The Wreckers Read online

  The clouds of the gathering dawn swept above us in jagged rows. When we climbed through the cut I saw streaks of black rain out in the Channel and a feather of smoke from the villagers’ fire. They sat where we’d left them, on the point below the garden.

  The Widow’s wagon was pulled up on the grass, the horses still in harness. The old woman stood by the seat, in a bonnet of wine-colored cloth. The villagers sat wrapped in tarpaulins, and behind them, on a churning dark sea, the ship glided through cloud banks. She was closer to shore, at times just a cable’s length from the surf; one way or the other, her struggle would end within the hour.

  “I can’t go home,” said Mary. “No matter how my uncle reacts, I can’t go home just now.”

  Nor could I. And Simon Mawgan wouldn’t be there while the ship was still embayed, I was sure of that. So we crossed the rise above the road and hobbled the ponies there, out of sight of the wreckers. And we lay in the sparse grass, watching the ship beating to windward. The sea was rougher, the waves higher. But she set her courses as the day began to brighten, and churned off to the east, tossing up spray.

  With dawn came a shift in the wind. It wasn’t much, less than a point, but the smoke of the wreckers’ fire no longer blew directly through the garden. It streamed to the west in bubbles black as molten tar.

  The ship was at the far end of St. Elmo’s Bay when the wind shift nearly caught her aback. She gybed around, circled close to the surf, and came bounding along the shore toward us.

  And with her came a horseman, riding like a Fury up the coast road. In a flurry of capes, he grew from a speck to a regal figure on a fine black horse. People turned their heads to watch him but didn’t move from their places. He rode up to the fire and, just as the man at the cromlech had done, stepped from the saddle as the horse reared.

  “Uncle Simon,” said Mary. “What do you suppose he’s been doing all this night?”

  “Waiting,” I said. He’d been huddled in a secret cove by the Northground cape, waiting there with a match and a beacon.

  Mary pointed. “He has no lantern with him.”

  “Then he’s hidden it,” I said.

  “Why?” asked Mary.

  I had no answer. Certainly he approached none of the wreckers, and none went to him. But they were too intent on the ship for that. First one, then another, then the whole lot stood up to watch her coming. With the shift in the wind, she was more likely than ever to clear Wrinkle Head.

  The fire sputtered. Smoke backed on the flames, then hauled round in a coil before it settled again to its steady stream. Sweeping across the Channel was a line of ragged black clouds. Behind it, the sky was bright as gold.

  “Wind’s changing,” I said.

  Mary rose on her elbows, watching the ship. “This time she’s out,” she said. “This time she’s free.”

  She was right, but only if the wind held steady. Decks streaming water, a silvery wake leaping behind, the ship buried her bow in the waves. I could just see the people on her deck, lines of sailors ready at braces and sheets.

  Again the smoke wavered. The stream of it humped and twisted like a snake.

  “What’s happening to the wind?” I asked.

  “It’s not the wind,” said Mary. “It’s the Widow.”

  The old woman had stepped up on her wagon seat. She straddled the driver, a foot on each side, and poor Simple Tom took hold of her ankles. She raised her hands. She held her palms toward the wind, then spread her arms wide, and wider, until she stood like a cross before the storm. A shriek of wind tore at her dress and her hair. The ship drove toward the point. Only five lengths to go, four lengths to go.

  “Blow ’er down!” yelled Caleb Stratton.

  The Widow chanted in a keening voice, and the wind came tearing over the sea, flattening the breakers, flinging spray high over the cliffs. It raged round her, taking her scarves and raising them straight above her head. It tore off her bonnet and carried it away in high, soaring circles.

  The ship lay almost flat in the water, her courses rubbing the waves. A longboat snapped from its chocks and rolled over the side. Water barrels tumbled after it.

  Along the cliff, the wreckers crouched on the ground. They put their hands on the earth; they lowered their heads and hunched their shoulders. And above them the Widow sang. She screeched like a flock of gulls.

  The ship passed so close to the point that her main yard scraped on the rocks of Wrinkle Head. But she was past, and she was safe now, and on the instant the wind fell to a breeze. The ship sailed off with her canvas glowing, and a moment later the sounds reached us—the cheers of the men aboard.

  It was Caleb Stratton who rose first from the ground. He cursed the ship. He picked up a stone and flung it after her.

  “She’s out!” he cried. “Free and clear.”

  The Widow lowered her arms. “It was that boy!” she shrieked. “It was him, the Devil in disguise.” She turned slowly around.

  “You all knew the boy,” cried the Widow. “Once he lived among you.” Her gaze swept over the slope, over the garden, over the ground where I lay. She seemed to stare right at me. “And he’s here. He’s somewhere close by.”

  I wanted to run then, to flee back to the ponies. But Mary held me down. The Widow made the sign of the evil eye. She spat on the ground between her spread fingers. “It’s him, I tell you,” she cried, her voice cracked and brittle. “Didn’t he come ashore in the very same spot where he drownded all these many years ago?”

  The wreckers mumbled quietly. Some crossed themselves with their fingertips.

  The Widow hissed like an angry cat. “You saw him! You all saw him! That ship was ours.” She pointed at Simon Mawgan. “It’s your doing,” she cried. “Put him back in the sea. Put him back in the sea that he came from, or you’ll rue the day you let him live.”

  Simon Mawgan, holding the reins of his horse, stood his ground as Caleb Stratton marched toward him. Brandishing his axe, Caleb shouted, “I know where he is! Find the girl, and you’ve found the boy.”

  “Touch the girl and I’ll kill you,” said Simon Mawgan. “Touch a hair on her head and—”

  “Why, we wouldn’t harm her,” said Caleb. “Use her for bait is all. You always get the rat with the prettiest bit o’ cheese.”

  Mawgan stalked across to him. They stood face-to-face, talking in voices too low to hear. Then Caleb stepped back. “Blast you, Mawgan!” he said. “I’ve got a way with children, I have. It’s called a cat-o’-nine-tails, and that will get the truth out of ’im quick enough.”

  “I’ll handle this,” said Mawgan.

  “See that you do.” Caleb took a step back. “I might tell the girl a story the next time I see her. Tell her about her father, maybe, and what happened one night on the Tombstones.”

  The next moment Caleb Stratton lay sprawled on the ground. Mawgan had flattened him with a blur of fists. “Stay out of it, Stratton!” he roared. “I’ll deal with that damned boy in my own way!”

  The Widow cackled. She spread her fingers and aimed them like a gun at Simon Mawgan. She swiveled round as he climbed back in the saddle and whipped his horse into a gallop down the road.

  “You’ll rue the day!” she called after him, and laughed. “The corpse lights will walk along the moor. The dead will sail upon the sea and the men will be of fire!”

  He didn’t look back. With dust at his heels, he rode off the same way he’d come.

  “Let’s go,” said Mary. “I want to get to Galilee before him.”

  “We’ll have to hurry,” I said.

  “No.” Mary looked at me through a well of tears. “He’ll slow down in a minute. His anger passes quickly.”

  Chapter 13

  FOUR TOGETHER

  We rode, not to the farm, but straight to the cromlech. It was my idea. “I want to see if he brings a lantern there,” I said. In the daylight, it looked like the strange, half-finished home of a mysterious people. The roof alone must have weighed more than a ton, and
it seemed barely balanced on the uprights. But a thousand years it had lain there, and thousands more would see it unmoved.

  We passed close enough that I could see the running man and his face of horror. Then we crossed the rise and sat on our ponies down in the valley, listening for the sounds of Mawgan’s horse.

  “He’ll see us,” I said.

  “Maybe,” she said. “Maybe not. I really don’t care.”

  In our time together I hadn’t seen her like this, her face as grim as the sky. I nudged my pony next to hers. “Do you still believe in the curse?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I don’t know what to think anymore.”

  She looked up at the sky, then down at the ground, and I reached across and took her hand. “Mary,” I said. “What happened to your father?”

  “He drownded on the Tombstones. He, my mother, my auntie, and Peter. The four of them together.”

  “On the same night?”

  Her lips barely moved. “The four of them together.”

  “How?” I asked.

  Mary had no chance to answer. The sky to the west, over the farm, exploded into a frenzy of rooks. And a cry came to us, a bloodcurdling shriek, then the sounds of the birds—their wings and their rattling voices. The rooks rose in a black cloud of spinning shapes. And the silence that followed was dreadfully still.

  “What’s happened?” cried Mary.

  The birds were circling above us as we rode through the hedgerows and into the farm. They whirled in a huge mass, a circle stretched by the wind, and in pairs or alone they settled on the roofs and the house and the cottage. They made no sounds; they only watched.

  We rode past the stable, past the cottage. “Eli!” called Mary. “Eli!”

  The stable door stood open. A heap of loose hay lay deep inside, a pitchfork driven into it with just the handle showing. We turned the ponies loose, and they trotted straight to the hay. And we stood in the clearing among the buildings, in an eerie quiet, with the feeling that someone had come and gone a moment before.

  We looked in the cottage, and it saddened me to see it. Only one room, and that was bare as a ship’s hold—just a rude table, a rickety chair, a bench to sleep on. His brother had amassed a fortune, but Eli had nothing. Mary closed the door.

  “It’s not like him,” she said, “to wander away. He rarely goes beyond the hedgerows anymore.”

  “Then he must be in the house.”

  Mary shook her head. “He would never go in there.” She led me to the front of the building. “Not once has he been through the door, not once so far as the porch.”

  “Because your uncle won’t let him?” I asked.

  “Shhh!” said Mary. “Someone is in there.”

  The door stood ajar, daylight flooding into darkness. We climbed toward it, and the planks of the porch creaked under our boots. “Eli?” said Mary, little more than a whisper.

  I pushed on the handle. The door groaned open. A sticky wetness plucked at my fingers, and I saw the tips stained with fresh, red drops.

  “Blood,” I said.

  Mary gasped. Then she pushed past me and into the house.

  It throbbed with a foreboding silence, a strangeness, that feeling again that someone had been there a moment before. The room smelled faintly of tobacco and the odd spice of burnt tinder.

  We walked through the house, the kitchen and larder and dining hall. We peered into cupboards and under tables. And we went up the stairs with our hands squeaking from sweat on the railing.

  In Simon Mawgan’s room was a great four-poster bed hung with luxuriant drapes. The walls were lined with bureaus and tables, their tops covered with basins of delicate china and all manner of brushes and combs. I snatched open the bed curtains, but no one was there. And when I turned from the bed, I thought for a moment that a ghostly face was watching at a window.

  “That’s Peter,” said Mary, coming in behind me.

  I stood staring at a painting, at a boy in sailor’s dress with a wild sea behind him. He was large as life, or slightly larger, and the paint had faded until he seemed unearthly pale.

  Mary touched my arm. “I’ve heard Uncle Simon talking to that picture. He talks and cries.”

  “What does he say?”

  “I don’t hear the words. Only the sounds.” She touched the frame. “He loved Peter more than anything. It must have changed him, what happened that night. He’s hard now. Hard as brick. As though he built a wall round himself.”

  “What did happen?” I asked.

  “I only know what my uncle has told me. His wife and Peter went with my parents to London. I don’t know why; I was only a baby, too young to walk. I was left with Eli.”

  She led me from the room and down the stairs. “They were all to come back on the packet,” she said. “But they found a ship leaving a day early that would take them to Polruan. She was called the Rose of Sharon. The men of the village found her embayed. And she was wrecked on the Tombstones.”

  “With false beacons,” I said.

  Mary nodded. “And Uncle Simon was there. He saw it all happen: the ship driving onto the Tombstones; the people standing on the deck and climbing the rigging, all of them calling for help. It was just a sound, a wailing; they couldn’t hear any particular voice. It took more than an hour for the Rose of Sharon to break up. And then the bodies came ashore, three score of bodies tumbled up on the sand.”

  We passed through the dining room and out the back door. The air felt thick, and the birds all faced south along the ridge of the stable roof. Mary held her skirts above her ankles as we stepped to the grass. “Uncle Simon walked down there, down to the beach, and he found his son and his wife with their arms round each other. He found his brother nearby—my father—with a piece of my mother’s dress torn off in his hand. My mother didn’t wash ashore for another two days.”

  Mary sounded terribly sad, but she wasn’t crying. She went before me, down the porch to the ground.

  “It was the first time,” she said, “that they used the false beacons. Uncle Simon says he doesn’t remember who lit them. But he still wakes in the dead of night, thrashing in his bed, screaming—” She stopped. Then: “He’s here.”

  “Who?” I asked.

  “Uncle Simon.”

  He came from the shadows of the stable, out into the yard with the riding cape folded over his arm.

  Mary ran toward him. “There’s been trouble,” she said. “Eli’s missing.”

  Mawgan shook out the cape and tossed it over his shoulders.

  “We heard a shout,” said Mary. “A horrible scream. And there’s blood on the door—at the house. Something dreadful has happened.”

  She put her fist in her mouth and bit down on a finger. Mawgan held her by the shoulders. “What exactly did you hear?” he asked.

  “A scream.” Mary closed her hands over her ears. “I’m sure it was Eli, and he screamed. He screamed like a rabbit.”

  “When?”

  “Just a few moments ago,” said I. “We heard it from the cromlech.”

  “The cromlech?” said Mawgan.

  “Yes.” I stared at him boldly. “Where you keep the lanterns.”

  His eyes blazed. “You went in there?”

  “Yes.”

  “You fool.” He ran his hand across his face, wiping sweat from his cheek and his neck. Wherever he touched himself, his fingers left ugly red smears.

  “You’ve blood on your hands,” I said.

  He turned a palm toward his face and spread the fingers open. He looked at his hand as though he’d never seen it before.

  I said, “It was Eli who sent me there.”

  His face flushed with anger. “Look, boy,” he said. “You don’t know what you’re doing. You’re like a horse with blinkers, going blithely along without seeing what happens around you.”

  I started to speak, but Mary grabbed Mawgan’s arm and stared at his hand. “It is blood,” she said. “Uncle, what’s going on?”


  “Eli’s dead.” Mawgan rubbed his hands together as though he was washing them. “I found him in the stable, in the hay, with a pitchfork through his ribs.”

  “No,” said Mary. She covered her face with her hands, and her body heaved with sobs. “Not Eli. Please, not Eli.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. And for a moment he held her more closely.

  Mary stared up at her uncle, and her lips trembled. “You weren’t going to tell me,” she said.

  “Of course I was.”

  “You weren’t. You wouldn’t have said anything if it wasn’t for the blood.”

  “Mary, he was my brother.”

  “And you hated him.” She backed away from her uncle. There were fingerprints of blood on her shoulders. “Did you do it?” she asked. “Did you kill him?”

  “Mary!”

  She bolted. She grabbed up her skirts and ran for the stable. And Mawgan turned to me. “Do you see what you’ve done?” he said. “Do you?”

  “What I’ve done?” I said. “And what happened on the Tombstones the night Peter drowned?”

  His eyes were dark and hollow. I wanted to stare him down, but I couldn’t. They were huge, frightful whirlpools that spiraled off into nothing. And I looked away, my face burning.

  Mawgan laughed. “You’re no more a man than the crabs that crawl on the beach,” he said. And he raised his hand and knocked me to the ground.

  I rolled away, thinking he would kick me. But he only glowered like a man who’s come across a beetle in his path. “She’s all I’ve got,” he said. “Don’t try to deny me that.” Then he turned his back and walked off to the house.

  I found Mary crouched on the stable floor, pulling handfuls of hay from the pile. Eli’s legs poked out, stiff and straight, and his face stared up through the yellow stalks. His eyes were closed, his mouth a wide O. Mary cleared the hay away; she brushed at his chest.

  Four holes made a row across his shirt, the cloth puckered and torn, stained with dark blood.

  There was hay in his hair, in his collar, in his fists. He looked like a scarecrow dropped there, a scarecrow bleeding and dead.