Oh, good heavens, Sam’s knife! If she could work it out of its holster, without anyone noticing, then...
Sam had shown her how to defend herself with it. And had made her practise stabbing pretend smugglers made out of sacks of meal. She gulped. Could she actually use it against a real, living, breathing smuggler? She didn’t think so.
Nevertheless, she might as well get it in her hand. She could pass it to Captain Bretherton.
She was sure, she reflected bitterly, he would have no qualms about plunging it right into someone’s heart. And twisting it.
‘Jenny had to go,’ Reverend Cottam was saying. ‘She was a danger to our whole fraternity. Had an attack of guilty conscience when one of her marks died.’
‘Marks? I don’t quite follow. Although she did mention an old lady she was working for...and some medicine...’
Reverend Cottam clapped his hands. ‘Now you are beginning to use your brain. Yes, the old lady she was working for had an unexpected reaction to the, er, medicine Jenny gave her. And died. Though I fail to see why that should have upset her so much. Old ladies die all the time. If only she’d kept her head...’ He shook his own.
‘Instead, she came down here, to you.’ Lizzie encouraged him to keep talking so that he wouldn’t notice the way she was slumping down, so that her hands could reach her ankles. For once she was glad that Lady Buntingford had never been able to completely cure her of the habit of slumping her shoulders. And that all of them had seen her doing it, during what had felt like the hours she’d been sitting in the smugglers ‘warehouse’, shivering with cold and loneliness, and humiliation.
‘Yes. The stupid girl,’ Reverend Cottam sneered. ‘She might have led the authorities straight to me. So of course, she had to go. I could see she would be of no further use to me.’
‘But...why was she...no, I don’t understand what she was doing giving old ladies medicine.’
‘It was only to make them sleep. On the occasions she was either lifting or replacing, their jewels.’
‘Jewels?’
‘Yes.’ Reverend Cottam sighed. ‘It all started with a lucrative little sideline I got going with the help of my...exporters.’ He waved one hand in the direction of Bolsover and his men, who were pulling on the oars with some vigour. Taking them further and further out to sea.
‘I come across all sorts of men, in my professional capacity. Visit everyone from condemned men in their prison cells to great families with more money than they know what to do with. The men in their prison cells impart all kinds of information about their lives of crime. And the great families demonstrate such carelessness with their goods that, really, they deserve to have them removed.’
‘You...you started stealing jewels from wealthy families?’
‘Yes. It was when...an elderly lady with leanings to the high church had me in to hear her final confession. And there was this jewellery box just lying there, on the dressing table. Well, I couldn’t help opening it, to see what might be inside. And there was this necklace. Diamonds.’ He sighed. ‘Well, what would you have done? I was all on my own, with those sparklers just winking up at me.’ He chuckled. ‘They went into my pocket. And I went straight to a fence I’d met not long before. Only...’ he shook his head ‘...it turned out that they were worthless copies, not the real thing. Can you believe it?’ He sounded affronted.
‘Many of the great families,’ he continued, in that indignant tone, ‘are not as wealthy as they would like the rest of us to believe. They pawn jewels and silks, and furs. Or, in the case of the females, have their jewels copied so that their foolish, fat husbands won’t find out about their gambling debts.’
The men were glancing over their shoulders from time to time, as though looking out for some sort of marker. And Reverend Cottam was in full spate. For once, she was glad that she was the kind of girl people didn’t pay much attention to. It meant she could reach down as though she was scratching her ankle and get her fingers round the hilt of the knife. All she had to do was ease it from its holster without anyone noticing.
She could do it. She could. It was growing darker by the second. The moon was on the rise. And Reverend Cottam’s voice was coming to her from the shadows, though he was only a few feet away from her. It was actually rather sinister, hearing him relate his descent into crime with such glee when she couldn’t see his face. She shivered again.
And under cover of that shiver, freed the knife from its holster, sat up straight and wrapped her arms about her waist again, concealing the knife under her reticule.
‘Which gave me the idea for an almost undetectable crime,’ Reverend Cottam was boasting. ‘I’d get a nice-looking young pickpocket into the house of one of those stupid old women who leave jewels lying about all over the place. She would lift them, take them to be copied, then return the fakes to the old woman and send the genuine article to me. Before long, I was taking orders. Can you imagine? And with my good friend Mr Bolsover’s connections across the water, I developed a most lucrative business. Until one old lady died and my best jewellery thief grew a conscience. Even then, we might have got away with it, had not some jealous, suspicious husband had all his wife’s jewellery examined and noted some of them were paste.’
‘So... Jenny was...’
‘My light-fingered young protégée, yes. A shame I had to get rid of her, really. Although the planning that went into the disposing of her will certainly come in handy, today.’
‘What...what do you mean?’
‘Well, we didn’t want her death to point back to us, did we? Had to make it look as though she did away with herself. Which meant there had to be no marks of violence on her body, or as few as possible. It would have been easy enough to hit her over the head, to stun her, then throw her into the sea and hope she drowned. But there was no guarantee. The shock of the cold water may have roused her. She may have been a strong swimmer, do you see?’
‘Ye-es.’ She gulped. For what she could see was that Reverend Cottam had planned out a chilling murder without suffering as much as a ripple of conscience. His only concern had been to ensure that nobody could trace the crime back to him.
‘We ruled out tying her hands behind her back, or any such clumsy ploy to ensure she drowned, since it would have been obvious that it was a case of foul play once her body washed up. But in the end, the solution I came up with was rather brilliant.’ He leaned close to her, jabbing his fingers in the direction of Captain Bretherton. ‘What we needed was to connect a sack filled with rocks to the body, so that it would submerge her long enough to ensure she drowned, but in such a way that the ropes would slip away from her before she was in the water too long. And, you know, men of the sea are fantastically clever at creating knots and fashioning contraptions from netting. But it was my own notion of employing ice which ensured our success.’
‘Ice?’ Her horrified eyes flew to the blocks which lay beneath the thwarts.
The two blocks of ice. And then she realised that the couple of bulky sacks, which she’d taken no notice of before, must be full of rocks. She gave an involuntary shiver.
‘Yes. We hoped that it would melt, so that the ropes would loosen enough to part company from the body. And then the body would rise to the surface and drift ashore on the next tide. Which proved to be the case. Nobody saw anything amiss in the small amount of netting tangled round either Jenny, or Mr Kellet, since such things get left behind at the tide mark all the time.’
Lizzie gripped her knife hard, her stomach churning. He wouldn’t be telling her all this, in such detail, if he had any concern whatever that she would ever be able to tell anyone else. He was simply gloating. Crowing over the way he planned to dispose not only of Captain Bretherton...but also of her.
At her feet, she felt Captain Bretherton tense, as though he, too, had reached the same dreadful conclusion.
‘Almost there, guvnor,’ said Bolsover
, suddenly. ‘Want me to get him ready?’
‘Yes, yes, you may as well.’
Bolsover and the man next to him stowed their oars, while the two sitting behind her and Reverend Cottam kept on rowing. But only one of the smugglers bent to the piles of rope lying in coils in the bottom of the boat. Bolsover, instead, inched closer to her.
‘May as well hand that over,’ he said, reaching for her.
For one awful moment she thought he’d noticed she had the knife in her hand. But it was her reticule he snatched from her hand. He had the strings open and Sam’s telescope in his hand before she had time to blink.
‘This’ll come in handy,’ he said, admiring the gift she’d scrimped and saved to buy her brother, in recognition of his heroism.
And Lizzie saw red.
‘Give that back,’ she cried.
‘You won’t be needing it no more,’ sneered Bolsover.
She lunged for it anyway. And Bolsover struck her across the face with the back of his hand. She landed with a thump on the coils of rope lying in the bottom of the boat at the exact same moment Captain Bretherton suddenly surged up out of them, yelling like a fiend.
He appeared to have his hands round Bolsover’s throat. And Bolsover was reaching for something, something that flashed silver in the moonlight.
‘No,’ she screamed and flung herself at the struggling men.
‘Sit down, you damn fools,’ shouted Reverend Cottam, as the boat rocked wildly. ‘Or you’ll have us all o—’
But before he could even finish it, Reverend Cottam’s prophecy was fulfilled.
The boat tipped over.
Launching all seven of them into the sea.
Chapter Twenty-Four
Lizzie and Bolsover, and Captain Bretherton and the smuggler who’d been in the process of deploying Reverend Cottam’s patent drowning device, all went over together in a tangle of flailing limbs and trailing rope.
A tangle that was going straight down, as if some unseen force had them in its grip. Which, of course, it had. Somewhere in the mass of nets and rope was one of those sacks of rocks.
Thank goodness she’d already got the knife in her hand.
Making sure she had a fistful of Captain Bretherton’s jacket in her free hand, Lizzie sawed at the rope which felt as if it was under the most tension. It parted swiftly and Bolsover and his accomplice vanished in a swirl of bubbles.
Even though she and Captain Bretherton were no longer plummeting down as fast as they’d been going before, for some reason they weren’t immediately heading in the opposite direction, either. And since she could move all her limbs freely she had to assume that Captain Bretherton was still being pulled down by something.
She felt her way frantically down his body, making sure she always held tight to some part of his clothing so that they wouldn’t be parted, somehow certain that if she let go, he’d keep on going down, while she’d go up. And he’d drown.
And there, round his knees, she found it. A tangle of netting and one of the blocks of ice. It took a few moments to hack away the netting where it was wound tightly round his leg. And when it parted, their descent into the depths slowed, considerably.
But they didn’t immediately start to ascend, either.
So she began to kick her legs. At almost exactly the same moment that he did. As though they’d shared the same thought, the same instinct for self-preservation.
It felt like a long way to the surface and took far longer to fight their way back up to the air, than it had taken to go the same distance in the opposite direction. Her lungs felt as if they were on fire and it was all she could do to fight the instinct to take in a breath.
Not yet, not yet, she said to herself, over and over again.
But at last, just as she’d begun to despair of ever reaching the surface, a gust of blessedly fresh air slapped her in the face. She sucked in a breath. Then another. And then, oh, no! She sank beneath the surface again.
This time it was his hands pulling her back up. She gasped in just one breath, as he yelled, ‘Your clothes. Your boots. They’re dragging you—’
He didn’t manage to finish his warning before she went under again. But it had been enough to let her know what she needed to do. First she got the knife under the lowest button of her spencer, and yanked it upward, then slashed the ribbons of her bonnet.
It made little difference. Her spencer just flapped round her shoulders like a pair of wings. How the heck was she going to get her arms free? Let alone get her boots off? Oh, God, she was going to drown after all. Her sodden clothing was almost as effective as Cottam’s sack of rocks in pulling a body down to the depths.
And then she felt strong hands grabbing for her. Captain Bretherton got one arm round her waist and she found herself clawing at him, though how he was going to stop her from drowning she couldn’t think. In her panic, she almost let go of the knife, somehow feeling that his big, solid presence represented safety. And he used that panic to take the knife from her. For a moment she was stunned by the theft. Until she felt a slight twinge in her back, just before her spencer split all the way up. And then he was pulling it from her.
For some reason, at that moment, their heads broke the surface once more and she gasped in a couple of breaths.
‘I’m going to cut your clothes off,’ he yelled above the roaring of the waves.
She had just time to notice that he was already only in his shirtsleeves and wondered how he’d been able to get rid of the rough jacket he’d had on, before she went back under again.
This time, he felt his way down her body until he was at her feet, hacking away at her boot laces, then he worked his way back up her body, pausing only to sever the waistband of her skirt. She half-toed, half-kicked off her boots and sort of floated her way out of the lower half of her gown on her way to the surface.
This time, when her face broke into clear air, there was next to nothing pulling her back down. But...where was Captain Bretherton?
She circled wildly, staring in every direction. The waves which now lifted or lowered her made it hard to make out more than short glimpses in any direction. She spied the upturned hull of the boat, several yards away, and a couple of oars floating nearby. But no sign of any people.
The loss of Sam’s telescope was as nothing to the feeling she got then.
‘Harry,’ she screamed. Never mind Lady Buntingford’s lessons. This was no time to stick to the rigid rules of etiquette that demanded a single lady should never use a single man’s given name.
‘Harry,’ she yelled again. Oh, what did it matter that he had played her false? Her feelings had been true, right from the start. He was the man she loved. And if she lost him now...like this...
There was a whoosh, not far to her left, and his head and shoulders shot free from the crest of the wave.
In two swift kicks she was beside him, had looped her arms round his neck and was holding tight. ‘I thought you’d drowned,’ she sobbed.
‘No, you saved me,’ he said, pushing a hank of her hair from her face. ‘Thank God for that knife.’ He pressed it into her hand. Though she had nowhere to stash it, not now she’d kicked off her boots. All she was wearing now were her shift, stays and stockings, which were sodden.
‘Just a moment,’ she said. Then let go of him, rolled on to her back and tucked her feet up one by one to peel her stockings off. Then, as she trod water, she pulled the busk from her stays and stuffed the knife into the pocket left behind.
‘I think you must be part-mermaid,’ he said, once she’d finished her manoeuvre. ‘I have never seen anyone so at home in the water.’
‘You were tremendously agile yourself,’ she replied in an effort to deflect the compliment.
‘The boat,’ he said with some urgency, indicating the upturned hull. ‘Come on.’
He began to swim in its d
irection and Lizzie caught up with him after only a few strokes, though what good it was going to be Lizzie had no idea. It was too big for them to overturn it and use it to sail home. Still, they both grabbed hold of it and rested against it for a moment or two, panting for breath.
At which point the moon came out from behind a cloud and she caught the distinctive sheen of bare skin.
‘Where is your shirt?’
‘Gone. Along with my boots and breeches, I’m afraid.’
He was naked?
‘I thought I’d better give us the best possible chance of surviving. Clothes were dragging us down, over and over again. And it is some way to shore.’
He was naked? Beneath the waterline, he had not a stitch covering his body?
‘Do you think you can make it?’ He turned and looked landward. ‘Damn, it seems to be getting further and further away.’
That was because of the current.
‘Come on, the sooner we get started, the sooner we will get to shore.’
The current!
‘No! You must not try to fight the current. It is too strong.’
‘What?’
‘You will exhaust yourself if you try to fight it. Besides, this part of the coast is so rocky we would be more likely to get dashed to pieces than find one of the few tiny coves. And then we’d be too exhausted to climb the cliffs to safety before the tide turned. Our only hope is to just stay afloat as long as we can and let the current carry us—’
‘But it’s carrying us straight out to sea.’
‘No. Well, it might appear so, but believe me, it only flows so strongly, in this direction, for a while and then it curves in again just past the headland they’ve started calling Lover’s Leap. Anything that goes in the sea round about here washes up in Whitesands Bay, eventually.’
‘Eventually? That doesn’t sound promising.’
‘No. Well, perhaps we could speed up the process by swimming with the current. If we turn on to our backs and let it get a hold of us...’
He started wrestling with the boat. ‘If only we could overturn it and sail it to safety. But I can’t get any purchase,’ he said, resting his forehead for a moment against the planking.
The Captain Claims His Lady Page 19
