Free The Raven's Lady by Jude Knight Page B

explore as a child, before his
mother married again and took him away. Good. He could bring a
troop to watch until the smugglers came to retrieve the goods, and
catch them all.
    Oddly, the boy
Felix had followed seemed to be directing the whole enterprise,
people appeared to be coming to him for orders, and several times
Felix saw him run into the surf to catch someone by the arm and
redirect them.
    The rowing
boats went back for another load, and the night was beginning to
lighten in the east before the last of them had its cargo removed
and put back out into the waves.
    Below, the
smugglers began to slip away singly and in small groups.
    Something odd
struck Felix about the faces that looked up at the cliff before
beginning to climb the path. No beards or mustaches. Not even the
shadows one would expect on at least some of them after a day’s
growth. His mind took a while to interpret what his eyes were
telling him. Women. Every smuggler he could see was a woman.
    He looked again
at the boy, shaking his head to dislodge the wild thought. No. Not
Miss Bellingham. That milk-and-water miss could not possibly be a
smuggler. The boy—or the woman, in fact—could be anyone in the
house, or could easily have come from one of the farms beyond the
house. But he was definitely a she. As the light strengthened, the
way she moved, and the curves inside the breeches she wore, became
more and more obvious.
    Then the raven
swooped down to land on the beach beside her, and removed all
doubt. Miss Bellingham’s pet cawed at her, a loud raven alarm call,
and she looked anxiously up at the cliff. A few quick orders to the
remaining women on the beach, and they all scattered, some heading
for the path and some for the narrow way around the cliffs that had
been uncovered as the tide fell.
    Now what did he
do? He stiffened his shoulders. Woman she may be, but smuggler she
certainly was. He would do his duty, of course. Even though once,
long ago, she had been Joselyn, the girl child who dogged his
footsteps and whom he would have died to protect.
    Miss Bellingham
led a few other women up the cliff face, and stopped to speak with
them a few paces from where Felix hid. The raven swooped in to join
them.
    “It will be
enough, Matilda,” she was saying. “The money we raise will pay your
rental and that of the other tenants and keep cousin Cyril from
casting you out.”
    “For another
quarter, miss,” the woman addressed as Matilda said dolefully. “We
canna keep doing this here smuggling though. If’n the Black Fox
catches us, or the excise, we’ll all hang.”
    Miss Bellingham
nodded, her brows drawn anxiously together. “By next quarter,
perhaps I will have thought of something else.”
    “Master Felix
had no business dying in foreign parts,” Matilda declared.
    “I do not
suppose he did it on purpose,” Miss Bellingham said. Was it just
his imagination, or did her tone sound wistful?
    “If’n he’d
lived, tha’ could have wed him,” another woman suggested. Felix
recognised her; she was a servant at the grange. “Tha’ always said
he promised to come back and wed thee.”
    “He was 14,
Betsy. Even if he was alive, he would have long forgotten a few
words said in haste when his mother took him away.”
    “Mayhap you
should marry that man your cousin brought home,” Betsy said.
    Miss Bellingham
gave an inelegant snort. “If I were inclined to marry, and I am
not, I would certainly not marry anyone who was friends with cousin
Cyril.”
    “He’s a
well-enough looking young man,” Betsy insisted, “and polite,
too.”
    “He is prepared
to pay my cousin in order to get his hands on my trust fund. In any
case, I do not think he wishes to marry me any more.”
    “Only for that
you’ve gone out of your way to discourage him,” Betsy said.
    Miss Bellingham
giggled. “I just listened to everything Cyril said he liked, and
did the opposite.”
    Why, the little
minx. Certainly, Miss Milk-and-Water was unrecognisable in