The Sparks Fly Upward by Diana Norman Page A

two villages had been trading with each other for centuries, trusting each other, sometimes intermarrying, always making a profit from their association. Therefore, government could both bugger off and fous-moi la paix . Gruchy, like Babbs Cove, decided who was friend and foe and over the years ‘ze missus’ had proved herself a reliable member of their company and was proud to be so.
    Yes , she thought, the boy and I could have met at Gruchy. Should have.
    They’d arrived. Sanders opened the coach door and let down the steps for her to descend onto the apron of the Pomeroy Arms, always Makepeace’s first port of call.
    The night was frigidly still apart from the sigh of water on sand. The looming T’Gallants cut off the westerly moon’s light from half the cove so that only the eastern cottages made a defined pattern of roofs and dark doorways, their fishing nets strung between them like spider webs. Behind them, a hunting owl swept optimistically over steep, white fields.
    The scene never failed to move her, though nowadays a sense of excitement was missing, as if the pungency of sea and seaweed had been taken away.
    The Pomeroy Arms smelled the same, though. A mixture of fresh whitewash battled with the old wood in its crazy, crisscrossing beams, logs burning in the huge grate, good cooking and the liquor ingrained in the tables of its booths.
    Every time she entered it, Makepeace thought that if the inn were on a coaching route it would be celebrated and she thanked the Lord that it was too far off the beaten track to be known to any but its locals. Even so, it prospered well enough, acting as it did as church hall, dispensary, meeting house, grog shop, refuge for locked-out husbands, courthouse, assembly room and funeral parlor. It was the place where the village men sat every night and their women, coming to fetch them home, stayed for a glass of something. It was wormed with hidden cupboards and passages where contraband was disposed until the ponies came to distribute it through most of southern Devon. It was the beating heart of the village. And it was a secret.
    Dell, shrieking, and Tobias, smiling gravely, advanced on her. Two children with pale, freckled negroid features were ushered out to ‘tell Jan Gurney that Herself has arrived.’ Another was dispatched to help Sanders, an old friend, with the horses.
    A chair was shoved under her bottom, her feet tipped onto a footstool towards the fire and a beaker of rum and butter put into her hand, another given to Thomas Glossop who was told, ‘Drink that now, it’ll drive the Divil from your soul and the snakes from England. ’
    Makepeace gave a stage groan. With a dubious past behind her, Dell’s marriage to the quiet, elderly black man who’d once been the Dowager’s servant had been happy for them both, and contentment had enlarged the woman in more ways than one, allowing her Irish-ness full rein—along with her figure.
    Knowing the inn’s importance to the village, Makepeace had wondered if she was doing the right thing when she’d made this odd couple proprietors of the Pomeroy. But the choice had been a success; Babbs Cove might be isolated but few villages in England were as familiar with foreigners. Generations of illegal trading with other countries had brought it into contact with the polyglot world of seamen. French, Dutch, Irish, Lascars, Chinese, Turks, Russians, Africans, West Indians . . . what were another couple of oddities? Especially when their ale was good, their secrecy assured, their cooking excellent and, for all the landlady’s Hibernian ebullience, it was the lisping but dignified and efficient Tobias who ruled the roost.
    Dell ignored Makepeace’s protest. ‘Are ye for France?’
    â€˜He is,’ Makepeace said, nodding at Glossop. ‘I’m not. I’m staying a couple of days before Sanders drives me to Bristol to meet Aaron. Will you put us