Endure My Heart Read Online Free

flies—anything to turn an honest penny. Young Mark is the junior partner in all these enterprises. I expect he is also Jemmie’s partner in the smuggling trade. Their being chased by Crites certainly looked like it. I had some suspicion Jemmie was involved, but was a little surprised to see Mark, not a day over fifteen, had so early entered the profession.
    I opened the door and let them in, before Crites should round the bend and see where they had gone. “He’s a-coming, miss. Will you hide us?” Jemmie asked.
    Indeed he was coming, cantering along on his old gray mare. I waved at him and called, “What’s amiss, officer? Are you after smugglers?” with a wink over my shoulder at the lads.
    “Two of them, Miss Anderson. Have you seen a sign of them?” he hollered back.
    “Two rough-looking fellows just passed by the window a minute ago. They were headed toward the sheepwalk. If you hasten, you’ll catch them.”
    “Thankee kindly,” he said, with a tip of his hat, and turned his mount in behind the school to the path where the sheep are taken to the hills, which our foolish geography book describes as the East Anglia Heights, though they are no more than gentle slopes. He would think he had turned the wrong way once he hit the sheepwalk and didn’t find them. The sheepwalk is a meandering path that runs more or less parallel to the main road by the sea, half a mile or so behind it.
    I closed the door and turned to my two petty criminals. “Well now, Jemmie and Mark, I hope you’re proud of yourselves,” I said severely. “I’m sure your mother would be mightily pleased to hear you were being chased by Crites.”
    Mark pulled his forelock and blushed, but Jemmie smiled in a cagey way. “It’s yourself we’re proud of, miss. I didn’t know the gentlemen had a friend in Miss Anderson.” The word “gentlemen” has no connotation of refinement here on the coast. It is a euphemism for smuggler, lest you are unaware of the term. It was natural they think the magistrate’s daughter harbor no love for them, but to tell the truth, Papa liked his nip of brandy as well as anyone, and was never harsh with them when they came before him. There was never a day when there was not a barrel of the best in our cellar at Fern Bank. And half a dozen barrels still there to scandalize Mrs. Everett! I wondered she had not been to chide me for it.
    “Only a friend in need, boys. I don’t approve of your shenanigans,” I scolded, in my best schoolteacher’s voice.
    “Aye, but a friend in need is a friend indeed, miss, as the old saying goes,” Jemmie replied. “We’ll not be forgetting your kindness. He nearly caught us hauling a barrel out of the ditch. We had to let him chase us, or he’d have got to routing around and found it.”
    “You’d best slip away fast before Crites is back,” I told them. They scampered out the door, back down the road to retrieve the barrel, while Crites plodded along the sheepwalk. I thought very little about it. Smuggling is a crime according to the laws of the land, of course, but here at Salford it is the largest employer, and has gained a certain respectability, as any well-paying employer will do. Work was scarce, and if a husband was to have bread and meat on his table to feed the family, he resorted to smuggling.
    Little real harm was done by it, in my eyes at least. People were taxed to death, and what was done with the money but pay off the debts of that expensive raft of royal dukes and their mistresses? We were generous in the extreme with our war heroes too. Wellington set up for life, but what of his “scum of the earth” soldiers, as he was kind enough to describe the men who saved England from Napoleon’s heel. They came home, mutilated, to grub for a bare existence, if they came home at all.
    No, no, there is no question in my view. Smuggling is an honorable profession. Call me an anarchist if you like, but I maintain I am a Christian anarchist, and would