The Wreckers

by Iain Lawrence

“But they do,” I said.

  “Oh, no,” she said. “They don’t.”

  “I saw them.” I turned to her, almost pleading. “I saw them from the ship.”

  “It’s quite impossible, John. You must have seen stars, or maybe—”

  “I saw the ponies on the cliff. They had lanterns on their backs.”

  “Are you sure?” said Mary. “Maybe they were boxes. Maybe they were—”

  “They were lanterns,” said I.

  “Oh, dear.” She closed her eyes. “Uncle Simon will be very angry to hear this.”

  “Angry?” I laughed. “He did it. He wrecked the Skye, and he wrecked others before her.”

  “No!” said Mary.

  “Look at his house. All those things.” I thought of my bedroom. On the wall hung a quadrant that a sailor had used to find his way from the stars. In Simon Mawgan’s house, it was a rack to hold socks.

  “You judge him too harshly,” she said. “He’s not an evil man; he’s really not. He only takes what the law gives him—a payment, or a share, from the wrecks that God brings about.”

  “God wrecks the ships?” I asked.

  “If not Him, then who else?”

  “It was men who wrecked the Isle of Skye,” I told her.

  “And it was my uncle who saved you from it,” she said. “And edn’t that the truth? Edn’t it? If he did wreck your ship, then why did he help you?”

  I had no answer for that. But still I wasn’t sure. “Where was he when it happened?”

  “With Parson Tweed. He was called away to see the parson.” She sat up. “And if that won’t convince you, then I suppose nothing will.”

  At that moment I believed her. How could I not? He was her uncle, and Mary seemed so sure of him, so loving. Of course I believed her.

  “Now, come on,” said Mary. “We’ve a fair distance to go yet.”

  “To where?” I asked.

  “Why, to the Tombstones.”

  We rode south, and met the road at Coffee Cove. But when it turned inland, we kept to the cliffs, and soon came to our destination.

  We pressed the ponies right to the brink. It scared them to stand there. They shied away, their eyes rolling as they tossed their heads. Mary kept hers steady while mine pranced sideways and pawed at the ground.

  “They never like it here,” said Mary. “They smell the fear and the dying.”

  Below us, the sea looked gray and cold. In endless rows, the waves gathered themselves, towering high, then rushed at the rocks in a heaving crash of surf and spray. The water whirled among those spikes of stone, leaping up in great white spouts, blasting into sheets, flying as spindrift across the cove. There was nothing left of the poor Isle of Skye; it was as though the wreck had never happened. But high on the beach, where the waves reached like fingers to the cliffs, were the same heaps of rope and shattered wood. And the gulls still circled round and round.

  “They always gather where there’s been a wreck,” said Mary, seeing the way I stared. “People say when a sailor drowns that his soul becomes a gull.”

  It was a nice thought. I studied them, the birds turning gray, then silver, as they flashed across the sun. Could one be old Cridge, another Danny Riggins, the foretopman, free now to spin through the sky?

  “I hate this cove,” said Mary. “It’s the worst place of them all.” The wind lifted her hair, and above her the gulls cried like babies. “It’s haunted, John.”

  Her uncle had said the same thing, with the same little shiver in his voice.

  “You can feel it, can’t you? The sadness.” With a press of her heels, Mary let the pony move back from the edge. Mine went with it; I couldn’t stop it. “You see corpse lights here,” she said.

  “Ghosts, you mean?”

  “Not as you’d think of them.” She looked at me, and her eyes were as gray as the sky. “All you see are lights. Pale blue lights that move along the beach or across the cliffs. At night and in the fog. Slowly, slowly they go: like a funeral march.” Suddenly she laughed. “Oh, it makes me scared just to think of it. When people see the corpse lights, they run away.”

  “Have you seen them?”

  She shook her head. “Years ago—before I was born—people heard a ship come ashore. It was a full moon, and flat calm, but in the village they heard a shout—a scream—and then the smashing of a ship. They all came, the whole village, and they stood right here along the cliffs. They stood and listened to the screaming, to the crack of wood and the thunder as the masts came down. But the bay was empty, John; there was no ship.”

  I looked down at the Tombstones, and I saw that the sea was changing. We watched the wind ripple across the surface, black bands that thickened and thinned as they raced toward us. Behind them, whitecaps bloomed.

  “The air was deathly still,” said Mary. “The sea was flat as a field, but they could hear the roar of heavy surf. And then, for a moment, they did see a ship. It was a ghost, a pale, shimmering hull, and they could see right through it to the Tombstones and the moonlight on the water. An old man of the village—he’s been dead twenty years—said, ‘The Virtue! She wrecked here eleven year ago.’ ” And as they watched, the corpse lights came. They rose up from that ship that wasn’t there, and came across the water.”

  Mary shivered. “The people ran away. They all turned and ran, except for one man who stayed behind. He shouted after them; he taunted them. He was going down to the beach, he said. He wasn’t scared of a few little lights. But he was never seen again, John. They say the ghost ship carried him off.”

  “And the lights?” I asked.

  “Uncle Simon used to tell me if I stayed out at night, the corpse lights would get me.” Mary smiled. “All children are told the same. And a month ago there was a ship embayed. She came in the night, and the men were waiting with lanterns. But they saw the corpse lights right there on the beach.”

  Mary pointed down the cliff. “It was one light, moving along. Caleb Stratton was there, and Jeremy Haines, Spots, and the others. And they all ran away; Caleb tried to stop them, but he couldn’t. In the morning the ship was gone. Some people said it was never there at all. It was the Virtue come back, they said, and she was looking for crew. They say the corpse lights are dead men. Dead men alive.”

  I looked down at the sea, and I thought of old Riggins, who’d told me stories of specters and ghost ships as the Isle of Skye sailed on a rolling sea. And I longed for those days, and wished I could live them again. I ached to ride a tall ship through the night, with the sails rising above me like patches over the stars. I had felt I would die if Father doomed me to work in the dusty prison of an office. I remembered him saying—he loved to say it—“You’ll never make a seaman.” Our voyage had been a lesson, to teach me that he was right. “Too many dangers by half,” he had said, hoping to save me from the very thing that had befallen us. I looked down at the sea, and I sighed.

  Mary tugged my sleeve. “Come on, John,” she said. “I’m tired of the sadness here.”

  As we backed and turned the ponies, a gust rose up the cliff and tangled their manes.

  “I’ll show you my garden,” said Mary. “My secret garden.”

  It wasn’t far. Nestled between the cliffs and the road, it lay in a little gully hidden by a tangle of bush. There, in a patch of soil about the size of a door, Mary had planted wildflowers.

  “I call it my memory garden,” she said. “For each wreck, I’ve started a plant.” She turned her head away and crouched suddenly on the ground. “It’s silly, really, edn’t it?”

  “No,” I said. “It’s not.” The flowers grew in rows, twelve abreast, filling the space. A little farther down the gully, she’d cleared the ground for a new plot. The soil was broken but empty, waiting like a fresh grave.

  “They grow so well here,” said Mary. “It’s a funny thing. I never water them, never weed them.” She groomed the flowers, arranging them on their stalks. “I can’t explain it. But it’s sort of like magic, don’t you think?
”

  She wasn’t looking at me. She stroked each flower, then touched its leaves, as though these were little people she hovered over.

  She lifted her skirts and held them clear of the flowers. “There’s so many. So many flowers. And each time I plant one, I cry.” She walked on her toes between them, up to the top of the garden. “Sometimes I imagine this whole bluff”—she spread her arms, and her skirts tumbled loose—“all that you see, covered with flowers, each for a wreck.”

  We made our way back to the ponies. As though by agreement, we didn’t ride them, but led them instead up toward the road.

  “Sometimes I can’t bear it,” said Mary. “I can hear it from the house, the screaming.”

  The wind gusted past us. I heard a distant sound of horses and leather.

  “I want to stop it,” said Mary.

  “You couldn’t,” I said. “It would be you against all of Pendennis.”

  She shook her head. “It edn’t the whole village, John. It’s just a few of the worst. Like Caleb Stratton and Jeremy Haines. Without them, the wrecking would stop. Without them, people would come to save the sailors, and not to kill them.”

  I said, “Parson Tweed told me Caleb is the leader.”

  “It looks that way,” said Mary. “But I think there’s someone else, someone secret. Caleb Stratton edn’t very smart. I think he’s like a puppet, and this person works him and tells him what to do. I have to find out who he is, the puppet master.”

  I wondered: Could it be Simon Mawgan, his house packed full of plunder from the wrecks? I was sure it wasn’t old Eli, and I knew it wasn’t Stumps. But I’d met no one else, apart from the parson and Mary herself.

  “Who might it be?” I asked.

  “Someone in the village, I’m sure. Someone I know. Whoever it is, he can go anywhere he wants with nobody wondering. And only Caleb Stratton will know his secret.”

  I sighed. I plucked at the grass.

  “But it edn’t so bad,” said Mary. “I have a plan.”

  I looked at her, and she glanced back for a moment, her eyes covered by her lashes. “Tell me,” I said.

  She blushed. “You’ll think me foolish.”

  “I won’t,” I said.

  She didn’t talk until we reached the road. And for a moment she stood combing her fingers through the pony’s mane.

  “The next time a ship wrecks on the Tombstones, I’m going to swim out to it,” she said. Her hands ran across the pony’s shoulder, down the ridge of its back. “I’ll get aboard somehow, and I’ll tie myself to the mast. And if they want the wreck, they’ll have to … to kill me.”

  “They will,” I said.

  She nodded. “Maybe. Maybe not.”

  It wasn’t much of a plan. But I could see by her face—the lines that hardened round her eyes—that she meant to try. “I know this, John,” she said in her Cornish way. “Whichy way it goes, it’s better than doing naught.”

  She was braver than I. As we stood there at the edge of the moor, the wind combing back the tufts of grass, she waited—I think—for me to agree, to throw my lot in with her wild idea. But nothing in the world would get me back on the Tombstones, back on the deck of a doomed ship to face Caleb Stratton and his men waiting there with axes and pikes.

  The ponies whinnied and tugged at their bridles. Mary stood her ground, her arm rising and falling as her pony pulled at her. She never took her eyes from me.

  And I heard again the horses and the creaking of wheels. “Someone’s coming,” I said.

  I couldn’t tell at first where the sound was coming from. Then, toward the village, I saw a swirl of dust blowing off across the moor. And a moment later two black horses and a clattering wagon came sailing up over the rise.

  “It’s the Widow,” said Mary. “The widdy-woman.”

  Chapter 7

  THE EVIL EYE

  With a great clamor of pounding hooves and groaning wood, the wagon swayed toward us in a boil of dust. The horses were bigger than any I’d ever seen, and they snorted in the harness. The driver cried out to them and shook his reins, and the wagon shimmied across the road. He was a small man, hunched in the seat, wearing a bully-cocked hat white with dust, a neckerchief across his nose and mouth. And over his shoulder rose a woman’s face and a flowing mass of pure white hair.

  “They say the Widow commands the winds,” said Mary. “She raises tempests.”

  The Widow stood up and held on to the driver’s shoulders as the wagon lurched between the ruts. Her face was brown as old parchment, wrinkled like a much-folded map. She looked right at me, with eyes that glowed pink as embers of coal. When the wagon was a dozen yards off, she cried out; not to the driver, but to the horses themselves. The animals bared their teeth and tossed their heads, huffing clouds of fog as though it was smoke they breathed. They slowed to a walk, and their hooves beat a steady march on the roadbed.

  The Widow kept her hands on the driver, her feet spaced wide apart. She turned only her head, and stared at me as the wagon rolled past. It was a deep, probing look, and her eyes burned with an awful hatred. I stared back, because I couldn’t take my eyes away. I could feel her reaching into my mind, as though fingers crawled in my skull. And still her head swung round as the horses marched on, until it seemed she was looking right back between her shoulders. Then she reached a hand toward me and curled her two middle fingers toward her palm. “Get back!” she said. “Get back where you were!” And she stood like that, staring and pointing, until the wagon rose on the next crest, and dropped out of sight. It looked as though she was sinking into the ground.

  “She’s put the evil eye on you,” said Mary. “You’ll have to watch for her.”

  Our poor ponies had gone half mad. They stood trembling, their ears pressed catlike against their skulls, their eyes rolled up to the whites like hard-boiled eggs. “Hush,” said Mary to hers. “Hush now.” It flinched when she touched it, then calmed slowly under her hand.

  “The Widow’s tetched,” she said, tapping her head. “People say she’s a witch, but I think she’s just crazy. Years ago she saw her brother drownded. Before that, her husband; his body was never found.”

  “But the way she looked at me. It was—”

  “She thinks you’re him come back from the dead.” Mary grabbed the pony’s mane and sprang up on its back. “It’s not just you,” she said, looking down. “She thinks the same of any man or boy who gets ashore from a wreck.”

  “How does she know I came from a wreck?”

  “News travels fast.” Mary watched as I hauled myself onto the pony. “They probably know of you in Polruan by now, and that’s better than twenty mile from here.”

  We started off down the road, side by side in the Widow’s wake. The dust from her wagon flurried ahead of us like a little tornado.

  “So there have been others,” I said.

  “Others what?” asked Mary.

  “Saved from a wreck.”

  “A few,” she said, “have reached the shore.”

  It was all she would say. And then she shouted at me to race her, and set her pony into a gallop for home.

  Though we ran at a breakneck speed, we never caught up with the Widow. The cloud of dust moved along at the same pace as ourselves until we turned inland on the path to Galilee. We hurtled round that bend. Mary was a length ahead—the hind hooves of her pony kicked divots of sod as we swung out onto the edge of the moor. She glanced back, and I saw her face through a veil of hair. I leaned forward like a jockey, stretched so flat along the mane that I peered between the pony’s ears. I could feel it writhing under me, pounding along like a boat in a seaway. I edged ahead, fell back a bit, surged forward again. Neck and neck we flew over the rise where Simon Mawgan had stopped to look at the view. Mary was laughing. “The loser,” she cried, “has to stable the ponies.”

  Into the glen the ponies ran shoulder to shoulder, paced so closely that their hooves sounded like a single animal. I was on the side closest to the manor;
Mary would have to pass ahead or behind.

  The path turned to the left. Mary, on the inside, inched ahead. She too was lying flat, her hands right up at the bits. The dust rose around us.

  The path straightened, then curved the other way. I could see the opening in the hedgerows. Mary was beside me, her lips dusted gray. And then she was gone.

  I could spare only a glance. She’d reined in the pony and passed so close behind that I’d felt a jolt as its head brushed the flanks of mine. And now she was running across the open moor.

  As I slowed for the opening, Mary braced her knees on her pony’s ribs. She hugged its neck. She aimed it straight for the hedgerow.

  I passed through the gateway. And ahead, to the right, Mary’s pony came soaring over the hedge. It flew as though winged, carrying her up in an arch, its forelegs clear by a foot, its belly just touching the leaves. And atop it sat Mary, graceful as an angel. She seemed to hang there for a moment, absolutely still. Then she came rushing down, and the pony’s hind legs crashed through the hedgerow in a litter of twigs and old leaves. The pony stumbled forward, almost touching its knees to the ground, then straightened and stopped. Mary had beaten me by a dozen yards.

  She laughed when I pulled up beside her. “You know where the stable is,” she said. “And if you see Uncle Simon, tell him there’s a special treat for supper. I made it this morning.”

  The ponies seemed hardly troubled by their run. They trotted ahead to the stable door, anxious as dogs to be back at their home. And as I came up behind them, I heard Simon Mawgan’s voice from inside the building, so loud with anger that he could have been standing beside me.

  “Damn your eyes!” he said. “I told you to watch that boy, didn’t I? Well, where did they go, then?”

  I heard no answer. He might as well have been speaking to himself.

  “Just show me!” he shouted.

  One of the ponies thumped against the door. Something clattered inside, and Mawgan roared, “Who’s there?”

  I opened the door. The stable smelled of hay. A dust of corn and oats floated in the light, and through this golden haze I saw Mawgan deep in the shadows with a crop in his raised hand. The other man was lying in a stall; I could see only his boots, and they pushed at the floor as he scrambled back.