Smuggler's Kiss

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford OX2 6DP
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in

Oxford New York

Auckland  Cape Town  Dar es Salaam  Hong Kong  Karachi
Kuala Lumpur  Madrid  Melbourne  Mexico City  Nairobi
New Delhi   Shanghai   Taipei  Toronto  

With offices in

Argentina  Austria  Brazil  Chile  Czech Republic  France  Greece
Guatemala  Hungary  Italy  Japan  Poland  Portugal  Singapore
South Korea  Switzerland  Thailand  Turkey  Ukraine  Vietnam

Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries

© Marie-Louise Jensen 2013

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

Database right Oxford University Press (maker)

First published 2013
First published in this eBook edition 2013

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above

You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

Data available

ISBN: 978-0-19-273364-1

This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

Cover photograph © Elisabeth Ansley/Arcangel Images. Photomontage: Catherine McIntyre

For Ann

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,

Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street.

Them that asks no questions, isn’t told a lie.

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark—

Brandy for the Parson,

’
Baccy for the Clerk,

Laces for a lady, letters for a spy,

And watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Running round the woodlump if you chance to find

Little barrels, roped and tarred, all full of brandy-wine,

Don’t you shout to come and look, nor use ’em for your play,

Put the brushwood back again—and they’ll be gone next day!

If you see the stable-door setting open wide;

If you see a tired horse lying down inside;

If your mother mends a coat cut about and tore,

If the lining’s wet and warm—don’t you ask no more!

If you meet King George’s men, dressed in blue and red,

You be careful what you say, and mindful what is said.

If they call you ‘pretty maid’, and chuck you ’neath the chin,

Don’t you tell where no one is, nor yet where no one’s been!

Knocks and footsteps round the house—whistles after dark—

You’ve no call for running out till the house-dogs bark.

Trusty’s
here and
Pincher’s
here, and see how dumb they lie—

They
don’t fret to follow when the Gentlemen go by!

If you do as you’ve been told, ’likely there’s a chance,

You’ll be give a dainty doll, all the way from France,

With a cap of Valenciennes, and a velvet hood—

A present from the Gentlemen, along o’ being good!

Five and twenty ponies,

Trotting through the dark—

Brandy for the Parson,

’Baccy for the Clerk.

Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie—

Watch the wall, my darling, while the Gentlemen go by!

Rudyard Kipling

I stood motionless in the darkness, looking out to sea. Dark waves with arching white crests were breaking on the shore before me. The water tore back from the shingle after each wave with a fierce rattle before crashing back onto it. It was like a hungry beast trying to devour the beach. To my left, a short way out in the bay, a black stone archway towered over the waves.

It was a chill, autumnal night. An onshore wind blew my long white veil straight back from my head. It tugged and fluttered to fly free. My white lace petticoats and my pink silk skirts flapped frantically around me. The sharp shingle bit into my silk-stockinged feet. I ignored it all and stared hopelessly into the darkness. Despair swept over me; hot tears poured down my cheeks. I let them fall unchecked.

I’d done what I’d had to do to rescue my family. I’d played my part. They were safe. But I couldn’t face the life that was my end of the bargain. I’d thought I could bear it. But what I’d discovered today had changed all that. I now knew I’d been wrong.

Still weeping, I sank down onto the cold shingle, casting aside the pink shoes that I’d been clutching tightly in my left hand. Without any clear intention, I began to scoop up handfuls of damp shingle. I took the hem of my petticoats in my hand to form an apron and began to fill it with stones. My tears continued to run down my cheeks, cooling swiftly in the sharp wind. My petticoats grew heavier and heavier on my lap. At last I swiped the tears from my eyes with gritty hands and struggled unsteadily to my feet. I clutched the heavily-laden petticoats to me. Blackness as impenetrable as the night filled my heart and obscured all my thoughts except the need for flight.

‘No one can deny me the right to escape,’ I whispered to myself. The wind tore the words from my lips and flung them away. What I was about to do was wrong by every law of man and God, but I couldn’t see a choice. There was no other way out of my predicament. Shaking with fear, but determined, I stepped deliberately forward. One, two, three steps before the first wave washed over my feet. I was shocked by the cold, but didn’t allow it to deter me. I walked on, half sliding down the steeply-shelving shingle bank. I was calm now; focused. My breathing was unsteady, but I walked on, ignoring the pain in my feet, the icy chill, somehow keeping my balance on the steep slope, despite the powerful tug and swirl of the sea around my legs.

My shimmering brocade-silk gown grew heavy about me and I fought to hold on to the heavy load of shingle I carried in my petticoats. It kept me steady, my feet on the bottom. Without it, the waves would have picked me up and tossed me about. I walked on, gasping as the waves smacked me in the face, until at last I was completely submerged. The water was dark and still around me; the rattle and swish of the waves muffled.

It was frightening and lonely under the water. I held my breath as long as possible, staring into the murky gloom as though it mattered whether I could see anything. How ridiculous, I thought. Death is always lonely, and it doesn’t matter that my eyes are darkening. Soon my suffering will be over.

My air was running out. My lungs were crying out to breathe. I fought the urge, forcing myself to stay quite still. But my body, young, healthy, full of life-force and potential, was screaming at me.
Don’t do this
, it shrieked.
I want to live!

My body battled my determination to drown. My instinct to breathe was so powerful, it overruled every other consideration. It freed the petticoat from my numb, unresisting hands, allowing the stones to rush away to the sea bed. Without them, I rose up like a cork and bobbed on the surface of the storm-tossed sea.

The first breath of air was the sweetest, most beautiful thing I’d ever known. A noisy, inelegant gasp of sheer desperation. The second was half salt water, causing me to choke and sag back under the surface. My gown and petticoats were sodden now, the air gone from them. Their weight was dragging me down.

What a reversal. I now fought the downward pull, thrashing frantically in the water, to keep afloat, to keep breathing that sweet air. Nothing could be more important than that. But I was no swimmer. I’d never learned how. And so it was a battle I swiftly began to lose. It was bitterly ironic that now I no longer wanted to die, I couldn’t save myself.

I was already swallowing salt water and sinking below the surface when something caught in my hair and tore at it. If I’d had breath to cry out, I’d have done so. If my arms hadn’t been weighed down by the weight of my brocade silk sleeves, I’d have tried to pull free. As it was, I just gritted my teeth and endured the pain, still fighting my losing battle to stay above the waves.

Except that now it was no longer a battle. Somehow I was able to breathe. Something was dragging me backwards. I fought against it, terrified. Stories of sea monsters, sirens, and wicked mermaids rushed over me.

‘Hold still, yer fool, we’re tryin’ to help!’ shouted a rough voice in my ear. Then my back banged into something hard, and I was scraped upwards and tumbled into a crowded wooden rowing boat.

At first I could take in nothing, think nothing. Every part of me hurt. I was coughing, spluttering, and choking up sea water. Someone held my head firmly over the edge of the boat while my body rejected all the water I’d swallowed. When the paroxysm was over, I hung on the side of the boat, noisily gasping the fresh air into my lungs.

‘Quiet now!’ ordered a voice behind me. I struggled round in my heavy, sodden gown to see who’d spoken. I could make out little in the darkness, but he looked like a fisherman. He was wearing a smock and a coarse petticoat over his breeches and his face was strangely blackened. Only his eyes gleamed.