The House of Arden, E. Nesbit [best historical fiction books of all time TXT] 📗

candle in it, and it smelt very nasty indeed. But what are smells, even those of hot tallow and hot iron, compared with the splendid exploring of a smuggler’s cave? It was everything the children had ever dreamed of⁠—and more.

There was the slow descent with the yellowness of the lantern flame casting golden lights and inky shadows on the smooth whiteness of the passage’s chalk walls. There were steps, there was a rude heavy door, fastened by a great lock and a key to open it⁠—as big as a church key. And when the door had creaked open there was the great cave. It was so high that you could not see the roof⁠—only darkness. Out of an opening in the chalk at the upper end a stream of water fell, slid along a smooth channel down the middle of the cave and ran along down a steep incline, rather like a small railway cutting, and disappeared under a low arch.

“So there’d always be water if you had to stand a siege,” said Edred.

On both sides of the great cave barrels and bales were heaped on a sanded floor. There were a table and benches cut out of solid chalk, and an irregular opening partly blocked by a mass of fallen cliff, through which you saw the mysterious twilit sea, with stars coming out over it.

You saw this, and you felt⁠—quite suddenly, too⁠—a wild wind that pressed itself against you like a wrestler trying a fall, and whistled in your ears and drove you back to the big cave, out of breath and panting.

“There’ll be half a gale tonight,” said the smuggler; for such, no doubt, he was.

“Do you think the French will land tomorrow in Lymchurch Bay?” Edred asked.

By the light of the lantern the smuggler solemnly winked.

“You two can keep a secret, I know,” he said. “The French won’t land; it’s us what’ll land, and we’ll land here and not in bay; and what we’ll land is a good drop of the real thing, and a yard or two of silk or lace maybe. I don’t know who ’twas put it about as the French was a-coming, but you may lay to it they aren’t no friends of the Revenue.”

“Oh, I see,” said Elfrida. “And did⁠—”

“The worst of it’ll be the lookout they’ll keep. Lucky for us it’s all our men as has volunteered for duty. And we know our friends.”

“But do you mean,” said Edred, “that you can be friends with a Frenchman, when we’re at war with them?”

“It’s like this, little man,” said the smuggler, sitting down on a keg that stood handily on its head ready for a seat. “We ain’t no quarrel with the free-trade men⁠—neither here nor there. A man’s got his living to get, hasn’t he now? So you see a man’s trade comes first⁠—what he gets his bread by. So you see these chaps as meet us mid-channel and hand us the stuff⁠—they’re free traders first and Frenchies after⁠—the same like we’re merchants before all. We ain’t no quarrel with them. It’s the French soldiers we’re at war with, not the honest French traders that’s in the same boat as us ourselves.”

“Then somebody’s just made up about Boney coming, so as to keep people busy in the bay while you’re smuggling here?” said Edred.

“I wouldn’t go so far as that, sir,” said the man, “but if it did happen that way it ’ud be a sort of special dispensation for us free-trade men that get our living by honest work and honest danger; that’s all I say, knowing by what’s gone before that you two are safe as any old salt afloat.”

The two children would have given a good deal to know what it was that had “gone before.” But they never did know. And sometimes, even now, they wonder what it was that the Edred and Elfrida of those days had done to win the confidence of this swaggering smuggler. They both think, and I daresay they are right, that it must have been something rather fine.

Having seen all the ins and outs of the cave, the children were not sorry to get back to Arden Castle, for it was now dark, and long past their proper bedtime, and it really had been rather a wearing day.

They were put to bed, rather severely, by Lady Arden’s own maid, whom they had not met before and did not want to meet again⁠—so shrivelled and dry and harsh was she. And they slept like happy little tops, in the coarse homespun linen sheets scented with lavender grown in the castle garden, that were spread over soft, fat, pincushion-beds, filled with the feathers of geese eaten at the castle table.

Only Elfrida woke once and found the room filled with red light, and, looking out of the window, saw that one of the beacon bonfires was alight and that the flames and smoke were streaming across the dark summer sky-driven by the wind that shouted and yelled and shook the windows, and was by this time, she felt sure, at least three-quarters of a gale. The beacon was lighted; therefore the French were coming. And Elfrida yawned and went back to bed. She was too sleepy to believe in Boney. But at that time, a hundred years ago, hundreds of little children shivered and cried in their beds, being quite sure that now at last all the dreadful prophecies of mothers and nurses would come true, and that Boney, in all his mysterious, unknown horror, would really now, at last, “have them.”

It was grey morning when the wind, wearied of the silly resistance of the leaded window, suddenly put forth his strength, tore the window from its hinges, drove it across the window frame, and swept through the room, flapping the bedclothes like wet sails, and wakening the children most thoroughly, far beyond any hope of “one more snooze.” They got up and dressed. No one was about in the house, but the front