For the next few minutes Calfhill hovered, anxious and suspicious, as the men tiptoed back into the waves and scrubbed the pitch from their faces and hands. Overhead a skein of plovers sailed inland. Smells of thyme and pastured sheep blew out to sea. Only a few minutes remained before daylight, but Calfhill's passengers worked as punctiliously as if making their morning toilets. One of them even paused to polish a few of the gold buttons on his coat-some kind of black livery-with a wetted handkerchief, then, stooping, the toes of his boots. His efforts were fastidious.

'For heaven's sake,' Calfhill murmured under his breath. He understood the risks, of course, even if his passengers did not. He was an 'owler', a smuggler whose usual freight was the sacks of wool he shipped to France or the crates of wine and brandy he transported back. Nor was he averse to smuggling passengers-an even more profitable trade. Huguenots and Roman Catholics, like the hogsheads of brandy, came to England, while Royalists went the other way, into France. And now it was the Puritans who were fleeing England, of course; Holland was their destination. In the past six weeks he had smuggled at least a dozen of them out of Dover or the Romney Marsh and across to Zeeland or on to pinks anchored near the North Foreland; a few others he smuggled off the pinks and into England to act as spies against King Charles. It was dangerous work, but he calculated that if all of this distrust and deception held out (as he knew it would, human nature being what it was) he would be able to retire to a sugar plantation in Jamaica within four years.

But this latest assignment was a peculiar one, even for an owler of Calfhill's experience. Two days earlier in Calais, in a tavern in the basse ville where he normally received information about his consignments of brandy, a man named Fontenay approached him, paid half of an agreed sum-ten gold pistoles-and gave him patient instructions.