Legg considered this. Finally, he said, “I may have some need for crewmen.”
“One of the useful things about my sailors,” Sabine continued, lowering her voice, “is that they have very short memories.” She looked at him through lowered lashes.
“I beg your pardon?” asked Legg. He’d scarcely taken his eyes from her face, but his expression tightened now from appreciative to something harder. Stoker stepped closer still.
Sabine exhaled prettily and looked right and left. “May I speak freely, Mr. Legg?”
“Please,” he invited. Everything about him was a randy invitation.
“I... I’m afraid I have not been perfectly honest with you.” Sabine raised a gloved hand and pressed her fingers against his arm, drawing him in.
Sabine went on, “Perhaps Ihaveheard of you, Mr. Legg. Perhaps there has been gossip here and there about certain voyages of certain ships registered under your name that have returned to port with a hull as empty as—” she held out her punch goblet “—this cup. Yet, with a crew that has clearly been worked to the bone as well as handsomely paid. Does any of this sound familiar to you, Mr. Legg?”
“Some sailings deliver goods to France but return to Portsmouth without taking on new cargo.”
“Come now. What shipper leaves a foreign port with nothing to sell in England? Not one as successful as you, I’m sure.” The words were accusing but her inflection was playful. Clearly, Legg was intrigued by the combination, and he relaxed. He traced a line from her finger to her wrist with the back of his hand. Stoker felt his stomach pitch.
Legg said, “What precisely are you saying, Mrs. Toble?”
“I’m saying that if you require sailors to staff a forthcoming voyage, especially something with a very high potential to make us all rich, I should like the opportunity to throw in my lot. The sailors that I can provide are not faint of heart, nor are they particularly watchful, or as I said, known for their long memories.”
She allowed this to sink in and then gave a little gasp, jerking her hand away. “Just to be clear,Ishould like to know. There are certain enterprises in which I don’t care to dabble. The nasty business of slavery, for example. But beyond that—?” She let the sentence trail off. “Does this sound like something that might interest you, Mr. Legg?”
Stoker listened to her wind him up, oozing conspiracy and a promising sort of vague illicit behavior that could mean anything. It was very effective, he had to acknowledge. A strange skill, unexpected; but his own twitchy jealousy aside, Stoker felt a new pride in how smoothly she had dazzled and duped Phineas Legg.
In the next ten minutes Legg revealed to her that he devoted two of his mother’s five ships to smuggling. He confirmed that the reason these ships returned empty was because their cargo was unloaded on the Isle of Portland, in Dorset—just as she had suspected. Finally, after they’d enjoyed another cup of punch and she allowed him to touch her arm a dozen unnecessary times, he finally revealed what he transported: two of the minerals in powder form, sulphur and saltpeter. They were purchased from mines in Italy and India respectively and smuggled through France.
Sabine listened carefully and then screwed up her face into a confused pout. Stoker could anticipate the next question—But why sulphur and saltpeter?—and he finally, after what felt like an eternity of restraint, stepped forward, and cut in.
“Beggin’ your pardon,madam,” Stoker said, “but you said to tell you when a certain lady was leaving the party?”
The intrusion was not welcome. Sabine and Phineas Legg looked up from their bent-headed conversation as if they were in the midst of solving all the problems of the world. Legg glared. Sabine feigned irritation, but Stoker knew well what she looked like when she was truly angry, and it was not this. She scolded him, which he ignored (he was not the actor she was), and put a possessive hand on the small of her back. Legg puffed himself up to his full height, sucking in a breath to protest, but Sabine went smoothly along.
“Forgive me, Mr. Legg,” she said briskly, “but my guard only follows expressed instructions from me. There is a certain woman that I must speak to on another matter. I came tonight for the purpose of catching her unawares. I’m afraid that I cannot afford to allow her to leave. But I am urgently interested in this business we might do together. May I seek you out later in the evening? Perhaps on the terrace, where we can be more private?”
Stoker slid his hand from her back to her waist, scooping her along.
Mr. Legg agreed reluctantly, and Stoker hustled Sabine into the crowded party, plunging them through dancers who swallowed them up in whirling silk and ostrich feathers.
“What?”asked Sabine breathlessly. “What’s happened? I almost had it. He was just about to tell me the great mystery of what the smugglers are doing!”
Stoker kept walking, shouldering around old women with two heaping plates of food and three debutantes comparing their fans. “He doesn’t need to tell you the bloody mystery. I already know.”
“You do?” She took two steps to his one, scrambling to keep up. Her face was flushed with excited exertion. It was her authentic face, the face that he thought of as only for him. She laughed anxiously. “What is it?”
“They’re making their own gunpowder, Sabine,” he said lowly, dragging her through a line of dancers. “Sulphur and saltpeter, when mixed with charcoal from your kiln in Hampstead, create the type of gunpowder that ignites hunks of rocks and the sides of mountains. It blasts open mining shafts. They’re not smuggling in any one thing, they are buying minerals and mixing them with elements they procure here in England.”
“On the Isle of Portland?” she surmised.
“Why not?”
“They’re mixing it themselves on this uninhabited island,” Sabine deduced, “then loading it on wagons in Dorset.” She looked at Stoker. “Is gunpowder mixed?”
Stoker nodded. “That’s the most rudimentary way to do it. Liquid can also be added to the mix and a little brick can be formed and dried. They call it a mill cake.”
“Could this process happen on a deserted island, perhaps inside a cave? The Isle of Portland is riddled with caves.”
“Absolutely,” Stoker said.
