‘Eva!’ He’d been in the back, either reading or working because he was wearing his glasses, but he took them off, tucking them into his shirt pocket as he came forward to greet me.
I looked round the room. ‘This is really nice, Oliver.’
‘Thanks. I’m afraid I can’t take all the credit, though. It was my mother’s idea. She came from a smuggling family herself, and she had this collection of things she’d been gathering over the years, and she always said someone should build a museum to put them in, so …’ With his hands spread, he gestured to what he had made. ‘Mind you, she didn’t stay to help me with it.’
I remembered his mother, a cheerfully no-nonsense woman. ‘Oh? Where did she go?’
‘Up to Bristol, to live with my aunt. Left me to fend for myself, so she has.’
‘Well, you seem to be doing all right.’
‘What, with this? The museum won’t pay any bills for me.’ Oliver smiled. ‘It’s a labour of love. No, I’ve got a collection of holiday cottages over St Non’s way. I let them year round, and so far that’s been enough to keep me in the black. I can’t complain.’
‘Holiday cottages? Really? You wouldn’t have one sitting empty right now, would you?’
‘I’m afraid not. They’re all booked through September.’
‘Oh.’
‘Why, were you wanting one?’
‘Thinking about it.’ I nodded. ‘I’m taking a bit of a break from my job and LA and … well, everything, after Katrina. You know. I was thinking I might rent a cottage round here, maybe stay for a while.’
He said, ‘Choose the cottage you like, and I’ll turf out the tenant.’
I smiled. ‘You don’t need to do that. But if one does come free in September—’
‘It’s yours.’ He watched me looking round the room and asked, ‘You want the tour?’
‘Yes, please.’
He’d done a good job setting up all the exhibits so they flowed one from the other in a pattern that was logical, from the earliest days of the settlement here through the bold privateers of the Tudor age right to the heyday of ‘free-trading’ in the late 1700s, when practically everyone took part in it, sometimes including the revenue men who were meant to be keeping the smugglers in check.
There’d always been trade between Cornwall and Brittany, on the French coast, and neither wars nor taxes had been able to persuade the Cornish free-traders to give up what for them was a good livelihood, and more than that, a most diverting game.
‘Like cat and mouse,’ was Oliver’s analogy. ‘Everyone knew who the smugglers were, the real job was to catch them. And then, once you’d caught them, you had to make the charges stick, because the local juries here would only let them off again. That’s why some of the revenue men in the end gave it up, helped themselves to a cut of the profits and turned a blind eye.’
I couldn’t imagine the constable turning a blind eye to anything, though he had not seemed to me like a man to be easily fooled. He must surely have known what the Butlers were up to. But then again, those men I’d seen from my window had gone to great lengths to come up from the woods without anyone noticing.
‘What did they smuggle in, usually?’ I asked.
‘Oh, brandy and tea and tobacco, French laces and silk. Anything that the government slapped a big duty on.’ He hitched a barrel over and sat down while I examined a small gallery of drawings of Polgelly’s famous smuggling ships.
I didn’t find the one that I was looking for, and so I asked him, ‘Did you ever hear of a ship called the Sally?’
He considered it a moment. ‘No, it doesn’t ring a bell. Was she a smuggler’s ship?’
‘I think so. She belonged to the Butlers who lived at Trelowarth.’
‘The Butlers? I don’t know them, either. What year would this be?’
‘Early 1700s,’ I said, trying hard not to sound too specific, because I could already tell from his face he was going to ask me,
‘And where did you come across all of this?’
I shrugged. ‘I read about them somewhere on the Internet, I can’t remember where. I wasn’t smart enough to bookmark it.’
‘The Butlers. Did it give their first names?’
‘Jack and Daniel.’
‘Well, I should at least remember that.’ He grinned. ‘It sounds enough like what I like to drink.’ Which led him to his next idea. Glancing at the windows that were for the moment free of rain, he said, ‘You’ve done the tour. Now let me buy you lunch.’
‘That’s what you do for all your tourists, is it?’
‘Certainly.’ His eyes, good-natured, challenged me to challenge him. ‘What’s it to be? Your choice – the Wellie or the tea room?’
I was torn at that, because I’d never been inside the Wellington. It hadn’t been the sort of pub you took a child into, which had only made it all the more intriguing. But I settled on, ‘The tea room, please. I’ll do a bit of corporate spying while I’m here, for Susan.’
‘Right,’ said Oliver. ‘I’ll fetch my coat.’
We were the only customers for lunch, and it was clear the waitress had a crush on Oliver because she set my soup down with a lack of care that bordered on disdain. Oliver, not noticing, looked puzzled when he saw me trying not to laugh.