Chapter 1 – Present day
It all started, I suppose, when my cat had her kittens. How it escalated from there into a tale of smuggling, betrayal and murder is a long story.
I’d only recently moved in, to my dream house – or at least it would be my dream house, once I’d renovated it – when I realised Mir was pregnant. She’s a lovely little cat – a tabby, petite and very friendly. At barely a year old she was young to be pregnant, but what can you do? Anyway, as her time grew near, I placed a few boxes lined with old towels around the house so she’d have a choice of labour wards and would hopefully spare my bed. It worked – she had her kittens in a box I’d put in the kitchen, near her food bowl. Just three in the litter – two were tabby and white, and the third slightly gingery in colouring. All healthy.
And then, when they were four days old, Mir decided to move her kittens. According to my book on caring for cats and kittens, this is quite common behaviour. The mother cat’s instincts make her want to hide the kittens somewhere away from where they were born. I’d left the boxes around to give her some options, but she declined all those, and chose the most awkward place imaginable.
I had just discovered where she was, when the doorbell rang. I ran to answer it, feeling flustered, not wanting to leave Mir and the kittens where they were but honestly not having much choice for the moment.
On the doorstep was a tall man perhaps a little older than me, in his thirties, with medium-brown hair and an attractive smile. He held out his hand to shake. ‘Nick Marshall, from Marshall Construction. You must be Mrs Galton? You asked me to come and quote for some building work?’
I had forgotten I’d arranged for another builder to come round to look at the work I wanted doing. I’d already had one good quote, from Seaway Renovations, but it’s always wise to get a few quotes and compare. Well, I hadn’t totally forgotten – just the panic I’d been in that morning as I searched for Mir and the kittens had put it right out of my head.
‘Yes, thanks. Call me Millie, though, please.’ Since splitting up with Steve I found I didn’t like being called Mrs Galton anymore. I was debating reverting to my maiden name of Sedgewick but I’d never much liked that surname and changing it once had been enough of a hassle. ‘Come through. I’ll show you what needs doing.’
He followed me through the small hallway and into the sitting room at the back of the house. I glanced over to the bricked-up chimney breast, and couldn’t help myself from blurting it all out. ‘I’m a bit distracted, Mr Marshall, sorry. My cat’s taken her kittens through there. I can’t reach them, and they can’t stay there.’
‘Where? And please, call me Nick.’
I bent down to show him. The fireplace had been closed up at some stage in the house’s history, with a plastic grid embedded to provide some ventilation. The grid was broken, and Mir had somehow squeezed herself and her kittens in through it. Using my phone as a torch, I could see her curled up in the furthest corner with the kittens neatly in a row, suckling. It was a large fireplace and my arms were not long enough to reach them to pull them out. ‘There. Can you see them?’
‘Ha! Yes. My word, that is really not very convenient, is it?’
‘It certainly isn’t.’
‘OK, so I have a few tools in the car. Not everything but I think I can fix this.’ Without waiting for an answer Nick went out to his car, parked on Stanpit just in front of my house. He was back in a moment carrying a blue canvas tool bag, which he dumped down in front of the chimney breast. Pulling out a large screwdriver he began trying to take out the rusted screws that held the grid in place.
I wished I’d thought of that. Somewhere in the garage I had a box of tools. Not many – Steve had kept most of our joint tool collection. But he’d sorted me out a ‘starter kit’ as he’d called it. ‘So you can do the basics,’ he’d said, with a sad smile.
Nick grunted. ‘Arrgh. Screws are so rusted. And this one’s lost its slot – as though someone’s tried to remove it before and the screwdriver’s slipped. I can crowbar the grid off, but it might mean some of the surrounding plaster breaks away.’
‘That’s OK. I’m thinking of opening up that fireplace anyway.’
Nick nodded. ‘OK, then.’ He pulled out a crowbar and rammed it behind the grid, levering it outwards. As he’d predicted, some plasterwork around the edge of the hole crumbled away, sending a cloud of dust into the air. With the grid off, there was more space to reach into the fireplace.
‘Thank you, I think I can get them now. Can you shine the torch while I reach in …’ I crouched down and put my whole arm and shoulder into the hole, and could just reach the animals. Should I grab Mir first or the kittens? The kittens, I thought. If I got them out, she’d follow.
With Nick leaning over me angling the phone’s light inside, I got one kitten out, transferred it to my other hand and picked up the second, which Nick took from me. As I grabbed the third Mir decided to assert her authority. I was holding the kitten around its tummy, and she grabbed it by the scruff of its neck. A tug of war ensued. ‘Bugger!’ I exclaimed.
‘What’s wrong?’ There was not enough space for Nick to see what was going on.
‘We’re having a bit of a tussle over the third kitten.’ I let go, extracted my arm and took the two kittens we’d retrieved, placing them into one of the prepared boxes. Mir then, as I’d hoped, came out from the fireplace to see where they were, and I was able to quickly reach in and remove the third kitten. ‘Come on, girl. Here they are, look. All safe and sound and believe me, this is a much better place for them.’ I put the third kitten with the other two and watched while Mir sniffed and licked them, checking all was well, and then with a glare at me settled down in the box to feed them.
Nick was standing, hands in pockets, grinning. ‘The things you do in this job. I’ve never before had to rescue kittens from a fireplace.’
‘Thanks so much,’ I said, grinning back at him.
He knelt down again and switched his phone torch on once more, inspecting the inside of the fireplace. ‘So you want to open this up? It’s huge – almost an inglenook. It’ll make a real feature in this room.’
‘Wonder why someone closed it off?’
‘Maybe too draughty. It’s probably too large to work well as a fireplace. Hmm, that’s interesting.’
‘What?’
‘It looks like … hold on …’ He reached in, as I had done, his whole arm and shoulder. It looked as though he was groping around at the back. ‘No, can’t quite reach. Well, I guess when we knock this brickwork out we’ll be able to see.’
I suppressed a smile at the way he’d said ‘we’. I hadn’t even talked through what I wanted done on the house yet, nor had he quoted. And I was fairly certain I’d use Seaway Renovations, as their quote had been very reasonable. Yet I liked Nick, already, and not just because he’d helped out with Mir and the kittens. ‘So tell me – what did you spot in there?’
He shrugged. ‘Not sure. Looks like there’s some sort of metal backplate to the fireplace. Which is odd. Anyway, as I said, we’ll see.’ As though realising the assumption he was making that I was going to employ him, he blushed a little. ‘I mean, when you open up the fireplace, whoever does it, you’ll see then.’
I smiled. ‘Right, I should talk you through all the work, I guess. Come on, let me give you a tour. I only moved in a couple of weeks ago, and this place looks as though it hasn’t been updated since the Seventies. But I fell in love with it as soon as I saw it.’
‘It certainly has potential. Right then, lead the way.’
I’d first seen the house four months earlier. I’d not been in the best state at the time. Steve and I had decided to separate – actually we’d been drifting apart for a long time, but somehow we hadn’t wanted to admit it was over. Besides, neither of us could afford to move out and pay rent.
But then Mum died. That brought it home to me that I needed to move on. You only get one life to live, after all. We had a long, tearful conversation and agreed to call it a day. Mum had left me a big wodge of money, and it meant that I could afford to start looking for my own house. We put our marital home on the market too, and Mum’s money plus my share of that meant I had a reasonably large deposit. Just as well, as my salary wouldn’t allow for too big a mortgage.
I can’t remember how many houses I looked at online, or even how many I trudged round in the company of an estate agent. Far too many. And none felt right – too big, too small, too modern, too ugly, in the wrong location.
Until this one. This eighteenth-century cottage whose front door opened directly onto the pavement. This crumbling stone building, with mossy roof tiles and cracked rendering, with an archway that once would have provided access for horses and carts to the back yard, around which were a few outbuildings including a garage. This rambling ruin with its overgrown garden backing onto the marsh, its Sixties kitchen and bathroom, its peeling wallpaper and rotting carpets. The previous owner – an old man – had lived in it for many years on his own. After he died his family had just left the house empty for a couple of years before finally putting it on the market. And then no one had wanted to buy it, given its condition. Until I saw it, and somehow, it spoke to me. There was potential in that big back room, with its view across the marsh to Christchurch Harbour. There was charm in the wonky roof line and low ceilings. There was history in this house; it had a past and I wanted to give it a future.
I’d wanted a new start. I’d wanted to build myself a new life. Why not give this old cottage a new life too – we could be rebuilt together.
Nick made a few notes as we walked around the house, nodding at my ideas, suggesting a few of his own, tapping on walls to see if they were solid or just studwork, peering at the view out of the upstairs windows. ‘You could knock through here, make this small room into an en-suite bathroom to that big bedroom at the back,’ he said. ‘And then open up this landing a little – that bit of wall isn’t really doing anything. You’ll get light to it from the window on the stairs, then. And what’s the attic like – can I take a look?’
I hadn’t been up there myself, but I had a stepladder in the garage, and Nick was able to get up using that. ‘Needs insulation, and then it could be boarded as storage. You’ve got a few roof tiles missing. Chimney looks sound from here.’
I was warming to Nick. He seemed to know what he was talking about. But I was worried about the quote – he’d already suggested a lot more work needed to be done than Seaway had included.
‘If you’re worried about the cost, we can probably split the work into essentials and non-essentials,’ Nick said as he climbed down from the loft, as though he’d read my mind. ‘Do the essentials – repairing the fabric of the house and giving yourself a couple of decent rooms to live in – first. Pick off the rest bit by bit. Doesn’t all have to be done at once.’
‘I like that idea.’
‘So what I’ll do, is give you an itemised quote, and mark the things you really need to get done sooner rather than later. Millie, I’ll be honest, I’d absolutely love to work on this house for you. We get a lot of jobs building extensions onto 1980s houses, or converting bungalow lofts into bedrooms. I’d love to be working on an older house, especially one where the owner wants to be as sympathetic to its history as you do. That fireplace … Anyway, it’ll take me a few days to get the quote sorted out. In the meantime, if you’ve anything more you want to discuss, here’s my card. Ring me any time.’ He smiled, and I noticed how one side of his mouth went up a little more than the other. A quirk that made the smile seem even warmer, more genuine, than it obviously was.
‘That sounds perfect. Being honest back, I’ve already had one decent quote for the work but I wanted others for comparison. I’m definitely impressed by you, but you understand …’
‘Of course. You’re right to get a few builders in to look at it. They’ll all have different thoughts as well, which might help you have more ideas. Well, I’ll get the quote to you as soon as possible, and I’ll look forward to hearing from you.’ He paused a moment, looking thoughtful. ‘Even if you don’t decide to employ my firm, I’d love to know what’s in that fireplace.’
I showed him out, and waved as he drove off, then wondered what on earth I was doing. You wave off old friends who’ve come to visit; not builders you’ve just met, with a strange obsession about your fireplace. Suddenly I had a horrible thought – what if Mir had taken her kittens back into the fireplace while we’d been upstairs? I rushed back in, but thankfully she and the little ones were still in the same box, which I’d tucked into a corner behind a pile of boxes where I hoped she’d feel safe. Just in case, I found a flattened cardboard box and taped that firmly over the hole in the wall. Mir watched, a resigned look on her face. I think she’d decided it was too dirty and draughty in there for the kittens anyway.
Chapter 2 – 1783
There was to be a run tonight, landing contraband. Esther Harris felt a surge of excitement tinged with trepidation rush through her at the thought. No matter how many times she’d taken part, she always found it such a thrill to be involved, even though she was well aware of the dangers. Probably half the people in the town were involved, she realised, in one way or another. She and her family perhaps more so than many, as her father was the landlord of The Ship at Anchor pub, on Stanpit. They preferred the term ‘free traders’ rather than smugglers.
‘What time is the run tonight, lass?’ Pa asked her, as she put away a tray full of tankards on the shelves above the bar.
‘Ten o’clock. There’ll be a half moon. Hoping the Revenue men aren’t around to see us.’
Pa was wiping tables. ‘Thomas Walker was in earlier. Told me they’ll keep away, as long as they get the usual.’
Esther nodded. There was a deal in place, with the Revenue men, or with most of them, at least. If they were given a portion of the haul so they could claim to have seized it and could fill in their reports accordingly, they’d turn a blind eye while the rest of it was being landed, stored and distributed. It had worked that way for as long as Esther had been involved.
‘Can we trust Walker?’ Esther’s older brother, Matthew, asked. ‘I know he gets a cut, but I don’t fully trust any of them. If it paid them more to turn us in, they’d do it at the drop of a hat.’
‘Walker’s sound,’ Pa said, with a glance at Esther. She felt herself blush. She knew Walker liked her, but she also knew he wasn’t the man for her. Not while Sam Coombes lived and breathed.
Matthew shrugged. ‘If you’re sure. As long as there aren’t Revenue men from elsewhere, we’ll be safe, then.’
Pa straightened up and groaned, a hand to his back. ‘I’m going to have to stay here again. Back’s too painful to go down to the beach. Esther, you’ll have to go in my place.’
She went over to him and put her arms around him. ‘I guessed I would. It’s all right, Pa. I’ve done it enough times. I know what to do.’
‘And you’ll both be careful?’
‘We will, Pa,’ Matthew said, with a grin at Esther. He loved the life – the night-time landing of goods, the camaraderie among the free traders, and the frisson of fear that one day they might be caught.
Pa nodded. ‘Well, I’ll be in the cellar and I’ll be able to help at this end.’
Esther kissed his stubbly cheek. ‘Thanks, Pa. I’ve some mutton stew for our dinner. I’ll warm it up now, while we’re quiet.’
Most of the men who’d normally be in the pub at this time were home, eating their own dinners or resting before the night’s activities. It was like having two jobs for many of them – farming, labouring or plying a trade during the day; working with the smuggling gangs at night. Not much chance to rest, but the rewards were worth it. Without the income from helping the free traders land and distribute goods, many local families would be in deep poverty. They accepted the risks in return for a better way of life.
They closed the pub at nine that night, locking and barring the front door. If there were to be any celebrations after a successful run, they’d take place at the Haven House Inn down at Mudeford Quay, rather than at Luke Harris’s hostelry on Stanpit. Esther took a rushlight through the secret entrance to the cellar – not the cellar they used for legitimately bought supplies but the other one – and Matthew followed her closely. It was always a little tricky negotiating the entrance, and she knew her Pa would struggle coming down later, with his bad back and all, but he’d manage, as he always did.
In the hidden cellar, tucked below and behind the main room of the pub, a few brandy kegs were still stacked against one wall since the last run. At this time of year contraband might be landed two or more times a week, depending on weather, tides and other factors.
Esther put the rushlight into a holder on the wall, and retrieved a bundle of clo...
