Stephen Hunt - From the Deep of the Dark

‘An unusual location for a rendezvous with your boat, good captain,’ noted Daunt. ‘No docks, no jetties.’

‘I’ve a mortal aversion to paying harbourmaster’s fees.’

‘No doubt,’ said Daunt. And a similar one to paying the revenue service’s duties on cargoes, I wager.

They followed a rocky path down from the cliffs curving around to the shale-covered beach of the cove below. Waiting for them was a handful of locals, oiled leather coats marking them as fishermen. Although it clearly wasn’t local fishing boats one of their number was signalling as he pulled the lid off a covered lantern and waved it aloft. There was an answering light from the darkness of the waves, lost beyond the crashing surf. Bright and high. Just where a conning tower would be if a u-boat was lurking out beyond the margins of the coast.

Daunt looked across to Boxiron, and the steamman nodded. ‘It is the Purity Queen,’ he confirmed, voicebox set low, as if he didn’t want to trouble the bundled body of Charlotte Shades folded over his iron arms. The steamman’s vision plate could see almost as well at night as during the day, and a lot further than any mere ex-parson from the race of man. And he had known the commodore’s craft well before the two of them had taken passage on the u-boat a couple of years earlier, heading for the dark isle of Jago. Daunt smiled to himself. The usual thought of most men in his current predicament would be simpler days, but their time on the island had proved anything but. Embroiled with the schemes of the Inquisition and the local ruler and a pantheon of the ancient gods besides.

Daunt smelt the approaching flotilla of longboats from the Purity Queen before he saw them, a bad egg reek from the small gas-driven paddle wheels carried ahead on the sea wind. Almost silently, four tiny craft pushed up onto the beach close to the man with the signal lantern. Without conversation, the group of locals standing around Daunt began to haul the boats out of the reach of the surf, sailors inside pushing out loading ramps and commencing the decanting of cargo. Whatever the contraband — brandy, mumbleweed, wine — barrels rolled down rapidly into the cove. Each wooden cylinder was small enough that it could be hefted up with built-in straps and tied to the back of a labourer before disappearing into a dark cut in the cliffs behind. Where did that cave end up, Daunt wondered? The cellar of the local tavern? Somewhere far out of sight of any riding officers from the revenue service, of that much the ex-parson was certain. For a royalist scoundrel like the commodore, the avoidance of Parliament’s taxes was a duty as much as an income stream, a warm glow of satisfaction supplied with each pint of cheap alcohol and discounted ounce of weed that made its way into the hands of a grateful populace.

The commodore indicated his longboats with a generous sweep of his arm. ‘There we are then. The board can watch every port from now until winter, but they can’t spy on every cove along the coast.’

Sadly was moaning about having to take to the water, until Dick Tull gave him a shove in the direction of the small boats. The little rat-like fellow limped unhappily forward on his cane.

‘So this is how you pay for your fine living, Blacky?’ asked Tull.

The commodore shrugged. ‘The board isn’t so mortal fussy about the Purity Queen ’s schedule when it comes to dropping off agents on foreign shores, nor running sealed message bags and crates of rifles sent to those it supports.’

‘I wouldn’t know,’ said Tull. ‘I only ever got to nobble people on our own shores.’

Using the sceptre like a walking stick, the commodore boarded a craft now emptied of barrels. ‘Then lucky you are for it. Nobody would hang you for spying in the Kingdom’s green and pleasant fields. Not when it’s your people with their hand on the lever of the gallows’ trap door.’

‘Not until sodding now,’ said Tull. And quite unhappy he sounded about the matter to the ex-parson’s ears.

Boxiron laid Charlotte Shades’ body carefully in the aft of the flat-bottomed craft. ‘I do not like running away, Jethro softbody.’

Jethro Daunt patted the steamman’s hulking back reassuringly. ‘Would that we were, old friend.’

No. I fear that we are heading for the heart of this affair. May the Circle turn us to the centre of this evil in time to stop an all-out war between the gill-necks and our people.

Charlotte could hear breathing coming from the dark between the trees; hard, rhythmic rasps, as the branches scratched and scraped at her while she forced a passage between the boughs. There was a smell of salt in the air like the sea, but how could that be when she was crashing through the night and a forest? She could sense the hunting party, flashes of distant light — from lanterns, or the pursuing creatures’ eyes. Charlotte was completely sodden, but she couldn’t remember getting wet. Had she waded through a stream to escape? The slippery mud beneath her bare feet was wet enough that there must have been a recent rainstorm sweeping through the woodland. Beating down on the roof of the one place where she could be guaranteed a warm dry bed for the night. There it was! Madame Leeda’s gypsy caravan, the two connected burgundy-coloured carriages pulled up in a glade, an antique high-tension clockwork engine in the rear carriage being wound tight by a small portable steam engine set up like a tripod on the adjacent ground. Rainwater had cleaned the gaudily colourful sign hanging on the side of the front cabin. Madam Leeda’s Cures and Potions. Each word in a different font, every letter in a different colour. A rainbow splash of ornament in the moonlit glade. Much like its owner, covered in a thick blanket-like hooded robe, swaying, despite her age, in a tuneless dance on wooden steps lowered from the carriage’s side.

‘Madam Leeda,’ Charlotte shouted, nearly stumbling over the partially exposed roots of a nearby oak tree. ‘It’s me, Charlotte!’ If Charlotte didn’t say anything, perhaps the old gypsy woman wouldn’t notice the state her visitor was in, clothes torn from the pursuit through the woods.

‘I see you,’ called the old gypsy, turning on the steps and peering out beyond the fire-pit she’d dug in front of the caravan, brushing the long silver hair out of her face. ‘Is that my Lotty come back to me?’

‘It is.’

Why wasn’t Madam Leeda asking Charlotte about where she had been all these years? Then Charlotte glanced down at her cold hands. Tiny, child-sized and her clothes — the same dress she’d been wearing when the family she had thought was her own had thrown her out. Just another failed crop on their farm after the payments from Charlotte’s mother to her adopted family had dried up. Charlotte’s only parting gift from them, the knowledge that she wasn’t their child… just an illegitimate bastard from an affair between Lady Mary and the scandalous lord commercial, Abraham Quest.

No wonder Charlotte had been so slow running through those woods; barely ten years old, a diet of berries and grass and leaves for week after week. She was inside the caravan, its main room crowded with cupboards, small wooden drawers by the hundred. Things to sell. Potions that could cure or curse, depending on who was buying, how much they paid, and what degree of respect they showed to the old gypsy woman selling them. The smell of herbs drying, mushrooms being cured, and a hare hanging up over a porcelain washbasin, bloodied and skinned. With so many amulets and charms, more fake than real; the belief of buyers usually all that was needed to provide the push for true love or the courage to face up to some local difficulty.

‘You may go into any of these drawers in this room,’ instructed Madam Leeda. ‘But not the ones through there.’ She indicated the slim rubberised lock that connected the lead carriage to the rear. ‘There are dangerous things inside there. Not for any child. Not for anyone not of the Shena, who has not mastered the old arts and the true gaze of knowing.’