Tanner’s Virgin

It was a clear day, with fair weather forecast through the following afternoon. I passed the afternoon walking in the fields. It was beautiful country, rugged and windswept and raw, and at a better time I would have enjoyed myself greatly. But there were too many things on my mind.

After di

By seven-thirty it was time to leave. A lad named Pensomething was driving me to Torquay in his father’s Vauxhall, and Poldexter had arranged to keep my stolen Morris until someone needed a ride to London, where it could be safely abandoned. We said our good-byes all around, toasted Free Cornwall as an equal partner in the Celtic-Speaking Union, and away I went. The Vauxhall was even worse than the Morris but at least I didn’t have to drive it.

I don’t know much about boats. The one I boarded at Torquay was about twenty feet long and it had a downstairs and an upstairs which I know aren’t called that. I guess you call them “topside” and “below,” but I wouldn’t swear to it. I really don’t know much about boats beyond the fact that it’s better to be on them than in the water. I also know that starboard is the right and port is the left, unless it’s the other way around.

Fortunately I didn’t really have to know much. I bargained with the captain and wound up paying twenty-five pounds for my passage, which was five less than I’d anticipated. Then I got on board and found a nice quiet corner and pretended to go to sleep. More men got aboard, and some of them loaded crates of something into the downstairs part of the ship, call it what you will. I went on pretending to be asleep, and I kept up this pretense until we were well under way, at which point it became impossible to go on because sleeping men do not vomit, and I had to.

One other thing I know about boats – if you have to throw up, you don’t do it into the wind. I threw up correctly and felt quite proud of myself. I was standing at the rail feeling proud of myself when a thin dark man with a spade-shaped beard came over and stood beside me. “You are not so much of a sailor,” he said dolefully.

“I picked the right side,” I said.

“How is this?”

“I didn’t puke into the wind,” I said. “I went to the port side and-”

“But this is the starboard side.”

“Precisely,” I said.

I escaped from him, regained my quiet corner and wrapped my mackintosh around me. It wasn’t raining but it might as well have been, because the Cha

I heard footsteps approaching and forced myself not to look up. The steps ceased. Beside me, a man cleared his throat laboriously. I ignored this, but he was not a man to be ignored. He sat down on the deck beside me and put a hand on my shoulder.

“You,” he said.

I made a pretense of coming groggily awake. I blinked at him. He was a young giant with shaggy blond hair beneath a black beret. His face was a mass of amorphous dough, almost featureless, marked by diagonal scars on both cheeks.

“Ho,” he grunted. “You sick, hah? You want cup soup? Hah?”

I thanked him but explained that I didn’t want a cup of soup just now.

“Tsigarette?”

Not that either, I said. Nothing just now, but thanks all the same.

“Is bad sea. Not to worry that you sick.”

His accent was hard to place. There was a Baltic undertone to it, and if I’d had to guess I’d have labelled him Fi

“You American?”

“Irish,” I said.

“Irish. Hah.”

He went away. An odd crew, I decided. One expects smugglers to be natives of the port from which they operate. On the south coast of England and the Isle of Wight, smuggling has long been a family occupation, with the tricks of the trade passed down from father to son over the centuries. It seemed odd that this particular smuggler would have put together a crew of foreigners. The Baltic giant was no native of Devon, nor was the dark man with the spade-shaped beard, who, now that I thought about it, had a definite flavor of Eastern Europe in his voice.

Time passed slowly. Most of the men were downstairs, and I was torn between a desire to join them – obviously it would be warmer there, with the wind less of a factor – and the stronger desire to stay by myself. The cha

I suppose we were halfway across when the Irishman sat down next to me.

“I’m told you’re a kinsman of mine,” he said. “Where are ye from?”

I looked at him. I couldn’t place his accent. “Then you’re Irish yourself,” I said.

“I am.”

That was no help. I said something about Liverpool.

“And you’re after saying good-day to Mother England, are ye?”

“I am that.”

“Not one of those IRA lunatics, I hope.”

“Oh, hardly that,” I said. “It seems I wrote a check and put some other lad’s name on the bottom of it, do you see?”

He laughed and slapped me on the shoulder. He told me his name was John Daly, and that his home was in County Mayo, and he’d spent some good days in Liverpool. Just where did I live in Liverpool? And did I know this chap, and that chap, and-

Someone called him about then, and he slapped me on the back again. “More bloody orders,” he said. “What you get when you take up with foreigners. They won’t keep me long, and I’ve a bit of holy water I’ll bring with me when I can. We’ll have ourselves a few jars and talk about the old place, shall we?”

“Ah, God save ye,” I said, or something like that.

And God help me, I thought. Something rather odd was going on and I seemed to be somewhere in the middle of it, along with being somewhere in the middle of the English Cha

A little while later I found out. The foreigners weren’t members of the crew.

They were the cargo.

I was feigning sleep again when I got the message. Evidently my act was a good one, because a trio of men in leather jackets passed me without notice and stood talking at the rail. The group did not include any of the men I had previously spoken to. With the steady roar of the wind, I could not at first make out any of what they were saying, but they did not sound English. Then the wind died down a bit, and it became evident that the reason they did not sound English is that they were speaking Russian.

I caught a few words here, a few words there. They were talking about guns and supplies and explosives and revolution. I listened intently while the wind blew up and died down, blew up and died down again. It was extremely frustrating. My Russian is fluent, but with the noise the wind was making I would have had trouble understanding them whatever language they spoke. On top of that they seemed to be speaking a dialect of Russian with which I was not familiar, so that of those words which were intelligible there were some I had trouble understanding.