The Gentleman Spy: A Guardian/Ward Historical Romance

Chapter 10

After Babin had disappeared in the bookshop, Beau had written to Monsieur Allard. Theo Allard was a retired spy and chemist who filled his time with intercepting smuggling boats, letting the Crown take credit for the seizures, and collecting a tidy sum for both the work and his silence in the matter. The pair had met at Cambridge. Theo, still a little wild and not having mastered English to the degree necessary to complete his coursework, had been in danger of being rusticated. The greater consequence, however, had been his father’s threat to disinherit him should the school send him home to the country. Beau had offered to tutor him, and when he was recruited by the Crown, Theo was brought on by his recommendation.

Allard was also a man who defied time and space with his uncanny ability to be everywhere all at once. Beau had sent off his note, and Allard had appeared. With him, he’d brought two things. The first, several small pills meant to be used to tie up loose ends or in instances of imminent mortal danger. They were an experiment with hemlock, according to Theo, who’d advised Beau against using the tablets unless he had the time to stay and ‘check his work,’ so to speak. The second, intelligence on Babin. The man was expecting a shipment of goods before the moon waned and took with it the light to guide the smuggling boats. Theo had also noted Mr Babin’s name had cropped up in groups known to empathise with Napoleon and hold similar revolutionary ideals.

Being informed was never enough for Beau. He had to see for himself. A glance at the clock confirmed the late hour. A minute spent listening to nothing but silence assured him the house had long gone to sleep. Beau slipped from his room, the thrill of sneaking around sending a frantic buzz through him. He took one of the unused, or rather, unknown, passageways he’d discovered as a child near the end of the corridor in the family wing. It brought him below stairs where he dipped into another, long-standing muscle memory carrying him swiftly through the pitch black. He spilled into the cold night air with nothing so disgraceful as a whoosh when the door opened in the masonry at the corner of the house. From the outside, the door appeared as nothing more than stacked honeyed bricks.

Saunders was leaning against the stone, hat low, blending into the dark and holding an unlit lantern. ‘The horses are tethered to the old oak near the Temple of Health. Figure with the half-moon, we’ve got enough light to walk and can light the lantern once on the road.’

With a sharp nod, Beau turned his steps, and the two walked in silence, the only sound the steady rhythm of Beau flicking the false bottom of his snuff box. Inside, tabs of belladonna powder sat waiting, although they would hopefully go unused. Plenty of things in nature could be turned into lethal, undetectable substances, including the leaf of the belladonna plant. The Home Office provided arsenic, but Beau, when forced to extreme measures, preferred something a little more creative and obscure.

Beau’s skin prickled, not from the cold January air, but the excitement of doing what he loved once more. He stretched his arm and bent it at the elbow several times, satisfied with the minimal pain in the movement. Crossing the miles to Broadstairs, he thought on their plan and contingencies as well as the weapons on his person, including two pistols, several knives, the snuff box, and a case with poison-tipped needles.

Unbidden, Miss Doubleday’s countenance filled his mind. He could see her sitting in the study, talking about a stepmother who didn’t want her and a distant cousin who couldn’t keep her, her expression resigned. If something happened to him, who would care for her? He shook his head. It was a ridiculous question, one to which he knew the answer. She would, of course, retire with his mother and sister to the dower house or the property his father had willed to his mother, if she even realised it was hers. Miss Doubleday would be cared for as she had been all the years he’d been gone. The answer to the other question rattling around in his mind was less certain and more important. Would she care if something happened to him?

Saunders snuffed out the lantern as they approached an unused barn situated a little off the lane and tied up the horses. Beau had had the chance to walk through it when he’d been waiting on the apothecary and had found nothing to suggest it was being used by the smugglers. Indeed, he would have been surprised if they’d utilised such an obvious spot.

Back outside, his eyes were quick to adjust to the dark. He could see the glimmer of light emanating from the Silver Swan a hundred yards down the road. An open field of waist-high grass unfolded from the barn to the inn and sprawled all the way to where the cliffs dropped off some twenty-five yards behind the inn.

Using two fingers to motion forward, Beau folded over and advanced, giving the inn a wide berth. Near the edge, they dropped to their stomachs, inching ahead till they could peer down at the small beach of Stone Bay. When he breathed in, the brine of the cold ocean air peppered his senses. On the shore, a donkey shifted from side to side while four men loaded crates from a fishing boat into a cart. Squinting, Beau could just make out the fore-and-aft rigging of a bigger vessel a half mile out at sea.

When the boat was empty, the four men separated. Two manned the boat, returning it to the water. The others led the cart by slow steps towards a roughly hewn path from the beach up the low cliff side. Beau and Saunders watched a few moments before glancing at one another. In tacit agreement, they moved further down the bluff and positioned themselves behind a crumbling wall, the remnant of a long-gone watchtower, ten feet or so from where the cart would crest the bluff.

Years of being a spy had taught Beau patience. He was not lost in his thoughts or otherwise distracted when the cart appeared a quarter of an hour later. He had been listening with keen ears and first heard the soft roll of wheels, the tetchy grunt of a donkey, the steady clomp of hooves five minutes before. There was a pause, then the sound of bottles clinking against one another.

‘Oi, careful. I don’t need to be stinking of brandy when we turn up at the Swan, or especially when I get home to the wife,’ barked one of the men.

It was quiet again, and Beau suspected they were sampling the goods brought over on the boat. He heard the sound of shuffling feet followed by a quick quiver of the bottles in their crates, as if one of the men had bumped the cart.

‘What did I just tell ye? My coat’s as soaked as ye are now.’

‘’At’s the least of yer problems if he goes on with that hare-brained scheme of his,’ the other replied with a derisive snort.

The first man scoffed. ‘Hare-brained is one way o’ puttin’ it. I’d call it foolish beyond measure, thinking himself some kind o’ modern-day Guy Fawkes. He’s forgettin’ Fawkes was caught and quartered.’

‘What are ye saying?’ Suspicion clouded the question.

‘Don’t be daft. All I’m saying is I think he thinks too much of himself. He’s had it easy here for too long. Rather than focus on the estate he’s so lucky to have, he thinks of nothing but keepin’ his father’s legacy alive and squeezin’ coins from the English. Greed is a story that begins well but ends poorly. A smarter man would leave on his own terms. He wants to go to the capital, he can go himself.’

Beau and Saunders exchanged worried glances.

‘I might consider it, if the price is right.’

‘Then you’re as big a fool as he. Bigger, even. Runnin’ is bad enough. I wouldn’t do it if not for Jemmy, but we can barely keep up with the expenses as it is. My father turns in his grave every time I lead a cart up this hill.’

‘He’d rise from it if he knew what was comin’ in on the boats when there was no moon.’ The sinister laugh accompanying this statement crawled over Beau’s skin like a hundred tiny spiders.

The cart rumbled onward past where Beau and Saunders were hiding behind the low stones, the conversation fading as if it were being pulled out to sea. When Beau looked up a minute later, he tracked the two men walking towards the backside of the buildings. A glowing lantern in the distance caught his attention. There was a third man behind the bookshop yanking open a pair of cellar doors.

The long, feathered grass provided cover as Beau and Saunders doubled back close to the barn. Once assured of being neither seen nor heard, Saunders said, ‘What think you? A drink at the Swan?’

Beau considered their options. The men, any men in the inn, would be suspicious of newcomers and reticent to speak on the subjects in which Beau was most interested. But needs must.

‘I suppose we’ll have to be our most charming.’

A few minutes’ walk brought them to the fringes of the high street. They approached the Silver Swan just as the men who’d escorted the cart appeared between buildings a short ways down.

One of the men came to an abrupt stop at the alley separating a hardware store and the inn. ‘You see what I see?’

The lascivious look on the man’s face nauseated Beau. He continued forward, reaching the inn as the door slammed open. Neither man seemed to notice the drunkard as he stumbled out and collapsed into a heap on the street.

‘She’s a prime article,’ the man continued, and Beau judged him to be the one who had both spilled and drunk the greater share of brandy. ‘My share from tonight’s take for the first go.’

Beau wasn’t sure of the kind of woman he’d find when he looked in the alley—judging by the silence, one who wasn’t interested in trading her favours for their coin—but he knew for certain he wouldn’t leave her prey to the smugglers in front of him.

‘Perhaps I’d like the first go, gentlemen,’ said Beau in a cool, arrogant accent. As he and Saunders approached the pair, the valet edged around the corner of the building, creating a physical barrier between the men and the woman in the alley. The smugglers were sizing Beau up, greed twinkling in the eyes of the drunk as he no doubt considered how much money Beau carried on his person and the worth of the pocket watch he must be wearing. The other looked fatigued, a trifle irritated, and ready to be done with his business for the night.

‘Ah, I can see you’re debating whether to fight for your claim. You may attack me, but my friend here won’t let you get very far. Trained in Asia in forms of combat I won’t do a disservice by attempting to pronounce.’

The man who’d been spilled on said, ‘Just making our way to the Swan for a nightcap,’ and nudged his friend. But the other hesitated, reaching behind him for the second time during their exchange as if to check whether his knife was still tucked into the waist of his breeches, ready to be plunged between Beau’s ribs at a moment’s notice.

‘Might I suggest a pound each, and we all go our separate ways as if this awkward moment between us never happened?’ As he spoke, Beau pulled out his snuff box and took a pinch. A sign for Saunders for how they would react should the shifty man before them choose violence.

The men looked at one another, an entire conversation started and ended with a gaze. The sober man nodded their acquiescence, although his partner scowled.

‘Delightful.’ Beau pulled a few coins from a purse inside his pocket, gave each man his share, and bid them good evening, although he would not have minded teaching the one a lesson. Behind him, raucous voices rose and fell as the men entered the Swan and the door closed with a cough behind them.

‘All right,’ he said, tucking away his snuff box. ‘Let us be quick with the rest of this business.’

‘No good, boss.’

Beau’s head snapped to his valet when he heard the phrase used only in times of exigency. Saunders tipped his head towards the alleyway. Beau stepped closer, preparing himself for any number of scenarios, including every smuggler in Broadstairs pointing their pistols in his direction.

There were no weapons or smugglers, much less a mob of them. Flattened against the stone wall, face as pale as the moon above and contorted in absolute terror, was his ward.