The Smugglers by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online

knew I held a dead man. Then my skin revolted at the thought of this, and I shook so badly that his head bobbed up and down. But a bight of rope was lowered for me, and I passed it around his shoulders. “Haul away,” I said, and climbed to the deck.
    The sailors pulled, the corpse came up; they pulled again, and he rose some more. He seemed to dance and shake, climbing from the water like a puppet from a stage. His chin rested on his chest, and his hair hung down to hide his face. And then he dangled above the rail, a figure in gray with buckled shoes, and the water fell from him in splashes on the deck.
    “Och, he's a wee manny,” said Captain Crowe. “Just a wee little manny.” He reached out and lifted the chin and I gasped.
    “Larson,” I said. The gentleman from the carriage. Hehad promised to find me, I remembered. He had told me to watch for him.
“I think I'm a dead man,”
he'd said.
“Now or later, I'm a goner,”
    “You know him, then?” asked Captain Crowe.
    “I met him once,” said I.
    Then Dasher spoke behind me. He said, “Throw him back.” He laughed, and I thought I'd heard that laugh before. “He seems to like his swimming,” Dasher said. “He's doing so well at it, he might be in Devon in a day or two.”
    “Stow it!” roared Captain Crowe. It was the first time in two days I'd heard him shout. “We'll heave him aboard, and when we're out at sea we'll bury him.” He saw me watching, and he tried to smile. “A proper burial,” he added.
    Poor little Larson was swung inboard and lowered to the deck. And the instant his shoes touched the planks, the wind came up. It wasn't strong, but it was fair. It carried a smell of muddy earth, in a strange and chilling coldness, and the
Dragon
tugged against her anchor like a horse against its harness.
    “Make sail!” said Captain Crowe. He was grinning, his crinkled eyes barely there. “Main and foresail, jib and staysail. Lively, lads; the
Dragon
wants to go.”
    Larson was left in a slump at the rail, the bight of rope still around his shoulders. Mathew and Harry went to the halyards, the captain to the sail lashings.
    “Mr. Spencer, you'll tak' the wheel, if ye please,” said Crowe. “We'll go south to the end of the Sands.”
    Huge and white, the sails streamed up and opened, flapping in the breeze. The anchor came aboard, and I felt us drifting back across the Downs. I spun the wheel; the
Dragon
lurched on her side. I spun it the other way, and she turned her head toward the open sea.
    It was an eerie wind that the dead man brought. It touched the
Dragon
but no other ship, and we passed through the anchored fleet like a silent, drifting cloud. A rippling patch of water went with us, but all around was calm. We sailed on a reach past a big East Indiaman that sat so still, even her flag wasn't ruffled. On every ship, a line of astonished men watched us pass.
    “Set the topsail,” said Captain Crowe, and–still grinning–he opened his long wooden box. “I'll even pipe ye aloft.”
    And so the
Dragon
went to sea, with a skirl of pipes in a ghostly breeze. The drifting dunes of the Goodwin Sands went by to port, the shores of Kent to starboard, and I alone steered this ship, this little world of ours. The square topsail flapped and filled, and I felt the pulse of the
Dragon
through the wheel as she quickened on her way.
    But soon Dasher came to take my place. “You can go,” he said. “I'll steer this thing. What's the course?”
    “Running free,” said I.
    “Running free,” he answered with a nod. “Straight ahead. Steady as she goes.” He wore an impish grin. “Lord love me, I like this sailor talk.”
    He settled in behind the wheel, his arms poking out from his suit of corks as though from a barrel, awkwardly bent to grasp the spokes.
    Suddenly he seemed disturbingly familiar. His laughter, his swaggering walk, even the words that he sometimes used made me think of the highwayman who had stoppedus in the forest. But I