The Devil's Luck (A Charlie Raven Adventure)

by Jan Needle

  Who stood there, with a musket in his hand, with smoke still trickling from its barrel. All around him, sailors watched. Not a word was said.

  Dripping water, white as a sheet, Craven Raven limped up to him and put a shaking hand upon his arm.

  ‘You missed me, sir,’ he said. ‘It was indeed an easy shot. For which I truly, truly, thank you.’

  And he fell down on the deck.

  And Captain Hector Maxwell was nowhere to be seen.

  About the Author

  Jan Needle has written four other novels about Daniel Swift, and his nephew William Bentley. The first of them, A Fine Boy for Killing, will be an Ebook soon. Paper copies are available from McBooks Press and through Amazon.

  Jan has had more than forty books published, including Death Order, his first one for Endeavour Press. The Times said of Death Order: ‘Kicks Winston Churchill off his pedestal and sniffs out a conspiracy surrounding Rudolf Hess’s puzzling flight.’

  The Guardian said: ‘Calculated to leave ageing colonels twitching and the rest of us open-mouthed…seems unlikely to endear him to the secret services.’

  His last thriller before Death Order, Kicking Off, was described by the Guardian as ‘compelling, vivid, racy…describes with unnerving prescience just what it going on.’ The Times said: ‘Recalls the golden age of British investigative reporting: hard-hitting, crusading, alarming…’

  http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0077VORDG

  Jan’s website is at www.janneedle.com

  Find more of his books at

  http://amzn.to/Hkb6oR

  http://www.facebook.com/skinbackbooks

  If you enjoyed reading The Devil’s Luck you may be interested by In the Dark of the Moon by Christopher Kenworthy, also published by Endeavour Press.

  Extract from In the Dark of the Moon by Christopher Kenworthy

  One

  The steady, gentle rain of the last few days had awakened the freshness in the ferns and filled the beck with a hurrying, bubbling impatience of water, and now that the sun had regained its summer friendship it was peaceful and pleasant under the pines.

  Matthew Milburn stretched one bare arm and then the other and smiled with the pleasure of the play of muscle against muscle and the soothing spring of the mossy forest floor against his back.

  After the heat of the past hours' felling, the moist leaf­mould felt clean. Since Ben and his son, Young Ben, had taken the trimmed trunks down to the road, silence had fallen again in the woods. Even when he strained his ears, he could hear nothing but the babble of the brook to his left and the occasional call of the curlew on the fells.

  It was an afternoon meant for a swim, decided Matthew, as the pins of sunlight probed his closed lids. A fly paused in its passage to investigate the rich odours of sweat from his soaked neck-cloth and decided him.

  Matthew swatted at his ear, bounced to his feet and flicked the heavy swag of hair from his forehead.

  Ghyll Tarn lay innocent, lapping at its private stones between the swelling purple of the fells above Shap Side. The trees crowded their skirts to the water's edge, and two tiny islets nuzzled their own reflections in a surface polished by the afternoon.

  The tarn was more of a miniature lake, really, aping the dignity of its broader betters like a tiny Windermere. It had been Matthew's playground since he had changed his skirts for shirts and his mother's kitchen for a shippen floor. He loved it as he loved the thick, drystone walls his ancestors had raised to found Shap Side farm.

  It gave him life, too, as it gave life to the farm. A tank in drought, a drain in flood, it kept the hillsides in green leaf when less lucky fells grew brown and dusty in the occasional sharp scorches of summer.

  It kept the cattle watered, the sheep from dying and the trees growing strong and straight. Half of Britain's wooden ships, his father had claimed, spread their sails on yards cut from Shap Side's peerless pines.

  Lower down, where the bottom land stretched abruptly flat among the corners of the mountains' feet, Shap Side cattle roamed fat and fertile, beef fit for an army - or at any rate for its generals: the roast beef of Old England had given place to salt pork for the rank and file, they said.

  Even the scraggy, aggressive little sheep which roamed free on the fells above the tree-line were worth the cherishing. Their fleeces clothed an army, their mutton-fat greased cartridges and their meat nourished a nation.

  Life, thought Matthew Milburn as he stripped off his sweaty breeches and boots and headed for a rocky outcrop with deep water under it, could be very good to a deserving man.

  The waters of the tarn received him like a favourite son and he dived deep, passing inches above the stone floor of the basin, where the weed waved and the fish flashed silver at this bubbling invasion from outside. It was cold down there, even on the hottest day, and he felt the skin­tightening shock of it pinch his face and his thighs even as the weed slipped sly fingers along his belly.

  The force of his dive wore off and he drove for the surface with arms knotty with muscle. For ten years now Matthew Milburn had laboured on his father's farm and he had earned his keep and his inheritance fair and square.

  He broke the surface with an explosion of spray and a roar of breath. By the far edge of the tarn a deer reared backward into the trees as his torso thrashed back into the water.

  The surface foamed as he threw himself into a churning dash for the edge of the tarn, his swimming more power than grace. It got him where he wanted to go but, if you wanted beauty, try someone else.

  A second dive; a long, leisurely swim round the nearer of the two islands, dislodging a lazy cormorant from its rock, and he was ready for his clothes again. Ben and Young Ben should be back with the horses by now and they would need a hand to get the logs hitched to the chains and pointed down the track to the road and the sawmill.

  Even so, he was loath to put on the sweaty clothes again before he had to, and he lay for a minute in the comparatively warm water at the edge of the tarn before standing up and emerging dripping onto the tiny shingle beach.

  His shirt was hanging from a low branch and he reached for it to towel his legs and buttocks before pulling on the cord breeches and knee-boots.

  But once towelled he could not find the breeches. Puzzled he cast around him. Surely that was his diving rock...? But of course it was. Well, then, the breeches would be hanging where they always hung. On the low branch beside the rock, ready for him to put back on.

  Only they weren't.

  Neither were his boots on the rock on which they always rested nor his waistcoat on the ends of the branch from which it always hung. Nor even his neck-cloth on the twig which generally most heroically bore its weight.

  His clothes, in short, were missing.

  Matthew was a young man as intelligent as any other young man, though perhaps a thought inclined to self­esteem, and for a long moment the idea that somebody had stolen his clothes simply did not occur to him.

  When it did occur, his first thought was to wonder what inspired the unknown clothes-thief to take everything except his shirt, which he would have considered an essential part of the outfit.

  He scrubbed away at his wet hair with it while he pondered the problem and came to no satisfactory conclusion.

  He was pondering this even less palatable fact when there came to him, ever so faintly, the merest suggestion of a giggle. A giggle moreover, which intended itself to be heard, followed up and discovered.

  Matthew froze and inclined his head slightly. There was that about the giggle which was more than a little familiar. A new light was being thrown on his situation, and he was suddenly reminded that he was sitting, naked, on a rock in the open while who knew how many pairs of eyes could be concealed in the surrounding woods?

  In a swift movement he had pulled the now thoroughly damp shirt over his head and swept the curtain of hair back from his face.

  Was that a slight - oh, so very slight - movement among the branches there? A suggestion of guilty flurry
among the forest ferns?

  He bounded into the woods, only slightly inhibited by the skirts of his shirt bobbing about his knees, and parted the curtain of ferns.

  There was a half-stifled shriek and a flurry of skirts, and he pounced, delighted, on a fleeing figure encumbered with an armful of looted clothes.

  "Emma Stavely! Give me back my britches," he roared, "or tha'll pay the price of sin, wench!"

  The delightfully rounded figure squirming in his arms convulsed in mock horror.

  "Matthew Milburn, tha'd never dare...!"

  "Never dare, girl?" Matthew's busily searching fingers were already finding their way beneath her skirts. "Never dare? We have a way with light-fingered people hereabouts, Miss Stavely, and they do not tell us we'll not dare!"

  And ever as he talked his insolent fingers were busily moving higher, despite her wriggling and struggling.

  "Matthew Milburn! Put me down this instant!" A note of real panic was entering into her voice now. Matthew threw her face-down over his knee with one gesture and threw her skirts over her head with another.

  A pink-and-white bottom only half covered by ruffled pantlets whose waist-string had snapped in the struggle was revealed. Since the pantlets were already halfway down, it seemed only logical to help them on their way. Matthew, ever a man of decision, did so. He held the squirming girl down firmly with his left hand while he hung the ruffled white pantlets on a low branch with the other. No sense to getting the girl's underwear dirty.

  The plump white thighs thus revealed went into contortions best described as frenzied. Matthew examined them with fascination, paying only half an ear's heed to the muffled diatribe coming from beneath the high-thrown skirts.

  He selected the spot for his first smack with some care, patted it gently to get his distance and swung his hand firmly. The smack sounded like a pistol-shot in the quiet of the woods. The legs straightened in a spasm and a shrill gasp came from beneath the pile of skirts.

  Matthew judged, rightly as it turned out, that half a dozen such smacks, firmly delivered, would be enough to put the recipient in a suitably penitent frame of mind. After six solid smacks the pink-and-white bottom had turned into a hot, red one. Its interesting squirming had been resumed to a frenzied degree and the tone of the diatribe coming from beneath the girl's skirts had changed from outraged and roundly abusive to penitent and apologetic.

  Matthew sat the girl upright on his knee - the heat of her buttocks on his own bare thighs was exquisite - and peeled the skirts away from round her face.

  A red, pretty, indignant face was revealed, flushed and tearful from its ordeal. Matthew kissed it lingeringly on the lips.

  "You hurt me!" Emma made her accusation with as much surprise as outrage. She had been so used to winding Matthew Milburn round her finger for most of his life that she had never, even in their previous love-play, thought of him as a sexually dominant man. She was about to learn.

  Even as she prepared to reassume her indignant attitude, Emma felt his fingers unfastening the buttons at the back of her neck.

  She gasped and put up her hands but she was too late. The slackness of her bodice warned her that he had undone the garment. In a moment, it was around her waist as he bent his head to her breasts.

  She beat at his shoulders with her fists, and he trapped her hands and held them behind her while his free hand pulled the clinging garments away from her body.

  "Matthew," she gasped. "You'd not... "

  "But I am," he told her softly.

  And she had to admit that he was. Very thoroughly indeed.

  Later, as they lay in the ferns, she leaned over his chest and tickled his nose with the end of a grass stem. Matthew snuffled and pretended to sneeze. They looked at one another with the mild surprise of two people who have only just discovered they are in love.

  Strange, mused Matthew, how he had known Emma since they were both small children. Her father's farm, Browhead, bordered his own father's land - indeed, between them, the Milburns and the Stavelys owned the whole of the valley right up to the high Blackcrag pass at its top end.

  In years gone by, the two families had combined to keep a permanent armed guard on the pass to the north and there were rousing stories of battles between the mountain men and the reevers from the Borders who occasionally tried their luck raiding southwards instead of northwards from Carlisle.

  None had ever penetrated the pass to raid either Browhead or Shap Side cattle. But the two farmhouses had steel caps and backs-and-breasts hanging on their walls to commemorate the fact that the Border Reevers had good reason to turn their attention northwards again, when Westmorland had proved too tough a nut to crack.

  "I'd best... I'd best get back to Browhead," Emma murmured into his thick, curly hair. Matthew, overcome with a new sense of awe, not only for her but for himself, nodded speechlessly.

  "I... I'll come up and speak to your father this evening, after supper," he said quietly.

  This time it was Emma's turn to nod speechlessly, but her eyes were alight with a new tenderness as she took her path across the open hillside towards the curl of smoke behind the shoulder of the fell which showed where the fortified farmhouse of Browhead kept its vigil on the road from the north.

  Matthew watched her go with a swelling feeling of happiness under his breastbone which had nothing to do with the weather or his own good fortune. How, he mused, could he possibly have previously failed to notice Emma's fine, dark eyes, with the grey of a goose's wing in their depths? Where had she kept that fine, full figure that he had never really seen it before? Why should he never previously have noted that thick, glossy dark hair and the generous sweep of her full-lipped mouth?

  He pulled on his breeches and boots, tucked in his shirt and swung his waistcoat about his shoulders. Then he turned his steps back to the woods and his day's work.

  But there was still a silence among the pines when he got back to the working site. None of the cut logs were gone, nor had the horses been back since he had left for his swim.

  Mystified, he cast about for some sign that the men had come back and left again. There was none.

  There was no point in cutting more wood until his morning's felling had been cleared down to the sawmill, and he could hardly carry the trunks down the road himself, so, swearing at half a day's missed work-albeit with a tender smile when he remembered how he had lost it -he gathered up their tools and set off down the trail to the road to find out what had happened to the Bens.

  For the first half mile the trail swung down through the trees on its well-established course, along one of those little diagonal folds of ground so common in the woods of Westmorland and Cumberland. Then it plunged straight down out of the woods and onto the pack road which cut along the bottom of the valley following the river.

  All the way down through the woods, he could see the fresh scars in the earth track where the logs had scraped and bumped their way along. At one point the scrub-marks slewed to one side and a confusion of horses' hoofprints showed where some frenzied manoeuvring by Old Ben, who seemed to be part-Centaur himself, had managed to keep the dead-weight under control.

  Matthew grinned to himself at the thought of the wicked language that little incident must have cost, and looked around for signs of tree-bark having been stripped off by its virulence. Old Ben's language with his beloved Shires was a byword in the area, and all the more remarkable since the man had never been known ever to swear at any human being, no matter how sorely provoked.

  Ask Young Ben, his son, about his father's language at home, and you would be told: " 'E'll sweer at th' 'osses an' th' 'arness. He'll nobbut raise 'is voice to me. But yon's enough, sithee."

  Matthew followed the tracks down and onto the pack­road in a mood of deepening puzzlement. There was every sign, easily read, of the trees being moved down the hill. But no sign at all of anyone coming back up the hill.

  Anxious, lest there should have been an accident involving both men - logs out of control
are tricky things, even when you have a pair of Shires to handle their weight - Matthew hurried his steps along the road. He could see the sawmill roof in front of him, down near the point where the river became deep enough for the barges to come up and pick up the planks and trimmed logs for floating down to Lakeside, and later to the sea.

  As he neared the mill, his mood of anxiety deepened. There was none of the noise he expected. The rattle of the mill-wheel, driving the great circular blade, the shouting of the cutting gang. The lower buzz from the sawyers' pits. All were missing.

  Sweating in his haste, he rounded the corner and came across a sight which stopped him dead in his tracks.

  Old and Young Ben stood by themselves at the side of the road, in front of four thickset men in the livery of Lady Sarah Sharpe, whose huge estates rolled over the fells and valleys up to the foot of Blackrigg valley. There were horses tied up outside the sawmill and one had a sidesaddle on it.

  All the visitors carried guns.

  Matthew slowed down his headlong rush to walking pace as he approached the group in the road.

  He recognised one of the men as Luke Wrathall, Lady Sarah's bailiff, commonly known as "Boss". A beefy, redfaced man with shoulders like a bull and intelligence to match, he was treated with caution by the locals first because of his power, but mainly because of his wrestling prowess. He prided himself that in the white tights and black trunks of the Cumberland ring, he could bring his man to ground within the count of three.

  Matthew had been wondering about that count of three recently. To be sure, Boss Wrathall had never been known to fall. But then, he had never been seen to take on a man of his own weight or more, either. Matthew had his own private plans for the next Grasmere Sports and they did not include hitting the ground before a count of three.

  Perhaps something of his intentions had filtered through to Wrathall. At any rate, the man walked slightly more carefully around Matthew Milburn. When he saw the brawny young man round the corner at the sawmill, he took a firmer hold on his musket. He had Lady Sarah's orders that nothing was to go wrong if he valued his skin.