Lucy Armstrong held the place next to my sister. Fielding's coachman, Jar vis, sat alone high upon the box; and I felt a twinge of consciousness at the thought of an earlier ride in a barouche-landau, and a more precarious seating. Mr. Sidmouth had parted from us some hours since—to avoid meeting Captain Fielding, I suspected, though the Gentleman Venturer of High Down claimed only pressing business about the farm.
“So much sun, and good food, and cheerful company, xvill prove tiring, I own,” the Captain said, with a broad smile on his weathered face. “We are quite surfeited with schemes of pleasure, are we not? Your uncle, Miss Armstrong, is the chief culprit, I fear, in all our cases of exhaustion.’ ‘Miss Armstrong dimpled prettily at this, but Cassandra seemed to find even so little effort as a smile beyond her powers, as I observed in some dismay. The Captain studied my sister an instant, and must have surmised the same. “We shall not tax you much further, Miss Austen,” he told Cassandra, “merely to charge you to enjoy the splendour of the countryside hereabouts, and that, in silence.”
And indeed, Captain Fielding could not have spoken with greater justice. The waving golden-green of the high downs in early September was a spectacle to behold; even so late in the day, with shafts of sunlight stretching warm and long towards the sea, haymakers were abroad in the fields, and the picturesque was completed by the introduction in the distance of the occasional hay-wain and stout horse, blowing at the chaff and the flies. To our left, as we progressed northwest, was the grey-blue edge of the cliffs, dropping precipitately to the sea; and then the sea itself, curling and re-forming ceaselessly against the rocks.
“Look!” Miss Armstrong cried. “A cutter! And a fast one indeed! It might almost be racing the ship behind.”
“I fear that it is.” Captain Fielding spoke grimly. “Jarvis! Pull up!”
The barouche rolled to a gentle stop with the coachman's “Whoa, there, Jezebel. Whoa, Shadrach,” and we four turned, as if possessed of one head, to gaze at the horizon.
The cutter was, as its name suggests, a fast little ship of light build and sleek lines; it clove through the waves like a knife through warm butter, making the most of a stiff breeze. Behind it came a heavier brig, flying the ensign of the Royal Navy—and that the one pursued the other, we little doubted.
“They would apprehend it,” Lucy Armstrong said, with all the wonder of nineteen. “Whatever for?”
“Wait but a moment,” Fielding replied, “and you shall see something curious.”
The cutter was nearing the distant end of the Cobb, and the Navy brig was well back; it looked as though the lead vessel should triumph. And then it came round, and almost to a halt in the waters west of the Cobb, and a frenzy of activity on the main deck could be observed.9
“They are jettisoning the cargo,” Cassandra said qui-edy. “It must be contraband.”
“Exactly.” Captain Fielding's voice held only satisfaction.
“Smugglers!” Miss Armstrong cried, her face alight. So even she was prey to the romance of the age. Her aunt could not approve it; but happily, we were spared Miss Crawford's strictures.
“What a fearful loss this must be, for the captain of that cutter,” I observed.
“Loss? That is very unlikely,” Captain Fielding replied. “They will have marked the place in Poker's Pool where the casks went down—indeed, they may even have buoyed them just below the surface—and will in due course retrieve them in the dead of night, in smaller boats. Provided, of course, the captain is not impressed.”10
“Why even attempt a landing in broad daylight?” my sister enquired. “It seems the worst sort of folly.”
“Lyme has been known as an hospitable port,” Captain Fielding said drily. “The local Revenue men and dragoons are so well-supplied with French brandy—of the sort that is very hard to come by—that more often than not, they are elsewhere engaged when the contraband arrives. Only one of your Revenue men is worth his salt— Mr. Roy Cavendish, the local Customs man—but his duties are too numerous, and his territory too broad, for the effective policing of Lyme. 1 cannot tell you how many afternoons I have watched waggons come in a long line to the shingle below the Cobb, their horses standing in surf up to their flanks, on purpose to fetch the smugglers’ shameful cargoes and bear them into the deep recesses of the Pinny,11 and thence to the Dorchester road,