He did not begin the conversation with any agenda in mind beyond getting better acquainted with this particular remote corner of England. But after a while he found himself tilting his apparently aimless chatter in a certain direction and gathering a few snippets of interesting information, even if doing so involved sifting through the barefaced lies he was told to get at the truth.
Smuggling in this area? This area? Puzzled looks and slowly shaking heads. Scratched heads. No, never. Not in a hundred years or more, anyway. Not like in the days of their long-ago forebears. The old-timers, now, would be able to tell him a tale or two, but even they could only tell the tales they had been told around a winter fire when they were nippers. Smuggling wouldn’t pay these days, even supposing anyone was interested in starting it up. Not with the revenue men breathing down their necks and the riding officers wasting their time out and about on the headlands looking for what was just not there. The government was wasting its money on their wages, it was. There was nothing for them to find hereabouts. Why should they use their boats for smuggling, anyway, when they could get a good catch of fish far more easily and make a lawful and decent living that way?
Gangs? Violence? Enforcement? In the olden days, maybe. The old-timers did tell some tall tales that would lift the hairs on the back of your neck, but no doubt they were just that—tall tales with no real truth to them. All they were good for was to make the nippers’ eyes grow big as saucers and get them calling out for their mams in the middle of the night. These days they were a law-abiding lot, they were.
There was definitely smuggling in the area, then, Percy concluded as he walked back to his horse and rode home. And it was clearly organized for maximum efficiency, with a leader and rules and a sure way of enforcing secrecy.
He did not particularly care if there was smuggling or not. It was a fact of life and was never going to end. There was no point in getting all excited and righteous about it unless one were a revenue man or a riding officer—or unless one’s own property was sometimes used as a transportation route or even for storage, as the cellar of the dower house had once been. And unless the servants in one’s employ were being terrorized and even harmed, presumably so that they would keep their mouths shut.
And, he wondered suddenly, arrested by the thought, unless the room one occupied at night were facing full-on to the sea so that on some dark and moonless night one might, if one happened to be awake, have a panoramic view of a fleet of small boats rowing into the bay below from a larger ship anchored some distance out and of a band of smugglers appearing through the break in the headland loaded to the gills with boxes and casks?
Was that the explanation for damp beds and walls and soot and thick, opaque curtains?
He tried to picture Crutchley with a cutlass between his teeth and a patch over one eye. He found himself smiling at the mental image his mind created. But he had thoroughly aroused his own curiosity.
He rode back home and tethered his horse in the paddock behind the stables rather than leading it straight inside to be tended. He instructed Mimms, his own groom, to make himself scarce for at least the next half hour, and went in search of the limping stable hand he had seen a few times.
He was a thin, ginger-haired man who must be in his middle twenties if he had been fourteen when Lady Barclay went off to war with her husband, though he could easily have passed for thirty or forty or more. His legs were noticeably crooked. His face was pale and curiously dead looking. He was mucking out a stall when Percy hailed him.
“Bains?”
“M’lord?” He stopped what he was doing and looked in the general direction of Percy, round-shouldered and shifty-eyed.
“Walk out to the paddock with me,” Percy said. “I am a bit concerned about the right foreleg of my mount.”
The man looked surprised. “Shall I fetch Mr. Mimms?” he asked.
“I have just sent Mimms on an important errand,” Percy said. “I want you to take a look. You were personal groom to the late Viscount Barclay once upon a time, were you not?”
Bains looked further surprised. But he set aside his fork, brushed straw from his coat and breeches, and stepped outside. Percy waited until he had gentled the horse with skilled hands and crooning voice and was bent over its foreleg. They were out of earshot from the stables.
“Who did it to you?” he asked.
He did not expect an answer, of course, and he got none. Well, almost none. Bains did straighten up sharply.
“Who did what, m’lord?”
“Keep working,” Percy said, leaning his arms along the fence. “In all fairness, I did not expect you to come out with a name. Will you answer a few questions with yes or no, though? Viscount Barclay was opposed to the smuggling that was going on in this area, was he not?”
Bains was carefully examining the horse’s leg.
“I was just a lad,” he said. “I was not his lordship’s personal groom.”
“He opposed smuggling?”
“I knew his opinions on horses,” the man said. “That was all.”