o' that myself.” He laughed and clapped my shoulder. “Ye've got the wheel,” he said, and took himself below.

Dasher had hauled himself up from the deck. He adjusted his corks and shook his hair. “He's a mean old cove,” he said. “But he's never wrong about the fog.”

In a moment Crowe was back, and he thrust a bundled flag into my hands. “Here,” he said. “Dasher, give him a hand.”

We clapped the ensign on the halyard, and the wind tore it loose into a flurry of white and red and blue. But in our haste, I saw, we'd set it upside down, the sign of a ship in trouble.

“Leave it,” said Dasher. “We're in distress all right, I guess.” But I turned it straight, and hand over hand we hoisted the flag to the gaff. It snapped and flogged against the topping lift, the big red cross and the Union Jack flashing in the wind.

Dasher gazed up at it, then aft at the cutter. “Oh, they're talking now,” he said. “They're wondering, all right. 'That's a king's ship up there,' they're saying. And now there's someone asking, 'Why's the navy running like a thief?' ” He laughed. “That's a sight they won't see every day.”

The flag gained us only a moment. Then the cutter, rolling on a crest, fired again, far across our bow. And a dab of color appeared at her peak, streaming in the wind. They had hoisted the same white ensign.

“Oh, that's droll,” said Dasher. “Sometimes I think we're
all
in the navy out here.”

I watched the distant flag curl and stiffen from the cutter's gaff. It was a strange sort of joke, I thought, for a smuggler to answer our ensign with another. I said, “Maybe it
is
the navy. That might be a revenue cutter.”

“Too far to tell,” said Dasher.

“I'll fetch the captain's spyglass.”

I turned to go, but Dasher held me back. “Too late for that,” he said.

For a moment I was angry, and I tried to shake off his hand. But Dasher had caught me off balance, and I stumbled back against the cushion of his corks. One of them broke loose and bounced across the deck.

“Look there,” he said, pointing at the cutter.

A band of clouds, laced with blue and yellow, tumbled in
behind her, rising up in feathered wisps like steam upon a cauldron. The sky grew darker; the sea began to simmer.

“Fog,” cried Dasher. He laughed; he danced a little jig. “Bless that poor old Captain Haggis. He's right again. He always is.”

It came quickly then, spreading across the water, billowing up against the sun. It touched the cutter and made a ghost of her, a gray and frightful ghost.

And the pattern of her shooting changed. With a shriek that scared the daylights from me, a ball passed overhead. It left a round and perfect hole in the belly of the mainsail, like a piece of sky pasted on the canvas. And the next shot came right after, in a moment that was utter terror. I heard the whistle of the ball and, already looking up, saw the tip of the foresail gaff shatter into splinters.

Dasher ducked behind the rail. His face looked suddenly old, suddenly very scared. “Oh, ho!” said he, with a grimace meant to be a grin. “They're down to business now.”

And the cutter vanished altogether.

A waft of fog seemed to hang above the
Dragon
's bow, then swirl around the masts. We raced through it, and through another after, and then the sun went out, and all our world was white. I couldn't see as far as the wheel; I could hardly see the water right below. And with every nerve atingle, I waited for the next ball to come speeding straight toward me.

The
Dragon
tilted heavily as Captain Crowe brought her up to windward. But he wasn't quick enough. I heard again that dreadful whistle, and right behind it a human scream, an awful, chilling shriek. The
Dragon,
head to wind, shivered
like a frightened horse, and the scream rose high, then went on and on.

“He's done for,” Dasher said, cowering by the rail. In his voice I heard the horror that I felt. “Good God, the captain's dead.”

W
e ran forward through the fog and found the wheel empty, turning by itself. Of Captain Crowe there was no sign at all, as though he'd vanished from the schooner. Dasher was almost frantic. He looked down in the scuppers and behind the binnacle.

“Captain Crowe!” he shouted. “Captain Crowe!”

The familiar old voice came back, with neither distance nor direction. “Stop your hooting, will ye? I'm here.”

“Where?” asked Dasher. And stupidly he looked toward the rigging.

“Here, ye daft gowk,” bellowed Captain Crowe. “By the foremast.”

“Go,” said I, and took the wheel. I turned it hard to leeward, and the
Dragon–
half aback–fell slowly off the wind. But Dasher worked himself in front of me.

“I'll steer,” he said. “Please. I've got no taste for blood.”

I only stared at him. This was Dashing Tommy Dusker, too frightened to go forward and tend to an injured man?

“Please,” he said again.” “It makes me queasy. Just the thought of blood does me rather poorly”

I left him there and went forward myself. By the time I reached the mainmast, the schooner had gathered way. When I reached the foremast she was sailing again, prancing along.

Down on the deck, his back to me, sat Captain Crowe. In his arms he held a body. A hand, red with blood, clawed at his shoulder. The head slumped back on one side; the legs jutted out on the other, toes turned inward.

“What happened?” I asked.

Captain Crowe tipped his head. “Stay there!” he barked. “Ye dinna have to see this.”

“Is he dead?” I asked.

“He's wishing that he was.”

I was aware then of the other man watching. Harry, the cook, stood by the mast in the edge of the fog, as silent as a figure carved from stone. He looked directly at me, eye to eye, but whether with fear or hate or tenderness I could not tell at all.

“Go on,” said Captain Crowe. “Awa' wi' ye now.”

The hand of the dying sailor clamped tighter onto the captain's shoulder. His head writhed side to side, but the feet moved not at all. From end to end he looked to be seven feet in length. But Mathew was not nearly as tall as that.

I was sure, in that moment, that he was the one who had warned me of danger. And I was sure that someone had
killed him in the cover of the fog. I stepped closer and looked down, and –

The man was cut in two. The cannonball, or something, had torn right through him, and now his blood and innards were spilling out across the captain's lap. It was a sight that nearly drove me to my knees: poor Mathew's wretched look of horror, the gap between his torso and his legs. I reeled away, back toward the wheel, where Dasher caught me and sat me down.

“Was it bad?” said he. “I guess it was. Oh, Lord, I can see that it was.”

Before long I heard a splash. And another after that. Then Captain Crowe came down the deck, past us to the stern. Wherever he walked, there were drops of red. He took off his cloak, bundled it up, and hurled it over the rail.

There were only four of us now on the
Dragon,
and we listened in dread to the sounds that came out of the fog. There was a creak of rope, a surge of water, and the terrible rumble of guns across a deck.

“So they've found us,” said Crowe. He looked up, and I saw the streaks of blood, in four straight lines, that stretched across his cheek. “The fog's no high enough tae hide the masts,” said he. “Dasher, get aloft. And you,” he said to me, “ye've got the wheel.”

Dasher went up the ratlines and disappeared, swallowed by the fog. I stared at a compass that seemed to swing wherever it wanted. In every direction was only whiteness; there was nothing to steer toward.

“Ye feel that?” said Captain Crowe. “The wind's going down.”

It was. The water that had roared at the figurehead now passed with a muffled hush. The schooner stood more up-right, and the sails had lost their fullness. It took a quarter turn of the great wooden wheel to do what a touch had done before.

“There she is!” cried Dasher suddenly. His voice came from above us.

“Where?” said Captain Crowe.

“Beside us there. Don't you see? Beside us, man.”

I saw her then, the bowsprit first, next the jib and the enormous main. Like a shadow of the
Dragon
cast upon the fog, she slid along beside us.

“Bear away!” Captain Crowe commanded.

I turned the wheel, but not fast enough for him. He threw himself at it, and the king spoke cracked against my knuckles, then passed in a blur with the others. The
Dragon
whirled to leeward, and the cutter faded into nothing.

We turned to port, then hard to starboard. We ran with the jib aback, and we jibed across the wind, and the compass spun like a whirligig. The fog fiddled with my senses; I stared wildly at things that weren't there. Flotillas of fantastic ships, enormous faces, and even ladies walking on the water came and went on every side. But I could
hear
the cutter, the slap of water at her hull, the flapping of her sails.

“Where is she?” asked Captain Crowe. Then, loud enough that Dasher would hear, “Where the
devil
is she?”

Dasher shouted down, “On the port side now.”

Crowe and I looked to the left, below the mainsail boom. I saw a shape loom up and disappear. A cannon fired wildly.

“Och, she's sailing circles round us,” said Captain Crowe. He threw the helm down, and around we went again, like children at a deadly game of blindman's bluff, groping through the fog.

But the wind fell ever lighter. And the fog grew even thicker. “Like porridge,” said Captain Crowe, a fair enough description. It was a bubbling gruel that filled the space between the masts and slowed the
Dragon
down.

Dasher came back to the deck. “Never seen a fog so thick,” said he. “I'm going goggle-eyed from all the staring.”

“If we canna see them, they canna see us,” said Captain Crowe philosophically. But he had hardly spoken when another voice, a stranger's voice, came clearly through the fog.

“I hear them there,” it said.

“Not a sound,” said Crowe, his voice a rasping whisper. “Not a sound, ye hear?”

This voice without a shape was worse than the shadows in the fog. It raised an icy panic in the bottom of my spine. Then came the sounds of the ship, the wood and canvas and water. And another voice, a different one, hailed us from that void.

“Heave to,” it said. “This is
Intrepid.
His Majesty's Ship
Intrepid.”

I laughed. I know how odd it sounds, but I laughed from sheer relief. These men weren't smugglers at all. “They're revenue,” I said. “It's all right now; it's the revenue.”

“Aye, so it is,” said Captain Crowe.

I raised my hands to answer back, but the captain hauled them down. In a trice he had an arm around my throat, a
hand across my mouth. “There'll be no shouting,” he said. “There'll be no sound at a'.”

I fought against him, but he was far too strong. He ordered Dasher to the wheel, and he dragged me kicking toward the rail. He shoved me down and held me there, bent backward across the bulwark. Like a clamp across my jaw, his fingers pushed against me, until my feet lifted from the deck and I saw the water rushing past the hull.

His hand smelled of blood. He snarled like a vicious dog.

“If ye mak' a sound,” he said, “so much as a squeak, I'11 tip ye over the side,”

S
omewhere in the fog, by the sounds I heard, the revenue cutter was coming about. Captain Crowe heard them, too, and he raised his great shaggy head to listen. In his hands I struggled like a dying fish, praying the ship would come across our bow. But the flap of sails and squeal of blocks grew only fainter, and at last disappeared. She had lost us in the fog.

Captain Crowe loosened his fingers, and it was all I could do to breathe again.

“Now,” said he, “ye're a smart young lad. If ye give me your word that ye'11 keep your mouth shut, we'll go on and finish the job.”

I slumped down on the deck, my hands at my throat. In the mist at the mainmast, I saw Harry watching me.

“What will it be?” said Crowe. “The
Dragon
's going to Dover. And when the brandy's off, ye can do as ye please.
So, tell me.” He kicked my ribs. “Do ye give your oath? Ye'11 never breathe a word o' this to any living soul?”

“I can't promise that,” I said.

He shrugged. “Then I'll pitch ye over the side. It's a' the same to me.”

He reached down, but I squirmed away. “You can't take the
Dragon”
I said. “What good's she to you?”

“No good at a',” said he, as calm as anything. “If I try to keep her, they'll hunt me like a pirate. But I can tak' her up to London, can't I, and tell that blasted father of yours how his poor, besotted son went ower the side in a storm. And he'll see me all weepin' and sad, and say, 'Why, bless your heart, Cap'n Crowe, here's a guinea for your troubles.' ”

He stepped toward me; I scuttled backward.

“Och, laddie,” he said. “Ye canna go far.”

I knew he was right, and I had never felt so helpless. Wherever I ran, he could follow. He would toss me over the side without a thought, and I would drown in the
Dragon
's wake, watching her shrink in the fog. I stood up and stepped back toward the mainmast.

“Take him, Harry,” said Crowe.

I had no time to look behind me. I heard a footstep on the deck and felt arms encircling my chest. The cook held me in an iron grip, and his breath was hot and spongy on my neck.

“Just give me your word,” said Crowe. “I ask no more than that.”

“I won't,” I said.

“Whit a shame,” said Crowe. “Whit an affy shame.” Then he grabbed me by the wrist and tore me away from Harry. He lifted me right from the deck and turned toward the rail. He held me there as the deck heaved up, and I knew I had but a moment left to live.