The Wicked Trade (The Forensic Genealogist Book 7), Nathan Goodwin [little red riding hood ebook TXT] 📗

Morton would have given anything to know what was going on inside her mind, as she stared at the envelope on top; her face gave nothing at all away.

Finally, she lowered the letters to the table. ‘Shall I read them?’ she said quietly.

Jack shrugged. ‘They’re yours.’

Margaret pinched her lips together and nodded her head, seemingly having made up her mind. ‘I’ll read them later, in private, with a glass of sherry by that lovely big fire in the lounge at the Mermaid.’

‘More wine, down that end?’ Juliette called, as though they were seated at some grand banqueting table.

‘Yes, please,’ Morton answered, receiving a welcome flashback of his dream last night. Thankfully—so far at least—it had just been a nightmarish vision and not a premonition. Nobody had stood up to give a speech and the chances of his biological parents eloping together seemed reasonably far-fetched, now. One thing, though, which he did notice: Juliette was only drinking orange juice.

‘Are you having some?’ he said to her, as she passed him the wine bottle. She shook her head and screwed up her face, leaving Morton wondering if she might actually be pregnant.

He topped up Jack and Margaret’s drinks and watched again, as Juliette expertly stitched together the two halves of the table by bringing the focus to mutual ground: Grace’s birthday. She brought to the table a lion’s head cake with a lit candle in the shape of a number 1 and began to sing ‘Happy Birthday.’

Morton joined in the song, then sat back with his glass of wine and allowed himself to indulge in holding on to this very moment. A moment without a past, with his mother, father, wife and daughter and the hope of many more occasions such as this.

He remembered his dream and smiled inwardly at the idea of standing up now and singing ‘Auld Lang Syne’. The balance of stark inappropriateness would be weighted equally, he felt, against the pertinence of bringing to mind the rest of his family—his adoptive family—who had raised him and helped shape him into the man which he was today.

He didn’t stand up and sing, but he did raise a silent toast to the two people who, despite their deaths, he still called Mum and Dad.

Chapter Sixteen

8th May 1823, Boulogne, France

The tide was low and there were several hours still left until the waters would return to raise the fishing boat, Nancy, from her sandy grounding. The crew—experienced fishermen from Folkestone—had scarpered into the ancient city’s backstreets, spending their wages before they had been earned on whores, liquor and gambling. At the top of the beach, safely positioned above the highest of tides, was a small network of ramshackle huts which, Sam noticed, had grown exponentially in number since his first visit here. Outside of most of the huts were an assortment of men: a motley jumble of local French carpenters and Englishmen lured from their home parishes on the coast of Kent by the handsome profits to be reaped from the building of smugglers’ boats.

‘When the sea be a-coming for her, she be ready to go,’ the carpenter—Rummy was his nickname—declared with a snort. He had been their usual boat-builder for a while in Deal, but, as with many others of his occupation, he had shifted his home and business to Boulogne in response to the English customs laws, which prevented the building of boats greater than twenty-eight feet in length. Rummy was a gaunt wiry man with no perceptible teeth and suspicious over-blinking black eyes.

This newly crafted boat, which Sam now carefully examined, was thirty-eight feet in length, capable of holding two hundred barrels of contraband.

Rummy waited patiently, scratching feverishly into his tangled ginger beard. When Sam had finished the inspection, Rummy opened his right hand: ‘Forty pound.’

Sam raised his smock, revealing a leather purse hanging from around his neck. He took out the money and handed it over.

‘Happen this one be a-lasting you longer,’ Rummy said with a chuckle. ‘Not that I be a-caring, course!’

‘Hm,’ Sam answered, turning his back on the carpenter and walking towards the Capécure, the old harbour area. Despite knowing from experience that he had plenty of time before the tide would reach the boats, he marched purposefully to his destination: one of the many warehouses situated just behind the busy harbour.

The buildings—mostly grey and starchily disinclined to reveal the nature of their wares—grew larger as Sam neared the harbour district. He entered a narrow cobbled lane, devoid of sunlight, owing to the tall repositories on either side, all the time walking with a lurching step in order to avoid the unforgiving merchants in their horses and carts, and the generous dollops of fresh manure which rose up indiscriminately in small hillocks. The last building on the street was demarked only by the name, Delacroix painted in large white letters above the gaping doors. This was the entrepôt, a microcosm of the city itself, an intermediary place which united producer and exporter.

Inside the vast warehouse Sam briefly took in the scene, now much less impressive than on his first visit. At one end of the building were dozens of carts containing goods of every conceivable kind: wine from Nantes; gin from Schiedam; genever from Brussels; lace from Bruges; brandy from Andalusia; rum from the West Indies; tobacco from Virginia—all of it stored in barrels and crates now being worked by dozens of men with the ferocity of a colony of ants. They carried the goods to the other side of the warehouse, where they were stored temporarily—often for just a few minutes—before another group of workers at the opposing end of the warehouse loaded them onto empty carts ready for export.

The process was almost mechanical in its methodicalness and was overseen by the watchful eye of Madame Delacroix from her office situated high above the main depot.

Sam looked up and,