The Wreckers (18 page)

In the next glare of lightning I saw it myself. The boat below me, filled to the gunwales, Stumps in his place with his arm tossed high. And he did have legs, or he seemed to. He lay right atop Parson Tweed, half wrapped in the black cassock. The parson’s legs poked down where Stumps’s should have been.

Thunder welled around us.

“You seen it!” cried Spots. “That time you seen it yourself. He’s waving at me, Caleb.”

There was more than a murmur of voices. And above them rose the Widow’s, shrieking as she’d shrieked before: “The dead will sail upon the seas, and the men will be of fire.”

“Damn the lot of you!” yelled Caleb. “You’re a flock of old hens, squawking at nothing.”

Lightning and thunder came together. In the glare I saw Stumps with his new legs kicking. I saw the ship, sails aglow, rushing toward us. And I could wait no longer.

I
rose to my feet and hurried down the slope. The wind plucked at me; the rain fell through the light of the beacon like a long golden sword. The pony whinnied, and Jeremy Haines turned around. His mouth fell open.

“The boy,” he said.

Caleb Stratton swiveled his head, black hair flowing. Behind him, the ship was still coming on.

“Put out that light,” I said.

Caleb laughed. “Hear that, Jeremy? The boy says to put out the light.” Then his hands moved, digging under his cape, and a pistol barrel glinted in his hand.

I ran past him down the slope, through the shaft of light. It flashed across me, and Caleb raised his pistol. “You’re stinking slime,” he said. And he fired.

I threw myself down the hill. I landed on my shoulder and flipped forward over the ground. I crashed against Spots’s spread legs and saw his oil keg go hurtling over the
cliff. Something spun from my pocket—the glass tube I’d taken so long ago from Simon Mawgan, the phosphorus match. I snatched it up and tucked it between my lips.

The sky glowed with lightning, darkened and glowed. Thunder cracked across the clouds; the storm was nearly past. But in the lightning I saw the men coming, the wreckers, Jeremy Haines ahead of them all with the wicked long knife in his hands.

And a man shouted, his voice high with fear: “The corpse lights! God save us; the corpse lights!”

In the darkness of the moor, a bluish light bobbed and danced. Slowly it slid along, rising up and dipping low, twirling over the haunted ground where the seamen lay. I knew it was Mawgan; I knew it was he. But still the hair prickled on my neck.

The wreckers watched in a silence I could feel. Even the surf seemed to fade away as every man and every soul stood to watch the corpse light. Then first one turned to flee, then a second and a third, and others after that. Spots scrambled up and raced away. Wagons creaked and horses cried.

But Jeremy Haines came stalking toward me, straight down the shaft of light. Another pistol appeared from Caleb’s cape, metal shining in the beacon. I darted to the pyramid of kegs; I took one in my hands. I held it up to throw it, and Caleb’s pistol flared.

The ball crashed through the keg, spilling thick oil down my arms and over my shoulders. The wind sprayed it across the grass, up the slope, and over the barrels where Caleb stood.

Jeremy Haines lunged for me. I brought the keg back and heaved it toward him. I saw him raise his arm, his cape coming up and fluttering in the wind, the light shining through it like the wing of a bat. The keg cracked against his arm, the thin staves caving in. From head to toe, he glistened with oil.

I took the match and held it up. I could hear my father shouting, and saw him from the corner of my eye flitting on the pony across the high ground, driving the wreckers before him. But I didn’t turn away; I was watching Jeremy Haines, and he knew at once what I had in my fingers.

“No!” he cried.

I snapped open the match. The paper burst into a white-hot ball. I flung it down on the stack of kegs.

The spilled oil burst into flames. The fire spread in a wild rage, engulfing the pyramid, licking out over the grass, rising in the wind. The kegs exploded in a roaring, searing flash of light.

Jeremy screamed. I could hear his clothing burn, see his outline, bright and orange in the rain.

The fire raged, roaring above the sound of the surf. Half blinded by the glare, I saw Caleb Stratton also outlined in flames. He and Jeremy Haines went spinning across the ground, beating with their arms at the fire that engulfed them. Jeremy Haines reached the cliff and teetered there; then, with a last scream that I will never in all my years forget, he toppled over the edge and into the sea.

Caleb Stratton followed him. For a moment he stood at the edge. Then a roiling smoke wrapped round him, and when it cleared, he was gone.

Father came up on the pony. He dropped straight to the ground and took me in his arms. “It’s over,” he said. “It’s over.” And he turned me toward the sea, and bade me to look.

The ship had steered away, bearing up toward the wind with the yards braced fully back. The jibs, as we watched, fluttered up the stays and filled with wind. And she went crashing off across the waves, a beautiful and wonderful thing, tacking free toward the Channel.

We stood and watched, and I let him put his weight on me. “Let’s go home,” I said.

I spent just one more night at Galilee. We sat in the kitchen, all huddled close to the cooking stove. I’d asked that a fire not be set in the great stone hearth; I’d seen enough of flames.

In his upstairs room, Eli snored softly. Twice every hour Mawgan went up to see him. “Soon as he wakes,” he said, “I’ll tell him that the wrecking’s done. That will bring the wretch round.”

“Is it really finished?” asked Mary.

“Yes, child,” said Mawgan. He put his hand on her shoulder. “Oh, the ships will still come ashore of themselves. And when they do, we’ll get what the sea tosses up. But the killing, the drowning, that’s over forever.”

Mary had kept her word. She had waited down at the Tombstones, ready to swim to the wreck. It was there we had found her, quietly crying in the rain.

In the kitchen at Galilee, we told her all that had happened, each taking a round of the story, leaving out nothing
except any mention of the
Rose of Sharon
. Mary listened to it all, and then turned to her uncle and asked, “Why couldn’t you tell me you were the corpse lights?”

“I’m sorry,” said Mawgan. “But if you weren’t afraid of them, people would start to wonder.”

“So you kept it a secret.”

“I keep many secrets,” said Mawgan, and abruptly changed the subject. “You, sir,” he said to Father.

My father looked up from his seat closest to the stove. His foot, bundled thickly with muslin, was propped up on a seaman’s chest.

“You’ll be careful to keep the bandages clean?” asked Mawgan. “ ’Course you will. And stay off that foot, you hear? Young John will fetch and carry for you.”

“Oh, no, he won’t,” said Father. “He’ll be too busy for that. It’s straight down to business for John.”

“Yes,” I said glumly. “The ledgers.”

“Hang the ledgers!” cried Father. “You’ve got sailing to learn.”

I looked at him, and he was smiling. “Do you mean that?” I asked.

Father nodded. “You’ve earned it, John. But you can go to sea on only two conditions.”

“Anything,” I said.

He laughed. “You’ll have to apprentice on one of my ships, and—”

“Of course!” I said.

“And eventually command it.”

I didn’t know what to say. Mary smiled at me warmly, and Mawgan too, through a cloud of his pipe smoke. Then
he stood up and clapped his hands. “Well, who’s for starry-gazy?”

“Not me,” said I.

Father asked, “What’s starry-gazy?”

“Londoners!” roared Mawgan. “Sometimes I think you’re all as wet as scrubbers.”

Father ate his share of that awful pie. He ate more than his share. And he sat up late, smoking pipes with Mawgan, talking of taxes and duties and I don’t know what else; I fell asleep in my chair as the voices droned round me.

And in four days I was home.

We came into London on the packet, ghosting up the Thames on the rising tide. It was good to be back, and Father and I sat together on the capstan, watching the north bank go gliding past. Shadwell Dock slipped astern, then Pelican Stairs as we floated up toward the headland.

“He’s a good man,” said Father suddenly. “Simon Mawgan, I mean.”

“Yes, he is,” I said.

“He’s going to take Eli in. Did he tell you that?”

“No,” I said.

“The upstairs room, that will be Eli’s, if the poor soul will accept it.”

“I’m sure he will,” said I.

The packet turned sluggishly, sails hanging slack, and drifted on toward Execution Dock. I said, “Do you think he’ll tell Mary the truth?”

Father shrugged. “Simon Mawgan is haunted by his secrets. I imagine that sooner or later he will have to tell her what he’s done.”

“What will she think of him then?”

“The same,” he said. “If she loves him, just the same.”

We passed New Crane Stairs, where New Gravel Lane came to the river. It was a street full of taverns, from the Ship and the Queen’s Head right up to the Horse and Dray. They were the haunts of seafaring men. Men like myself.

I said, “I love you, Father.”

And this is how it ended. I don’t know what happened to Mary and Simon Mawgan. I don’t know what became of the Widow.

But I do know this. The storms still thrash at the coast of Cornwall. The waves eat at the rock with a pounding of surf and spray. Never again will a sailor look up from a storm-tossed deck and see the false beacons gutter and burn. The wreckers only sit and wait. But on the darkest, wildest nights—or so the story goes—the corpse lights still walk on the beach at the Tombstones.

There is no doubt that there were wreckers once, men who profited by the plundering of unfortunate ships. Stories of this are found not only in Cornwall, but all along the coast of southeast England, and up and down the eastern shore of North America, from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys.

In the late eighteenth century, Parson Troutbeck of Cornwall’s Scilly Islands included in his prayers one that is often quoted in the stories of the wreckers: “We pray Thee, O Lord, not that wrecks should happen, but that if wrecks do happen, Thou wilt guide them into the Scilly Isles, for the benefit of the poor inhabitants.”

Other parsons in other places prayed for this same thing. And whenever a ship came ashore, it was a race to be first at the scene. But this was wrecking in its passive sense, as merely salvaging, and it still goes on today. I myself have combed the beaches for shoes and hockey gloves and camera cases when cargo containers were lost from ships at sea. And once, just below my home, a pallet full of coffee, soap, cigarettes, and beer fell from a ship loading at the dock. For days afterward, the harbor was full of little boats as people went searching through the tide pools, armed with dip nets to collect the plunder.

But the violent form of wrecking, as performed in this
story by the men of Pendennis, is a different matter. References to the deliberate destruction of ships can be found in books written as long ago as 1775. In 1882 Frederic W. Farrar wrote in his
Early Days of Christianity
, “The men of Cornwall went straight from church to light their beacon fires.”

It is hard now to separate truth from fiction. There are some historians who say that no ship was ever deliberately wrecked, though this is probably going too far. Inside the old clipper ship
Cutty Sark
, now in permanent drydock in Greenwich, is the figurehead from the
Wilberforce
, a ship built in the Bahamas in 1816. A plaque below the figurehead offers this history of its ship: “She was lured ashore by wreckers at Lee, North Devon, on 23rd October 1842. Seven seamen were drowned. (The wreckers tied a lantern to the tail of a donkey on the beach which produced a movement similar to the light of a ship at anchor.) This was the last known instance of a ship being trapped by wreckers.”

The history of wrecking as given in this story by Mary to John follows the most popular view. The practice gradually got worse and worse, until harsher laws and penalties ended it altogether.

In any case, it should be remembered that far more imperiled seamen were saved by Cornishmen and others than ever were drowned by wreckers.

For other views, readers may enjoy Daphne Du Maurier’s 1936 novel
Jamaica Inn
and the 1974 nonfiction book
Shipwreck
, which contains many photographs of old wrecks and has a text by John Fowles.

When I was a child, my father read me bedtime stories. He gave the people voices: a creepy one for old blind Pew; a roaring one for Billy Bones. He brought the books to life in a way I both loved and hated, for I recall nightmares of pirate ships and smugglers. I saw the
Hispaniola
come tacking up the river that flowed behind our house, two thousand miles from any ocean, sailing all that way to plunder from the pennies that I’d saved in a little metal bank shaped like an Idaho potato. It was somewhere in my father’s stories, or the footnotes to his stories, that I first heard of the men called wreckers, who worked at night on lonely shores. And years later, when I set out to write a story that I hoped would be very much like those of my childhood, it was the wreckers I remembered.

My father inspired this story, then helped with research I could not do myself, living in a remote place on a northern island. He dragged my poor mother over half of Cornwall, looking for the haunts of the wreckers. He searched through old books and sent me information by the boxful. He told me of the time from his own childhood when he went inside a cromlech and saw it glowing in the darkness. And finally, he read my story in its various versions, pointing out its errors.

My agent, Jane Jordan Browne, spent years with the
wreckers, always giving me encouragement in the form of little notes: “Don’t give up”; “We’ll get there yet.” Her assistant, Katy Holmgren, helped immeasurably with a major revision as the story came closer and closer to the ones I remembered.