LITMIR.BIZ

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lost and rudderless. Like them, he’d been headed towards a life of shiftlessness before he’d been found, a boy not interested in school, only in running wild in the great outdoors. A balanced life needed both freedom and structure. Stepan would pay forward the favour Dimitri had done him if he could. One didn’t need to be poor to need direction. The pitfalls of being an orphan were no respecters of station.

      As for the smuggling—well, everyone did it. There wasn’t anyone in Shoreham who wasn’t connected to ‘free trading’ in some way, either as merchants or consumers or employees. That made it a fairly safe ‘industry’. Folks were less likely to turn in their friends and their own suppliers of goods they couldn’t afford by other means. There were the politics of it, too—this was a way to stand up to an unfair government that taxed goods beyond legitimacy. It was a way to stand up to greed, to a system sustained by standing on the backs of those who could least afford to support the weight, while the system ignored those in the most need: widows, children, orphans, broken men home from war and farmers who could no longer afford to farm. To Stepan, smuggling was protest. When the system changed, he would change.

      Joseph shut the spyglass and handed it back. ‘Shall we go down, milord?’

      Stepan pulled a pouch of coins from his pocket. ‘Make sure everyone who works tonight gets their share. I’ll see you later.’ He would ride down in a moment to meet the Lady Frances at the docks. While he was respectfully and publicly paying the duties on her cargo, the Razboynik would put in unnoticed to the quiet cove below the bluffs. Joseph Raleigh and the land crew would stow the vodka and small packets of spices in the caves. Then, they would spend the week preparing the vodka for transport from Shoreham to London, where Stepan had managed to make Kubanian food, drink and artefacts the latest rage. The women wanted their knick-knacks, the men wanted their vodka.

      It was a good arrangement, one that had increased his fortune and satisfied his need for adventure. The arrangement was neat, but not too neat. There was, after all, a margin for risk. Multiple aspects of his ‘business’ could be discovered at any time. The caves where he stored his treasure were not his own. They belonged to the estate of Preston Worth, whose wife, Beatrice, was a friend of Dimitri’s wife. Worth and his family were not always in residence. The man’s work took them to London a good part of the year as it did now and, when it did not, Worth was a civil prevention officer intent on ridding the coast of smugglers while one roosted in his very own nest. The irony of it appealed to Stepan nearly as much as the risk.

      Preston wasn’t the only threat. There was always the potential the coastguard would discover his illicit little enterprise. Little or large wouldn’t matter to the King’s men. The penalty for smuggling was still the same: hanging or, if one was lucky, transportation.

      Not that Stepan worried about either overmuch. If anything, the penalty for discovery challenged him to be more creative. A good smuggler these days couldn’t rely on simply outrunning the British as one might have done in the past. In the modern era, a good smuggler had to outsmart the soldiers. Thankfully, Stepan was very smart. His new casks with their secret compartments were proof of that. Even if the Razboynik had been stopped, he doubted the excise men would have found anything of concern.

      Stepan turned from the bluff and strode to where his horse waited. They would ride to the docks and then the hour back to Little Westbury and the hospitality of Dimitri Petrovich. He didn’t mind the long day in the saddle or even the rain. He had plenty to occupy his thoughts. He was already planning his next delivery. That ship was due next month and would require more thought than this one. The Razboynik was a practice run of sorts to try out the decoy and the new casks. The other ship, the Skorost, carried an enormous vodka cargo along with more spices and precious Russian saffron. The stakes were infinitely higher. Planning excursions kept his mind busy. It was better to think about how to land contraband than to think about other, less feasible things, like the unattainable Anna-Maria Petrova, Dimitri’s vivacious sister.

      There was nothing but disappointment and heartbreak down that road. If anything were to come of his fantasies in that direction, transportation and hanging would be the least of his worries. Dimitri would have him drawn and quartered, and that would be after Dimitri had him castrated. He’d always admired Dimitri’s tenacity when it came to protecting his family. Stepan just never wanted that tenacity turned in his direction. He valued Dimitri’s friendship too much, and well, to be frank, he valued certain parts of his anatomy, as well.

      Stepan smiled ruefully and swung astride his horse. He had smuggling to soothe his agitated soul. It gave him purpose and a cause. It kept him out of the house a good part of the day and out of Anna-Maria’s energetic orbit. For the sake of all parties concerned, he’d concluded long ago that Anna-Maria was a passion best indulged at a distance.

      * * *

      She saw him coming the moment he turned down the long drive towards the house. Hmmm. Where had he been this time? Anna-Maria stood carefully to the side of her gauzy white bedroom curtains where no one could see her and pondered her question. She’d made something of a study of Stepan in the long winter months he’d been with them in Little Westbury. It had begun as a way to pass the time until spring, until she could go to London and make her debut. She was nineteen and by rights she should have gone to London last year, but she’d been too new to British shores in her brother’s opinion. This year, she could hardly wait. Finally, her life could begin. Anything would be more exciting than the country.

      But until she could go to London, her brother’s friend made an interesting enough subject. There was an air of mystery to his absences. He left mid-morning and returned late each evening just in time for dinner. Anna had entertained the notion of trying to rise with him in the mornings, but the earlier she rose, the earlier he rose, until he was leaving well before his usual mid-morning departures. She’d experimented with that variable for a week before she gave up trying to pace him.

      She watched Stepan ride up the drive, so straight in the saddle, his hands and legs moving imperceptibly to guide the big horse. Stepan’s riding was refined. He might not be a cavalry officer like Nikolay, but he rode just as well. She’d grown up watching him ride. Stepan, like the others, had always been in her life, just as her brother had. If her brother acted more like a father to her, his friends acted more like uncles. Nikolay, Illarion and Ruslan were the friendly sort of uncles. Affection came easy to them. They’d been the ones to pull her braids, to tease her, to tickle her and make her laugh. Stepan was more reserved, hardly ever indulging in horseplay even when she was younger. When she was growing up, Dimitri had explained in terms a six-year-old could understand that Stepan didn’t know how to be part of a family. They had to teach him.

      If so, Stepan still didn’t know. He’d grown more reserved the last few years, more distant, not only emotionally, but now physically. He and the others had spent most of last year in London at her brother’s town house. She’d missed all of them. Together, they’d been her family, but she’d missed Stepan most. Regardless of how stoic he was, she’d grown used to his presence. He was always there, a fixture she could count on, less mercurial than Illarion, more even-tempered than Nikolay. She’d been excited when Dimitri had told her Stepan was coming for the winter. She thought she’d have Stepan all to herself for nearly four months! But when he’d arrived, he’d been more aloof than ever and had spent many of his days like this one—gone.

      The realisation steeped the sense of mystery. What or who drew the stoic Stepan out into the cold and the rain? Below her on the drive, Stepan dismounted and gave the reins to her brother’s groom. Anna smiled. That was her cue. She would greet him and ferret out his secrets; maybe she would even coax a smile from him. Out of all her brother’s friends, Stepan smiled the least and worried the most.

      Stepan stood in the entrance hall, unwrapping a muffler as she sailed down the stairs, all air and light teasing. ‘Where have you been? Who have you seen?’

      Stepan looked up. She’d startled him. ‘Are you my mother now?’ It was not an unkindly chiding, but it was still chiding. There was no mistaking that he was scolding her.

      ‘Someone needs to be if you’re going to be out all day and come home soaking wet.’ She took hold of

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