She glanced nervously over her shoulder, but no one was there ready to march her off into custody. If only Evans could keep Sir Harry talking at the gate for a while longer, perhaps she would still have time to warn Nicholas, assuming that he did not know what was going on outside the house. Was there a back entrance? Could she reach it without being seen? Even if there was no back door, there would surely be a window she could tap on. Kate was very aware of the danger to herself, but she must try.
The hedge surrounded the house. Kate kept close to it, moving as fast as she dared, watching where she set her feet so that she did not give away her presence with the snapping of a twig. Fortunately the night was not particularly dark despite a cloud cover that completely hid any sign of moon or stars. She believed it was the time of a new moon, anyway.
There was an opening in the hedge at the back of the house, and Kate, peering cautiously around one end of it, was relieved to see that indeed there was a back door. She would have to cross a patch of open garden to reach it, and the garden might already be filled with soldiers lying in wait. But she was not going to turn craven now. She took a deep breath and stepped into the opening of the hedge.
But before she could take even one step forward, she felt herself grabbed roughly from behind, one iron-hard arm completely enclosing her upper body and arms, and one large hand clamped over her mouth. Struggling was useless, as she discovered within a very few seconds. How could one struggle when one had no arms with which to do so and when one’s kick did not even cause one’s captor to wince? Trying to scream was equally useless. Nothing but a pathetic little “Mmmmm!” could get past the clamped hand.
A head covered with a woolen cap, the face blackened with some substance, appeared in front of her and looked into her face. Kate glared back. He was the strangest-looking coast guardsman she had ever seen.
“She’s not a wench from these parts,” he said to her captor. “A pity. We could ’ave just turned ’er over to ’er pa or ’usband for thrashing. She must be from the ’ouse.”
Kate’s captor grunted. “If she be a lady,” he said, “I can’t think what she would be doing so far from the ’ouse and snooping around ’ere.”
“What are we to do with ’er?” the first man asked. “Take ’er inside?”
“Na,” the captor said. “ ‘E’ll be just getting everything ready now. ’E won’t want to be troubled with no wench. We’ll ’ave to take ’er down with us an’ keep an eye on ’er. ’E’ll deal with ’er later. Yer’ll find that it don’t pay to try to meddle with Dorest smugglers, my fine lady.”
Dorset smugglers! Kate’s eyes widened if that were possible. Had the world gone mad? She had risked her own safety to come to the cottage of a highwayman and kidnapper to save him from the imminent arrival of a Judas and the coast guard, and she had had the misfortune to run into a band of smugglers? She was suddenly seriously alarmed. These rogues were going to take her with them until they had completed their night’s work, and then they were going to have their leader deal with her. Deal with her? That could mean only one thing, could it not? They would not be able to release her now that she knew so much. And she was likely to learn more within the next few hours.
These thoughts did not have a chance to formulate themselves clearly in her mind. Kate was too absorbed with a consuming terror as the hand over her mouth was removed, only to be replaced immediately by a foulsmelling handkerchief that the blackened man pulled so tight at the back of her head that it forced her mouth open painfully. She still could not scream past it, she discovered when she tried. Her captor meanwhile had grabbed one of her wrists in each large hand, twisted them behind her back, and tied them with something, tightly enough to cut off the circulation of blood. While her mind was still in a whirl of bewilderment and terror, she was spun around to face her captor, who stooped and slung her over his shoulder. She saw in that one brief instant that he was disguised in the same way as his companion.
“A good thing we was passing this way,” her captor said with a grunt.
Even her terror became of little importance to Kate for the following ten minutes. It was replaced entirely by pain. The two men walked quietly but briskly away from the cottage in the direction of the cliffs and the sea and then clambered down a cliff path to a small pebbled beach below. Kate, hanging head-down against the back of the larger man, felt as if her head would burst from the pressure of the blood pounding through it and as if her mouth were being cut to ribbons by the handkerchief. She almost choked and had to fight in a blind panic for breath when she tried to swallow. She tried to keep her bound hands against her back, but sometimes they swung backward painfully, pulling at the muscles of her shoulders. Once during the descent her knuckles grazed against some rock. She tried to keep her eyes shut but could not seem to stop herself from watching in terror the precipices that swung below her vision as they descended.
Finally they were down on the beach and she became aware of other hushed male voices.
“What ’as Fred got there?” she heard one voice whisper.
“There was a wench snooping outside the cottage,” Fred’s companion explained. “From the ’ouse, like as not. We brought ’er down ’ere.”
“Are you mad?” someone hissed. “She hadna seen anything. Nothing’s ’appened yet. Yer should ’ave just bumped ’er over the ’ead and dumped ’er somewhere close to the ’ouse. Now she’ll know bloody well what’s going on. We’ll ’ave the coast guard at our ’eads.”
“Fred and Jake never were ones for sensible thinking,” someone else said.
“Lord,” another voice said in an awed whisper. “It’s Mrs. Mannering. She’s from the house, all right. You numbskull, Fred. Why bring her here? Now we’ll have to do something about her. And we have never had to do violence before.”
“I’m taking ’er into the cave,” Fred said sullenly. “ ’E can decide later what to do with ’er.”
Kate felt half-dead by the time she was finally set down. She was sitting on sand; she could feel that much. But it was several minutes before she could raise her head and take note of her surroundings. She was sitting inside a cave, which was large enough to delight children perhaps, but not as large as she would have expected a smuggler’s hideout to be. It was empty of anything except one dim lamp hanging from a projection of rock in such a manner that its light would be visible only from inside the cave. There was one man standing at the entrance, his back to her. She suspected it was probably the man she had first seen: Jake.
She would not be able to save Nicholas now. Sir Harry Tate had found him and somehow he would bring him harm. There did not seem to be any soldiers around, but anyway, Sir Harry could be up to no good. “Your friend may live to see another day,” he had said to Mr. Dalrymple that afternoon, ominous words if she had ever heard any. Nicholas was going to be led into a trap, and he would hang. The one consolation to her was that she would not be there to see it. She would already be long dead, her throat slit on the sand of this cave.
Terror came bounding back.
Nicholas Seyton arrived at the cottage rather later than he would have liked. But he had not wished to retire too early at Barton Abbey. Even insomniacs do not go to bed immediately after dinner. When he did arrive, it was to find Russ Evans standing at the gate, looking dubiously up at the sky. As usual, the night of a new moon had been chosen so that there would be as much darkness as possible. But the clouds this evening actually made the sky light and luminous. Well, Nicholas said, clapping his friend heartily on the shoulder eventually, there was nothing they could do about the matter now. The ship from France would be sending its boat into the bay within the next hour or so. They would just have to trust to good fortune and the sharp senses of Josh Pickering and a few other men who had been stationed in places where they might note the approach of the coast guard.
He was pleased to discover that all was ready. The cellar at the cottage had been cleared out ready to receive the boxes and casks that would fill it for the next two days until the smuggled items could be distributed. It was a risky business, hauling all those items up from the beach and across the open ground to the cottage, but it was really the only sensible thing to do. The cave was neither large enough nor sufficiently concealed for them to risk leaving everything there.
So he was not late after all. All he had to do was go inside the house to don his wig and mask and then follow Russ to the beach. Mrs. Evans and Parkin would remain at the cottage to oversee the arrival of the smuggled goods and their orderly stowing in the cellar. He had worn the mask and wig almost from the start of his work with the smugglers, rather than the woolen cap and the coal-blackened face favored by the other men. He supposed that their disguise was more practical, but he liked the idea of his own. He knew that the very blond hair was especially unwise. But it was so different from his own hair that he felt it would offer sufficient protection from recognition if he were spotted from a distance.
In actual fact, he never had been spotted. This smuggling business was by no means a frequent event. Sometimes two months, sometimes three, passed between shipments. And although the coast guard knew that smuggling did happen in the area, they had never come close to catching any of the culprits. Indeed sometimes a whole operation was conducted without their seeming aware that anything out of the ordinary had occurred.
When Nicholas reached the beach, he walked to the water’s edge. The other men—some dozen of them-were also watching the water tensely. And they did not have long to wait. Soon a ship’s boat was rowed almost silently up onto the beach and all the men went to work lifting boxes of silk and lace and kegs of brandy out of the boat and carrying them up the beach to be stowed temporarily in the cave. All worked quickly and silently. They had done this often enough that each man knew his job. Nicholas meanwhile spoke with the French captain who had come with the boat to receive his payment and to make arrangements for the next run. The usual wrangling continued during most of the hauling process. The captain asked too much for his cargo. He must be satisfied with less. He pressed too hard for an earlier run. The next one must not be within two months at the soonest.
Finally the last box had been carried to the cave, and the Frenchman climbed back into the boat, shrugging and gesticulating, but satisfied with his night’s work. Nicholas watched the boat grow smaller as it drew out into the bay, and turned to watch the men, stretching and resting themselves for a few minutes before beginning the far more demanding haul up the cliff path and across to the cottage. One of them wandered toward him.
“Begging pardon, Master Nick,” he said, “but there be one small problem tonight.”
