Free The Tudor Signet by Carola Dunn Page A

you meant when you said you fagged for Captain Aldrich? What else did he make you do?”
    “That is enough, Emily,” said Lilian. “We shall leave the gentlemen to their port and their business.” She led Miss Thorne and Emily out.
    The captain’s gaze followed her every step of the way.
    As soon as Blount had set out the port and brandy and closed the door behind him, Des sighed and said, “When you wrote that you were staying with your elder sister, I pictured a stout, matronly woman like my own elder sister.”
    “Lilian must have come as quite a surprise, then.”
    “That she did! Before I forget--not that I’m likely to--will you convey my thanks to her ladyship for...for the meal?”
    Pouring brandy, Malcolm nodded his understanding. “Of course, old lad. Here, try this. It crossed the Channel long before Boney set himself up.”
    Des visibly tore his mind from Lilian’s kindness, and her charms. “Thanks.” He warmed the glass in his hand, sniffed, and sipped. “First rate. It still comes across, you know. Navy, Preventives, Excisemen, between the lot of us we’ve never been able to stop the smuggling.”
    “I know,” Malcolm said grimly.
    “Are smugglers concerned in this mysterious affair which brings you down to Devon?”
    “They have a rôle in it.”
    “And is Miss Bertrand involved, by any chance?”
    “Only on the periphery. How the deuce did you guess?”
    “Your expression when she was talked about. I remember the look from our schooldays. You were concealing something.”
    “Not a parcel of goodies from home,” Malcolm said, grinning.
    “I still remember those fruitcakes. All right, what’s going on, and where do I come into it?”
    Malcolm reached into his inside pocket for his letter of commission, unfolded it, and laid the parchment before the captain. Des read it in silence, then looked up.
    “The First Lord! I thought my position wasn’t all your father’s doing. You have some influence at the Admiralty.”
    “Not much. I’m just an errand boy. This is the first mission entrusted to me.” He drew his chair closer and lowered his voice. “It starts, believe it or not, with a smuggler with a patriotic conscience.”
    “A contradiction in terms, if ever I heard one.”
    “Not quite. True, the fellow don’t cavil at cheating the Customs and Excise, nor at trafficking with the French. But when he was asked to carry a letter, he opened it and read it and didn’t like what he saw. He turned it over to a local Justice of the Peace--who turns a blind eye in exchange for his share of smuggled brandy and a bit of lace for his lady, I daresay—and the Justice sent it up to the Admiralty.”
    “Naval secrets?”
    Malcolm nodded. “It ended up on my superior’s desk. There wasn’t much to be done at that point. We assumed no more letters would be entrusted to the man since the one failed to get through.”
    “You didn’t question this smuggler?”
    “We don’t know who he is. The Justice, William Penhallow, refused to say more than that it is a Cornishman, on the grounds that if the fellow ceased to trust him we’d hear no more.”
    “Reasonable, I suppose,” Des admitted.
    “Effective, at all events. There have been three more letters.”
    “You don’t know where he gets them, I take it.”
    “He swears to Penhallow he doesn’t know the man who gives them to him, only that he’s a buyer of run goods and by his voice he’s a Devon man. They all sound the same to me.”
    “Oh no, if I’ve learned anything living down here it’s that you can tell which side of the Tamar a man comes from by his speech. Still, that’s not much help.”
    “No. Apart from anything else, the man is probably no more than a messenger and may know neither the contents of the letter nor who provides the information. Fortunately we have another clue. The letters are all marked with a curious seal, presumably to verify their provenance to the recipient. A seal in the form of a