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time, and passed the days in the same way as all the wives in Plyn, with baking and cleaning, and mending her man’s clothes and the boy’s too. There was the walk to church of a Sunday and joining in the simple gossip of the neighbours afterwards, with a cup of strong brewed tea, and a slice of saffron or seedy cake and then home to supper, and the boy put in his cot and she and her husband to sleep sound beside one another till morning came.
    In the spring of 1833, a fortnight after Samuel’s second birthday, his sister was born.
    She was fair and blue-eyed, very much like Samuel, and gave not more trouble than he had done at the same age.
    The little girl was christened Mary, and Thomas was nearly as proud of his daughter as he had been of Samuel.
    Though Thomas liked to think he had his own way over things, it was generally Janet who had the last say in the matter. She would fling a word at her husband and no more, and he would go off to his work with an uneasy feeling at the back of his mind that she had won. He called it ‘giving in to Janie’, but it was more than that, it was unconscious subservience to a quieter but stronger personality than his own.
    He would never have admitted it, but he ‘couldn’t quite make Janet out’, to use his own unspoken epithet. She was his wife and he loved and respected her, there was the home and the two children to bind them together, but her thoughts were a mystery to him. It was funny the way she would go off into silence sometimes, and gaze out of the window towards the sea, with a queer unbelonging look in her eyes.
    He would notice this of an evening, when he had been sparing a moment to play with the children after the day’s work, and there would be Janet, with her work on her knee, inside of herself as it were.
    ‘What are you thinkin’, Janie?’ he would ask her, and she’d either shake her head smiling and make no reply, or come out with some nonsense or other such as - ‘I’d been a man, Thomas, if I had my way.’
    It was hardly encouraging to be told this. What could she want with being a man, when there wasn’t a better home in Plyn, nor two sweeter children, nor indeed a more faithful, loving husband than himself?
    ‘It’s a puzzle you are to me sometimes, Janie, for sure,’ he would say with a sigh, and then she would change her mood, like the sudden flash of lightning in summer, and come to where he’d be sitting with the children on the floor and maybe join in with them in their play or question him on real sensible matters that a man could answer, as to the work at the yard and so on. And then, perhaps, before he knew it, she’d be off again with some wild foolish saying, like expressing her pity for old Dan Crabb, who’d been caught at last in his smuggling tricks and sent off to Sudmin for trial.
    ‘But, dear heart, the man is a villain, and an evil double-faced rogue i’ the bargain; deceivin’ His Majesty’s officers, breakin’ the law and raisin’ his hand against honest, peaceable folk.’
    ‘Aye, Thomas, but it’s a man’s game, for all that.’
    ‘You call it a man’s game, do ye, a sneakin’ rotten thing like smugglin’. Why, I would’n shake the hand of one o’ them, for fear of contamination.’
    ‘I reckon I would then, an’ follow him too. It’s often I’ve pictured the life to myself. A pitch-dark night in Lannywhet Cove, an’ no sound but the waves breakin’ on the shore. Then a faint light glimmerin’ through the blackness, and oars creakin’ stealthy-like. There’d come a whistle, faint an’ low, an’ your boots would crunch on the shingle as you crept to meet the boat. There’d be voices murmurin’, while the stuff was unloaded, and then a shout and a cry from the top o’ the hill, and wild confusion on the beach; an’ you’d be runnin’ for your dear life, your hair in the wind, with nigh six revenue officers pantin’ at your heels. That’s livin’, Thomas, and dyin’ all in one - no