The Wreckers

by Iain Lawrence

  I shook my head. “It’s not true. You’re wrong about this.”

  “I think not,” said Mawgan, a grim smile on his lips. “It is true. And I’m afraid there’s no help for you anywhere now.”

  Mary whirled around to face me, then just as abruptly turned back to her uncle. “What’s true?” she said. “I don’t understand!”

  “The barrels,” said Mawgan. He was talking not to her but to me. “He was hiding something in the barrels, boy. Your father’s a smuggler.”

  “He’s not!” I said.

  It couldn’t be true. Father a smuggler? No, it wasn’t possible. I’d seen him follow every law and every rule, cheating no one of so much as a farthing. Ever since I could remember, he’d drummed into me the importance of honest work. A duty, he’d called it: “It’s the duty of man to earn his living by harming no soul.”

  But the sawdust … how had it gotten into the bilge of the Skye and clogged the pumps if it didn’t come from the barrels?

  Father had built up his business from nothing. He started as a petty clerk, and in a few short years came to own a fine house and two ships and a carriage and …

  How had he done that? I’d never wondered before. And if he was a smuggler, what better way to smuggle gold—or anything else—than to roll it right past the eyes of the excise men in false-bottomed barrels, avoiding all taxes and duty? But Father wouldn’t do that; it made no sense.

  Then why did we load the barrels at night? Skulking about like thieves.

  Mawgan watched these thoughts passing, in frowns and teary eyes, across my face. Then he touched me gently on the arm. “Well, come, come. Don’t look so downhearted, lad. Your father’s not the first smuggler, nor the last, I’m sure. Nothing wrong with a bit of smuggling, the way the taxes are these days.”

  The coast was rife with smugglers, it was true. Only a brave man poked about the shore on a moonless night. But my father? He liked to boast that every drop of tea he ever drank had the duly paid. So if Mawgan was right, then Father’s whole life had been a sham and a farce. If Mawgan was right, then greed had wrecked the Isle of Skye. And greed had put us on the same side of the law as the wreckers.

  “So what happened to it?” asked Mawgan suddenly.

  “To what?” I asked.

  “To the gold, boy! To the gold. Or whatever it was.” The anger was building in him again, darkening his face like a squall. “You passed Gibraltar, did you not?”

  “Yes.” It had been dusk, and an English squadron had been making for the harbor.

  “And then you turned north,” said Mawgan. “And sometime between there and the Channel, someone shifted it—didn’t they?—from the barrels to a different place. The bilge, I would bet.”

  “But Uncle,” cried Mary. “You said that—”

  “Sawdust!” snapped Mawgan. “That’s all there was. Tobacco would have floated. So would tea or coffee, chocolate or bottles of gin; even sugar or salt would have floated in their packets. But gold would still be there—wouldn’t it?—lying out on the Tombstones.”

  He was breathing heavily. I found myself squeezing my glass match so hard that it could have broken in my fist. I slipped it in my pocket and held out empty hands. “I don’t know what was in the barrels,” I said. “Whatever it was is gone forever.”

  “Not quite,” said Mawgan. “Because your father will know where it is.”

  The truth of this stunned me. If Caleb Stratton thought there might be gold—or anything else—on the Tombstones, he would get it. If not from my father, then from me. I doubted that he would sit and listen, as Mawgan had done, to my story. And then another thought formed, and swirled in my mind like troubled water. Was this why Mawgan had saved me? To find for himself the secret of the false-bottomed barrels?

  “For myself, of course, I don’t care about the gold,” said Mawgan, as though he’d read these thoughts in my mind. “But the wreckmen are talking about it, John. From the night on the Tombstones, when barrels came ashore broken and spilling sawdust, they’ve been thinking on this. Your father’s the key. If Stumps knows of it—”

  “He does.” I told Mawgan what Stumps had said: I’m that close to having more gold than I’ve ever dreamed of. A passage up the coast, one night at sea.

  “And straight to Execution Dock,” said Mawgan. “That’s my guess. He’ll take the gold and sell your father for a nice reward. But if Caleb Stratton finds him first … Well, let’s say he’d better not.”

  “For heaven’s sake,” said Mary. “Just talk to Stumps. Offer him money, and he’ll—”

  “Can’t do that,” said Mawgan flatly.

  “Why not?”

  “Because Stumps has vanished. He hasn’t been seen at the blockhouse or anywhere else.”

  Mawgan sat back with the smug smile of a cat. He seemed almost happy at this new twist in my fate, whistling the notes of an odd little song as he took up his pipe and tobacco.

  Mary drew her legs up on her chair and sat on her ankles. “Uncle?” she asked. “Why were you looking for Stumps?”

  “What?” he said. A big pinch of tobacco hovered over his pipe. He stuffed it in, then pressed it down with his thumb. “I don’t care for your tone, Mary. I have no business with Stumps. If you must know, I was taking tea today with Parson Tweed. This is the talk in the village.”

  “And what has happened to Stumps?”

  “I have no idea. My guess is he’s hiding. Waiting for the moon.” Mawgan cracked another of the matches, scattering more glass around his chair. He lit his pipe and stared at Mary through a cloud of thick smoke. “Or are you suggesting that I know more about this than I’ve told you?”

  “Of course not,” said Mary.

  “Good. Now let me sit here and think.”

  We left Mawgan at the table, in his haze of sweet smoke, and went outside, Mary and I. It was a warm night, quiet in the valley, with not a breath of wind in the hedges, though high, shredded clouds oozed like ink stains across the stars. A little bite of moon seemed to balance on the rooftop, and then rose as I watched, as though leaping from there to start its flight across the sky.

  “The wreckers will be watching tonight,” said Mary.

  “It seems calm enough,” I said.

  “Here it does, yes. But along the cliffs, with the clouds coming in, there could be killing by dawn.”

  She said it sadly, in a low voice that was almost a whisper. “I’m ready,” she said. “If it comes to that.”

  I took her arm, and we walked by the front of the house. In the window, I could see Simon Mawgan puffing on his pipe.

  “Can he really help me?” I asked.

  “He’ll do what he can,” said Mary. We walked through the square of light that fell from the window, then down the long side of the house. “Uncle Simon gets angry sometimes, but he’s just as quick to forget.”

  “I saw him take a riding crop to Eli.”

  Mary scuffed her feet in the grass. “I’ve seen that, too. Uncle gets in a rage at Eli, but he never harms him.”

  “He was trying to tell me something,” I said. “Eli was. He drew a picture, like this.” I took her to the cart path and there, in the dirt of the ruts, I sketched the running man with my finger. “I think he was trying to warn me.”

  “Warn you of what?”

  “I don’t know.”

  Mary peered at my drawing. “Oh, John, that means nothing,” she said. “That’s the man on the tomb.”

  I didn’t understand.

  “Come and I’ll show you.”

  We kept walking, beyond the house, between the stable and the cottage, all its windows dark. “You have to realize,” she said. “You don’t know the stories. You don’t know what’s happened before.” Her face was pale in the moonlight, and I could see she was trying to decide what to say, or how to say it.

  We left the buildings behind before she spoke again. “They’ve been like this ever since I can remember. Eli despises Uncle Simon.”

  “Then why does y
our uncle keep him here?”

  Mary looked puzzled. “He can’t run him off.”

  “Because he’s so old?”

  “He’s not so old,” said Mary. “Why, he’s only a year or two older than Uncle Simon. When I was very small I couldn’t tell them apart. Now you’d never guess they’re brothers, would you?”

  “Brothers?” I said.

  “Yes. He’s my uncle Eli, though I never called him that. He’s always been Eli. Plain old Eli. And all this land is half his.”

  We passed through the hedgerows and started up the slope of the valley. We were heading north, away from the sea. “Then why,” I asked, “does he live in that little cottage?”

  “Years ago, they both did. Oh, once the Mawgans had a lovely place, but they lost that in a fire. When the wrecking started, Uncle Simon built the new house on the ruins of the old one. Eli is the only man I know who never touched a thing from the wrecks. He worked in the ground, in the mines, for his shilling a day. He called it honest work; you can see what it did to him.”

  I said, “He didn’t lose his tongue in the mines.”

  “No. Eli despised the wrecking so much that one night he rode to Polruan in a storm. The wreckers had a ship embayed; they didn’t see him go. Like the wind he went, and he came back at dawn with the revenue men. They were an hour too late. The wreck was stripped, but in the moor they found a fresh grave. There was one man hanged for that—Caleb’s brother.”

  Near the top of the slope, the ground steepened. Mary panted as she climbed—it didn’t occur to me that she might be crying. And at the top we felt the wind again. It rushed at us over the moor, it came with a dry moan through the grass. And I heard a thrumming, a faint beat, that was surf on the cliffs.

  Mary stepped along the ridge, and the wind took her hair and her clothes and stretched them like streamers. “The wreckers held a court; they do everything proper. If Eli hadn’t been a Mawgan, if he hadn’t shared right of wreck, they would have killed him on the spot.”

  “So they cut out his tongue?” I said.

  She turned round, and we stood for a moment with the wind at our sides. “That’s why I have to stop this,” she said. “However I can.”

  She looked at me as though waiting, wanting me to promise to help. And when I didn’t—I couldn’t do that—she pulled away. “Come on. We’re almost there.”

  We ran east for a way, then back down the slope, to a jumble of enormous stones arranged on the moor. Four stood upright, like the walls of a shack, and the roof was an enormous slab lying at a tilt across them. In the eerie light of cloud-shadowed stars, it looked ancient and foreboding.

  “It’s a cromlech,” said Mary. “It’s the tomb.”

  “Whose?” I said.

  “Nobody knows.”

  The stones didn’t join. There were rocks heaped at the corners, but wind moaned through the gaps. We walked toward it, then in a circle round it. In a corner was an opening, a dark, gaping hole where the stacked rocks had tumbled away.

  “What’s in there?” I asked.

  “Nothing. Only dirt.”

  “I want to see.” But when I stepped up on the rocks, Mary pulled me down.

  “Don’t!” she said. “Uncle Simon says there’s a terrible curse. He says anyone who even looks in there will die within the day.”

  I laughed. “You believe that?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do,” said Mary. “But see, John? There’s carvings on the stone. Here’s your running man.”

  Even in the darkness I could see it easily. The lines were deeply carved, and I traced them with my fingers, up the legs and the body, round the head. I felt foolish. Eli hadn’t told me to run for it; he’d said, “Running man.”

  “But why?” I asked Mary. “Why did he show me this?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “You can’t always tell with Eli.”

  The stone was cool and gritty. I kept following the lines of the drawing, hoping to feel in them the secret that Eli was trying to pass on. A gust of wind whistled in the stone, like voices inside. Mary shivered.

  And a sound came to us, a hollow pop, then another.

  “Gunshots,” I said.

  “Wait,” said Mary. She clutched my arm and listened. I could see every muscle in her neck, and her eyes were staring. “Only two,” she breathed. “Thank God, only two.”

  “What does it mean?” I asked.

  Her skirts billowed like sails as the wind gusted again.

  “There’s a ship in the bay.”

  Chapter 9

  A SHIP EMBAYED

  I climbed up onto the top of the cromlech, onto the thick stone roof of the tomb. I stared into the wind until my eyes stung, but I could see no sign of a ship.

  “We’re too far from the sea,” said Mary. She wouldn’t climb up; she stood off a few yards, only a shadow at the edge of the darkness.

  “I might see her topsails,” I said. “Topgallants if she’s big enough.” They would rise above the cliffs like huge, floating birds.

  “It’s too far!”

  “Not if she’s right at the cliffs. She might be aground.”

  “No!” said Mary. “Only two shots. Three is a ship coming ashore. Four is a wreck.” In the wind, her voice was faint and high, the voice of a small girl. “John, hurry!”

  I turned to leave. And in the action, the turning away, I saw the sail.

  “There she is!” I cried. It took shape to the south, a tier of canvas like a stack of child’s blocks. Topsails and topgallants and royals. A full-rigged ship. “Mary, come look.”

  But she wouldn’t come closer. I tried to fix a bearing on it, a course from the house. Then I scrambled down from the slab. And Mary was gone.

  “Mary!” I shouted.

  “Here!” she said. “Hurry.”

  I couldn’t see her. I followed the sound, over the brow of the knoll, into the gloom of the valley. “Hurry!” she said, and I ran straight down the slope. But I’d gone only a dozen steps when a hand grabbed my ankle and I tumbled to the ground.

  I cried out.

  “Shhh! Someone’s coming,” said Mary.

  It was a man on a horse, and he rode at a gallop the same way we’d come. A dark shape on the moor, then a silhouette on the ridge, he came with a snorting and a hammer of hooves. Across the sky he rode, a black thing tattered and torn, a cape flowing back. Straight to the cromlech, to that ancient stone tomb.

  The horse reared up, and he slid from its back to the ground. I felt Mary’s arm fall across my shoulder as she pushed me down in the grass.

  “He mustn’t see us,” she whispered.

  “Who is it?”

  “I think it’s—I can’t really tell.”

  The horse was between us and the rider. We could see the man’s legs below its belly, nothing more than that. He strode to the cromlech and climbed up the loose stack of rocks.

  “He’s going inside,” I said.

  “No one,” said Mary, “would dare go in there.”

  The horse lowered its head and nibbled at the grass. It stepped forward, reins swinging loose. Only one step, and it went no farther.

  We could hear a clattering sound, metal on metal. Then the grinding of boots tramping on stone. And a gust of wind howled through the cromlech like the cries of lost souls.

  In a moment the man reappeared. But still we could see no more than his legs, until he came right to the horse and climbed up in the saddle. And then he was like a silvery trace, like a thing not quite there. He was holding something bulky and square, and he balanced it before him as he grabbed up the reins and put his heels to the horse. He swung it round.

  “Can you see who it is?” I asked.

  “I can’t be sure,” said Mary. “But it looks like Uncle Simon.”

  Whoever it was, he rode off even faster than he’d come, over the knoll and straight to the south, to the sea.

  “Come on!” said Mary. But I was already on my feet. And when we ran off in different directions, we both st
opped and looked back in surprise.

  “Where are you going?” she asked.

  “To the cromlech,” I said.

  “Why?”

  “We have to see what’s inside.”

  Mary was horrified. “You can’t go in there,” she said.

  “We have to see.”

  I started up, and she came at my heels. “Please, John. It’s cursed. Go in there and you’ll die.”

  I kept walking. Even when Mary grabbed me I kept going. She fell on the ground behind me, pleading, reaching with her hand. But I went straight to the cromlech, and straight inside.

  The wind whirled through the tomb. And a strange green glow came from the walls, from the lichen that grew there—eerie patches of light that seemed like eyes in the darkness. I imagined the stones were watching me as I fumbled to the back of the tomb, and found what I knew would be there. They were stacked in a pile, and I took up the closest and shoved it out before me. I heard it rattle down the stones, and when I came out Mary was holding it.

  “There,” said I. “That’s what Eli sent me to find.”

  “A lantern,” she said.

  “A beacon,” I told her.

  We ran to the house with the lantern between us, each with a hand on the bail. It rocked, making the shutters open and close, and the thing tolled like a bell.

  The stable door was open, but we passed it by. We dropped the lantern on the porch and crashed through the door. Mary called out for her uncle. But the place was empty. And when we looked in the stable, the black horse was missing.

  “It couldn’t have been him,” said Mary. “It couldn’t be Uncle Simon.”

  “Then where is he?” I said.

  “I don’t know. But I’m going to find out.”

  We bridled the ponies and rode south at a steady pace, up and down the humps of the moor. Before we came to the road, on the last rise of the moor, we turned to the west. And there at our side was the ship.