The Wreckers Page 8

  She was a ghost in the dark, beating hard to windward with every sail set. Each mast was a tower, tapering from courses to royals, each yard braced back to the shrouds. Between them stretched the staysails, a wall of canvas. She leaned in the wind and hurled herself through the waves in a blizzard of spindrift. And I would have given my soul to be aboard her.

  It was a beautiful, ghastly scene, all in black and shades of gray. To the west was Wrinkle Head, to the east lay Northground, and between them was a vast bay with the ship in the middle. She bore down on Wrinkle Head, taking each wave on the bow with a blast of spray.

  Along the cliffs there were people, forty or more, some tall and some short, thin ones and plump ones, children and men and old women. They stood at the edge like crows on a roof ridge, watching the ship on the sea.

  Pressed by the wind, beaten by waves, the ship slipped sideways a yard for every ten she gained. The big mainsail disappeared, seeming to shrink up into the foot of the topsail. And then the bow swung round to the wind. Staysails and jibs shivered like flags. The yards went crashing across. The ship slowed as she turned, coming upright into the wind, then raced off toward Northground, toward the other wall of her prison.

  From the cliffs came a groan, a cry of despair. A tall man raised his fist, and shook it at the ship. And then, as one, the rabble shouldered axes and pikes and followed the ship in a long, wavering line.

  I looked for Simon Mawgan among them. But there was no sign of him, no sign of his horse. Not a man in the group carried a lantern.

  As they walked below us they started singing, first one and then all—men, women, and children—their voices swelling into a slow and mournful hymn.

  Hear me, O God,

  As I pray to Thee,

  From the shore

  Of the perilous sea.

  If sailors there are,

  And wrecks there must be,

  I beseech You

  To send them to me.

  I beseech You

  To send them to me.

  Mary clucked at her pony and backed it over the rise. Mine went with it, as though they were lashed together. We hobbled them out of sight from the cliffs, then crawled down to the shelter of Mary’s garden.

  There was nothing we could do but let the scene unfold; the ship would clear the cape, or she would not. For her, the wind was like a slope of shifting sand, and for every yard she climbed, she slipped a little back. For an hour or more she ran toward the cape, inching up the slope of wind, until she was no more than a shadow in the distance. Then she turned again, and the wreckers cheered; the ship was still embayed.

  “Sometimes this lasts for days,” said Mary. “The people wander back and forth and back and forth. They sleep up here, and never leave until it’s over, until the ship is free or on the rocks. There edn’t a one of them who’ll go away and miss the chance to be first at a wreck.”

  It seemed an awful thing to do, as cruel as the crowds that massed in their fine clothes for a London hanging.

  “So you see what I mean,” said Mary. “They’re waiting, is all. They’re not using false lights.”

  “Where’s the man from the cromlech?” I asked. “Where’s your uncle?”

  Mary shrugged. “But he edn’t here, is he?”

  To me, that only meant he was waiting somewhere else, ready with his lantern. He would wait till dawn and then no more; his was a nighttime business. Once the ship had seen the shore, there would be no use for beacons.

  The ship sailed past, and past again, trapped between the capes. And then, when the night was nearly done, the Widow came, standing in her wagon with her hands upon the shoulders of her small and dusty driver. She called out to her horses with a wildly piercing cry, and they pounded on before her with their heads outthrust, their coats ashine with sweat.

  “Now the ship is doomed,” said Mary. “When the Widow arrives, there’s a wreck in the offing. She feels it like a coming storm.”

  “Where has she come from?” I asked.

  “From the moors. She lives in a house flung together from wood and thatch, down at the end of the Mawgan land.”

  “You’ve been there?”

  “I’ve seen it,” said Mary. “Uncle Simon takes her food sometimes. Tea and loaves of bread. And I’ve seen Eli shuffling off that way all by himself as night is coming down. But in the whole village there edn’t another man who’ll ride out to the Widow’s place.”

  She passed below us, the horses slowing as she whistled to them.

  “I followed Uncle Simon once,” said Mary. “I watched him go up to the house. But the Widow wouldn’t come to the door. I saw her face in the window—it looked like frost on the glass—and she never moved from there.”

  “And her driver?”

  “That’s Simple Tom. The idjit boy. He used to wander through the village, until the Widow took him in. Won’t talk to another soul; only to her.”

  Once more the ship scudded past, close-hauled for the point. Once more she turned away. In my heart and mind, I was sailing with her. Though she moved in silence, like a toy on the water, I heard inside me the awful creaking of her planks and the strain of the lines; I felt the icy blasts of tossed spray. And I felt the danger, that horrible thrill of peril.

  Behind her came the wreckers. And at last they tired of their trekking. They settled down round the Widow’s wagon, and soon others came up from the road with bundles of wood and tarpaulins. They built a fire that filled the wind with sparks, with a tang of smoke that drifted down right upon us.

  “The whole village is here,” I said.

  “I daresay it is,” said Mary.

  “Then Pendennis is empty?”

  “Yes.”

  I looked away. “I’m going there. I’m going to look for my father.”

  I thought she would stop me, or at least try. Really, I hoped she would. But she only said, “We’ll both go.”

  “But if they find me—”

  “They won’t,” said Mary. She got up into a crouch and started picking at her flowers, breaking off the heads. “I know every street and passageway.”

  I didn’t argue; I didn’t want to. Mary took the flowers in her hand, and together we slipped back to the ponies and rode off for the village.

  Side by side we trotted down toward the stone bridge. With the headlands behind us, we could see the buildings of Pendennis stepped on the slopes of the harbor’s far shore. Scattered through its length, a few little windows shone with lamplight. But it was a dark place. And it filled me with fear.

  Chapter 10

  WRAPPED IN CHAINS

  The hooves of our ponies clopped on the bridge. We climbed up the high road and entered the village through a break in an ancient wall. And there we left the ponies, at a public trough where water trickled from a spout shaped like a fish head.

  Mary took me first to the churchyard. “I never come to the village without stopping here,” she said.

  The wind sighed past the church and blew in whirls round the headstones. The stained-glass saints glowed with a faint light, as though they watched us—or watched the storm—through a veil of thin curtains. Behind them moved a shape, and Parson Tweed went gliding by the row of faces.

  Mary took a flower from her bunch and laid it down by a headstone. “For my father,” she said. She left the second on the grave beside it. “For my mother.” She tucked back her hair. “I bring flowers for the people who mean much to me,” she said. “For my heroes. You don’t think that’s silly, do you?”

  “No,” I said.

  She left four more—for her aunt and for Peter, for a friend and a cousin—and still kept one in her hand as we walked toward the gate.

  “Who’s that for?” I asked.

  Mary smiled. She pressed the flower into my hand. “For you.”

  She meant it kindly. But to be counted among her dead heroes, to be honored the same way at the side of their graves, gave me an icy chill.

  “What’s the matter?” asked Mary.


  I was wondering: The next time Mary came to the churchyard, would she be stooping at my grave as well? With a shudder, I thought of the cromlech. It’s cursed. Go in there and you’ll die.

  The wind chased us round the back of the church as we headed down to the harbor. Mary didn’t look back. She started off along a lane, knowing I would follow. I shoved her flower into the breast of my jersey. The others were already scattering across the graves, rolling and spinning from stone to stone.

  From the dirt to cobblestones, we traced the route I’d ridden with Simon Mawgan. We arrived at the harborfront not far from the same spot where he’d found me in the hands of Caleb Stratton, a knife at my throat. But now the tide was high, and the boats that had lain stranded in the mud tugged like horses at their mooring ropes, rubbing against the seawall with a squeal of cork.

  The long street was dark and empty. In both directions, the buildings crowded around us, inns and warehouses and deserted boatworks. My father could be in any one of them—or none at all. It seemed an impossible quest.

  Even Mary looked downhearted. “Did Stumps give you a clue?” she asked. “Anything at all?”

  I tried to remember. And I heard again that awful, quiet rasping of his voice. If you put the wreckmen on me, your father will rot where he lies. Only I know where he is, and there he’ll stay. But there was no more than that, no hint at all.

  “Is there a song that he knows?” asked Mary.

  “Stumps?” I asked.

  “Your father, silly,” she said. “Is there a tune you can whistle, and your father will know that it’s you?”

  “Yes,” I said. When my mother lay dying, there was a song he’d sung to comfort her. He sat by her bed, and held her hand, and sang it over and over from dark until dawn. “I don’t know the name, but it sounds like this.” I whistled it for her.

  “Again,” said Mary when I’d finished. “Keep whistling. But stop if you see someone. Stop if you hear a sound.”

  Up the street we walked, and the notes came softly back through the canyon of buildings. They came back through time, and I felt myself six years old again, seeing the horrors of those long nights, my mother’s face shrinking like old wax, her pretty face turning awful and ugly.

  “Keep whistling,” said Mary. We walked inland, the wind behind us, past an inn and a chandlery.

  In the end, my mother’s teeth had stood out in rows, bared and gumless like those of a horse. And my father, seeing my distress, locked me from the room. I’d sat in the hallway, hearing the song through the door until, one night, it suddenly ended. When the door opened, my father looked down at me. He said—

  “Don’t stop, John.” Mary gave my arm a gentle shake. “If we pass him by, we’ll never find him.”

  I started again, hardly aware I’d stopped at all.

  My father had said, “She’s gone.” I thought he meant that she’d somehow risen from the bed and disappeared. When I looked in and saw her there, covered over with a sheet, I thought he was playing a trick. I’d pulled away the cover and stared down at that—that thing that I hardly knew was my mother.

  “Shhh!” said Mary. When she squeezed my arm, I jerked with sudden fear. “Someone’s coming,” she said, and pulled me into a deep doorway.

  Footsteps sounded on the cobblestones. Not one person, but two.

  We crouched by a wall, in the darkness, and hardly dared look. The people would pass within an arm’s length of us.

  I could hear Mary breathing. I could hear my own heart, like the whistling flight of an owl. The footsteps grew louder.

  Then a peal of laughter, and a woman’s voice thick with Cornish brogue. “An’ I says to ’im, ‘Why,’ says I, ‘I lost one zackly like that only t’udder day.’ An’ lissen, Mally; it were jist the same one, jist the same ould roul o’ lither! Did’ee ever see or hear tell o’ sich a thing?”

  They walked right by, two old women laughing and nodding, leaning on each other like drunken sailors. Their laughter, their footsteps, faded off down the street. And I heard instead the slop and chop of water at a wall.

  I sat up. It wasn’t a doorway that Mary had led us to, but a narrow alley roofed by the top floor of the chandlery: a passageway to the sea. A draft came up it, cold and salty. I whistled my song, and it filled the space like the voices of a choir.

  And I heard a scratching in reply.

  Mary’s fingers squeezed around my arm. Again I whistled; again came the scratching.

  “It’s coming from the bottom,” said Mary.

  We walked deeper into the alley. Where the chandlery ended, the floor dropped off into a walled flight of carved steps, narrow and steep. I started down them.

  The scratching stopped. I whistled softly. And the same tune came echoing back, the same rhythm tapped out on stone or brick.

  With a hand braced on each wall, I felt with my foot for the next step down. Mary pressed behind me, and slowly we descended. At the bottom the steps went straight to the water. On one side the wall was bare plaster. But on the other the building was made of stone, all chipped and cracked. And set in an arch was a small and ancient door. I pushed against it and felt the jar of a heavy bolt.

  I pressed my ear to the wood and listened for the tapping. Looking up from the bottom, the alley was like a gun muzzle, a dark tunnel with a small, square slot for the entrance. The tapping echoed through it, but I couldn’t hear it at the door.

  “The harbor,” said Mary. She had her eyes closed. “It’s coming from the harbor.”

  I moved to the bottom step, with the water at my feet. I poked my head out into the wind. A narrow wooden ledge jutted from the building, a tarred timber just four inches wide. Above it was a drain tunnel, an enormous pipe made of brick. Green water thick as paste oozed from its mouth. Things like soft icicles hung from the brick, swaying like pendulums. And the tapping came from there.

  “Father!” I called. “Father, it’s John.”

  His answer was a mumble, like the frantic sounds of old Eli, and my first thought was that Stumps had done the same thing to my father. And then I remembered. His lips will look like splattered worms, and he’ll choke on his very own tongue.

  I pulled myself back into the passageway. “He’s in there,” I said. “In the drain.”

  “Are you going in?”

  “Yes.”

  Mary touched the bolted door. “This building was once a brewery,” she said. “You should be able to come out this way.”

  I took off my coat and spread it on the steps. “We’ll need the ponies, Mary. Could you get them?”

  “All right.” She started to leave, then stopped. “Be careful,” she said, and went running up the steps.

  The stone was broken at the corner. Clumps of grass and bushy plants grew in the chinks where mortar had fallen away. As I felt for handholds huge pieces came loose in my hand. They clattered down and fell with a splash into the dark water of the harbor. I swung out and planted my feet on the narrow, slippery ledge.

  The water was just a few feet below, an ebb tide swirling round the stone. I couldn’t swim. If I fell in there, I’d be swept out to sea like a bit of wood.

  Spread-eagled, groping for holds, I inched along the wall like a fly. The water gurgled; the wind’s gusts tried to pluck me from the ledge. But I gritted my teeth and kept going. And before long, my hand closed on the lip of the drain tunnel. I slithered through, into a dank and fetid hole. A furtive rustle of rats preceded me.

  The space was large enough that I could easily stand. I went only a few steps before I came upon Father. He lay on a ledge of brick, a foot above the slime of the open drain. He was on his back, with an old neckerchief knotted tight in his mouth. I tore it loose, and he gasped long breaths of that foul air.

  “John,” he said. His voice was hoarse; even the sound was painful. “I can’t believe … it’s really you.”

  I dipped my fingers in the mire and touched them to his lips. His tongue darted out, fat and pale like a garden slug. �
�Moved,” he said. “Used to lie … against the brick. Wet there.”

  He was right. Water condensed on the walls of the drain—good, clear water that tasted of lime. I pressed my hand against it until a tiny pool filled my palm, then let it dribble into his mouth. He drank handful after handful as the muscles in his throat burbled and creaked. Then I rubbed it on his eyes and his forehead, and in the thick bristles of his beard.

  “Better,” he said. “Thank you.”

  “There are ponies coming,” I told him. “We have to get you up to the street. Is there another way out?”

  “Trapdoor,” he said. “Above you.”

  “What’s up there?”

  “Nothing,” he said. “Empty room.”

  “Can you walk?”

  He shook his head. “I’m changed,” is what I thought he said. But as I ran my hands along his legs, feeling for blood or broken bones, I found metal collars locked round his ankles, heavy chains padlocked to ringbolts in the brick. There were more collars at his wrists, another belt of chain around his waist. He was fettered like a dog to his narrow shelf. Even with a file it would take time to work him free; with a hammer and chisel, I would need hours. I had to get the key, and only one man would have it.

  “Have you seen Stumps?” I asked.

  “Who?”

  “The man with no legs. They say he’s vanished. They say he’s—”

  Father rattled the chains. “No!” he said. “Comes at dawn … at dark.”

  “He came today?”

  Father nodded.

  “At dark he came?”

  “Listen.” Father stretched his head toward me. “Tomorrow, on the night tide … taking me out.”

  “Stumps?” I asked.

  “Yes.” His voice hissed through the tunnel. “No … no moon … leaving by boat.”

  “Where?”

  “God knows,” said Father, with a dreadful shudder.

  Smuggled gold had led us to this. Gold and greed had wrecked the Isle of Skye and killed its crew. In that instant, if it had been anyone but my father lying there, I could have hit him. Hit him and kicked him and punched him for all that he’d done. But I only glared at him in the darkness.