Chapter One

W ith consummate ease born of years at the helm, Captain Jack Trevelyan brought his new lugger, The Fly , a boat he’d only taken possession of a month ago, past the dangerous Enys Rock and into the shelter of Bessie’s Cove. She handled like a dream, and not just thanks to the experience of his crew. Their combined skills helped, of course, but the fact that they were working with a sleek greyhound built for speed and easy handling played the biggest part. Jack had found, to his delight, that The Fly responded almost to his very thought, like some living sea creature given into his hands. He patted her gunwales with a proprietorial hand, as though she were a woman, grinning as she skimmed through the shallower water towards the beach.

As they lost the wind between the cliffs, The Fly slowed, and her crew took down her now sagging sails. They worked together like the well-greased cogs of a clock, and he had no need to issue any orders. Within minutes, they were as far in as their draft would allow, with an anchor down stem and stern to steady them, as the bo’sun, Jack’s boyhood friend, Daniel Bussow, organized the launching of the gig.

Jack raised a hand to shade his eyes as he peered inland. The cliffs here weren’t particularly high, but the way they overhung the narrow inlet provided as good a hiding place as any for a none-too-large boat. To see down into the cove from the cliff path, any nosy person had to get right to the edge. And the same went for out to sea. Once in the sheltered waters of Bessie’s Cove with their sails furled, no passing revenue cutter would be able to spot them.

No wonder John Carter, Daniel’s uncle and the self-styled King of Prussia, had set up business here back in the last century. He was long dead now, but Jack partnered with the man who’d carried on his tradition, his son-in-law, Captain Will Richards. Thanks to the two of them, the well-earned reputation of the Carters lived on.

Was that Will on the eastern cliffs now, watching them unloading the goods? Most likely. Jack raised an arm and gave the distant figure a leisurely wave. He received a wave in return.

The crew, scarcely needing any organizing from Daniel, unloaded the ankers of gin, brandy and rum they’d picked up in Roscoff into the waiting gig, as she bobbed beside the larger boat, along with a couple of chests of tea and several bails of silk, one of which Jack had earmarked for his own mother’s use. Down on the little sandy beach, Will’s men were already shoving their own gig into the waves to come out to help.

“Thassa good run,” a gravelly voice to Jack’s right said.

He glanced at the old man by his side. Old Tummels, gripping the ratlines in one hand, rubbed his whiskery chin, as averse to doing any lifting work as always, but forgiven it thanks to his appearance of advanced old age. He paid Jack’s father a peppercorn rent for a tumbledown cottage on the westerly headland that Jack had more than once offered to improve. He’d been turned down every time. For some reason, Tummels seemed to enjoy both his isolation and the conditions he lived in, and, as he only worked when he needed a few shillings for his ale, he wasn’t often a member of Jack’s crew.

Jack had known the old man all his life. “So it should be,” he said, glancing left towards the westering sun. “Be dark soon.”

“Cap’n Will—be he a-goin’ to store the kegs in the caves ternight? Or mebbe down one o’ they shafts?” The old man might well be thinking of tapping off a bottle or two for himself, unobserved. He’d been known to do that before.

Jack shrugged. He’d done his bit by bringing this consignment over from Brittany. It was up to Will to sort out where it went, and how safely stored it was. Jack didn’t much care about who got what profit out of it, so long as he made his bit. After all, with what his father had put in trust for him, he didn’t really need the money. But he did need the excitement. He wasn’t about to stop making these trips back and forth across the channel in a hurry.

With the gig well filled, Phoby Geen, another of Jack’s boyhood friends, who’d been steadying her by holding one of the ropes hanging from the side of The Fly , settled himself at the oars. Young Harry Richards, Will’s son and heir who’d accompanied them on this trip to Roscoff, took the other. The two young men put their backs into it and pulled for the shore.

They passed the other gig on its way over and soon that was being filled with the remainder of the cargo.

Jack swung down from where he’d been standing in the bows, grabbed the last anker of brandy and passed it down. With a grin, he hopped over the gunwales and slid down a rope to land lightly in the gig. “I’ll take an oar.” This gig was larger than the one they carried on The Fly and would take four men to row it.

Hosking, their carpenter, shifted over on his thwart and Jack settled beside him, taking hold of the butt end of one of the oars. As he did so, he happened to glance to his right again, westwards. Movement caught his eye. A skirt billowed. Was that someone else up on the edge of the cliffs, out near the tip of the headland, staring down at them? A girl by the look of it, her gown catching in the stiff sea breeze and her long dark hair blowing out behind her. Where the hell had she come from? The only houses hereabouts were Will’s own, out above neighboring Prussia Cove at Porth en Alls, Bessie’s Kiddleywink, near where he’d spied Will waiting, Tummel’s single story fisherman’s hut on the western headland, and that empty thatched cottage some far-off widow-woman owned, standing just back from the cliffs. No one had lived in it since Brewinney Pascoe’d gone over the cliffs onto the rocks below.

So where had a strange girl appeared from?

“Heave ho,” Hosking growled, and Jack set to with the other three, pulling for the little sandy beach. With the tide right in, the way it was now, not much of the beach was on show. He had no need to worry about The Fly when the tide started to drop, though, Daniel was to take her round to Penzance to do some honest work picking up a cargo of fish to carry round to Plymouth. Not the sort of work that appealed to Jack, so he’d be staying on land until the time for the next run across the Channel to Roscoff came around.

Between strokes of the oars, Jack glanced back at the clifftop again, but the girl had vanished, if she’d ever been there at all. He shook his head. Perhaps she’d been a pisky. After all, the next cove along was called Pisky’s Cove. Or a figment of his imagination.

The gig bumped on the sand and the men jumped out, splashing through the shallow waves and pulling the gig clear of the water. Jack jumped out as well and lent a hand. Laden with all their contraband, she was a heavy load.

A strong hand clapped him on the back. “Well done, lad, ye’ve fetched a tidy load in this time, and in broad daylight. Right under the noses of the gaugers, too.”

Jack looked up at his friend Will. A big man by any standards, and a good fifteen years older than Jack, lately fine living had given him a sizeable paunch, but not detracted from his fierce good looks. His graying hair still sprouted in luxuriance, giving him the appearance of a trustworthy elder statesman. Which he was, really. The most honest man Jack knew. If you didn’t count the smuggling. “Not sight nor sound of a revenue cutter.”

Will grinned. “Probably busy round at St Ives and up to Padstow. They’ll not catch us down here unless they think to give the Penzance Collector a cutter of his own to play with. And we know they won’t do that. Pendennis’ll put a stop to any ideas that way.”

As Pendennis, the local magistrate, was the one who’d decide whether or not to allot a cutter to Penzance, Will was more than likely correct. The magistrate was not averse to taking a few kegs of brandy that had paid no duty for himself, and was always ready to turn a blind eye on what went on in his jurisdiction. It suited him well to ignore the goings-on to the east of Penzance.

Will slung an arm around Jack’s broad shoulders. “Young Harry’ll sort everything out here. You come on up to the Kiddley with me for a tot of something that’s paid no duty, and tastes all the better for it.” Leaving the men to unload, the two captains started back up the narrow path to Bessie’s Kiddley, a hostelry named, as many were, after its most famous proprietor. Although nowadays, at pushing eighty, the old lady did none of the work.

*

From the doorway, Mrs. Harriet Penhallow, widow, surveyed the state of the tiny, thatched cottage her late husband’s great-aunt, Mrs. Bolitho of Marazion, had seen fit to offer her and her children. Habitable was not a word she would have chosen to describe it. Neither was clean. A slender woman, with her rich chestnut hair at this moment covered with a demure bonnet trimmed with mourning black, her delicate brows furrowed in a worried frown.

Beside her, the stout and sensible Bertha, who’d been Harriet’s nurse as a child, then lady’s maid, followed by nurse to her two children, and had now matured into unpaid general factotum cum lifelong friend, heaved a heartfelt disapproving sigh, but stayed silent.

“It’s awful,” fifteen-year-old Lydia, with no such inhibitions, said, wrinkling her pert nose. “Surely you can’t expect us to live here ?” She pulled a face. “No one should be expected to live in a place like this.”

Bertha’s lined face settled into a heavy frown that sent Harriet’s heart sinking to her boots. She’d been against coming here from the start and had made it plain to her mistress. Now, she must be thinking she’d been proven correct in her doubts. Which in all probability she had.

“You can see the sea,” twelve-year-old Theo, ever the optimist, piped up, hopping from one leg to the other as though he might need to find the privy very shortly. If there even was one. “It looks like we’re on top of some cliffs, but there might be a beach. With sand and waves. Maybe caves. Can we go and look, Mama? Can we?” His voice rose in desperate pleading.

Harriet sighed, although not so deeply as Bertha had. She might as well let both the children go. It would give her time to form a plan of action with Bertha. Something that needed to be done swiftly as the late September evening was approaching. “Off you go then, but if there are cliffs, keep well back from the edge in case they’re crumbly. I don’t want you having an accident on your first day here.”

“First day?” Lydia scowled. “You say that as if there’s going to be a second day.”

Harriet bit her lip. Of course there was going to be a second day, and a third, and so on into a distant infinity. They had nowhere else to go and were lucky old Mrs. Bolitho had seen fit to offer this… this hovel. No, she mustn’t think of it like that. She had to be positive. It had four walls and a roof, at least, which was more than they’d had yesterday. It was going to be their home, come what may. The old adage that beggars can’t be choosers sprang to mind. Since Ben’s untimely death at Waterloo, they’d definitely become beggars.

But she didn’t want to think about Ben.

“Come on, Lydia.” Theo, buoyed by the resilience of youthful optimism, grabbed his sister’s hand. “Let’s go and explore.”

Lydia spent exactly three seconds wrestling with whether to join her brother in his enthusiastic explorations before her curiosity got the better of her. However, holding hands with her younger brother was clearly not the way she wanted this to go. She snatched her hand back, and the two children ran off, Lydia holding up her skirts the better to run.

Silence would have descended had the cottage not been on the coast, where the distant rumble of the waves in the cove below was a constant, and so were the raucous cries of the wheeling gulls overhead. A stiff westerly blew, reminding Harriet that it was autumn, and winter would soon be upon them. Before that, they needed to make sure this cottage, whatever it was called, was windproof and watertight. Because they were going to have to make do and mend here, and stick it out, come what may.

Thanks to Ben. But she’d sworn not to think about him.

Bertha set her pudgy hands on her hips and scowled. “Doesn’t look like anyone’s been living here for a long time.”

Harriet nodded. “At least the roof appears to be in reasonable condition, though.”

Bertha’s expression said that this was small comfort, and Harriet had to admit she was right. About everything.

The cottage did indeed look as though no one had lived there for a long time, with dirty, ragged curtains at filthy windows, tall weeds jostling the foot of the walls, and an unloved, uncared for air about its exterior. But they’d have to make the best of it. Harriet suppressed another sigh. “Well, let’s go inside and take a look. We haven’t anywhere else to go, so we’re going to have to.”

She pushed the front door, which might once have been painted blue, wider open and stepped through it, Bertha right behind her. Was this the kitchen? Hard to tell. At least there was a table, dustcovered and littered with the remnants of what had to have been someone’s long-ago last meal in the house. And a stone sink. And was that filthy, rust-encrusted object a kitchen range? Could it be made to function?

Bertha harrumphed loudly as she ran a finger through the dust on the table. “Fancy leaving your dirty dishes out like this. What sort of a person lived here, I’d like to know? Did a moonlight flit, I’d wager, owing rent.”

Harriet nodded. “At least Mrs. Bolitho has said we don’t have to pay her any rent. That was very kind of her.”

Another harrumph from Bertha who had formed a low opinion of their benefactor, Harriet’s late husband’s great-aunt, even though neither of them had met her as yet.

Harriet pretended she hadn’t heard. She’d better take a quick look at the rest of the house before the children came back, just in case it was even worse. Although, how it could be worse than this first glimpse lay beyond her imagination.

There appeared to be two good-sized rooms downstairs, if you didn’t count the lean-to pantry—was it even a pantry?—tacked onto the back of the kitchen. A huge, inglenook fireplace took up most of the adjoining wall in the second room, sharing its chimney with what remained of the range. Some cobweb-shrouded, high-backed wooden chairs stood in front of it, one with a dirty blanket heaped on it. In a corner, a rickety door gave onto a twisting spiral staircase whose treads creaked with every step Harriet took. She took care to place her feet at the edges, for fear of the wood being rotten.

On the first floor, a narrow landing provided three more doors. To two bedrooms, if you could call them that, and a box room. No beds though, unless that pile of filthy rags heaped in one of them could be called a bed. The small, leaded windows badly needed de-spidering and a good clean, but the plasterwork seemed to be intact, and at least the windows still had glass in them. Really, if she looked beneath the liberal layer of dirt and dust, this was quite a nice house…

Well, it could be a nice house. Nothing like the one they’d rented in Bath though. Within walking distance of Lydia’s school.

Briefly, the image of the home she and Ben had shared when he was home on leave from the army flashed into her head. Small, but perfectly appointed, with a kitchen in the basement and quarters for Bertha, Mrs. Birch the cook, and Daisy the parlor maid in the attic. How she’d once loved that house… where her children had been born and she’d been so happy in the first year or two of her marriage. Until… No. She wouldn’t think about that. There’d still been happy moments in amongst the… No. She had to stop remembering. She just had to be thankful that French dictator had escaped his island prison and set out to reclaim France for himself. Thankful for Waterloo…

This was a new beginning and she had to make the most of it.

She snatched herself out of her reverie. She also had to be practical. This was her reality now, for both herself and her children, and nothing she could do would change anything, and even if she could have changed it, would she have wanted to? She had to be thankful for what she still had. Thankful to Napoleon, and to Mrs. Bolitho, who had come to her aid when she found herself homeless, despite her worry that the lady nurtured some ulterior motive for her sudden kindness. She’d think about all of that later.

She retraced her footsteps down the corridor and creaking stairs and into the cottage’s sitting room. If that was what she was going to have to call it.

Running footsteps sounded outside and Theo charged into the cottage, his dark curly hair blowing in the breeze. “I saw a ship, Mama! Down in a beautiful little bay with real waves and sand. And it’s a proper ship with sails and sailors!”