Seahaven

Chapter One

Uncle Jorfant was away fetching his new bride, a young country girl from a farm way back in the high moorland that was Seahaven’s defence and the source of its isolation. For Robin, his uncle’s absence was a welcome break from working for him at The Fat Lamb—the coaching inn his uncle kept. Jorfant was tall, strong and lean with long, lined cheeks. He wore his own hair in a grizzled queue, had a hard, deep-set eye with a hard hand to go with it and there was that about him which made grown men wary of crossing him. Jorfant’s bloodline had not been entirely local, and he was said to be quick with a knife. This was smuggler country, where there had been foreign wrecks along the coast for a century or more. His complexion and deep nature were rumoured to hail from that source, though none dared say it to his strong, uncompromising face. It was impossible to tell from his expression if Uncle Jorfant were thinking something, or simply looking at you for longer than was necessary. Either way, it felt uncomfortable, and Robin was pleased to be out from under his opaque scrutiny for a few days.

Jorfant was Robin’s father’s much older half-brother, and at the time of his premature death had taken on a kind of support for his young widow and child. Robin had been his unpaid worker from very early childhood, in return for their meagre cottage rental and the essentials of life. There had been relief in Robin’s mother’s face when Jorfant had announced his forthcoming nuptials. Robin was old enough now to suspect the reason for those sporadic visits over the years, when Jorfant sent Robin out to the inn and remained with his mother alone. His mother said nothing to Robin and, since they were wholly dependent on Jorfant, never protested about it either, although afterwards she was subdued and thoughtful. Privately Robin hoped, now Jorfant was wed, that this demand would cease. It had bred in Robin a quietly growing loathing for Uncle Jorfant, the origins of which he was not entirely sure about.

For the present, then, he was freer in time, although still pot-boy for his uncle’s underling, Sam Davey, a burly man whose own sottishness kept him tied and underpaid at The Fat Lamb. Though a convivial drinker, Sam retained the discretion required at The Fat Lamb and kept his eyes and ears sharp enough to be an efficient informer for Jorfant. Word of the ‘Press Gang’ coming usually reached him first and Robin would be sent running from door to door warning all the menfolk to race into hiding up the twisting, narrow streets to the moors. Jorfant had his ways of making people owe him something.

Today, Robin was darting up the steep steps to the churchyard on the other side of the village and harbour. There were wide stopping places where men carrying coffins had to rest going up the cliffside to a burial. He was going to meet Sophie among the tumbled gravestones and cracked tomb slabs they had used to peer into as younger children, looking for skeletons in the empty dark below with a thrill of horror. Still young enough to be playmate companions, they were just of an age now for their association to begin to be disapproved of. A gentle separation of them had begun socially, where once they had been left to play together happily enough. There was a business connection between Robin’s uncle and Sophie’s father and since his earliest days Robin, as messenger between, had freely entered the big house with its steeply terraced gardens overlooking the cultivated parkland opposite and enjoying views right down to the sea. Now that Sophie was older, she was both less supervised and more so, a constraint which she chafed at and did not quite understand. Sophie was the daughter of shipping company merchant Mr Elijah Gardiner and had been promised by understanding since babyhood to his much younger business investor, Walter Wallace. This was in part to safeguard Sophie’s future. Mr Gardiner had married late and, sadly, his wife had not survived childbirth. As an elderly father, he had felt the need to ensure that his daughter would be looked after in what were always uncertain times. A fortune held today could vanish as easily as a life tomorrow. Mr Wallace had begun to give Sophie approving looks when she appeared dressed for dinner and with her hair up. Otherwise, she still scampered about, tomboyish. Her governess teaching only ever intermittent, Sophie was left mostly under the care of indulgent and busy servants and could still slip off to spend time with Robin. When he caught up with her, he could see her at what they always called their lookout point, right on the far corner of the graveyard wall—at the clifftop. She had brought a small brass telescope (there were many such maritime objects in her father’s house) which glinted in the dim sunshine as she held it up to her eye. Together, they scouted the ships and small boats busy along the water.

“Will there be a ship soon, Robin?” she asked him impatiently.

“I have had no messages to carry around. But do not forget, my uncle is away getting wed. He brings his bride back soon.”

“The next time there is one I will join you in the tunnel from the shore! I’m as tall as you now, you know.” They had checked this agreed measure by standing back-to-back at the last time of meeting. “You have promised me forever and they stop me from getting out more and more!”

“I know and the next time you shall, Sophie. Here, I’ve brought the old clothes of mine I promised you. A shirt and breeches, an old jerkin and boots.”

Their plan was a simple one, that Sophie would pass in his company as a village boy should anyone spot her in the dark. She put her foot in the boot and giggled at her stocking foot slipping around in the tough leather of its clog-soled clumsiness.

“I will put on a pair of woollen stockings. They will fit me then.”

Her eyes were bright with the imagining of this adventure, often rehearsed between them.

“Grease your hair and tie it back,” Robin reminded her.

“I will steal some of father’s pomade as well as his stockings,” said Sophie with careless daring.

Robin no longer just took messages but had told Sophie of helping to roll the stolen barrels of tea, coffee, spices, tobacco and spirits up the underground tunnel that ran beneath the cottages. She was beside herself to join in.

“I don’t want to be a lady! I want to be a smuggler too!” declared Sophie.

“You might have to be both.” Robin thought of the big house Sophie lived in, awash with the bright light of windows and mirrors, high up from the crammed alleys and yards strung across with lines of fish, like washing hung out to dry—where his cottage was. He had begun to realise that Sophie lived in two worlds, and he lived in one. “You will be a lady when you marry Walter,” he said, and they both laughed because the idea of either of them ever being old enough to marry anyone still seemed so ridiculous.

Putting the bundle down behind the curved wings of a drooping stone angel, Sophie tagged Robin and they ran around the tombstones, which were so scalded by salt winds that names and inscriptions were weathered mysteries, melted back into the grain of the rock like sandworm wriggles left on a wet beach. Spontaneous races were still part of their activities, prompted also by the physicality of this romping and touching, lighting sparks on their skin where they had only nipped and pinched one another before. Sophie, despite her skirts, beat Robin into the old church and ran up to the boat-shaped pulpit, laughing sacrilegiously and declaring herself the winner in ringing tones that echoed in the wooden rafters and brought the sexton in to chase them out. He was never far away, for there were always graves to be dug in Seahaven, where life was hard and survival at sea or on land was a matter of chance or continued good health.

Sophie said goodbye, took home her bundle of clothes against the time when she could join Robin and he returned to the cottage. On his tiny bedroom windowsill, up in the attic of the narrow cottage of one room stacked above another, he picked up the scrimshaw carved whale’s tooth that his dead father had brought back from Greenland and, lying on his cot holding it, fell into a light doze. He dreamed of whales, fat and plentiful as cattle, blowing plumes of spray and splashing their tails like mermaids while he was in a tiny craft holding a harpoon, which was a golden spear. He, too, would go whaling when he grew up. Robin was certain of that. It had a fairy-tale aspect to him, of bravery engaged in a noble pursuit, sea waves in soft white curls about them, the whales graciously docile as they met their fate gently from a skilled hand. He woke to hear his mother calling him.

“Robin! Sam Davey’s sent for you! Your uncle is on his way with his new bride. You’re to make sure the small back parlour’s swept and ready, light a fire, trim the lamps and fill them.”

Robin went below, down what was more simple foot holes in a plank than a staircase. He had hoped for longer, but his uncle had been gone for a week. Robin had already been working early at the inn that morning, clearing out cinders and laying fires, mopping floors, washing pots from the night before. It had been a long day before he met Sophie in the afternoon, after serving on in the taproom over the dinner hour. Robin often snatched catnaps where he could in between times. His mother was putting on her bonnet.

“I’ll come and join you there,” she continued, “but I will go to the market first and buy her a posy. Trust your uncle to bring her in time for market day when he can bring produce back to sell on there too! Yes, some flowers for the poor lass and a woman’s face to greet her would be a kind thing. It’s a man’s world she’ll find herself in at The Fat Lamb.”

Robin hurried along through the market day busy streets to The Fat Lamb, passing under the coaching inn’s archway with its great, heavy, diamond-shaped lamp in the middle, and into its courtyard. Over the inn door, a painted wooden sign with a solid-looking, short-legged mutton on it swung in a briskly increasing wind. It was squally weather and there was probably a storm coming in with the tide. Sam Davey was in the bar in his usual dirty apron, and it was busy with thirsty people in from the market.

“About time!” he grumbled when Robin entered. “Were you asleep, you lazy boy? I sent word over an hour since!”

This being untrue and a habitual moaning, Robin ignored him and set about his work prior to his uncle’s return. The back parlour was dark and poky but was made up now for a little sitting room, with a small wooden settle, an armchair with a carved, lumpy back and a table brought in. Robin swept the floor and dusted it with clean sand, lit a fire in the small grate and when he had trimmed the lamp, for all it was still afternoon, lit it because it was so dark in there. The black oak panelling took on a cosy glow and the old pink cushions on chair and settle looked almost comfortable. His mother appeared with the flower posy she had bought, and they went out into the courtyard as Uncle Jorfant’s gig swung in.

Beside him was a young girl with a fair, country face under her bonnet and, stepping down to the ground, she took Robin’s mother’s flowers as if puzzled as to how she came to be here or to find herself with this harsh-looking man, her husband and clearly a law unto himself. There was kindness, though, in the way he took her hand to lead her in and through to the small, dark parlour, where light from the lamp and fire trembled in her round, pale eyes like tears.

“This is to be yours, my dear,” said Jorfant, as if the little room were a greatly thoughtful gift, and perhaps to him it was, for who could ever know what was in Jorfant’s unreadable mind? “Now then, Esme, Robin here is my nephew and he’s always about the place, so you may send him out for things, ribbons and such, if you’ve a fancy for them. This lady is my brother Frank’s widow, Rosalind. I’m sure she will be a friend to you when the time comes.”

There were implications in this speech not lost on Esme, who said, “I will not be going out then, Jorfant?”

“With me, of course, as a married lady. After that, you will soon be too busy with babies to think of going out, I dare say. Otherwise, you have your parlour here to keep you away from the bother of the inn. You can sew and make lace here as you did before. Esme makes very fine lace. They will miss those skilled hands at home, won’t they?” He patted her hand here in a proprietorial way. “Still, we shall have excellent lace to sell now too, will we not, Esme?”

Esme nodded meekly, although surely this was far too dark a room for that activity, as Robin’s mother pointed out, saying, “Why, Jorfant, her poor eyes will soon tire dreadfully doing such work in here!”

He gave her a look of sharp displeasure at being contradicted. His warmth withdrew as if a kindness were being rebuffed and he would not forget it, injured within.

“I dare say Robin can keep a bright lamp lit, can’t he?” he demanded brusquely.

“Of course, Uncle,” Robin hastened to say.

“Well, then. And my attic room here is as light as that at the farm, is it not, if the parlour isn't good enough?” Again, for all there was no reason for it, his tone was a resentful one of needlessly wounded pride and suggested the criticism had been Esme's too, although she had made none by word or look. The complexity of his manner brought an awkward silence, as it so often did. “Rosalind,” Jorfant continued after a simmering moment, “Help Esme settle into our rooms upstairs, will you? I have business at market now. It won’t do for all the produce we brought to spoil, will it? I’ve butter, cheese, good meat, vegetables and oats to sell. Robin, get about helping me with it, boy. Bring the handcart round to the gig and get unloading.”

“Yes, Uncle.”

Esme was a farm girl, so not sheltered from the truth about babies, but the immediacy of Jorfant’s remarks about her soon being busy with them and Robin’s mother being a friend ‘when the time came’ (that clearly being the time Jorfant had in mind) seemed to have struck her into silence. She followed Robin’s mother upstairs without saying any more while Robin and his uncle went out to deal with the marketing. The day was not over yet and there was plenty of selling time for new goods coming into it.

Perhaps on that first occasion, Jorfant had been trying to impress Esme with her newly married status because in fact, as the innkeeper’s wife, she too was sometimes called upon to serve the customers. Jorfant had her bring her ringlets through when any soldiers, excise men or members of the local militia were in, a distraction while Robin was sent scurrying to warn the villagers to pass the word on. Apart from that, Jorfant kept her close unless she went out on his own arm—to church, to market with some of the pretty lace she had made, or perhaps along the broad promenade below the church with him. He dangled her before people’s eyes like a bauble in a jeweller’s window, so that her comeliness seemed of elusive interest and there appeared to be a purpose to it beyond showing her off. He fed, clothed and sheltered Esme and they were doubtless fully man and wife, but Jorfant’s smouldering indifference, with something amoral beneath it, seemed as untouched by Esme as it was by anyone, Robin thought. Robin’s mother listened to his talk of it shaking her head.

“Just do as you’re told, Robin. That’s the best way with Jorfant,” she advised.

At least there were no more of Jorfant’s unexpected and intermittent visits to the cottage now he was married, for which they were both grateful. The day soon came when Sophie’s father sent for Robin again to pass a message to Jorfant about which merchant ship was due to arrive carrying contraband by prior arrangement. In partnership with Mr Gardiner, Jorfant then smuggled on liquor and goods from the supply ships and kept his own inn well stocked. Mr Gardiner was always delighted to see Robin on these occasions, if only as the messenger boy, and he would be sent running back to his uncle with the name of the ship and when the next delivery might be due to come in.

“The Floribunda is not far from port now, young Robin,” he instructed him today. “I expect news of a signal any day soon. Will you remember the name?”

“Of course, sir!”