Alastair said, smiling genuinely for the first time since waking to find himself in the cottage, “this could prove to be extremely interesting.”
CHAPTER ONE
THE KENTISH COAST had long been considered the gateway to England, an island empire whose six thousand miles of coastline were its best defense as well as its greatest weakness.
The Romans had landed along the Kentish coast, followed by the Germanic tribes that were united under Egbert, the “First King of the English.” Alfred the Great, England’s first great patron of learning, was sandwiched somewhere between Egbert and William the Conqueror, followed by the Plantagenets, the Tudors, the Stuarts, the terrible, tiresome, homegrown Cromwell, and finally, the House of Hanover and its current monarch, George III.
The king, blind and most decidedly mad, was not aware that his profligate, pleasure-seeking son had been named Regent, which was probably a good thing, for the knowledge just might have proven to be the death of poor “Farmer George”—but that is another story. More important was the fact that another adventurous soul was once again contemplating the Kentish coast with hungry eyes.
Napoleon Bonaparte, ruler of all Europe, had amassed the Grande Armée, his forces surpassing the ancient armies of Alexander, Caesar, Darius, and even Attila. He had set his greedy sights on England early in his campaign to conquer the world, although pressing matters on the Peninsula and to the east (where the Russians and their beastly winter had proved disastrous to the Little Colonel) had kept him tolerably busy and unable to launch his ships across the Channel. This did not mean that the English became complacent, believing themselves invincible to attack from the French coast.
Quite the contrary.
Martello Towers, an ambitious string of lookout posts built on high ground from Hythe to Eastbourne, were still kept munitioned and manned by vigilant soldiers of His Majesty’s forces. Dressed in their fine red jackets, the soldiers stood at the high, slitted windows of the grey stone cylindrical towers, their glasses trained on the sea twenty-four stupefying hours a day. In their zeal to protect their shores, the English had even dug the Royal Military Canal between Rye and Appledore, optimistically believing that it would give them an extra line of defense from the Froggies.
Five great seaports—called the Cinque Ports—lined the southeast coast, at Hastings, Dover, Sandwich, Romney, and Hythe, with the towns of Rye and Winchelsea vying with them for prominence, and these too had garrisons of soldiers at the ready.
All this vigilance, all this preparedness, the Peninsula Campaign, and the Russian winter—added to the fact that the Strait of Dover, also referred to as “England’s Moat,” was not known for its easy navigability—had proved sufficient in keeping Bonaparte from launching his soldiers from Boulogne or Calais.
It was not, alas, sufficient in preventing inventive English smugglers from accumulating small fortunes plying their trade from Margate to Bournemouth, almost without intervention.
Using long-forgotten sea lanes, the smugglers, known as the “Gentlemen,” did a roaring trade in untaxed medicine, rope, spices, brass nails, bridal ribbons, brandy, silk—even tennis balls. So widespread was the smuggling, and so accomplished were the Gentlemen, that even the Comptroller of the Foreign Post Office sanctioned the practice, as it brought French newspapers and war intelligence reports to the island with greater speed and reliability than any other, more conventional methods.
But, the Comptroller’s protestations to one side, there were the Customs House officers to be considered. The smugglers may have been helping the war effort in some backhanded way, but they were also making the customs and revenue officers a redundant laughingstock, as the flow of contraband into England was fast outstripping the amount of legal, taxable cargo landed on the docks.
Many customs officers, loyal and hardworking, employed the King’s men in forays against the smugglers. Many more did not. A few slit throats, a few bludgeoned heads—these were ample inducement for most customs officers to keep their noses tucked safely in their ale mugs on moonless nights, when the Gentlemen were apt to be out and about. Besides enhancing the possibility of living to a ripe old age, turning one’s head was a good way for customs officers to increase their meager salaries, for the smugglers were known to be extremely generous to those who were good to them.
Popular sentiment as well was on the side of the Gentlemen, whose daring at sea demanded admiration—and supplied the locals with a wide variety of necessities and luxuries without the bother of the recipients having to pay tax on the goods.
As late as July of 1805, Lord Holland, during a Parliamentary Debate, conceded that: “It is impossible to prevent smuggling…. All that the Legislature can do is to compromise with a crime which, whatever laws may be made to constitute it a high offence, the mind of man can never conceive as at all equalling in turpitude those acts which are breaches of clear, moral virtues.”
All in all, it would be easy to believe that a, for the most part, comfortable bargain had been struck between the Gentlemen and the rest of the populate, but that was not the case. As the war dragged along, the unpaid taxes on contraband goods were, by their very absence, depleting the national treasury and war coffers, making the customs officers the butt of scathing lectures from their superiors in London.
The coastal forces, made up mostly of young men who had joined the military for the fun—the “dash” of the thing—only to be denied the clash of battle with the French, were itching to do battle with anyone. The Gentlemen and their nocturnal escapades were just the thing to liven up the soldiers’ humdrum existence.
But most important, the Gentlemen, who were extremely profit-oriented, were lamentably not the most loyal of the King’s subjects. Contraband was contraband, and money was money, no matter whose hand had held it last. Along with the spices and brandy and silk, there was many a French spy transported across England’s Moat, carrying secrets that could conceivably bring down the empire.
All this had served to complicate the Gentlemen’s position, and by 1813 the many small dabblers in the art of smuggling had called it a day, and the majority of the contraband was brought to the shores by highly organized, extremely unlovely gangs of cutthroats, villains, and sundry other souls not averse to committing crimes “equalling in turpitude those acts which are breaches of clear, moral virtues.”
THERE WAS A LONG, uncomfortable silence in the main drawing room of Seashadow, broken only by the light snoring of the napping Mrs. Biggs, whose impressed services as vigilant chaperone of Elinor Dalrymple’s reputation left much to be desired.
“That was a most edifying dissertation, Lieutenant Fishbourne—even if the bits about Cromwell and the Regent did not necessarily relate to the Kentish coast. But it begs me now that you have concluded—you have concluded, haven’t you?—to ask how all this pertains to me,” Elinor Dalrymple inquired wearily as she poured the young man a second cup of tea—for his lengthy, dry-as-dust dissertation on the history of England and smuggling must surely have caused him to become quite parched. “Or should I say—how does all of this pertain to Seashadow? Surely you haven’t had reports of smuggling or spying along our beaches?”
Lieutenant Jason Fishbourne, attached to the Preventive Service by the Admiralty and stationed these past eighteen months in the port of Hythe, leaned forward across the low serving table to utter confidentially, “Have you ever heard of the Hawkhurst Gang, Miss Dalrymple?”
Elly’s voice lowered as well, one slim white hand going to her throat protectively, as if she expected it to be sliced from ear to ear at any moment. “The Hawkhurst Gang? But they are located near Rye, aren’t they—if, indeed, that terrible gang is still
