Though the taverns were able to supply themselves with illicit spirits, unchecked, the coastguard were ready to arrest an d detain run goods not destined for their cellars. Deeds of violence were not rare, and many a revenue officer fell a victim to his zeal. The story went that on Sunken Island off Mersea, a whole boat's crew were found with their throats cut; they were transported to the churchyard, buried, and their boat turned keel upwards over them.
The gipsies were thought to pursue over-conscientious and successful officers on the mainland, and remove them with a bullet should they escape the smugglers on the water.
The whole population of this region was interested in this illicit traffic, from the parson who allowed his nag and cart to be taken from his stable at night, and received a keg now and then as repayment, to the vagabonds who dealt at the door far inland in silks and tobacco obtained free of duty on the coast.
The gipsies intermarried with the people, and settled on the coast. The life of danger and impermanence was sufficiently attractive to them to induce them to abandon their roving habits; perhaps the diff erence of life was not so marked as to make the change distasteful. Thus a strain of wild, restless, law-defying gipsy blood entered the veins of the Essex marshland populations, and galvanised into new life the sluggish liquid that trickled through the East Saxon arteries. Adventurers from the Low Countries, from France, even from Italy and Spain � originally smugglers � settled on the coast, generally as publicans, in league with the owners of the contraband vessels, married and left issue. There were neither landed gentry nor resident incumbents in this district, to civilise and restrain. The land was held by yeomen farmers, and by squatters who had seized on and enclosed waste land, no man saying them nay. At the revocation of the Edict of Nantes a large nu mber of Huguenot French families had settled in the 'Hundreds' and the marshes, and for full a century in several of the churches divine service was performed alternately in French and English. To the energy of these colonists perhaps are due the long extended sea-walls enclosing vast tracks of pasture from the tide.
Those Huguenots not only infused their Gallic blood into the veins of the people, but also their Puritanic bitterness and Calvinistic partiality for Old Testament names.
In spite of this infusion of strange ichor from all sides, the agricultural peasant on the land remains unaltered, stamped out of the old unleavened dough of Saxon stolidity, forming a class apart from that of the farmers and that of the seamen, in intelligence, temperament, and gravitation. All he has derived from the French element which has washed about him has been a nasal twang in his pronunciation of English. Yet his dogged adherence to one letter, which was jeopardised by the Gallic invasion, has reacted, and imposed on the invaders, and the V is universally replaced on the Essex coast by a W.
In the plaster and oak cottages away from the sea, by stagnant pools, the hatching places of clouds of mosquitos, whence rises with the night the haunting spirit of tertian ague, the hag that rides on, and takes the life out of the sturdiest men and women, and shakes and wastes the vital nerves of the children, live the old East Saxon, slow-moving, never thinking, day labourers. In the tarred wreck-timber cabins by the sea just above the reach of the tide, beside the shingle beach, swarms of yeasty, turbulent, race of mixed-breeds, engaged in the fishery and in the contraband trade.
Mehalah went to the boat. It was floating. She placed the lanthorn in the bows, cast loose, and began to row. She would need the light on her return, as with the falling tide she would be unable to reach the landing-place under the farmhouse, and be forced to anchor at the end of the island, and walk home across the saltings. There was a yellow grey glow in the west over the Bradwell shore, its fringe of trees, and old barn chapel standing across the walls of the buried city. Othona stood sombre against the light, as though dabbed in pitch on a faded golden ground. The water was still, and it reflected the sky and the stars, with such distinctness that the boat seemed to be swimming in the sky, among black tatters of clouds, these being the streaks of land that broke the horizon and the reflection.
Gulls were screaming, and curlew uttered their mournful cry. Mehalah rowed swiftly down the Rhyn, the channel that divided the Ray from the mainland and led to the "hard" by the Rose Inn, and formed the highway by which it drew its supplies, and from which every farm in the parish of Peldon carried its casks of strong liquor. To the west extended a vast marsh from which the tide was excluded by a dyke many miles in length. Against the northern horizon rose the hill of Wigborough crowned by a church and a great tumulus, and some trees that served as landmarks to the vessels entering the Blackwater. In ancient days the hill had been a beacon station, and it was reconverted to this purpose in time of war. A man was placed by order of Government in the tower, to light a cresset on the summit, in answer to a similar beacon at Mersea, in the event of a hostile fleet being seen in the offing.
The boat - a flat-bottomed punt - hissed among the asters, as Mehalah shot over tracts now submerged; she skirted a bed of bullrushes. Suddenly as she was cutting the flood, the punt was jarred and arrested. She looked round. A boat was across her bows. It had shot out of the rushes and stopped her.
"Where are you going, Glory?"
It was Elijah Rebow, the last man she wished to meet at night, alone on the water.
"That is my affair, not yours," she answered. "I am in haste � let me pass."
"I will not. I will not be treated like this, Glory. I have shot you a couple of curlew, and here they are."
He flung the birds into her boat. Mehalah threw them back again.
"We will accept none of your presents. You have brought my mother a keg of rum, and I have sworn to beat in the head of the next you give her. She will take nothing from you."
"There you are mistaken, Glory; she will take as much as I will give her. You mean that you will not. I understand your pride, Glory! and I love you for it."
"I care nothing for your love or your hate. We are naught to each other."
"Yes we are! I am your landlord. We shall see how that sentiment of yours will stand next Thursday."
"What do you mean?" asked Mehalah hastily
"What do I mean? When you come to pay the rent to me next Thursday, you will not be able to say we are naught to each other. Why! you will have to pay me for every privilege of life you enjoy."
The girl's heart failed for a moment. What would Elijah say and do when he discovered that she and her mother were defaulters? However, she put a bold face on the matter now, and thrusting off the boat with her oar, she said impatiently, "You are causing me to waste precious time. I must be back before the water is out of the fleets."
"Where are you going?" repeated Rebow, and again drove his boat athwart her bows. "It is not safe for a young girl like you to be about on the water after nightfall."
"I am going to Mersea City," said Mehalah
"You are going to George De Witt."
"What if I am? That is no concern of yours."
"He is my cousin."
"I wish he were a cousin very far removed from you."
"Oh Glory! you are jesting." He caught the side of the punt with his hand, for she made an effort to push past him. "I shall not detain you long. Take these curlew. They are plump birds; your mother will relish them. I shot them for you."
"I will not have them, Elijah."
"Then I will not either," and he flung the dead birds into the water
She seized the opportunity, and dipping her oars in the tide, strained at them, and shot away. She heard him curse, for his boat had grounded and he could not follow.
She laughed in reply.
In twenty minutes Mehalah ran her punt on Mersea beach. Here, a little above high water mark, stood a cluster of wooden houses and an old inn,