by Edward Cline
And Leith misinterpreted Pannell’s silent musings. He waited for the Commissioner to go on.
Pannell smiled. He had heard the whispered talk about Leith. Rumors of smugglers and contraband runs were not the only pieces of gossip he gleaned from the town. A suspicion was forming in his mind. “Hmm,” he droned. “You’ve no fatherly attachment to the boy?” But before Leith could respond, he waved the question aside. “Never mind that. It’s none of my affair.” He sighed. “Still, the information is straight from the horse’s mouth. And it’s early information, too. Penlilly’s less than an hour’s ride from here. Altogether, very curious.” The missing parts of the intelligence tickled his mind. He rubbed his chilly hands together near the candle, and smiled again. “Hiram Trott,” he chuckled. “It will be a pleasure to include him in the catch, if there is a catch.” He studied Leith, but said nothing.
“You’ll go to Penlilly?” asked Leith, hopeful.
Pannell shrugged. “I haven’t decided yet.” The wind blew some raindrops against the room’s sole window. He nodded to it. “You’d better push off now, sir. Looks like some nasty weather’s about to break.” He stood up and bowed slightly to Leith. “Thank you again, Mr. Leith. Your devotion to me is most commendable. Don’t think it won’t have its rewards. Goodnight, sir.”
Leith blinked and smiled in tentative relief. “Grateful to you, sir. Goodnight.” He backed out of the room, then crept down the wooden steps outside that connected the inn stables with Pannell’s room. As he went, he grunted once in amazement that the Commissioner, for the first time, had smiled at him.
In the next instant, though, his amazement was checked by the suspicion that there was something wrong with the gratitude expressed in that smile.
Chapter 22: The Trap
PENLILLY-BY-SEA WAS A COLLECTION OF FISHERMEN’S COTTAGES CLINGING precariously to a slope that was not quite sand, not quite earth. There was no central street, only a maze of time-worn footpaths between the battered cottages; there was not even a tavern, only the much-frequented home of the eldest fisherman, who was the village’s principal buyer of contraband liquor.
Almost a mile west of the village was a flat stretch of beach that was a smuggler’s dream. The shelf beneath the surf ran gradually out from the beach for about a hundred yards. Except during gales, there were few or no breakers for galleys and other small craft to negotiate. The beach itself rose gently to the headland above; there were no cliffs to ascend or circumvent. Ruins of an older village dotted the slope. The crumbling walls of the cottages and the salt-pocked stones of a roofless ancient chapel were virtually hidden by bramble bushes and rushes.
Pannell knew this stretch of beach well. It and others like it along the Cornwall coast were described by him in detail in a special journal he kept of likely smugglers’ landing sites. But he had never caught anyone here.
In the past, he did the logical thing and came to a rendezvous point on the night of a rumored run, only to find that the Skelly gang had unshipped and toted off their contraband in daylight hours before. It did not seem to matter how early he appeared at these points; the Skelly men would always have come and gone. The phenomenon stung his sense of smartness and wit. After a two-hour rest in Gwynnford, he led his men out again into the wet darkness and rode west, hurried past Penlilly, and then doubled back beyond the county road that paralleled the coastline. It was dawn when he posted his men in the cottage ruins, and had their mounts installed out of sight in the chapel ruins. The chapel he used as an observation post, for one of its shattered high windows commanded an unobstructed view of both the beach and the slope leading to it.
On foot, by himself, he surveyed the beach, looking for evidence of a run. All he found were the decayed remains of fishing nets that had snared on tide-exposed rocks. The morning was blustery and the wind drove needles of cold rain into his face as he trudged through the sand. But he was pleased; there was no evidence that the Skelly or any other gang had ever used this beach in the past.
He went from ruin to ruin and advised his men that they might have a long wait ahead of them. There were six with him. A seventh, the youngest agent, had been given a hastily written note of apology to the Surveyor-General in Fowey to take to the captain of the mail packet this morning. Each man with him carried a musket charged with deadly double ball, a brace of pistols similarly charged, and a sword. He noted with satisfaction that none of them grumbled about their lack of sleep. This was, he knew, their first real crack at the Skelly gang. Their high morale was rooted partly in a sense of vendetta, but mostly in the prospect of sharing the proceeds of the wealth they might find in Skelly’s headquarters. It was said to be fabulous.
Pannell understood this, and was also in the same high spirits. If everything went well — if it was true information he was acting on — this could be the beginning of his last collar in Cornwall.
On the road to Penlilly, he gave his men specific instructions for dealing with the Skelly gang. “We will wait until the offenders are ready to leave with their booty. Apparent success will make them cocky and careless. On my signal, we will surprise them. If they’ve strung together all their ponies, shoot the lead pony dead. If any one of them brandishes a firearm, shoot him. If you see any one of them giving orders, shoot him. Some of you have seen service in His Majesty’s forces abroad. Treat this encounter, if it occurs, as a military one. Remember: Only one group may come out of it the victor. It must be us.”
Thomas Fix, his lieutenant, asked, “How many are in the gang, do you think?”
“I don’t know. You know we’ve heard talk of there being between ten to a hundred.”
“Are they well-armed?” asked another agent.
“No better than we,” said Pannell. He knew what was on his men’s minds. Some gangs in Kent and Sussex had, in their encounters with larger posses of Revenue officers, displayed considerable military prowess. One gang had fought so skillful a rearguard action that nine Revenue men had been killed or wounded.
He gave other orders: no pipes, no fires, no cards or dice to while away the time, and no talking.
He kept two of his men in the chapel with him. They wrapped their greatcoats around their shivering bodies to warm themselves. Pannell sat on a fallen stone by the shattered Romanesque window, and set his pocket watch on the sill. In the gray dawn it read six-thirty-five.
At ten o’clock Pannell was munching on a piece of bread when a solitary figure appeared on the beach, coming from the west. It was only a pauper, who paused now and then to stoop and pick up a clam. The man passed by. At ten-twenty a sail appeared on the gray horizon and seemed to move toward the shore. Pannell glanced at his men, who were huddled together in a corner of the chapel, asleep. He picked up a pebble and tossed it at them. “Mr. Fix! Mr. Craun!” he said. “We may have company soon!” The men awoke, seized their muskets, and jumped up to join their superior at the window. “Glass, Mr. Fix!” ordered Pannell.
Fix rushed to Pannell’s mount and retrieved a spyglass from a saddlebag. They watched the sail of a sloop grow larger, but never sharp enough in the haze to see it clearly. Pannell sniffed in disgust, and handed the spyglass to Fix. “Your eyes seem to be better than mine, Mr. Fix. What do you make of it?”
Fix squinted through the tube for a moment. “She’s flying the ensign, all right,” he commented. Then he shrugged his shoulders as the sail moved away to the west and vanished into the dawn gloom. “Might’ve been the mail packet, sir,” he suggested.
Pannell snorted and snatched the glass from Fix’s hand. “Too big to be a packet, Mr. Fix! Learn your ships!”
At ten-forty-five, a little after the drizzle had stopped, a rider appeared on the top of the slope. Pannell’s tired eyes watched it with desperation, then with excitement. The rider was joined by four others. They came rapidly down the slope to the beach. Pannell sent Albert Craun to alert the men in the cottages, then raised the spyglass to watch the newcomers.
The riders dismounted and began to do odd
things. One man dropped a bundle of wood on the beach leeward of a large rock just above the high-tide mark, stacked it quickly but neatly, and lit a fire. Another man reached for a pair of what looked like French china packing crates tied together over his mount’s saddle, untied them and dropped them in the sand. Then he calmly kicked in the sides of the crates, and Pannell thought he could hear the breaking of the contents. Another rider untied a cluster of brandy ankers and artfully distributed them along the beach. The fourth man reached into a leather bag and tossed objects here and there into the sand, but mostly around the fire. The fifth man — actually a boy on a pony — took three of the horses and led them up and down the slope over and over again.
It was a busy group of strangers, engrossed in staging a contraband run that never occurred.
When Thomas Fix glanced at Pannell at his side, he saw that the man’s broad face was a sickly red, and that it trembled with rage. Fix did not dare put into words what they were witnessing, for while he was as startled and angry at the simplicity of the ruse as was Pannell, his superior’s wrath worried him more. At that moment, Craun returned, breathless and excited. “They’re ready, sir!” he whispered. “Say, what kind of dodge are those fellows up to, anyway?”
Pannell did not answer. He knew what was being done, and had been done for almost five years. To him. To his predecessors. But mostly to him. His hands began to shake, and he lowered the spyglass. He shut his eyes and squeezed the ends of the glass with both hands and snapped off one end of it. Then he dropped the tube. “To our mounts!” he exclaimed, his voice a dry rasp.
Fix glanced at Craun, then ventured, “If these are Skelly men, sir, we could follow them back to their hideout, and then we could — ”
Pannell jerked his head around. Fix stepped back from the fury he saw in it. “Do you think anyone could follow them across open country without being seen, Mr. Fix? Do as I say, damn your eyes!”
* * *
The five men were John Fineux, commander of the ruse and a former dancing master who had made the mistake of correcting a Peer’s politics; Aubrey Shakelady, a former Grub Street hack and pamphleteer whose limericks had offended half a dozen members of the House of Lords; William Ayre; Richard Claxon; and Jack Frake. They worked quickly and without waste of motion. They were not worried about being seen by the inhabitants of Penlilly-by-Sea, who had been advised of the ruse and rewarded for their silence with a cask of premier Dutch gin. They were concerned about the column of soldiers they had seen four miles down the county road, marching east, as the gang emerged from the moor on its way to Penlilly. Less than an hour ago they had seen the sails of The Hasty Hart, returning from Guernsey, beating to windward toward Portreach, another fishing village five miles east of Penlilly, and the true landing site.
Jack Frake led the horses back to the fire William Ayre had started, dropped their reins, and glanced around at the site. John Fineux was inspecting it, adding some last subtle touches to the “rendezvous.” Aubrey Shakelady was trying to tease a smile from Richard Claxon with a bawdy joke. Claxon, whom Jack Frake suspected still had a fever, but who had insisted on joining in the task so that he could be paid a part of the proceeds from the actual landing, sat on his pony and stared down at Shakelady with incomprehension. Jack Frake had never been able to establish an easy rapport with the older boy, and Claxon, always lost in the pages of his Bible, had never invited anyone’s friendship. Shakelady was having no better luck.
John Fineux came up to his charges. “Well, gentlemen, what do you think? Fine job, I’d say. All right, let’s mount up and leave this place. Those soldiers can’t be more than a mile away by now. Looked to me like they were being quick-marched.” He picked up the rusty poker Ayre had left in the tent of burning wood, and stuck it upright in the center of the crackling fire. “Symmetry, my boy,” he said to Ayre. “Symmetry and grace. Always strive for it.” He chuckled once. “If Pannell and his crew come along soon enough,” he added, tapping the top of the poker with a finger, “perhaps it will be hot enough for a certain curious hand.”
The site looked as though many men had waited here for a vessel to arrive and anchor a quarter mile offshore. Burnt twists of pipe tobacco, empty rum and gin flasks, crumbs and bits of food, a dropped coin or two, a broken clay pipe, spent lantern candles, and many more little signs ringed the blazing fire and were littered for yards around it. A trail of hoof and footprints was stamped into the sand and the ground and led up the slope to the county road.
Fineux turned to his mount and put a foot in the stirrup, then paused when he heard a sound. They all froze for an instant, for it was a sound none of them had ever expected to hear. “Oh, no… ” said Fineux. It was the pounding of hooves on the slope above them. Fineux glanced around once at the slope, then shouted an order. “Run, gentlemen! Split up! Get back to the caves and warn Skelly!”
Two shots were fired. Double ball struck the saddle of Fineux’s mount, and as the horse reared up in panic, another struck the man in the nape of his neck. He fell to the sand and his mount bolted. For an instant, the four gang-members gaped at the bloody hole below the man’s head, matted with hair and the ribbon he had used to tie it together.
Jack Frake turned and saw three horsemen riding across and down the slope from the direction of a pile of ruins. Four other men emerged from the brush. Two had stopped beneath puffs of smoke to reload their muskets. The other two halted, knelt, and were preparing to fire.
One of the men on horseback, who was in the lead, waved a pistol in the air and shouted, “Halt, in the name of the King, or be cut down!” Jack Frake recognized Henoch Pannell.
Richard Claxon, after a glance at Fineux and then at Pannell, dug his boots into the sides of his pony and began running east up the beach. One of the dismounted men took careful aim with his musket and fired. The pony whinnied and went down with a muffled scream, trapping Claxon beneath its thrashing body. William Ayre, who by this time had remounted, yelled in outrage and galloped toward Claxon to help him. Another shot boomed, and Ayre jerked from his saddle and fell heavily to the sand.
Aubrey Shakelady did not bother trying to remount, but dashed down the beach. Pannell turned his mount on the slope and galloped after him. “Halt, damn you!” he shouted. Shakelady looked back once, but continued running and splashed into the water. Pannell overtook him, and fired his pistol into the man’s neck as he passed. Shakelady collapsed in the surf, face down, and did not rise again.
Jack Frake leaned in the saddle of his pony and took the iron poker from the fire. He was ready to take his chances on an escape down the beach, but stopped when he saw Pannell trot back to Richard Claxon and take a second pistol from his saddle. He did not like what he saw in the man’s face, a look of perverse pleasure at the sight of the moaning youth struggling to push himself out from under the pony. He raised the poker like a sword, galloped forward, shouting and waving his weapon in the air. Pannell saw him coming, reined in by the fallen pony, and turned the barrel of the pistol in his direction. Then he smiled strangely, and turned the barrel back toward Claxon, and fired into the pony’s head.
Jack Frake did not hear the hooves behind him, nor the musket balls whistling around him, and was oblivious to the Revenue men closing in a circle around him. He did not know that the second and third horsemen tried to bring him down by firing at a gallop, but had missed. One officer, Fix, came swiftly from behind and swung the stock of his spent musket at the boy’s head. It connected with a sharp crack.
The encounter with the Revenue men had lasted less than a minute.
When he opened his eyes again, it was to the shock of water thrown into his face. He was lying on a pile of straw in a dark, foul-smelling room. It was a fisherman’s cottage in Penlilly. Richard Claxon lay on another pallet a few feet away from him, his right leg wrapped in rags. He moaned quietly, his head rolling back and forth in the straw. Henoch Pannell and two of his men stood over them, watching and waiting. Pannell drew placidly on a pipe.
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p; Jack Frake tried to move. His ankles and wrists were cuffed together. The back of his head ached and throbbed, but his awareness of the pain receded when he saw his predicament.
“Look at them, gentlemen,” said Pannell, putting his arms behind his back, his teeth clenching the pipe. “Live Skelly men. Not very impressive now, are they?”
His men said nothing. Fix, who had been the longest with Pannell, felt it wiser not to mention that it had taken them nearly five years to capture but two of the gang. And none of the gang here, dead or alive, had been armed.
“Well, let’s get this over with.” Pannell turned to Jack Frake. “Get him up.” Fix and Craun came over and lifted the boy to his feet. Pannell took a step closer and said, “You are Jack Frake, aren’t you? It has been some time since we both occupied the same room. I recognize you from the Sea Siren. You’ve grown, of course. The criminal life seems to have agreed with you.”
Jack Frake said nothing.
Pannell nodded to the prone figure of Richard Claxon. “And we know who he is, too. There was a Bible in his saddlebag, and his name inscribed in it. Your late friends remain nameless. What were their names, Master Frake?”
Jack Frake said nothing, but regarded the Commissioner with curiosity and fear.
Pannell frowned. “You look at me as though I were not a man, but a monster,” he said. “But, a man I am, and one who is doing his job. Some men work with their hands in metal or wood. I am a man who works in law.”
Jack Frake shook his head and spoke. “You surrendered your manhood when you joined the Revenue — and your humanity. So, I have nothing of consequence to say to you.”
Pannell scoffed in amusement, then shook his head lightly. “A somewhat sophisticated opinion for a smuggler, that. It reflects a fairly exotic education, sir.” He paused to shake out the contents of his pipe, which he tucked inside of his coat. “Well, so much for civil chatter. I will ask you this once, Master Frake, and civilly. If I need ask it again, it will not be so civilly.” He took another step closer to the boy, and stood so that his face was only an inch from Jack Frake’s. “Where is Augustus Skelly’s headquarters?”
