Free The Smugglers by Iain Lawrence

What if they arrived to find us there already?

Chapter 9
T HE H OME O F N IGHTMARES
    T hat year was one of peace between England and France, but for most of my life the countries had been at war, and I had grown up to fear the French as bogeymen and savages. In the shadows below my childhood bed, in the frosted patterns of the windows, it hadn't been beasts that lurked, nor ghosts, nor spirits, but cruel and sneering Frenchmen.
    And so it was with trepidation that I watched the shore loom closer and saw it turn from black to gray as the night became the dawn. A streak of white etched across the darkness became a line of surf, and behind it were only shadows. This was France, the home of all my nightmares, and it stretched ahead and off to port, a low and rolling land that looked very much like Kent.
    The wind that had driven us straight from the Downs began to ease at daybreak, as though its task were done. No longer was the
Dragon
pressed to her rails in the sea, flingingherself from wave to wave. She moved along like a stately thing, and I stood my last watch alone at the wheel until Captain Crowe sent me away.
    He brought the signal flags, a bright little bundle of blue and white and yellow. “Hoist these,” he said. “Then off with ye, lad. I know these waters well, and I'll tak' her in myself.”
    It was the oddest pair of flags that a ship had ever flown, one a sign of entering a port, and one a sign of leaving. Captain Crowe watched as I pulled them up the halyard and then remarked, with a dry wit, “They won't know if we're coming or going.”
    The blue peter above, the yellow jack below, they fluttered in the failing wind. I thought again of Father and hoped he would approve of what I'd done. The
Dragon,
for all intents, was now a smuggler, and I alone had set her to that business. France lay right before us, and the
Dragon
plowed toward it.
    I went back to my place at the eyes of the ship, feeling in some foolish way that the farther forward I was, the sooner I would get there. Below me, the carved dragon took the seas in its teeth and gnashed them into foam. And I watched the land go by, a league to port–little squares of houses, the different greens of field and forest. All the sea was ours, and whatever strange ship it was that shared our voyage, she was nowhere to be seen.
    The land came slowly closer, as though it spread itself toward us. Then we passed a rocky cape, and it seemed to open like a door, to show a village in a bay behind it, a harbor for the
Dragon.
    Dasher went shouting through the ship, and up came Mathew and Harry. We struck the topsails and then the foresail as we came behind the headland. There, in the shelter of the cape, the sea went suddenly smooth, the wind turned light and fitful. And under main and jib we went in spurts and dashes, through a flock of fishing boats that floated on their moorings, past a little brig and a tiny English ketch.
    I heard a squeak, and Dasher came beside me, bulging with his corks. “That's the
Dover Girl,”
said he, pointing to the ketch. “A fine old smuggler. Here for tea, no doubt. Tea and pilchards.”
    She floated so low in the water that her scuppers were nearly awash. Then we passed to leeward of her, through a stench of rotten fish. It was so thick that I could almost
see
the odor wafting from her hatches.
    “She'd best be on her way,” I said.
    Dasher laughed. “Oh, she'll wait another day at least. It might be a hot one.”
    “But the fish,” I said. “They won't be worth a ha'penny then.”
    “Of course they won't,” said Dasher. “But they'll cover the smell of the tea. If you were a revenue man, would you shovel your way through that?”
    I had never heard of this trick of the smugglers. “How do you know that?” I asked.
    “You live in Kent, you hear the talk,” he said. Then, again, his rakish grin appeared. “And of course I've done it, eh? What about that? Oh, I've led the king's cutters on many a fine chase. Had them