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avid interest of a young child. She had no idea that
anyone else except her mother knew of the arrangement.
    “I enjoy
it.”
    “Excellent. We
shall see you tomorrow at the usual time then,” Jonathan replied,
and ignored her shocked look as he swept out of the tap room.
    He had every
intention of being there for the next reading, and made a mental
note to ask Kat a few carefully structured questions about the
exact nature of the goods her mother had for sale on her stall.
     

CHAPTER
THREE
     
     
    Kat hefted the
last box of vegetables on to the back of their aged cart and stood
back to brush her hands off.
    “That’s
everything then,” she muttered and glanced up at Agnes, who sat on
the bench seat with the reins in her hands.
    “Wait a minute
while Billy helps me, then you can be on your way.” She shivered as
a swift breeze tugged at the loose folds of her dress and she
hurried back into the house to get out of the biting chill. Billy
stood in the middle of the sitting room. He stared down in horror
at the large mound of items on the floor as though he wasn’t sure
where it had all come from.
    “Where are we
going to hide all this?” he whispered. He glanced at Kat with a
mixture of fear and consternation.
    Kat knew that
he dreaded the knock on the door that announced the arrival of the
excise men just as much as she did, but today was worse than any
other day because they now had two loads of smuggled cargo, and
nowhere to put most of it.
    “We can hide
the bolts of cloth, tea and sugar in the usual places,” Kat sighed
and moved to the fireplace to stamp out the fire. The temperature
within the room had only just started to go up. It was a shame to
extinguish the meagre flame but still, their freedom depended on
getting rid of the evidence as quickly as possible.
    She hefted
Billy up the chimney and handed up the bolts of cloth. They managed
to secure all of the bolts up there, double the usual amount, and
turned to gather up as many of the boxes of tea and sugar as they
could carry. Once the packages were stored in their usual place,
they returned to the sitting room. The mound still looked huge.
Without the vegetable boxes in the yard, they had nowhere else to
put the goods.
    “Right, let’s
empty the copper kettle. We can put the tea in there,” she sighed
and turned her gaze toward the small bucket containing a flowering
plant. She quickly emptied the contents and ordered Billy to bring
a packet of the tea. After she had carefully repositioned the soil
around the packet and knocked roots off the plant to make it go
back into the pot she stood back to assess her handiwork.
    “Cor, that’s a
good idea,” Billy whispered in awe.
    “I know,
Billy-boy, I am pure genius,” Kat teased him and turned to study
the room carefully. “Now move, and hurry up because mother is
waiting.”
    Together they
broke up the rest of the contents, placing packets of sugar in
boots, under the dresser and under the feed bucket of Molly’s
stable outside. Unfortunately, the mound that sat in the middle of
the sitting room floor didn’t seem to have gone down much at
all.
    She sighed and
glanced at the pile of tea boxes, brandy barrels and sugar sacks
and shook her head. She had no idea what they were going to do
now.
    “Heads up!”
    “Oh God, no!”
Kat cried and shared a look of fear with Billy. Her heart began to
race and she fought the rising well of panic that threatened to
overwhelm her. She moved to the door and beckoned Agnes, who had
heard the cry and was already on her way back to the house. Kat
studied the garden for several moments but immediately dismissed
the possibility of digging holes big enough to hide the goods. She
was about to turn back toward the house when she caught sight of
something at the far side of Molly’s stable.
    “Billy,” Kat
snapped and turned to her brother with a smirk. “It’s time to get
inventive.”
    She ignored
Billy’s questions, stalked inside the house and gathered