Book One of five · Historical fiction
A boy who lies too easily. A coast built for smuggling. And the one cargo that should never have been carried.
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The story
Tom Johnstone is ten years old the morning his mother sends him down to the quay to ask his Uncle Georgie for work. Georgie asks if he can tie a bowline. Tom says yes. He can't.
It's the first lie anyone catches him in, and it gets him a berth instead of a clout round the ear. Over the next sixteen years it's followed by plenty more: to masters in Poole, to the Riding Officers on the marsh roads, to a magistrate with a cellar that fills by itself, and to the men he owes money at the Angel. His father, Black Tom, takes him out on his first run at fifteen. By his twenties he has his own boat, his own crew, and a name all along the Solent.
Then, in the autumn of 1792, a man pays far too much to be carried across the Channel and won't say who he is. The war comes. Lymington fills up with French émigrés. And in 1798 a quiet, careful passenger asks Tom to take him to Flushing, and the Crown wants very badly to know why he did.
Told by the old man himself, sixty-seven and by his own fireside, to a daughter who writes it all down and doesn't let him get away with much.
An extract
Georgie Hammond was down at the far end, over-hauling a net that had seen better decades: a big, slow-moving man with my mother's own frown stamped somewhere under his beard.
“Well,” he said, not looking up. “If it isn't Black Tom's boy.”
“It is, sir.”
“Can you tie a bowline?”
“Yes, sir.” I could not, in fact: not reliably, not in the dark, not with cold hands, which is the only condition under which a bowline is ever actually required of a man. But I'd watched it done perhaps forty times, and was confident, in the manner of boys who haven't yet been sufficiently humiliated to know better, that watching and doing were much the same thing.
“Show me.”
I showed him. It was not, by any fair account, a bowline. It was a knot with ambitions toward being a bowline, the way a scarecrow has ambitions toward being a man. Georgie looked at it a good five seconds before he laughed (not unkindly, but not kindly either) and untied it with two fingers.
I felt the excuse come up ready in my mouth (the cold, my hands, the wind off the water) and shut my teeth on it, and said nothing. His eyes went to my hands, and back to my face.
“Lying to me already,” he said, “and you not stepped foot in the boat yet. You'll do. Get in.”
From Chapter One, “Lymington Harbour”
The course
Ten years old, half-frozen hands, and a knot that isn't a bowline.
A new master, a boat full of bigger boys, and a squall off Studland.
Fifteen, barefoot on the shingle, with his father and a French lugger offshore.
A passenger who pays too much, and a name Tom still won't put on paper.
A French friend from the Angel sails with the émigré army. Not all of them come back.
A storm, a French customs lugger, and a stranger watching from the quay at home.
Two gaols, a shared cell, and a man called Robert with a plan.
What's real
Thomas Johnstone, born 1772, a Lymington smuggler from boyhood. His 1798 arrest, imprisonment and escape. The émigré regiments in Lymington, the Quiberon disaster of 1795, and the theft of the French Crown Jewels in September 1792.
The fireside and every word Tom says to Janet. The masters, crews, gaolers and fellow prisoners. The mechanics of the escape.
Where the record disagrees with itself, the book picks a version and says so in a note at the back, along with a short guide to who in the story was a real person.
Next in the series
Exile on the Dutch coast, a pardon from the Crown, and eleven thousand pounds of debt.
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