Smuggler's Moon by Bruce Alexander

surely a blessing in disguise. I was caught in a raid on the beach carriedout by the excisemen together with the Deal constables. Just why I, or Dick Dickens, or any of them, thought this sort of thing on the beach could go on without getting the notice of the excisemen and the magistrate I’ll never know. Or maybe Dickens and those shadowy men behind him thought their bribes had purchased a free hand to operate indefinitely. Or maybe, as Dickens told me on a jail visit, it was all just a misunderstanding. Anyway, this raid looked specially bad, for an exciseman was shot and killed by one of the wagon drivers, an evil old ne’er-do-well named Rufus Tucker. When I heard the sound of that shot, I took off running—and went right into the arms of a constable. Others were better than I was at getting away. In fact, most were, but because a man had been killed, there could be no question of getting off with a fine and jail time. The five of us who went before the magistrate—Rufus Tucker was one—could all have been sent on to Old Bailey, judged guilty, and hanged on the next hanging day. But as it happened, only one was executed, and that was Tucker. The remaining four, not one of us over twenty-five, were given the opportunity to enlist in the Army, and given the chance, we took the King’s shilling. The year was 1758, you see, and replacements were needed for those lost in the American colonies in the war against the French. Well, you see the result: Here I am, a veteran of campaigns in the Ohio Valley and Canada, alive and healthy, though missing an arm. Yet that—as you, Sir John, and you, Jeremy, well know—was lost later in the Grub Street campaign.”
    Sir John, who had been squirming a bit during the last sentence or two of Mr. Perkins’s tale, banged upon the ceiling of the coach with his stick, signaling thus to the driver for a stop.
    “A good story, well told,” said Sir John to the constable. ”But I fear I must interrupt now and make for the bushes. Pray God this will be the last such stop on this journey.”
    The coach came at last to a complete halt. He jumpeddown to the road below, and I followed with the latest issue of the
Gentleman’s Magazine
in hand.
    “Do you see a likely place, Jeremy?”
    “Over this way, sir,” said I, taking him by the arm. (Only in emergencies did he permit this.) I led him off the road to a copse of trees with sufficient undergrowth to provide a blind.
    “Paper?”
    I put the magazine in his hand.
    “You may leave me now, Jeremy. I shall call you when I need you.”
    And so leave him I did. There was no arguing with him at such times as these. Insofar as he was able, he maintained his privacy in spite of his blindness.
    Returning to the coach, I found Clarissa and Mr. Perkins had taken this opportunity to loosen the knots in their limbs. As I approached, I saw that their attention was wholly taken by something down the road and just out of my sight. The driver and coachman seemed also to be staring off into the near distance. Once I reached them, I saw that the object of their interest was a kind of large cage suspended over the road from the strongest limb of a stout old oak tree. Inside that cage was a skeleton which, as if in some grotesque All-Hallow’s-Eve masquerade, was dressed in a tattered, dusty, and faded suit of clothes. I had heard of such before, though never before had I seen one.
    “They call it a gibbet,” said Mr. Perkins, thus informing Clarissa. ” ‘Twas thought a terrible disgrace amongst condemned men to know their bodies would be put on display in such a way.”
    “As indeed it should have been,” said the coachman. ”Dead or no, who would want the corbies peckin’ out his eyes or pullin’ off his nose?”
    “Gibbets used to be common as flies on a carcass,” said the driver. ”Seemed there was one decorating every cross-roadfrom one end of England to another. Don’t see them so much anymore.”
    Clarissa, quite unruffled by the