The Wreckers (8 page)

“And what’s this?” asked Mawgan.

“It’s”—she lifted the lid—“starry-gazy!”

There were even more pilchards than last time, their poor blackened heads poking from the crust, watching me balefully with round, dead eyes. And I thought right away of Tommy Colwyn, caught on the moor with a spade in his hands and a row of bodies not quite buried.

“Prettiest thing I’ve ever seen,” said Mawgan. “But look at that, then: You’re giving half the pie to young John.”

“Oh, there’s plenty for you,” said Mary, her whole face turning scarlet.

I couldn’t have eaten a bite of that pie if it hadn’t been for Mary. She sat and watched me tackle each mouthful, smiling and nodding as though I was a baby she was feeding. While I choked down my share a swallow at a time, Simon Mawgan worked at his like a coal miner wielding shovel and pick.

When we were finished, Mawgan took a pipe to one of the big captain’s chairs. He arranged himself in the last of the evening sun and filled his pipe with pinches of shredded tobacco. Then he looked up to see if I was watching, and from a bowl at his elbow he took a small piece of glass. He held it up in his fingers.

“Have you seen one of these, John?” he asked.

“No,” I said. It was a tube of thin glass, the width of a pencil and closed at both ends. The bowl was full of them—little cylinders with rolls of paper inside.

“Look close, then,” said Mawgan, and I leaned forward. “Closer, lad.”

With a flourish, Mawgan rapped the tube on the edge of the table. It shattered, scattering glass. And in the instant, the thing burst into flame.

I pulled back—it had nearly set my hair alight—and Mawgan laughed delightedly. It was the paper burning, with a furious flame and a stench of sulfur. He held it to the bowl of his pipe, puffing smoke like a dragon.

“A phosphorus candle.” He held it until the flame dwindled, then tossed it into a brass pot on the floor. It fell with a tinkle of glass. “Straight from France, that is, and the first to reach England, I daresay. Take one, lad. Take one.”

I stepped forward and helped myself from the bowl. The floor around him was gritty with tiny bits of glass.

“The paper’s coated with phosphorus,” said Mawgan. “Burns like the devil and nothing puts it out. But the best thing about them”—he tapped the pipestem on his teeth—“is the fact that they float, you see.”

Mary brought a candle and walked through the room lighting lamps and tallow dips. The faint, fizzly smell of the phosphorus vanished in a reek of fish oil. Nowhere had I seen so many lamps. There was no need to carry one from room to room, as I would in London; they filled the house with a glow of yellow light.

Mawgan laughed. He was in a fine humor now. “Everything should float,” he said. “Wouldn’t it be all the easier, hmmm, if gold could float?” Then he sat back, blowing smoke rings that floated like wreaths to the ceiling. He took the pipe from his lips and picked off a piece of tobacco.

“So,” he said to me. “What’s this I hear about your father?” I must have blanched, and he laughed. “Don’t look so shocked, lad. Mary told me everything.”

I saw her shoulders twitch, but she didn’t look back. She was carrying her candle from one light to the next, guarding the flame with her hand.

“So he’s alive, is he?” asked Mawgan.

“Yes,” I said.

“Yet you told me there was nobody else. I asked you outright, and you said it straight to my face.”

“I told you there was no one I
saw
.” I blushed at this, the weakness of it.

“So,” said Mawgan. He tamped the tobacco in his pipe. “You were going to let your father perish in some lonely prison rather than worry yourself about it?”

I turned the match end over end in my hands. “That’s not the way it was.”

“Oh, but that’s just how it was. You lied to me, John.”

“I had to,” I said. “Stumps—”

“That won’t do, my son. I give you safety, clothing, I give you food and shelter. Yet you repay me with lies. Why, boy? Why?”

It was Mary who answered. “He didn’t know that he could trust you, Uncle. And is that such a wonder?” She snuffed the candle between her fingers. “His shipmates are dead, his father’s a prisoner, and how should he know whom to trust?”

Mawgan blew a perfect ring of smoke that drifted up and hovered over him like a halo. He nodded. “Right you are, Mary. Right you are.”

I found it hard to believe that this was the same man I’d seen only hours before, livid with rage as he lashed at Eli with a riding crop. Now he sat like a saint, with a charming smile. And I still didn’t know whether to trust him or not. He seemed quite harmless, yet every man in Pendennis obeyed his commands.

Mary blew out her candle. “I thought you could help him,” she said. “Or I would have kept quiet.”

“I understand,” said Mawgan. “But you haven’t told anyone else, have you?”

“Of course not,” said Mary.

“No one at all?”

“Uncle, please.”

“ ’Course you haven’t.” Mawgan smiled his gentle smile. “But the problem, you see, is what can I do?”

“Why, ride to Polruan,” said Mary. “Bring the coast guard. Bring the excise men.”

“Oh, I wish I could, Mary.” Mawgan turned to me, and his smile was gone. “But it’s not so simple as that, is it then, John?”

“It’s not?” I said.

His face turned dark and angry. “Don’t play me for a fool, my boy; I’m not a Bristol boatsman. This is your father we’re speaking about.”

“Really,” I said. “I don’t know—”

“Lies, lies, lies. You’re just full of them, aren’t you?”

“Uncle!” cried Mary.

Mawgan tapped out his pipe on his palm. There was still redness in the ashes, but he ground them between his hands. “Tell her,” he said. “Tell her what you had in those barrels on the
Isle of Skye.”

“Wine,” I said.

“Liar!” Mawgan slammed his fist on the table. “Don’t tell me your traveler’s tales. Do you think I don’t know?”

“What, then?” said Mary, with the same shrill of anger.

“Watch your tongue, girl.”

Mawgan sat in his chair like a crouched lion, breathing softly and watching me with eyes that had the yellow glow of the lamps in them. “Tell us,” he said, and his voice was soft, but barely so, like porridge about to boil. “Tell us about the night you loaded this wine.”

“W
e anchored after dark,” I said. “In a little cove. When we lowered the boats, and the men clambered into them, Father held me aside. He told me to stay on the ship.”

Mawgan narrowed his eyes. “And you didn’t wonder at that?”

“I had no reason to wonder,” I said. “He told me to help stow the barrels below.”

“Fair enough,” said Mawgan. “Go on, then.”

He leaned forward, Mary beside him, and I told them as carefully as I could every detail of our strange midnight visit to Spain.

My first glimpse of the shore had come at dawn. Through the morning we bore down on it. And then, a league or so from land, Father had the ship heave to. He went below with the captain and old Cridge, and when he sent for me an hour later to bring them a bottle and
glasses, they were huddled around the table, over a chart I couldn’t see. “Why are we waiting?” I asked. The men looked at each other. Captain Stafford had his arms crossed. He didn’t look happy at all; he sat there like a bulk of timber. And then Father said, “For nightfall, of course. They’ll light a beacon for us, to show us the way.” “Aye,” said Cridge. “That’s right.” Then he’d sent me off with a wink.

Simon Mawgan frowned. “And that didn’t sound odd?” he asked.

“Not to me,” I said. “Remember, this was all new to me. I’d never been to sea before.”

As the sun was setting, we’d backed the jibs and swung back toward the land. There was a breeze warmed by the desert, and the men worked bare-chested to set the topsails. That was all, only the topsails. And we ghosted down as the night thickened around us. It was a black night in the dark of the moon, but we showed no lights. I did wonder at that; it was because of pirates, said Father—“The waters here are thick with pirates.” But he sent me aloft, up to the foretop with a hooded lantern. And he said, “When I give you the word, show the light at the shore. Count to five and then close it. Do that twice, you understand?” I told him I did. “That’s our signal,” he said. “So they know we’ve come on honest business.” And up I’d gone into the rigging.

This time it was Mary who scowled. “Even I would have been suspicious at that,” she said.

“So I was,” I told her.

But it all had been so wonderfully mysterious. The brig slipped through the water in total silence, charged with a sense of danger that tingled in the air like a lightning storm. I watched for pirates, and saw them on every quarter—dark shadows of boats that changed, every one, to wave tops and ripples when I looked more closely. Then, straight ahead and low on the water, I saw a flare of bright light. And Father called up, “Show the lantern!” I opened the shutters, and everything around me—the mast and the stays, the swell of the topsail—glared with a golden glow. The shutters clicked shut, opened again, and when I hooded the lamp for the last time, I could still see the ropes and the rigging burning and moving in my eyes. “Let go!” called a voice, and the anchor fell with a splash, the chain rumbling out. The sound echoed back from a shore I couldn’t see as the
Isle of Skye
turned slowly, head to wind. And the topmen—poor Danny Riggins leading them all—came swarming up to furl the sails. Then the boats were swung out and lowered, and I watched them carry my father into the night.

“Did you hear voices?” asked Mawgan. “Any sounds from shore?”

“No,” I said. “We must have been at least half a mile off. It took the boats nearly an hour to come back.”

We’d listened for them. Every man remaining on the ship stood at the rail, watching and waiting. We were a little world in the darkness, the ship silent, the foresails lying in heaps at the foot of the stays. Old Cridge judged his time by the stars; he kept glancing up. Then we heard
it, very faint, the creaking of oars. “Show your light,” said Cridge, and I cracked open the shutters. The boats came sliding out of the gloom, each weighted to the gunwales with a stack of barrels. The men in them were grim and quiet, not at all the usual thing when sailors and wine are sitting so close. The barrels came aboard; the boats went off again. And they made four trips before the work was done.

Mawgan nodded. “Forty barrels in all. More or less.”

Each in its turn, the boats were hooked onto the tackles and brought aboard. The topsails were unfurled and sheeted home, the foresails raised. They flapped in the wind, and the topsails bellied back against the masts. In silence, the men tramped round the capstan; no chanteys were sung as we left that place. The anchor came up streaming mud and weeds. We made sternway with the helm over; then Cridge ordered the topsail yards braced around, the jibs sheeted home, and we slewed off onto a starboard tack. At the first sign of dawn, we were farther off than we’d been at dusk.

“Is that all that happened?” asked Mawgan.

“It is.”

He took a breath. It reminded me of the way the wind lulled before a furious gust. He rapped his fingers on the arm of his chair. They sounded like soldiers marching.

“Now I’ll ask you again,” he said. “And for the very last time. What exactly did you bring in those barrels, boy?”

“Wine,” said I.

Mawgan snorted. “Oh, there was wine in them, true
enough. Yes, and nothing but wine in a third of them. Maybe a flagon or two in each of the rest!”

“A flagon?” I said.

“Aye. Quite enough to satisfy any curious guardsman who tapped a bung, wasn’t it? And under the false bottom, packed in sawdust so it wouldn’t knock about, was a bar of gold, perhaps? A packet of diamonds?”

“No!” I said.

Simon Mawgan leapt to his feet. He toppled that big, heavy chair as easily as a bottle. He meant to hit me—I was sure of it—but Mary ran between us.

“Look at him,” she said, her hands on his chest. “Just look at him, Uncle. You can see he edn’t lying.”

I must have stood there ghastly white, my fingers fiddling with the little glass match that Mawgan had given me. Suddenly it all made sense: a mysterious night on a dark shore; sawdust in the bilge of the
Skye;
the wreckers’ obsession with a few broken barrels. There seemed to be only one explanation, and Mawgan had led me to it step by step. But still I couldn’t believe it.

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.”