Cottage by the Sea (12 page)

   "Oh, Jesus!" Blythe groaned into the vortex whirling around her. "Shhh-it!"

   A second later a youthful voice behind her shoulder whispered loudly, "Psst! Blythe! In here! Behind the secret bookcase. Quickly, now, beauty, or Kit and Ennis might find us and tell their da!"

B
lythe Barton was among the select few who knew that the Hall had not just one, but
two
secret bookcases. Even so she was startled when, without warning, a section of the library wall suddenly pivoted inward in the same fashion as the book-lined panel that provided access to the kitchen pantry from the small sitting room.

   Kit Trevelyan's cousin, Garrett Teague, emerged from the shadows like some agitated apparition, gesturing frantically.

   "Blythe, come quickly! Kit and his father are on their way here! Follow me," he said urgently. "I'll explain everything!"

   The lanky seventeen-year-old whose black hair fell across his forehead to the arches of his ebony brows stood before her in the narrow opening between the movable bookcase and a comer of the library.

   "Zounds, but you'll addle my brain with such fool trickery!" she gasped. "How did you know—?"

   "You're not the only one who knows this hidey-hole, missy." The young man smiled mischievously. "Kit said Uncle Collis supplied the wood to line the inner chamber and then shared the cost with your da of expanding that cave down by Hemmick Beach."

   Blythe surveyed her childhood companion's plain brown breeches and matching cuffed coat, which were devoid of decoration. Garrett Teague and his Trevelyan cousins and she had kept company throughout their youth, but sadly, this engaging bookseller's son could not afford the luxury of fine clothes. The dark hue of the lad's jacket collar only served to emphasize his bronzed complexion. Local gossips whispered that Garrett inherited his faintly Latin cast from a survivor of the Spanish Armada in the time of Queen Elizabeth, two centuries earlier. The waterlogged sailor had been given shelter by a Gorran Haven man with a hot-blooded daughter. After rather hasty nuptials, so the story went, a girl child was born to this unlikely union, and 'twas she who married into the Teague family. From that day forward Teague descendants were distinguished by their romantic temperaments and swarthy skin tones.

   Garrett suddenly cocked his head and listened intently. Footsteps could be heard in the hallway, coming in their direction. The sound of voices—one a woman's, and the other loud and insistent and obviously male—was growing louder by the second.

   "Jesu, Blythe," he hissed. "'Tis bound to be my uncle Collis. I came to warn you that—"

   "Warn me?" Blythe echoed. "About what?"

   "Quickly!" her rescuer cried. "Or they'll find us out!"

   He dashed across the chamber and grabbed Blythe's arm by the ruffled cuff that encircled her wrist. She wore a light muslin frock featuring a pointed, boned bodice and scooped neck with additional ruffles sewn around its edge. Her feet were shod in dainty slippers made of soft leather dyed pale pink. Despite her stylish appearance, Garrett Teague unceremoniously dragged her across the room and into the gaping black hole behind the bookcase. "Kit told me about this secret door in Barton Hall," the boy whispered in the darkness. "'Tis best if we head for the stables!"

   "Garrett!" Blythe protested into the surrounding blackness.

   "What?" he grunted, pushing the secret bookcase back in place.

   "Pray, what is going on?" she demanded.

   "According to your guardian, there's to be no more waiting," Garrett replied testily. "You're to be betrothed to my cousin without delay," he added, his adolescent voice cracking under the weight of his announcement. "Now, stop prattling while I try to find the spring latch that will open the door into the walled garden."

   Shocked by the suddenness of this revelation, Blythe stood stock-still as she heard Garrett knocking softly against the sides of the hidden closet.

   "Has Ennis come with them?" she asked in a muted voice.

   There was silence and then she heard Garrett sigh.

   "Give it up, Blythe. As we both know full well, 'tis the eldest son who's come to claim your hand."

   "Guardian or no, 'tis daft for your uncle Collis to think I'd accept that pockmarked dolt who rarely has the wit to say a word to me," Blythe replied disdainfully. Cautiously she took a step forward and felt her toe collide with something solid. Her hands shot out to prevent her falling, and she clutched at a curved wooden object that appeared to be a barrel in a stack stored next to the wall.

   She groped her way along in the dark and sniffed the air. The sweetish smell that met her nostrils confirmed her suspicion that several casks of spirits had recently found a hiding place in the bowels of Barton Hall. Her father had had this secret room constructed after Blythe had gone up to London two years ago to visit her aunt. Her mother had warned her not to ask questions about the muffled sounds they sometimes heard in the dead of night, but Blythe had swiftly assumed the noises were caused by the delivery of contraband goods stored in barrels like the ones stacked at her feet.

   Garrett seized her by the wrist once more.

   "I am an eldest son," he proclaimed suddenly, the earnestness in his voice harsh in her ear. "If I had wealth and land, would you marry me?"

   "Before Kit Trevelyan? Of course," she laughed. "You're my friend."

   "Then we must hide, till we can make an escape."

   "Escape?" she asked, alarmed by the ferociousness in Garrett's voice. "To where?"

   "Plymouth!" Garrett answered promptly. "And thence to America, if you truly wish to avoid this match."

   "And how, my fine adventurer, do you propose we pay for passage and keep ourselves once we get there?" she demanded, snatching her hand away as the seriousness of the situation began to penetrate her consciousness.

   "We'll hide in the stable loft," Garrett whispered back, "and when the coast is clear, you'll gather together as much Barton family silver as we can carry."

   "And then?" Blythe asked, dumbfounded by his audacity.

   "I only just learned this morning of Uncle Collis's intentions to post the banns before your father's year of mourning has elapsed," Garrett replied, continuing to search for the door that led outside the castle walls. "However, with a silver candlestick or two, perhaps we could coax an owner of a village sloop to take us to Plymouth, or if we must, we could nick two ponies from your stable and ride there by cover of night."

   "Thirty-five miles? Are you mad?" Blythe felt a knot of cold dread nestle in the pit of her stomach. "Besides, how could we possibly escape without someone stopping us?" she said, stretching out her hands to see if she could assist in Garrett's search for the secret catch to the outside door. "Would Ennis come?"

   "He knows naught of this scheme," Garrett replied grimly, "nor would he risk his fine neck cloth to help, I can assure you! He stands to gain only if this match with Kit comes to pass."

   "'Tis not true!" Blythe protested, thinking of a series of brief, stolen kisses they'd shared recently in the shadow of the cliff at Dodman Point.

   "Ennis's one true love is art, Blythe Barton, and 'tis time you saw the truth of that. If Kit Trevelyan marries you, your wedding portion will be more than ample to send Ennis in fine style to Italy, where his only desire is to study with the master painters there."

   Just then the muted sound of shouting suddenly grew louder on the other side of the bookcase.

   "Aha!" Garrett announced triumphantly as a dim shaft of light penetrated their lair. "I've found the door to the outside! Come, now, let's make a dash for it."

   Blythe allowed her young companion to guide her swiftly down a path that bisected a kitchen garden enclosed by three high stone walls near the back door of the turreted mansion. Garrett fumbled to open the gate's latch, and the pair ran through a wooden arch encrusted with flowering purple clematis. He pointed in the direction of a path that veered off to her right, turning his back on the trail that headed left toward the sea.

   Within minutes they arrived, panting with exertion, inside the musty-smelling stone building filled with fat ponies stirring restlessly in their stalls. Garrett and Blythe scrambled up a steep ladder and dived into a pile of straw. The silence in the stable was broken only by the ponies pawing and snorting below the loft.

   "'Tis not Kit's fault… all of this…" Garrett ventured quietly, peering at her through heaps of hay.

   "Lud! What a fool you are sometimes!" scoffed Blythe, burrowing deeper in the straw and praying she wouldn't commence a fit of sneezing that would give them away. "Just because he's been ill, I suppose you feel sorry for your surly cousin?"

   "Ill?" Garrett protested. "The smallpox nearly killed the poor chap. And can you imagine your disposition if pockmarks had marred your pretty face?"

   "A pity it didn't kill him," she opined. "Then Ennis would be the eldest and I could marry…"

   The seventeen-year-old Barton heiress had the grace not to finish her sentence. She knew if she disclosed to Garrett the depths to which she desired to be wife to Ennis and Ennis alone, she would greatly wound his feelings. But everyone from Dodman Point to Nare Head, including Garrett Teague, knew full well that she had never made a secret of her single-minded affection for Ennis Trevelyan, Garrett's handsome, beguiling cousin. But neither her guardian nor her late father—truth be known—gave a farthing for her happiness. Not a whit, she thought morosely.

   "Blythe, you're a fool if you—" Garrett began in a low voice.

   "I know perfectly well why Collis Trevelyan has stormed over here," she interrupted in a hoarse whisper. "He's protecting an investment, pure and simple—and the soundest way to do that was to order me to marry his eldest son without delay. Well, I'll have none of it!"

   "Brave talk, m'girl," Garrett whispered back, "but then your only way out of this coil is to flee! You're key to the whole damnable scheme!"

   The truth of Garrett's words smothered Blythe's imminent retort. For years now the Trevelyans and the Bartons together had traded their locally raised wool to the Frenchies in exchange for contraband brandy and lace. These were items that, if one avoided paying the exorbitant taxes required by the Crown, fetched other needed goods and hard cash from Cornish landowners who lived farther inland and above all despised paying customs duties.

   In fact, Blythe had realized in the months since her father had died that she was merely a pawn in the game of "free trade" played by nearly everyone in Cornwall. The entire region was sick of paying for such foolhardy wars as the recently concluded fiasco in the American colonies. As a consequence, fishermen provided the smacks and wherries for transporting goods across the Channel. Farm laborers served as "bat men" to beat off any challengers when the wares were ferried from ship to shore into cellars, attics, and assorted hidey-holes near Gorran Haven and Mevagissey. The linchpin in the entire enterprise was landowners like the Bartons and Trevelyans who supplied the woolen goods for export and, later, provided strings of ponies needed to cart the foreign luxury goods inland to waiting customers.

   "If members of the clergy like the Reverend Randolph Kent didn't dance to Collis Trevelyan's tune, I might not be in such a coil!" Blythe hissed. Kent and his fellow men of the cloth had filled their flasks with free brandy by allowing contraband kegs of spirits and ropes of tobacco to be stored in coffins and buried in their churchyards in the dead of night under the collective noses of the harried customs officials. As far as Blythe could determine, everyone in Cornwall benefited from the illicit enterprise except her!

   "The government's taxation of the West Country is wholly unfair, and you know it!" Garrett rasped, defending his mild-mannered relative. "Uncle Randolph says that the Trade keeps the poorer folk from starving when gales ruin the crops or the fishing's poor or the tin mines play out. But then, I don't suppose m'lady ever considered such calamities in her pampered world—brat!"

   Stung, she glared back at him and retorted, "Well, perhaps there's truth to some of that, but the king's men are taking aim at the gentry now, as well, and your two uncles put us all in danger—not just the small fish like you, Garrett Teague!"

   Both of them knew full well that smuggling had become so widespread on the west coast, as the eighteenth century drew to its close, that red-coated king's men had taken to keeping an eye on even the most prominent local families like the Edgecumbes, Bartons, and Trevelyans. As recently as the previous day, a clutch of soldiers had made an unwelcome and totally unexpected visit to Barton Hall at the precise hour that goods on a French ship were due to be off-loaded and stored in the library's hidey-hole. Fortunately the Bartons' stable boy had had the wit to run to Hemmick Beach and signal the vessel away, but everyone involved in the business—and especially Blythe's widowed mother—had been rattled by such a close call.

   With the Barton-Trevelyan coastal properties joined through the bond of marriage, Blythe knew that the Preventive Service would have a difficult time guarding against illegal shipments of brandy, tea, and lace landing on Hemmick Beach. Barton-Trevelyan lookouts posted along the estates' boundaries to warn of the approach on land and sea of such nosy "visitors" would make it impossible for a Revenue Service spyglass to gather any proof of the movement of goods from ship to shore.