The Forest - Edward Rutherfurd [327]
Even Isaac Seagull’s keen eyes could not pierce this darkness. He was supervising personally. This shipment was the big one. Behind him, two hundred men and eighty ponies waited quietly in a long, well-ordered line.
Each pony could carry a pair of barrels with flattened sides, roped together over its back. These barrels were called ankers and each held eight and a third imperial gallons. The men would mostly carry a pair of half-ankers, one on their chest, the other on their back, each weighing about forty-five pounds – a heavy load when they had a tenor fifteen-mile march ahead of them.
The tea was packed in waterproof oilskins, known as dollops. A pony could carry several of these. The bales of silk were also in oilskin packages, but for these Seagull had devised a special form of transport. Half a dozen tall, strong women were standing just behind him. They wore long dresses that hung very loose on them. As soon as the silks were brought to shore, however, their dresses would come off. The silks would be wound round them, yard after yard, as though they were being embalmed, and at last, when they had all they could carry and were twice the girth they had been before, they would put their dresses back on, and ride and walk their way to their various markets. Within a couple of days, two of these women would be up at Sarum and another over at Winchester.
As he waited in the dark, Isaac Seagull smiled to himself.
There were so many routes you could choose when you were landing goods on the shores of the Forest. For the smaller drops Luttrell’s Tower in the east was useful. So was the Beaulieu River. It amused him, on occasion, to use the old fortress of Hurst Castle: the Customs had actually put an agent there a few years back, so Isaac Seagull, in his genial way, had gone to see him and asked: ‘Would you like me to break your head or pay you?’
‘Pay,’ the fellow had said promptly and, although he reported to Grockleton, he had followed Seagull’s orders ever since.
On the west side of the Forest, along the coast between the spit of Hurst Castle and Christchurch, there were two wonderful landings. These were the narrow gullies coming down to the shore where a string of packhorses could wait unseen. Bunnies, these little defiles were called: Becton Bunny lay just below Hordle; Chewton Bunny a mile or so further west. Chewton was good because the beach on each side contained treacherous quicksands, to impede the Customs men. From Chewton you went up a mile or so to the Cat and Fiddle Inn, then across the Forest, up the track called the Smugglers’ Road between Burley and Ringwood. There was the first of several Free Traders’ markets held quite regularly up that way. And from the Smugglers’ Road you passed up into the northern forest and far beyond.
But back in the eastern forest there was also Pitts Deep. There were advantages to that, too. You could go eastwards, skirting Southampton; or you could go by Boldre church and across into the western forest by the ford above Albion House, picking up the Smugglers’ Road a few miles further on. Pitts Deep was good, and less obvious. That was why a shipment was coming in there now.
Grockleton tensed. Without his realizing it his claw-like hands gripped Puckle’s arm, causing Puckle to curse quietly as the lantern shook.
For a moment more the Customs officer failed to see anything, but then he did: a faint blue light, winking out at sea. Puckle flashed the lantern again. Two more blue winks. Two from Puckle. Then a long blue flash.
‘They’re coming in,’ the smuggler said quietly. A partial break in the cloud gave them a little starlight now. Just enough to make out the water’s edge and the white lines of the lapping waves. Grockleton felt his pulse racing. The moment of triumph. Soon it would be his.
Beside him Puckle did not feel any excitement at all. For him, he knew, this was the final action that must seal his fate. ‘Don’t worry,’ Grockleton, meaning