Page 73 of Why Do Earls Fall in Love?
She pressed her lips together, obviously bracing herself.
“Eventually, the Customs office began to notice that the Broadscombe gang had increased their activity, and their profit. Once they realized, they sent a new officer to look into it. My father first tried to warn him off, then to pass it off as an insignificant local tradition. The officer didn’t fall for it. My father even offered a bribe, but the man was resolute. One night he was lured out to investigate a fire, supposedly set atop the cliffs as a signal. I don’t know what happened or who was involved, but the customs man was found broken at the bottom in the morning.”
“Good heavens,” she breathed.
“William and I desperately tried to talk Father into breaking it up, after that. William especially, hated the whole idea of our family involvement. He argued constantly that it was un-English, as well as immoral. He’d always been mad for the sea and enamored of the navy. He pored over the naval dispatches and the descriptions of the battles. He longed to apprentice to a captain and go to sea, but our father would not hear of it. William wouldn’t give up, though. He got himself accepted to the Royal Naval Academy.”
“Your father let him go?”
“It was a near thing. Heaven knows, I argued hard and long for it. Father was mean and volatile. I did my best to stand between them, but it grew so much worse once I went to school. I wanted William out from under Father’s rule. In the end, he finally agreed. I had to help support William for the two years he served onboard before he could become a Midshipman, but it was well worth it. He did exceedingly well. He’d taken his exam to rise to lieutenant and was waiting for the results when the patrol ship he served on tangled with a French smuggler off the coast of Jersey.”
“Oh, no.”
Whiddon breathed deeply. “He was injured. He lost a leg and was shipped home.” He looked at her with bleak despair. “His life, his future was ruined. By smugglers.”
“I can only imagine the anger he must have felt,” she whispered.
“He lashed between fury and despair. His sweetheart, the girl he’d pledged to marry, once he’d gained a rank of good salary, declined to wed a cripple. She abandoned him for a banker in Dartmouth.”
Her eyes filled. “He lost everything.”
“I feared for him. He was so low. He blamed Father for everything. He became obsessed with finding a way to punish him, to take away something that meant something to him. He settled upon the smuggling ring.”
“Oh, dear.”
“William wanted to destroy it all, but he felt he had to do it from the inside. He started with the lower tier men, befriending them and listening to their advice, their stories and thoughts and grievances. I think he meant to stir them up, and stage a coup, taking over the gang from both Hurley and Father, but something stopped him. He discovered something.”
“Something worse than murdering a Customs official?”
“As bad, at the least. More far reaching, in any case.”
“I’m almost afraid to hear it.”
“I am afraid for you to hear it,” he admitted. “God knows, I’ve been sick over it.”
“Just say it,” she whispered.
He looked away from her. “William, in spending time with the villagers who were involved with the smuggling, heard their stories, old and new. And some of the older tales . . .” He shook his head.
“How old?” she asked.
“It began with the Terror in France.” He lowered his head onto his hand. “It was before you and I were born, but surely you’ve heard the stories.”
“We all have. Torture. Betrayal. Murder. Old and young. Women and children.” She shivered. “Madame la Guillotine.”
“Most of England was horrified at the stories coming out of France at the time, but my father and Hurley had apparently seen a chance to line their pockets. They set up a network. From the coast, through the countryside, even into Paris, itself.”
“They smuggled aristocrats out?” She straightened. “But surely, that was using their operation for good?”
“It might have been, had they not charged exorbitant prices.”
“Oh.”
“And it wasn’t enough that they charged those refugees a fortune to save their lives and get them out of France. Once they had them away, they robbed them blind. Men, women, families. Those people lost nearly everything. They brought what few valuables they could carry, to help them survive, to allow for a chance at a new life. Jewels, art, coin. My father stole it away. Their very futures.”
She drew a shuddering breath.
“Yes. I should have told you before I married you. Now you are stained with our shame.”
