The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [260]
He passed the entrance of the Angel Inn. Mr Isaac Seagull, proprietor, standing in the door, gave him a bow and a smile. He glanced across the street. The landlady of the Nag’s Head, dead opposite, also outside, was smiling too.
‘Good morning, Mr Grockleton.’
He didn’t like it. He didn’t like it a bit.
He noticed the wooden sign of the Nag’s Head swing, just an inch or two, with a faint creak in the sea breeze. Was it a mere chance, or had people stopped all down the street? His feet alone were ringing on the cobblestones; the rest of the town had paused to watch him: a hundred masks, like painted figures in a carnival, or mummers at Hallowe’en. And behind those masks, so polite and smiling?
He knew. The long tail of his black coat, his starched cravat, his white knee-breeches, all suddenly felt as though they had turned to solid mortar, trapping him as securely as if he had been put in the stocks. His high, broad-rimmed hat seemed to be made of lead as he forced himself to raise it to a lady in front of the little bookshop. He knew what the friendly faces meant. They were all in on it.
There had been a run the night before and he was the Customs officer.
Customs and Excise. There had always been taxes to pay for the shipping and landing of goods. And traders had always tried to avoid them. The owlers of Lymington had shipped wool out of England illegally for centuries. But it was not the exports that were the main concern now. It was the goods coming in. And there lay the huge problem.
It was the scale of the business. As Britain’s commercial empire grew the tide of imports swelled at an ever increasing rate. Silks and laces, pearls and calicoes, wines, fruits, tobacco and snuff, coffee and chocolate, sugar and spices – the list was huge. Fifteen hundred different items were liable to Customs duties now. And greatest of all were the two items without which, it would seem, Englishmen would lose all their vigour and their island would probably sink beneath the waves. Tea: if drinking coffee and chocolate was fashionable, everyone, from highest to lowest, drank tea. And brandy.
Brandy was the elixir of life. Its uses were manifold. It protected against the plague, cured fever, colic, dropsy. It stimulated the heart, cleaned wounds and kept you young. If you were frozen, brandy warmed you. Why, if the surgeon had to saw off your leg, he’d give you a pint of brandy first before he hit you over the head. Or, of course, you could always drink it for pleasure. And on every drop of brandy you bought, Customs were due. But nobody wanted to pay.
‘It is unreasonable that people curse the Customs,’ Grockleton would observe plaintively to his wife, ‘when it is the Customs money that pays for the Navy vessels to protect the very trade which brings them the goods they desire.’
‘I am sure there is nothing rational about it,’ she would agree.
But however unreasonable – and Grockleton was perfectly right – everyone tried to avoid paying; smuggling was widespread. It was the job of the Customs officials to stop it. Customs officers were not popular.
The chief official for the whole region, the collector, was based at Southampton. The next most senior man was Grockleton at Lymington. Then there was another officer, rather less senior, in charge along the coast at Christchurch. In theory, the Customs officers had quite impressive forces at their disposal. There were sea vessels – swift cutters, usually – to intercept the smugglers’ boats. There were riding officers, one every four miles, to patrol the coast. There were tide-waiters to check incoming ships, gaugers to inspect barrels, weighers, searchers – the titles changed as the Customs men thought of new ways to regulate the trade. The senior men like Grockleton were almost always posted in from outside, so as to be free of local ties; quite often they had just retired from some other branch of government service. Salaries were modest, but the