The Wreckers Read online

  His face, so jovial before, had become fierce as a lion’s. White spittle bubbled at the corners of his mouth. He shook me. “Do you?”

  There was a sound behind him, like a clap, and a girl’s voice spoke sharply. “Uncle Simon! You’re scaring him.”

  His face changed on the instant, the anger in it melting again to kindness. By the time he turned away from me, Simon Mawgan was smiling like an angel. “Mary,” he said.

  She was beautiful. Strong and tanned, she stood in the doorway with her arms crossed. She was my age or maybe younger by a year, and her hair—with the lamplight shining in it—looked the way the sea does on a rosy dawn. “Who is this?” she asked.

  Mawgan laughed. “This is John Spencer,” he said. “A shipwrecked sailor.”

  “You were shouting at him.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “But I hear stories like those, and they make me angry. I like a good wreck as much as the next man, but I won’t abide false lights and I won’t stand for murder.”

  “I know,” said Mary. “But Uncle, you weren’t there last night.”

  “No matter,” said Mawgan. “I know the men of Pendennis.”

  Mary nodded. “I’ll put the dinner up,” she said, and slipped away like a butterfly.

  Mawgan took off his coat and hung it on a peg. He reached out for mine, then glanced toward the door. His voice dropped to a whisper. “I’ll tell you this,” he said. “If any man lives from that wreck, his life isn’t worth tuppence. Not tuppence, you hear?”

  I gave him my coat. It was wet and dirty, heavy with salt.

  “We might all be in peril if one got ashore,” he said. He bent over toward me. “So tell me. Is there anyone else?”

  I was afraid to lie. He would see it in my eyes as plain as a signal. But a vision of Stumps rose in my mind, his face bloated like sewer gas. Your father will rot where he lies. I had no idea whom I could trust, and so I decided to trust no one at all.

  “Well?” said Mawgan. His brow narrowed. “Did someone else get ashore?”

  “No one I saw,” I told him.

  He stared at me for a moment. Then: “Very well,” he said. “Now come and eat.”

  We sat down to a dinner that would have fed a whole watch of seamen. There were pasties and lammy pies, a huge slab of pork, a tower of bread. “That’s wheat bread,” said Mawgan, his mouth overflowing. “You won’t see cornmeal or barley bread in this house.” Mary laid it down, went back for more, fetched plate after plate as Mawgan shoveled it down.

  Finally, Mary came from the kitchen with a thing so awful I could hardly bear to look. It was a pie, with a crust as smooth and brown as a sandy beach. But through it poked the heads of fish, thrusting up as though she’d baked them alive as they floundered for air. Their big cooked eyes bulged toward the ceiling.

  “Ah,” said Mawgan. “The starry-gazy.” He cleared a vast spot, pushing with his elbows at dishes and bowls.

  Mary laughed. She put the plate at the edge of the table and went past us to the door. “That edn’t for you.” Her Cornish accent sounded like music. “I made that’m for Eli.”

  “For Eli?”

  “Now, don’t go on, Uncle. You’ve got plenty as it is.” She took a shawl from its hook and tied it round her chin. “Starry-gazy’s all the poor old soul can eat.”

  Mawgan snorted. “Last week lammy pies was all the wretch could eat.” But he let her take the plate and step out through the door with no more fight than that. He launched a ferocious attack on the pasties that lasted until Mary was back. “Coffee,” he said as she took off her shawl.

  “It will have to be tea.” She was smiling, brightened by her walk. “We haven’t had a coffee wreck in the longest time.”

  I was stung by the way that even Mary could talk, with such nonchalance, of what came from the drowning of sailors. I told them I was overcome by the rich food, by the warmth of the house. And I let Mawgan lead me to an upstairs room, where I fell asleep to the sound of laughter below.

  Chapter 5

  A ROW OF BODIES

  My father came to me again in my dreams. He stood at the stern of our little brig, his hands clasped behind his back, his beard parted by the wind. He was giving orders in a calm voice, and it was I who obeyed every one.

  First I was at the helm, then up in the topmast, then down in the waist hauling all by myself on a halyard. And wherever I went, Father followed. Each time he came he was thinner and weaker. His lips turned black, his eyes grew big as eggs. He begged me for water, and he asked for his ring. “Have you seen it, John? Have you seen my ring?”

  Then he sent me below, down to the bilge. And he came crawling behind me on hands and knees, crawling from the darkness with rats all round him. His eyes had popped from his head, and they dangled on bloody strings, swaying against his cheeks. He was begging, but I couldn’t understand him. And when he opened his mouth it was full of blood, and I saw that his tongue was torn away.

  I woke screaming. I didn’t know where I was. And then I felt a hand on my forehead, and it was Mary leaning over me.

  “Hush,” she said. “Hush, John.” She touched my lips, my eyelids. “You were dreamin’, is all.”

  She scooped up a bundle of clothes from a chair, then went to the window and opened the curtains. It was morning, though the sky was darkly red.

  “You’ll want to be getting up,” she said. “Breakfast is waiting. Then you can come with me across the moor.”

  “And your uncle?”

  “He’s off on his business.” She did an imitation of him, her cheeks puffed out: “ ‘Can you keep an eye on him, Mary? ’Course you can.’ ” She laughed gaily. “He took a fancy to you, I think. You must remind him much of Peter.”

  “Who’s Peter?” I asked.

  “He wouldn’t have told you. Peter was his son.” She dropped her bundle on the bed. “He found these for you. Pair of breeches and a jersey.”

  There was a coat too, and a neckerchief. They looked nearly new. “Were they Peter’s?” I asked.

  “No,” she said. “But Uncle told me that the boy who had them last was no bigger than you.”

  Mary turned her back as I dressed. I said, “What happened to Peter?”

  “He was drownded.”

  The clothes fit well enough, but there was a rip in the jersey, by the shoulder. It looked about the size of a cutlass blade.

  “I can mend that’m for you,” said Mary when she saw me with my fingers poking through the hole. And after breakfast, as I sat on the sea chest by the window, she leaned over me with a strand of yarn between her lips, and she pulled and poked at the cloth.

  “Mary?” I said. “Was Peter drowned at a wreck?”

  The needle stopped for only a moment. “Yes,” she said.

  “He was a wrecker?”

  “No.” She tossed back her hair. “He was very young, John. But don’t ask about that. It’s a thing Uncle doesn’t like to have talked about.”

  She went back to her work, and I watched the needle pass in and out of the cloth. Her fingers were strong, more like a man’s than a girl’s.

  Then I said, “Who was Tommy Colwyn?”

  The needle stabbed against my skin. “Sony,” said Mary.

  “Who was he?”

  She tied a knot, then broke the yarn with a quick tug. “How do you know about Tommy?”

  “The men in the village,” I said. “They talked of him.”

  “And what did they say?”

  “That he’s found on the moor under a cloud of crows. That his eyes hang out like watch fobs.”

  Mary drew in a breath. She turned away from me, her face to the window.

  “Was he a wrecker?” I asked, and she nodded. “He was caught, was he?”

  “And hanged in chains.”

  I shuddered. That was an awful thing to see, a man hanged in chains. I’d seen the pirates at Execution Dock, their dead bodies left to blacken and rot, picked at by birds, swinging in the wind for weeks or even months a
s a lesson to others.

  “And he hangs there still?” I asked.

  Mary nodded. “But Tommy wasn’t hanged for the wrecking,” she told me. “They found him on the moor, with a spade in his hands and a row of bodies not quite buried.”

  There was a catch in her breath as she said it. Her shoulders drooped. “It was the wreckers they wanted. They said to Tommy, ‘Give us their names and you’ll go free.’ He weren’t there at the wrecking, but he knew who was. He said, ‘I won’t tell you that.’ So they hanged him. Only a boy, and they hanged him.”

  “He deserved it,” I said.

  “No.” She touched the window. “You don’t understand, John. You don’t know how it is.”

  “Tell me, then.”

  “Not in the morning. I don’t think about this in the mornings.” Her cheeks were red as rose hips. She took my hand and pulled me up. “Let’s go now.”

  “Where?”

  “Across the moor.”

  There were ponies in the stable, and we rode them bareback, laughing as we raced over the empty land. Mary was a better rider than me, sitting with her skirts hiked up and flowing in the wind. We splashed through brooks, hurdled crumbling walls, ran and ran with the sun at our backs.

  “This way!” cried Mary, and veered to the south, to the top of a knoll.

  She beat me by a furlong and was already seated on the ground—flush-faced, her skirts smoothed around her—when I gained the summit and slid from the pony.

  “Edn’t it beautiful?” said Mary.

  It was. I felt I could see halfway to London from the top of that rise. To the south was the Channel, with a glower of clouds over faraway France: a gale in the offing. Westward, the rooftops of Pendennis were nestled in their cove, the church standing above them like a block of gray stone. But it was to the east that I looked.

  And Mary guessed what I was thinking. “Uncle will put you on the next packet,” she said. “You’ll be home in a fortnight. Maybe less.”

  “But home to what?” I said.

  “Why, your mother. Your father. They’ll be worried to the death about you.”

  “I have no mother,” I told her. “She died when I was very young.”

  “And your father?” Mary was looking up at me, surrounded by her skirts like a flower.

  “He was on the Isle of Skye.”

  “Oh, dear,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  I wanted to tell her the truth. I felt I had to tell someone. In two weeks, maybe less, I’d be sailing off to leave my father at the mercy of the legless man. And to have him think forever that I had died in the wreck.

  “Have you no uncles?” asked Mary. “No aunties?”

  “No.” I sat beside her. The ponies stood off at a distance, watching us with round, wondering eyes.

  “So you have no one,” she said. “You poor thing.”

  Her eyes were so kind, so gentle, that I knew I could trust her. “Mary,” I said, barely a whisper. “My father is still alive. He’s hidden somewhere in the village.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “Stumps,” I said. “He—”

  “That horrible man?” She shook her head. “No, John. You can’t believe what he tells you.”

  “But he had my father’s ring,” I said.

  “He collects things, John. Little baubles. He’s like a magpie that way; he always has been.”

  “It’s more than that,” I said. “I know it’s true.”

  I told her how I’d sheltered in the blockhouse and how Stumps had found me in the dark. I told her everything that had happened from then until the moment that she found Simon Mawgan shouting at me in the doorway of the house. She listened in silence, her knees drawn up and her arms around them.

  “So I can’t tell anyone,” I said. “Or Stumps will kill my father. And I don’t know what to do.”

  “Uncle will know,” said Mary.

  “But he’s one of them!” I cried.

  Mary laughed. “You don’t know my uncle.”

  “I know he’s a wrecker,” I said.

  “He’s not.”

  “They all are.”

  “And then so am I?”

  “Well, maybe not,” I said. “But Tommy Colwyn—”

  “Stop it!” Mary leapt to her feet. “It’s not the people, John. It’s this country. This wasteland.”

  I shook my head.

  “The men of Pendennis were miners once. They went down in the ground for a shilling a day, down so deep that the sea rushed in at their feet. And in the days of rain and floods they couldn’t work at all, and they’d go for weeks without earning a farthing. Others went fishing; all day they spent out in the fog and the storms for a bucket of pilchards. That was all a boy could hope to do. He could drown in the mines or drown in the sea.”

  She wrung her hands, then buried them in the folds of her skirt. “You’ve seen the land. Most of it won’t grow potatoes, and it won’t graze sheep. There were people so hungry that they scraped up limpets from the Tombstones. But the Mawgans were wealthy. They had Galilee, and they owned the best of the mines. The Mawgans never suffered like the rest.”

  She took a breath. Her eyes seemed as round as the ponies’. “Once in a while—in a very great while—a ship would come to ruin on the rocks. And there would be food then, and wine, and huge heaps of things just waiting to be carried off and sold for pounds and pounds. And for once it was the Mawgans who suffered.”

  “Because no one was left to work the mines?”

  “Not only that.” Mary bunched her skirt in her fists. “By law the Mawgans had ‘right of wreck.’ We still do. Any ship that comes ashore in the great arc of St. Elmo’s Bay—anywhere between Wrinkle Head and Northground—legally belongs to my uncle. His father had right of wreck; his grandfather did before that. The oldest man in Pendennis can remember a Mawgan standing in the ruins of a tea wreck, swatting at men who came for the chests, yelling that they were his, that it all belonged to him.”

  Mary turned toward the sea. “Only rarely did ships come ashore on the Tombstones. They might wreck there”—she pulled a hand free and pointed to the east—“or there, or there, or there. So the people followed them. Whenever a ship was caught on the lee shore, the whole village—women and children and men—tracked it along the coast. For days they wandered with it, back and forth, back again. And they prayed, John, they knelt and prayed that the poor ship would meet its end before it got to the next village, before it met the crowd that had set out from there with their own axes and picks.”

  She was staring at the gray waters of the Channel. Her voice dropped, and she shivered. “The law said that anything that came from a wreck was free for salvage. But for it to be a wreck, no one could survive—not man or beast. If one person—if so much as a dog—made it safely ashore, then it weren’t really a wreck at all. ‘The wreck edn’t dead,’ is what they’d say. So it was the law, John, that made the devil’s work of wrecking.”

  “Because,” I said, “they killed the people who got to shore.”

  “Yes. It came to that.” She sat again, close beside me. “But it got worse. It got much worse.”

  Chapter 6

  THE HAUNTED COVE

  Mary sat on the grass, her face to the sea. Her voice grew faint and faraway, as though she talked from a different place and a different time.

  “I only once saw them use the false beacons,” she said. “It was the night of a terrible storm. You could hardly stand in the wind, it was that strong. And a ship came running down toward the shore.”

  “When was this?” I asked.

  “Seven years ago,” said she. “I was only a child.” She closed her eyes. “We lay in a row along the cliffs and watched that ship. The waves were breaking right over the decks, and we could hear the sails blowing out—boom, boom—one after the other. It was Caleb Stratton who said, ‘Show them a light.’ I remember him standing when everyone else was flat on the ground, standing in the rain and the wind, with that big black
beard of his like a mask on his face. ‘We done it before,’ he said. ‘Show ’em a light and they steer straight for it.’ Uncle Simon would have none of it—I remember him shouting—and most of the people felt the same way. But Caleb had a power and a strength, and there were always a few who would follow him. Stumps—he still had his legs then, though not for long—ran off to fetch a lantern. They tied it to the tail of a pony that they walked across the cliffs. I remember the way it flared in the wind, the way the men laughed. Those poor wretched sailors; they must have thought they saw the masthead of a ship going into harbor. And they followed like lambs. Right to the Tombstones.”

  “Did you see that?” I asked.

  “No. They sent us home, the women and children.”

  “And your uncle?”

  “He stayed at the cliffs.” Mary lay back and put her hand over her eyes. “The storm blew all night. And Uncle Simon came home in the morning, all bloodied and bruised, soaked with salt water. He had tried to stop them, he said. He had tried to put out the light, and they attacked him.”

  “He told you this?”

  “And I believed him,” said Mary. “He poured a huge glass of brandy. It shook in his hands. Then he told me how the ship drove up on the rocks and how the masts fell, sails and all. The men were standing on the clifftop, Caleb and the others, laughing and dancing like boys at a game. And Uncle—this is what he told me—followed them down to the beach and took up an axe. And in the darkness he—” She stopped, breathing softly.

  “What?” I asked.

  Mary spread her fingers and peered at me between them. “That was the night Stumps lost his legs.”

  Suddenly the day seemed very cold. I could imagine the scene as Mary described it, Stumps writhing on the ground as the axe rose and fell. But just as easily I could imagine a cable cinching on his legs, Simon Mawgan wielding a lantern instead of an axe.

  “A lot of men drownded that night,” said Mary. “And since then my uncle’s made sure that they never again used the lights.”