Poppy looked around at all the crates, blinking. “But wouldn’t that be quite a lot of opium?”
He put the cake back and snapped the lid of the mango wood box shut. “You’re not wrong.”
“So they’re smuggling opium into Britain? Is it in such demand here?”
“I have no idea. I can tell you that it’s often used by armies.” He knew all too well what happened to soldiers who couldn’t dull the pain of their wounds during or after surgery. It was excruciating.
Poppy was frowning as she continued to look around. “These crates all look identical. Shouldn’t there be a whole range of items? Fabric? Fruit? Liquors? Lace?”
“As you say, it’s odd all the crates look the same. This isn’t an ordinary smuggling run at all.” And Carlos would know.
“We have to get back to the house,” she said. “And then we have to tell…well, somebody! A magistrate has to see this.”
“I agree.” He carefully replaced the lid of the opened crate, hammering the nails back in place to hide the fact that they’d examined it. “Let’s go. And I’ll go outside first.”
“Why?”
“Because if anyone is out there, I’ll say I’m alone. That will give you time to hide in the caves.”
Poppy’s eyes widened, and she suddenly shivered. “Oh. This was a really risky thing to do, wasn’t it?”
“Yes, it was,” he said, not mincing words. “Now let’s go, before the tide traps us in here and drowns us.”
“Oh, my God.” Poppy practically pushed him along through the passageway. At the entrance, where the cave dark gave way to the vaguely more luminous dark of the night air, he told her to douse the lantern. Then they waited, barely breathing.
He edged closed and looked outside, but saw nothing. “All right, the coast is clear.”
“This is not the time for levity.”
“But the coast is clear,” Carlos said. He couldn’t keep a laugh out of his voice though, happy that Poppy actually thought he was back to making bad puns, instead of barely containing his panic.
Carlos’s mood improved even more as soon as they stepped on the beach, and he took a huge breath of salty sea air. The pair walked quickly to the stone stairs and made their way back up the cliff face. He had never found the lights of a house more comforting than at that moment.
Just then, he saw an odd flashing at the top of the house. He looked up, but it wasn’t repeated. Perhaps one of the rooms had been lit—or darkened—abruptly. Or a curtain had been pulled back. But he didn’t have leisure to consider that now. He had to help Poppy get back into the house. He didn’t want her to get in trouble, no matter how airily she spoke about her reputation.
“I suppose I can’t just stroll back into the drawing room,” she said, watching the windows along the ground floor.
“Not with the way your outfit looks now,” he warned. “Your slippers sound like they’re made of mud.”
“You’re not far off,” she admitted. Poppy looked down, then realized she was still wearing his coat. She shrugged out of it and handed it back to him. “My thanks, Señor de la Guerra.”
“Carlos,” he insisted. “After traversing a smugglers’ cave together, it is socially acceptable to use Christian names…when alone.”
“You are truly a master of etiquette,” she said with a wry smile. Then she looked back at the house. “How should I do this?”
“There’s a door on the far side of the house that the servants use to get to the outbuildings. It’s the same door tradesmen use. Go along the side yard here, behind that yew hedge. Your gown will practically glow if the moon comes out, so move quickly. When you get inside, be as silent as you can. You’ll see the servants’ stairs at one end. Take that up to the upper floor and when the hallway is empty, sneak back to your room and stay there for the rest of the night.”
Poppy’s eyes were wide. “Well. You’re prepared.”
He didn’t want to get into why that was. “In the morning, if anyone asks where you went, tell them that after you stormed out of the dining room doors to the terrace, you had a change of heart and you immediately went back in through the foyer doors, which were open, and you pouted in your bedroom all night. You ignored any knocks at the door, and refused to call a maid to help you get ready for bed.”
“I already told Mrs. Towers I didn’t need any maid assigned to me,” she said.
“Good. And I’ll tell people that I did go out and look for you, since I was worried about a young lady alone. But I didn’t find you, and I just walked around the grounds—if anyone was looking for me, we must have just missed each other in the darkness.”
“You have an answer for everything, don’t you?” she said.
“It helps to plan ahead. You don’t want to have to answer awkward questions about how you’ve spent the last hour.”
