“Milady?”
“Never mind,” I said. “You were telling me about casks and fires.”
“Oh, indeed, yes.” Fergus brushed back his thick shock of black hair with his hook. “It was the day before I met you again, milady, at Madame Jeanne’s.”
The day I had returned to Edinburgh, no more than a few hours before I had found Jamie at the printshop. He had been at the Burntisland docks with Fergus and a gang of six men during the night, taking advantage of the late dawn of winter to retrieve several casks of unbonded Madeira, smuggled in among a shipment of innocent flour.
“Madeira does not soak through the wood so quickly as some other wines do,” Fergus explained. “You cannot bring in brandy under the noses of the Customs like that, for the dogs will smell it at once, even if their masters do not. But not Madeira, provided it has been freshly casked.”
“Dogs?”
“Some of the Customs inspectors have dogs, milady, trained to smell out such contraband as tobacco and brandy.” He waved away the interruption, squinting his eyes against the brisk sea wind.
“We had removed the Madeira safely, and brought it to the warehouse—one of those belonging apparently to Lord Dundas, but in fact it belongs jointly to milord and Madame Jeanne.”
“Indeed,” I said, again with that minor dip of the stomach I had felt when Jamie opened the door of the brothel on Queen Street. “Partners, are they?”
“Well, of a sort.” Fergus sounded regretful. “Milord has only a five percent share, in return for his finding the place, and making the arrangements. Printing as an occupation is much less profitable than keeping a
“I daresay,” I said. Edinburgh and Madame Jeanne were a long way behind us, after all. “Get on with the story. Someone may cut Jamie’s throat before I find out why.”
“Of course, milady.” Fergus bobbed his head apologetically.
The contraband had been safely hidden, awaiting disguise and sale, and the smugglers had paused to refresh themselves with a drink in lieu of breakfast, before making their way home in the brightening dawn. Two of the men had asked for their shares at once, needing the money to pay gaming debts and buy food for their families. Jamie agreeing to this, he had gone across to the warehouse office, where some gold was kept.
As the men relaxed over their whisky in a corner of the warehouse, their joking and laughter was interrupted by a sudden vibration that shook the floor beneath their feet.
“Come-down!” shouted MacLeod, an experienced warehouseman, and the men had dived for cover, even before they had seen the great rack of hogsheads near the office quiver and rumble, one two-ton cask rolling down the stack with ponderous grace, to smash in an aromatic lake of ale, followed within seconds by a cascade of its monstrous fellows.
“Milord was crossing in front of the rank,” Fergus said, shaking his head. “It was only by the grace of the Blessed Virgin herself that he was not crushed.” A bounding cask had missed him by inches, in fact, and he had escaped another only by diving headfirst out of its way and under an empty wine-rack that had deflected its course.
“As I say, such things happen often,” Fergus said, shrugging. “A dozen men are killed each year in such accidents, in the warehouses near Edinburgh alone. But with the other things…”
The week before the incident of the casks, a small shed full of packing straw had burst into flames while Jamie was working in it. A lantern placed between him and the door had apparently fallen over, setting the straw alight and trapping Jamie in the windowless shed, behind a sudden wall of flame.
“The shed was fortunately of a most flimsy construction, and the boards half-rotted. It went up like matchwood, but milord was able to kick a hole in the back wall and crawl out, with no injury. We thought at first that the lantern had merely fallen of its own accord, and were most grateful for his escape. It was only later that milord told me he thought that he had heard a noise—perhaps a shot, perhaps only the cracking noises an old warehouse makes as its boards settle—and when he turned to see, found the flames shooting up before him.”
Fergus sighed. He looked rather tired, and I wondered whether perhaps he had stayed awake to stand watch over Jamie during the night.
“So,” he said, shrugging once more. “We do not know. Such incidents may have been no more than accident— they may not. But taking such occurrences together with what happened at Arbroath—”
“You may have a traitor among the smugglers,” I said.
“Just so, milady.” Fergus scratched his head. “But what is more disturbing to milord is the man whom the Chinaman shot at Madame Jeanne’s.”
“Because you think he was a Customs agent, who’d tracked Jamie from the docks to the brothel? Jamie said he couldn’t be, because he had no warrant.”
“Not proof,” Fergus noted. “But worse, the booklet he had in his pocket.”
“The New Testament?” I saw no particular relevance to that, and said so.
“Oh, but there is, milady—or might be, I should say,” Fergus corrected himself. “You see, the booklet was one that milord himself had printed.”
“I see,” I said slowly, “or at least I’m beginning to.”
Fergus nodded gravely. “To have the Customs trace brandy from the points of delivery to the brothel would be bad, of course, but not fatal—another hiding place could be found; in fact, milord has arrangements with the owners of two taverns that…but that is of no matter.” He waved it away. “But to have the agents of the Crown connect the notorious smuggler Jamie Roy with the respectable Mr. Malcolm of Carfax Close…” He spread his hands wide. “You see?”
I did. Were the Customs to get too close to his smuggling operations, Jamie could merely disperse his assistants, cease frequenting his smugglers’ haunts, and disappear for a time, retreating into his guise as a printer
