By the light of the lantern the smuggler solemnly winked.
‘You two can keep a secret, I know,’ he said. ‘The French won’t land; it’s us what’ll land, and we’ll land here and not in bay; and what we’ll land is a good drop of the real thing, and a yard or two of silk or lace maybe. I don’t know who ’twas put it about as the French was a-coming, but you may lay to it they aren’t no friends of the Revenue.’
‘Oh, I see,’ said Elfrida. ‘And did—’
‘The worst of it’ll be the look-out they’ll keep. Lucky for us it’s all our men as has volunteered for duty. And we know our friends.’
‘But do you mean,’ said Edred, ‘that you can be friends with a Frenchman, when we’re at war with them?’
‘It’s like this, little man,’ said the smuggler, sitting down on a keg that stood handily on its head ready for a seat. ‘We ain’t no quarrel with the free-trade men – neither here nor there. A man’s got his living to get, hasn’t he now? So you see a man’s trade comes first – what he gets his bread by. So you see these chaps as meet us mid-channel and hand us the stuff – they’re free traders first and Frenchies after – the same like we’re merchants before all. We ain’t no quarrel with them. It’s the French soldiers we’re at war with, not the honest French traders that’s in the same boat as us ourselves.’
‘Then somebody’s just made up about Boney coming, so as to keep people busy in the bay while you’re smuggling here?’ said Edred.
‘I wouldn’t go so far as that, sir,’ said the man, ‘but if it did happen that way it ’ud be a sort of special dispensation for us free-trade men that get our living by honest work and honest danger; that’s all I say, knowing by what’s gone before that you two are safe as any old salt afloat.’
The two children would have given a good deal to know what it was that had ‘gone before.’ But they never did know. And sometimes, even now, they wonder what it was that the Edred and Elfrida of those days had done to win the confidence of this swaggering smuggler. They both think, and I daresay they are right, that it must have been something rather fine.
Having seen all the ins and outs of the cave, the children were not sorry to get back to Arden Castle, for it was now dark, and long past their proper bedtime, and it really had been rather a wearing day.
They were put to bed, rather severely, by Lady Arden’s own maid, whom they had not met before and did not want to meet again – so shrivelled and dry and harsh was she. And they slept like happy little tops, in the coarse homespun linen sheets scented with lavender grown in the castle garden, that were spread over soft, fat, pincushion-beds, filled with the feathers of geese eaten at the castle table.
Only Elfrida woke once and found the room filled with red light, and, looking out of the window, saw that one of the beacon bonfires was alight and that the flames and smoke were streaming across the dark summer sky – driven by the wind that shouted and yelled and shook the windows, and was by this time, she felt sure, at least three-quarters of a gale. The beacon was lighted; therefore the French were coming. And Elfrida yawned and went back to bed. She was too sleepy to believe in Boney. But at that time, a hundred years ago, hundreds of little children shivered and cried in their beds, being quite sure that now at last all the dreadful prophecies of mothers and nurses would come true, and that Boney, in all his mysterious, unknown horror, would really now, at last, ‘have them.’
It was grey morning when the wind, wearied of the silly resistance of the leaded window, suddenly put forth his strength, tore the window from its hinges, drove it across the window frame, and swept through the room, flapping the bedclothes like wet sails, and wakening the children most thoroughly, far beyond any hope of ‘one more snooze.’ They got up and dressed. No one was about in the house, but the front door was open. It was quite calm on that side, but as soon as the children left the shelter of the castle wall the wind caught at them, hit, slapped, drove, worried, beat them, till they had hard work to stand upright, and getting along was very slow and difficult. Yet they made their way somehow to the cliff, where a thick, black crowd stood – a crowd that was not really black when you got quite close and could look at it in the grey dawn-light, but rather brilliantly red, white, and blue, like the Union Jack, because they were the armed men in their make-shift uniforms whom old Lord Arden had drilled and paraded the evening before. And they were all looking out to sea.
The sea was like the inside of an oyster-shell, barred with ridges of cold silver, the sky above was grey as a gull’s wing, and between sea and sky a ship was driving straight on to the rocks a hundred feet below.
‘’Tis a French ship, by her rig,’ someone said.
‘The first of the fleet – a scout,’ said another, ‘and Heaven has sent a storm to destroy them like it destroyed the accursed Armada in Queen Bess’s time.’
And still the ship came nearer.
‘’Tis the Bonne Esperance,’ said the low voice of the smuggler friend close to Elfrida’s ear, and she could only just hear him through the whistling of the gale. ‘’Tis true what old Betty said; the French will land here today – but they’ll land dead corpses. And all our little cargo – they’ve missed our boat in the gale – it’ll all be smashed to bits afore our eyes. It’s poor work being a honest merchant.’
The men in their queer uniforms, carrying their queer weapons, huddled closer together, and all eyes were fixed on the ship as it came on and on.
‘Is it sure to be wrecked?’ whispered Elfrida, catching at old Lord Arden’s hand.
‘No hope, my child. Get you home to bed,’ he said.
It did not make any difference that all this had happened a hundred years ago. There was the cold, furious sea lashing the rocks far down below the cliff. Elfrida could not bear to stay and see that ship smash on the rocks as her carved work-box had smashed when she dropped it on the kitchen bricks. She could not even bear to think of seeing it. Poetry was difficult, but to stay here and see a ship wrecked – a ship that had men aboard – was more difficult still.
‘Oh, Mouldiwarp, do come to me;
I cannot bear it, do you see,’
was not, perhaps, fine poetry, but it expressed her feelings exactly, and, anyhow, it did what it was meant to do. The white mole rubbed against her ankles even as she spoke. She caught it up.
‘Oh, what are we to do?’
‘Go home,’ it said, ‘to the castle – you’ll find the door now.’
And they turned to go. And as they turned they heard a grinding crunch, mixed with the noise of the waves and winds, enormously louder, but yet just the sort of noise a dog makes when he is eating the bones of the chicken you had for dinner and gets the chicken’s ribs all at once into his mouth. Then there was a sort of sighing moan from the crowd on the cliff, who had been there all night for the French to land, and then Lord Arden’s voice:
‘The French have landed. She spoke the truth. The French have landed – Heaven help them!’
And as the children ran towards the house they knew that every man in that crowd would now be ready to risk his life to save from the sea those Frenchies whom they had sat up all night to kill with swords and scythes and bills and meat-choppers. Men are queer creatures!
To get out of it – back to the safe quiet of a life without shipwrecks and witches – that was all Elfrida wanted. Holding the mole in one hand and dragging Edred by the other, she got back to the castle and in at the open front door, up the stairs, and straight to a door – she knew it would be the right one, and it was.
There was the large attic with the beams, and the long, wonderful row of chests under the sloping roof. And the moment the door was shut, the raging noise of the winds ceased, as the flaring noise of gas ceases when you turn it off. And now once more the golden light filtered through the chinks of the tiles, and outside was the ‘tick, tick’ of moving pigeon feet,