The Morgow Rises!

by Peter Tremayne

  THE MORGOW RISES!

  Peter Tremayne

  © Peter Tremayne 1982

  Peter Tremayne has asserted his rights under the Copyright, Design and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work.

  First published in 1982 by Sphere Books.

  This edition published in 2017 by Venture Press, an imprint of Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  CHAPTER I

  CHAPTER II

  CHAPTER III

  CHAPTER IV

  CHAPTER V

  CHAPTER VI

  CHAPTER VII

  CHAPTER VIII

  CHAPTER IX

  CHAPTER X

  CHAPTER XI

  CHAPTER XII

  CHAPTER XIII

  CHAPTER XV

  CHAPTER XVI

  CHAPTER XVII

  CHAPTER XVIII

  CHAPTER XIX

  CHAPTER XX

  CHAPTER XXI

  CHAPTER XXII

  CHAPTER XXIII

  CHAPTER XXIV

  For Chris Lowder

  Bedheugh war pan dhe an Morgow; Oleugh rag an re yn few.

  Kyneugh war an re angenys.

  Y fyth deweth a buptra.

  — An Lyver Ruth a Kernow

  Beware when the Morgow rises; Lament for the living.

  Lament for the unborn.

  All things end!

  — The Red Book of Cornwall

  CHAPTER I

  Old Billy Scawen screwed up his brown, weather-beaten face, shaded his pale blue eyes with one gnarled hand and examined the position of the sun hanging behind the wispy wreaths of cotton wool clouds that scudded over the azure sky.

  “I do reckon the tide’ll start to turn within the half-hour, Jack,” he grunted to his son who was hauling a lobster pot over the side of their bobbing dinghy.

  Young Jack Scawen paused in his work and glanced up at the sky.

  “Are’ee goin’ straight into Bosbradoe then, dad?”

  “Reckon so,” replied Billy Scawen with a look of distaste at the sum total of their morning’s catch. Three-quarters of the pots they had put down had come up empty. “We’ll not make much on this lot, so we might as well go straight home.”

  His son looked at the three lobsters that lay in the well of their boat and sighed.

  “First the herring and now the lobsters. It’s they upcountry folk that be doing it, dad. They trawlers from Lowestoft and the like. They’ve gone and fair ruined the fishin’ hereabouts for Cornishmen. Look at they big trawlers…” he flung a hand towards a dark shape on the horizon. “They take the herring by the ton and don’t leave enough behind to ensure there be a catch next year.”

  Old Billy Scawen nodded absently. He did not need his son to tell him the facts of life. Twenty-five years ago he had skippered a trawler out of Penzance. That had been in the days when the Cornish fishing fleet was a force to be reckoned with. Why, he could still recall when it was possible to walk from Bosbradoe jetty out to Poldene Light over the decks of the harboured herring fleet. He drew out his battered briar pipe, clenched his teeth around it but made no move to light it. He drew a comfort out of the taste of the stem in his mouth.

  “Bring up the anchor, Jack,” he said moodily, turning to the outboard motor.

  “Ain’t we putting down the pots afore we go in?”

  Billy Scawen shook his head.

  “Some’in’s stove in several of they,” he said, pointing to the wicker lobster pots. “Reckon as how we best spend this afternoon repairing ‘fore we puts them down again.”

  Jack Scawen moved to the bow and hauled up the anchor. Behind him the “pop-pop-pop” of the outboard motor sounded as the engine spluttered into life and the little wooden dinghy began to push towards the frowning granite cliffs of the coastline a quarter of a mile distant. About a hundred yards away to their starboard rose two large granite towers, rising almost vertically some fifty feet or more out of the sea. Billy Scawen swung his boat, Ysolt IV, in an arc away from these rocks. They were the Trevian Rocks which for years had been a favourite spot for the men of Bosbradoe to catch lobsters. Billy Scawen gazed at the black granite rocks, whitened at the top by the droppings of countless seabirds which swirled in white droves around them crying fretfully. He pursed his lips in a soundless whistle.

  “Reckon Trevian Rocks are played out, Jack,” he called. “Tomorrow we’d best try further down the coast.”

  His son did not reply for the moment. Young Jack Scawen was gazing with a puzzled expression at the water. There was a faint wisp of mist, almost steam-like, arising from a patch of sea in front of their dinghy. Yes; he could only liken it to steam rising from a hot bath. Then he noticed that the sea had started to bubble. But that was impossible! Even as he looked, the bubbling sea spread in a circle around their bobbing craft which now began to toss and sway in a dangerous fashion.

  Billy Scawen cried out, some inarticulate oath, as he sought to keep the craft from capsizing.

  Then something hard seemed to smash into the underside of the Ysolt IV. The waters around them seemed to erupt. Billy Scawen’s mouth dropped open in horror, the briar pipe falling to the boards and smashing to pieces. Then young Jack Scawen gave one long, piercing shriek of terror.

  Jack Treneglos was in a good mood as he headed his thirty-foot ketch around the headland within sight of the Trevian Rocks. It had been a good morning’s work and he was putting back into Bosbradoe with a substantial catch. When sold, it would certainly be enough to give his three-man crew a pretty good dividend. Not that it was before time. The fishing had been fairly bad this season and more than once Treneglos had wondered whether the time had come when he should look upon fishing as a sideline and convert his ketch for pleasure-trips; go down to Newquay or Tintagel and drum up trade from the tourists like many another skipper-owner before him. Times were bad for Cornish fishermen. Without protection for native fishermen, the Cornish seas were being farmed bare by the factory trawlers from upcountry, from France and even from the Soviet Union. Once the slogan of the Duchy had been “Fish, Tin and Copper!” Well, the tin and copper mining had all but perished being uneconomical to mine — it was far easier to mine it from places like Malaya and Bolivia. And now the fish were going. Many a good skipper and crew had wound up on the beach or migrated in search of work. Treneglos shook his head and smiled bitterly. Well, that didn’t concern him today. He’d had a good catch. No need to worry for a week or two. Maybe the fishing would be good tomorrow, too. Maybe his luck had started to change.

  “Hey, Jack!” one of his crewmen came hurrying aft to the wheelhouse. “Ain’t that wreckage close by the Trevian Rocks?”

  Treneglos reached for his glasses and raised them to his eyes with one hand while the other kept the wheel steady.

  He frowned and adjusted the focus.

  “Something’s gone to pieces right enough, Jer,” he muttered. “We’ve got time before the tide turns. We’d better take a look.”

  He swung hard at the wheel and the ketch turned sluggishly towards the towering granite rocks. Within fifteen minutes they were a hundred yards away and Treneglos put his engines into neutral, threw a lash over the wheel to keep it steady, and joined his men on deck.

  “See anything?” he called.

  They were pulling at pieces of wood with boathooks.

  “Small craft by the look of the pieces, Jack,” said Charlie Treneglos, Jack’s younger brother. “Must have been smashed to bits on the rocks.”

  “It be a recent wreck, Jack,” muttered Jeremiah Trevaskis who, saving Jack Treneglos himself, was the oldest and most experienced man on board. “See the smashed pieces of wood? They haven’t had time to discolour where they be splintered.”

  �
�We better put back to Bosbradoe and call the coastguard,” said Treneglos. His ketch was not equipped with radio.

  “Hey,” Charlie’s voice was startled. He had fished up another piece of drifting wood. Screwed to it was a metal nameplate — Ysolt IV.

  “Christ Almighty!” Treneglos forgot he was an elder of his chapel. “That’s Billy Scawen’s dinghy. He and Jack were picking up their lobster pots here this morning.”

  Charlie was pointing to pieces of wicker-work floating in the water. They were clearly the remains of lobster pots.

  “Happen you’re right, Jack,” he muttered.

  The Treneglos brothers had known Billy Scawen all their lives. They lived in the next cottage but one in the village of Bosbradoe. Jack Treneglos scanned the seas anxiously. There was nothing in sight but small pieces of floating wreckage.

  “We’d best sheer off, Jack,” Old Jer tugged at his arm and indicated the grim black Trevian Rocks to which the ketch was slowly drifting.

  Treneglos turned for the wheel house.

  “We’ll take a turn around the rocks,” he called over his shoulder. “Keep your eyes peeled.”

  The ketch moved slowly forward and described a circle around the rocks. They saw nothing. All they heard was the pounding of the waves around the thrusting granite and the screaming cries of the sea birds constantly wheeling and darting around the white-capped pinnacles.

  With a muttered oath Jack Treneglos turned the ketch towards the coast.

  His brother Charlie joined him in the wheelhouse.

  “Looks bad, Jack,” he observed.

  Treneglos was silent for a moment.

  “It’s strange, Charlie. It’s been clear weather all morning. I can’t imagine how a man of Billy Scawen’s experience could have let his dinghy smash to pieces against the rocks.”

  “Something must have gone wrong,” hazarded Charlie. “Billy knew the waters off Bosbradoe like the back of his hand.”

  “Aye,” agreed Jack Treneglos. “Aye, something must have gone wrong.”

  The drifting clouds suddenly obscured the sun. The day went cold and black and Treneglos found himself trying to suppress a shiver.

  CHAPTER II

  “Happy” Penvose fastened the cap of his Thermos flask as tight as he could and packed it into the leather satchel which contained some sandwiches and a couple of apples. Then he opened the larder door and grinned at the impressive cake which his housekeeper, Mrs Treneglos, had baked for his birthday. “Happy” Penvose was seventy-two years old that day but looked ten years younger.

  “Might as well take a bit to celebrate,” he muttered to himself. He had a habit of talking to himself; it came of many years of isolation, working underground in mines. He cut a slice of the cake, wrapped it in greaseproof paper and put it into his satchel.

  From the sideboard he picked up an electric flashlight and stowed this in the bag. Then he collected two Davy-lamps, a hand-pick and a large corded rope such as rock climbers use. Thus equipped, he left his house via the kitchen door, pausing in the back yard to glance up at the sky.

  “This could be the day,” he said loudly.

  Henry Archibald Penvose was considered an eccentric in Bosbradoe which was admittedly a village of eccentrics. He had been dubbed “Happy” in his youth from a convoluted progression of his initials. Looking back, he could remember the time when Bosbradoe, like many another place in Cornwall, had a large mining population, when the major part of the world’s tin and copper supplies flowed from the bowels of the Cornish earth. He had left school at fourteen years of age to join many previous generations of Penvose men labouring in Wheal Tom, the great tin mine whose shaft and crumbling engine house had once led to one of Cornwall’s biggest mines. In its heyday, in the midnineteenth century, Wheal Tom had produced 160,000 tons of ore a year. When “Happy” Penvose started his mining career as a tutworker in its granite bowels, production had dropped to less than 40,000 tons a year. Production had continued to decay until it finally stopped in 1939. The stoppage was not only due to diminishing production levels but to the terrible flooding of September 1938, when the lower levels of the mine, which stretched far out under the sea, collapsed killing seven men and injuring many more.

  By the time of the flooding “Happy” had been a foreman at the face. With no mining work left in Cornwall he had taken his skills to Pennsylvania and then to Bolivia, specialising in surveying mines for tin lodes. He had been successful and accrued a small fortune before retiring to his native Cornwall, to the very village where his career had begun. Here, in Bosbradoe, he had purchased the crumbling old mansion called Tybronbucca — which translated from the ancient Cornish language meant “The House on Goblin Hill”. Tybronbucca was a rambling building which had begun its life in Tudor times but had been extensively restored in the mid-Victorian period. It had been the family home of the owners of Wheal Tom and the deserted engine room and entrance to the mine shaft stood not a hundred yards from the old house in its sprawling overgrown grounds. Both mine and house were cut off from the rest of the grounds by towering hedges of veronica, escallonia and privet.

  “Happy” Penvose had lived there for six years, almost as a recluse. Mrs Treneglos, from the village, “did for him” on two days a week. But the only time Penvose mixed with the villagers was when his young niece from London came to stay with him and insisted on taking him to the local public house. “Happy’s” main occupation seemed to be in spending his days by himself exploring Wheal Tom with his lamps and instruments.

  “God alone knows what the old boy expects to find down there,” muttered Constable Roscarrock to Noall, the landlord of The Morvren Arms, once. “I warned him about going down those disused mine workings by himself. The place just isn’t safe; they’ve not been used since ‘thirty-nine.”

  “He’s just a bit gone in the head,” observed Noall. “He was in here the other week telling me as how old Wheal Tom could be opened up again. Reckons as how he will strike a new lode of tin ore down there.”

  Constable Roscarrock shook his head sadly.

  “A lifetime of mining has gone to the old fellow’s head.”

  It was true that “Happy” Penvose firmly believed that Wheal Tom’s once rich seams had not been exhausted and that the mine, given the right tax incentives, could be made to produce a considerable proportion of British tin demand. The thought had grown and grown in his mind until it became an obsession.

  “Listen, Noall,” he had told the landlord of The Morvren Arms when that worthy had expressed his doubts about the idea, “do you know what it would mean if Wheal Tom was opened again? Look at the financial recession in Cornwall. The fish are going, the china clay industries are in the doldrums, so what is there left? Tourists? Look how the tourists are changing Cornwall. How long can it last? No, we want to revive Cornish industry again. That’s the only answer for the future of Cornishmen and women. The mines of Cornwall never ran out of ore. It was simply considered cheaper to get tin and copper from other parts of the empire. Now there is no empire. So what is needed to open up the Cornish mines again?”

  Noall shrugged. “You sound like one of they Cornish nationalists — Mebyon Kernow and suchlike,” he said half jeeringly.

  “Why not?”

  “Happy” Penvose went red. “Why don’t the London Government give a tax moratorium during the development stages of reopening the mining industry in Cornwall? It’s done in every other country. It would stimulate tin mining and enable it to become one of the mainstays of our economy. Such tax relief would lead to a fourfold expansion within a few years. Yet London still prefers to buy in near enough a hundred million pounds’ worth of tin each year rather than stimulate the Cornish mines again.”

  The landlord of The Morvren Arms, not knowing enough to answer, merely shook his head disbelievingly.

  “By God!” swore “Happy” Penvose, as he looked at the man’s cynical smile, “I’ll find some new lodes in Wheal Tom and when I do I’ll have her in production…I’
ll have her in production within the year!”

  But that declaration had been made five years ago and “Happy” Penvose was still looking for the new lode.

  “Surely he must have been over every foot of Wheal Tom by now?” Noall had asked Constable Roscarrock a few nights previously.

  “He’s a stubborn man is Henry Penvose,” said the policeman. “The whole family were stubborn as I recall. Still, isn’t old “Happy” the last of them? Didn’t they all die in the flooding of ‘thirty-eight?”

  Noall frowned and paused in his task of polishing glasses. “No, there’s “Happy’s” niece who lives up London way. She must be his younger brother’s daughter. William. That’s right. He was the youngest boy who was still at school when the flooding occurred. He never did go down the mines but went up country and opened a garage.” Constable Roscarrock scratched his chin reflectively. “That’s right. Claire Penvose; that’s his niece, isn’t it? The young blonde girl who comes to visit “Happy” every summer. Well, she ought to persuade the old boy that it’s dangerous to keep going down those mine workings by himself. Pull me another pint, Noall.”

  “Happy” Penvose paused at the deserted engine room of Wheal Tom and stood for a moment with bowed head. It was a ritual he observed no matter how many times he passed by the crumbling ruin. It was a silent tribute to the men who had given their lives in Wheal Tom; not just in the last disastrous flood but in the generations who had scratched a precarious and dangerous livelihood from the mine.

  He roused himself and walked to the head of the mine-shaft. The old lifts had long since rotted away but “Happy” Penvose had repaired a series of ladders and where repair was impossible constructed others by which method he was able to gain the lower reaches of the mine. In the years that “Happy” Penvose had been exploring Wheal Tom he had examined practically every gallery and shaft in the workings. It was true he had discovered several tin seams but had dismissed them as non-profitable by virtue of the fact that they were not extensive enough. Nevertheless he was convinced that Wheal Tom still possessed workable seams somewhere within its dark caverns.