The Wreckers (17 page)

“But they’re coming in,” I said. The masts were nearly in line, the sails overlapping.

Father put a hand to his forehead, shielding his eyes from the rain. “On the
Skye
, we saw lights. But—”

“The wreckers,” I said. “When the ship’s closer in, they’ll light their false beacons.”

“So that was it. A light in the shadow of death,” said Father, and I shuddered.

We rode slowly toward the Tombstones, on ground that shook with the surf. The wind rushed up the face of the cliffs, and the pony’s mane stood in the air like the fur of a frightened cat. The rain fell in sheets, and the sky to the south flared with lightning.

“Look!” said Father.

On the hills above us the villagers were gathering. I saw them come over the rise, carrying their tools of destruction. They seemed to come from the earth and sink below it
again, on foot and on horseback, adults and children. And then came a wagon huge and black, enormous horses in the harness. The Widow.

When the Widow arrives, there’s a wreck in the offing. She feels it like a coming storm
. But the last time, she’d been wrong.

Father grabbed my shoulder. “Look,” he said again.

“I see them,” said I.

“No. Look there.”

Thirty yards before us, in a hollow at the cliffs, stood a horse with no rider. Empty stirrups twisted and turned; its tail flew like a streamer. Then it raised its head in a dark tangle of mane, and I saw it was Mawgan’s horse, Mawgan’s fine pacer.

With a happy little snort the pony started toward its stablemate. It swayed under us, carrying us along. Then suddenly it shrieked. It reared and bolted, and I fell with a thud to the ground. Father clung to it somehow, grabbing for the reins, and in a dim flash of lightning I saw what the pony had seen.

Simon Mawgan crouched at the edge of the cliff. All in black, from his boots to his hat, he shone in the lightning glow. Even his face was darkened—a mask of coal dust or boot blacking. His eyes peered from it as though he was only that: a pair of eyes in the darkness. He stood still as death. And on the ground before him was a lantern.

I walked straight to him. The surf thundered and the rain came down. “I knew I’d find you here,” I said. “With a ship for the wrecking.”

He squinted at me as the rain poured from the brim of his hat. Even his horse seemed to stare at me. Father had
brought the pony under control, and came toward us along the cliffs.

“Your father?” asked Mawgan.

“Yes,” said I.

“And Stumps?”

“He’s dead.”

Mawgan barely flinched. “No shame in that.”

“So is Parson Tweed.”

“The parson?” said Mawgan. “You killed Parson Tweed?”

“He shot at me,” I said. “He was the leader, wasn’t he? He was your hoop that held the staves together.”

An odd expression came to his eyes. It was a look of surprise, as though the idea had never occurred to him. “And the gold?” he asked.

“There is no gold. Never was.”

He chuckled. “If that’s the truth, it’s the one thing you never lied about. Now, let me get on with this business.”

I hit him full in the chest. I drove against him, head down like a ram. We fell together, crashing onto the ground at the very lip of the cliffs. I leapt away and snatched up the lantern.

“Wait!” he shouted.

I hammered my fist against the glass.

“You fool!” said Mawgan. He rolled on the stones and the grass, struggling to his feet. Then Father brought the pony in, and its hooves trampled round him. It was a scene of madness: Mawgan all black on the ground, only his eyes and his hands to be seen, the pony stomping and snorting above him, and Father on its back like a demon.

I bashed at the glass. I raised the lantern and flung it down. The lens shattered. Then I hurled the thing over the cliff—“No!” screamed Mawgan—down to the rocks and the surf far below.

Mawgan lay still. The pony stood over him, straddling him, and he put his hands around its forefoot. “You’ve doomed them,” he said. “You’ve lost the ship.” He sounded wretched, in utter despair.

Father stared down. “What’s he talking about?” he asked.

“Look at the glass,” cried Mawgan,

There were shards of it at my feet. I knelt down and took one in my hand. It was thick and darkly colored.

“I wasn’t going to wreck the ship, you fool. I was going to save it!”

The lightning flared and shone off the glass, and for an instant it glowed a deep blue in my palm.

“The corpse lights, boy,” said Mawgan. “
I
am the corpse lights.”

Pale blue lights that wander on the beach and the cliffs
, Mary had said.
It doesn’t matter what’s happening; if people see the corpse lights, they run away
.

Mawgan shoved at the pony’s hoof. To Father he said, “Sir, would you kindly back this animal off before it sends us both over the edge?”

I nodded to Father. He moved the pony back, and Mawgan sat up. His poor horse still watched us, bewildered.

Mawgan glared at me. “Why do you think I hide the lanterns in that stone heap? Why do you think I ride down here at the sound of the shots?”

I shook my head. I didn’t know anymore.

“I walk with the lantern,” said Mawgan, “and they see me and think it’s the corpse lights. I couldn’t help the
Isle of Skye
. Parson Tweed kept me half the night, and now I know why. But tonight … tonight I waited in Mary’s garden—”

“She told you about her garden?”

“Of course not.” He rolled to his knees and stood up. “But who do you think tears out the weeds? Who do you think waters the flowers?”

I said, “She thought it was magic.”

So I was wrong, and Eli was wrong. And Mary—poor Mary—had been right all along when she’d told me to trust Simon Mawgan. But now I had thrown away the one hope of saving the ship. “Why?” I said. “Why couldn’t you tell me?”

“No one could know,” he said. “Not Eli, nor anyone else. Even Mary had to believe in the corpse lights.”

The lightning flashed. And for the first time we heard the thunder that followed, the storm coming closer. It was a rolling, sinister sound that shook at the air like fists.

And at that instant, on the hills beyond us, a light flared up from the darkness. The wreckers were lighting the beacons.

A moment later there were two of them burning. We could see in their golden glow the shapes of the men, the ragged clothes of the Widow, two pyramids of oil kegs to fuel the lanterns. And out in the Channel, the ship turned toward the lights.

“She’ll touch in less than an hour,” said Mawgan. “Shell come aground on the Tombstones, and that will be the end of her.” He stood with his back to us, facing the wind and the rain, shouting against the surf. “They might put an anchor out, but it won’t save them. They might chop down the masts, but in the end they’ll come ashore. They always do.”

“You know a lot about it,” said Father.

“I’ve done it!” Mawgan whirled round just as the lightning flared. The blacking on his face was mottled by the rain, and his skin showed through like a skull. “I wrecked the
Rose of Sharon!”

“The ship your brother was on,” I said.

“Yes. My brother and his wife, my own wife, and my son, Peter. Nearly all that I loved were on that ship. And I lit the beacons that brought them ashore.”

“You’re a monster,” said Father.

“I am, sir. Yes, that’s just what I am.” The lightning flashed over him. “But God knows I’ve paid for it. I lost my son and my wife and my brother. I turned my other brother, Eh, against me, and he loathes me to this very day. I drove my mother mad. But you’ve seen that, John, what it did to her.”

“No,” I said. “I—”

“You have,” he said gently.

I couldn’t believe it. “Not the Widow,” I said.

Mawgan nodded. “Mary doesn’t know who she is. The poor woman doesn’t know herself who she is. But I live in dread that someone will tell Mary. That Caleb Stratton or Parson Tweed—well, there’s one worry gone. It’s not for
any love of me that Eli hasn’t shown her the truth. He and all the others, they hold it over my head like an axe.”

Father looked down from the pony. “I’ve met that young woman,” he said. “And I believe she would forgive you if you gave her that chance.”

The beacons flared and smoked. The rain swirled through the light in sheets of yellow and red. The great ship kept coming.

Mawgan said, “There’s only one chance. I’ll ride back for another lantern.”

“No time,” I said.

He whistled, and the horse came over. Mawgan collected the reins. “John,” he said, “there are fifty men up there on the moor. We’ve no hope of stopping them any other way.”

“And Mary’s waiting down at the Tombstones.”

“What?” He wedged his boot in the stirrup.

“She’s going to try to swim to the wreck,” I told him.

“Then there mustn’t be a wreck.” Mawgan climbed up into the saddle. “Somehow we’ll stop them.” Then he shook the reins, but I reached up and grabbed them.

I said, “There’s a lantern on the porch. We left one there.”

He didn’t answer. He wrenched the reins from me and beat at the horse with his hat. And he flew off at a gallop toward Galilee.

I stood beside the pony. I touched my father’s leg and felt the warmth of blood soaking through his boot. We watched the ship come on, rolling through the swells. The lightning flashed, and flashed again, and the thunder rumbled
like enormous barrels. And off to the west, toward the Tombstones, we saw a little boat.

It came round the headland, carried out by the tide into the breakers. We saw it in the lightning and lost it in the darkness, flashes of it now tumbled in a wave, now flung to the crest, a little boat with a man propped on the gunwale. The man never moved at all, but his arm flailed as the boat heaved and wallowed in the waves. It shot straight up, then fell at his side, then pointed toward us; and the boat—filled with water—sailed on along the shore.

The whole sky went white with lightning. The pony trembled.

“Stumps,” I said.

It was my little boat, the one from the bridge, and it was Stumps who sat within it, his body lodged in place. He rode the seas with dead, blind eyes, one arm waving as the breakers hurled him about.

“John,” said Father, and I looked away from that boat and its horrid crew. “If we’re to do something,” he said, “we’d best do it now.”

The ship drove steadily on. Even in the darkness I could see her then, the water frothing on her decks, the sails so high above them. The beacons burned upon the hills, and I heard a moan of voices.

“We’ve only moments left,” said Father.

The men who guarded the beacons would have pistols and knives, axes and picks. We had nothing. There would be many of them, and only two of us. It wasn’t too late to ride back the way we’d come, and straight on to Polruan. It would be easy to do that.

Then I looked at the ship. She bore down on the shore with a bone in her teeth, rising at the head as each wave overtook her, as though she strained for a sight of the land. Very soon the ship would reach the breakers—too late then to turn away.

“I’ll go on foot,” I said. “Father, do you think—”

“Just tell me what to do.”

It was hard to give him orders. I blushed in the night.

“Tell me,” he said.

I pointed to the east. “Ride back along the road until you come to a wagon track. Follow the high ground toward the sea and you’ll be right above the Tombstones. Wait for me there. I’ll try to get to the beacons. But you’ll have to—” I couldn’t go on.

“I’ll have to draw them away,” said Father.

I licked my lips. “Yes.”

“All right,” he said. He clasped my hand. “Bless you, John.”

I loped off along the cliffs. The pony’s hooves squelched on the grass, then vanished in the boom of surf. And I was alone.

The ship came surging on. I was racing it, running with no inkling of what would happen, thinking only of the men aboard her, of Mary. I remembered her words:
I don’t think I’ll be going home tonight
. Ever, she’d meant. She would be waiting somewhere at the edge of the sea.

I crossed the slope and circled round behind the lights, one on the ground and one on the back of a pony. When I was right above them, and the ship was coming straight toward me, I stopped and caught my breath. The cliff edge
was not far from my left, and the spray of the breaking waves flew above me in the wind. I could smell the fumes of the lanterns; I saw the shadowed forms of the men who tended them, two in capes beside the pony, one more below. He stood and stretched, looking down toward the ship. The lightning flashed, very close, and the thunder came soon after. The ship rode up on a wave, and the water broke round her.

I could hear the wreckers’ voices, low and furtive, as they led the pony a foot or two to one side. On the ship, the helmsmen would think they had gone off course. And I watched her masts step apart as she fell off a bit before the wind.

A man laughed. “Like leading sheep to slaughter, ain’t it?” he said. He patted the pony’s neck.

The other man used the animal for shelter as the wind moaned up from the sea. “Soon now,” he said. “Just a brace o’ shakes, Jeremy Haines.”

Caleb Stratton. I felt cold prickles on the back of my neck, ice in my stomach and heart. Caleb himself, and the grinning man, were tending the upper beacon.

“Who’s below us?” asked Caleb.

“Spots.”

Shining like a specter, Spots stood in the full glow of the light. He was taking a keg from the pyramid at his side.

“Blast him,” said Caleb. “A bit o’ baggywrinkle’s got more sense than Spots. Run down there and tell him to stand away from the light.”

I dropped to a crouch and crept forward. But Spots stepped with his keg back into darkness.

“He’s fetching fuel for t’other lantern,” said the grinning man.

Caleb grunted. “Then stay where you are.”

Lightning streaked again, a flash that turned the night to day. And Spots screamed. “Look there!” he said. “Oh, Lordy, look there!”

“Stow it!” shouted Caleb.

“It’s Stumps. He’s dead and he’s come back. And he has his legs again!”