Pride and Percabeth

Chapter Twenty

During the hunt, Piper and Lord Skye decided to play a trick on Annabeth and Lieutenant Jackson.
The inmates of Skye Castle gathered in the drawing room prior to supper. Lieutenant Jackson and Dona Reyna were playing whist with the Duke and Duchess. He kept the Duchess enthralled with stories of cruel Barbary pirates who bully foreign ships that sail into their domains by demanding that they pay a tribute to the local pasha in exchange for safe passage. If the ship can, or will, not pay the tribute, then the pirates fire their canons on the foreign ship, take the sailors as hostages, and put them to work building their cities.
Dona Reyna listened with polite indifference as His Grace went on about the appointment of excise men and riding officers. As a Catholic, the Duke of Olympus was unable to sit in parliament but all the M.P.s for the surrounding boroughs were in his pocket and jobs and offices were given out as his pleasure.
Excise men and riding officers patrolled the coast (excise men on sea; riding officers on land) looking for smugglers bringing in contraband from Europe. Piper knew that such measures were only for appearances sake. Most of the excise men and riding officers were easily paid off and all the shopkeepers in the area bought their goods from smugglers. Nearly every citizen of any given seaside town was involved in a smuggling operation to some degree. His Grace down to the poorest farmer or fisherman bought tea and gin that had come into the country illegally. And the problem was getting worse now that England was at war with France and legitimate trade had been interrupted.
Annabeth was pinning together geometric shaped bits of colorful fabric to make a quilt. On the front side, the pieces were arranged as to form a square shape while the pattern on the backside was more circular.

Piper sat with her, darning the pink stockings she had torn during the hunt.