The Smugglers by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page B

the papers I pulled from the pouch.
    The first was a map folded in four. It was crudely drawn, and the lines had smudged near the creases, but I saw the coast of Kent and the English Channel, the entrance to the Thames. It was much like the image Captain Crowe had drawn on the table of the Baskerville, but in two places were markings in the shape of an X, and some writing was blurred beyond reading.
    The second paper was a letter, but it too was badly smeared. It tore nearly in two when I tried to open it.
    “What does it say?” asked Captain Crowe.
    I held it out to him, but he shook his head. “I canna read,” he told me.
    I flattened the page on the planks of the deck. My fingers were soon blue with ink, as the whole top third of the letter was an enormous smudge, and the rest not much better. But I read aloud the parts I could–a few words here and there.
    “… have come among the Burton gang …”
    “The Burton gang!” said Captain Crowe.
    “… a small army … eighty men … smuggling spirits …”
    “Och, that's enough,” said Crowe. “It's a lot of prattle.”
    But I kept reading. “… time running out … I am attracting suspicion …” And the last sentence was nearly all in the clear. “A major run is planned for six nights after the moon is full; the contraband of sixty barrels to be brought across in the …”
    “In the what?” asked Captain Crowe.
    “It doesn't say,” said I. The rest was fully smudged.
    I looked up from the letter to see the captain with his knife in his fist. He had come toward me across the spread-out remnants of the sailcloth, and now–at its edge–he squinted at me. The sailors, too, had stopped their work. Harry stood before me and Mathew behind, and the three made a silent tableau as the deck heaved up on a swell.
    “And whit do ye mak'o this?” Crowe asked. “It seems like a lot o' daftness to me.”
    “I think he came to find me,” I said. “He was fleeing from this smuggling gang, and he needed my help to get to London, maybe. He knew about the
Dragon.
”
    “Och, yere as daft as the wee manny.” Crowe dug his knife into the cloth and tore away a long and narrow ribbon. This he carried back to the shrouded body, and he started binding the dead man's knees. “Put it a' back in his pockets, I say. Let him tak' his secrets to his grave.”
    There was one more thing inside the pouch: a small book–a sort of ledger. It was so sodden that I had to peel the pages open one by one, like the layers of an onion.
    Mathew and Hany moved closer, bending forward to see the book. Mathew sucked air through his teeth. But Captain Crowe only glanced at me. “And whit's that?” he asked.
    “I don't know,” said I. It seemed to be a list, but the writing was small and blurred. It filled nearly half the book, and beyond it the pages were blank.
    “This gang,” said Crowe. “This Burton gang. Ye've heard o' them before?”
    “Oh, yes,” I said. It was one of the largest smuggling gangs in all of England. I remembered Father reading of it in
The Times,
ranting about the villainy. But we'd heard nothing at all of the Burton gang for perhaps a year or more.
    I kept turning pages as the
Dragon
slid along in a hiss of water. Whole sections passed through my fingers in thick and gummy wads. A list of names, perhaps; nothing more than that. And I was about to close the book when, right at the back, I found a note that was not quite so blurred as all the rest.
    “Look at this,” I said.
    In a different, fainter ink, Larson had recorded everydetail of a smuggling run. There were dates and times; there were signals to be made and answered. Everything was included but the name of the ship and the harbor she sailed from. I read it out, and the captain listened, frowning, as he bundled up the dead man's body.
    “Captain Crowe,” I said, “it's now!”
    “What?” His face grew even greater wrinkles. “Speak sense,” he told me.
    “Look.” I shoved the book toward him