‘What was the fetchin’ trade?’ Dan interrupted.
‘Fetchin’ poor Flemishers and Dutchmen out o’ the Low Countries into England. The King o’ Spain, d’ye see, he was burnin’ ’em in those parts, for to make ’em Papishers, so Frankie he fetched ’em away to our parts, and a risky trade it was. His master wouldn’t never touch it while he lived, but he left his ship to Frankie when he died, and Frankie turned her into this fetchin’ trade. Outrageous cruel hard work—on besom black nights bulting back and forth off they Dutch roads with shoals on all sides, and having to hark out for the frish-frish-frish-like of a Spanish galliwopses’ oars creepin’ up on ye. Frankie ’ud have the tiller and Moon he’d peer forth at the bows, our lantern under his skirts, till the boat we was lookin’ for ’ud blurt up out o’ the dark, and we’d lay hold and haul aboard whoever ’twas—man, woman, or babe,—an’ round we’d go again, the wind bewling like a kite in our riggin’s, and they’d drop into the hold and praise God for happy deliverance till they was all sick.
‘I had nigh a year at it, an’ we must have fetched off—oh, a hundred pore folk, I reckon. Outrageous bold, too, Frankie growed to be. Outrageous cunning he was. Once we was as near as nothing nipped by a tall ship off Tergo Sands in a snowstorm. She had the wind of us, and spooned straight before it, shooting all bow guns. Frankie fled inshore smack for the beach, till he was atop of the first breakers. Then he hove his anchor out, which nigh tore our bows off, but it twitched us round end-for-end into the wind, d’ye see, an’ we clawed off them sands like a drunk man rubbin’ along a tavern bench. When we could see, the Spanisher was laid flat along in the breakers with the snows whitening on his wet belly. He thought he could go where Frankie went.’
‘What happened to the crew?’ said Una.
‘We didn’t stop,’ Simon answered. ‘There was a very liddle new baby in our hold, and the mother, she wanted to get to some dry bed middlin’ quick. We runned into Dover, and said nothing.’
‘Was Sir Francis Drake very much pleased?’
‘Heart alive, maid, he’d no head to his name in those days. He was just a outrageous, valiant, crop-haired, tutt-mouthed boy roarin’ up an’ down the narrer seas, with his beard not yet quilled out. He made a laughing-stock of everything all day, and he’d hold our lives in the bight of his arm all the besom-black night among they Dutch sands; and we’d ha’ jumped overside to behove him any one time, all of us.’
‘Then why did you try to poison him?’ Una asked wickedly, and Simon hung his head like a shy child.
‘Oh, that was when he set me to make a pudden, for because our cook was hurted. I done my uttermost, but she all fetched adrift like in the bag, an’ the more I biled the bits of her, the less she favoured any fashion o’ pudden. Moon he chawed and chammed his piece, and Frankie chawed and chammed his’n, and—no words to it—he took me by the ear an’ walked me out over the bow-end, an’ him an’ Moon hove the pudden at me on the bowsprit gub by gub, something cruel hard!’ Simon rubbed his hairy cheek.
‘“Nex’ time you bring me anything,” says Frankie, “you bring me cannon-shot an’ I’ll know what I’m getting.” But as for poisoning——‘ He stopped, the children laughed so.