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Published by Yearling, an imprint of Random House Children’s Books a division of Random House, Inc., New York
Copyright © 1998 by Iain Lawrence
Map by Virginia Norey
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eISBN: 978-0-307-78901-3
Reprinted by arrangement with Delacorte Press
v3.1
For my father
CONTENTS
Cover
Map
Other Books by This Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
1. The Wreck
2. A Drowning
3. The Legless Man
4. Galilee
5. A Row of Bodies
6. The Haunted Cove
7. The Evil Eye
8. The Mystery of the Barrels
9. A Ship Embayed
10. Wrapped in Chains
11. A Gargoyle Come to Life
12. A Stone for a Heart
13. Four Together
14. A Terrifying Decision
15. Across the Moor
16. A Dead Man Rises
17. False Beacons
18. Men of Fire
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
Chapter 1
THE WRECK
For seven days we ran before the storm. We raced through waves that seemed enormous, chased by a shrieking wind. We ran toward England under topsails and jib, in a brig called the Isle of Skye. She leaked from every seam, from every hatch and skylight. But she went like a witch mile after mile, wrapped in a shroud of spray.
I was wet and cold, and sometimes frightened. But I loved it all, my first time at sea.
Skye was my father’s ship, though he was never a sailor. To him, the sea was a nuisance, and the ship was a thing to be owned, like his carriage and his office desk. “Only owners and admirals,” he liked to boast, “can order a captain about.” And this rare voyage—Father had called it a ride—was meant to teach me that a scribbling of ledgers was better than a life at sea. “You want to be a sailor?” he’d said. “Why, you’d be driven mad by the boredom.” And he’d laughed. “Or scared out of your wits. So it’s one and the same.”
But I was never at loose ends, and not once so scared as that. We’d fìlled the ship with Italian linen and Turkish raisins, and with Spanish wine that we’d loaded on a strange and mysterious night. We’d covered the deck with chicken coops, and then sailed for home. And on the seventh night of our return trip, the barometer was rising.
The cautious little crosses on Captain Stafford’s chart showed us seven leagues southwest of Plymouth. But even that was too close to land, and Stafford begged my father to let him heave to until daybreak. “I’m not at all sure where we are,” he said.
Father would have none of it. “Raisins,” he said, shaking a finger. “Raisins don’t keep well in salt air.”
So on we went. And an hour before dawn, the Isle of Skye hurtled down a wave. She hit the trough in a burst of spray, and water filled the deck. A thousand times we’d done that, and might a thousand more, but now the chickens rose from their perches and hurled themselves, shrieking, against the cages. An old sailor named Finnigan Quick stared at them with horror.
“Land,” he said. “They smell the land!”
My father was beside me, his hand clutching a backstay, his scarlet cape flapping in the wind. He lowered his head against the spindrift, then grabbed my collar. His golden ring was cold as ice, and it pressed against my neck as he pulled me right against him.
“Go below,” he said. His beard was like hoarfrost on my cheek. “Go, John. You’ll not be scared down there.”
“But I’m not scared up here,” I said. “We’re fetching the shore, and—”
He gave me a push, to send me on my way. But I didn’t go below; for the first time in all my fourteen years, I disobeyed my father. I climbed to the weather shrouds and hooked myself to them like a spider. And the next wave rolled us over so far that I was lying flat above the sea.
It seemed forever until the ship found her feet again. And then the lookout cried down from the maintop, his voice made ghostly by his speaking trumpet. “Land ho! Land ho!”
He was invisible up there, where the storm clouds tangled in the rigging. It might have been God Himself who hailed us from the heavens.
“Breakers ahead!”
I saw my father stiffen. He looked frightened and lost, like a deer about to flee. At the wheel, the helmsman wrestled with the ship. But Father didn’t move, and others came running past him. There was Cridge, the mate, his white hair blowing like a horse’s mane. Danny Riggins was beside him, the foretopman from Plymouth. They threw their weight on the wheel and brought the brig to her course. And up from the ship’s waist in his dark tarry-breeks came the master.
“Captain Stafford!” cried my father. He clutched at the man’s arm.
Stafford shook him off. “Up helm,” he shouted. “Up helm and wear ship!”
It might have torn the masts out of her. But the Isle of Skye was a good strong ship, and she flung herself round on a crest. The yards went over with a squeal of blocks. From stem to stern she shivered. Then the wind slammed against her, and she heeled so far that the mainsail yard tore a furrow from the water. Down below, something snapped with a gunshot sound, and I heard the rumble of barrels as the cargo came loose.
A wave as high as the maintop shattered on the weather side and pushed the brig down in the trough. I was under water one moment, then gasping for air, then under again. I heard a man scream, high and shrill.
And after it came the sound of the breakers. It was a thrumming, throbbing noise. It was a low pulse, like a heartbeat. My father’s head came up, turning like a hawk’s. And suddenly, like a thunderclap, the mizzen topsail shredded into rags and rope.
The Isle of Skye came upright, then settled again with the scuppers in the sea, water tumbling over the rail.
“As you bear,” yelled Captain Stafford. He raised his head, his hands cupped round his mouth. “Masthead there,” he screamed.
But the lookout had disappeared.
A man came aft with a dripping wet rag in his ha
nds. “The pumps,” he said. “They’re clogged with something.”
“With what?” said Stafford.
“Sawdust, I think.” He shook out his rag, and a flurry of red-colored shavings scattered to the deck.
Father gazed at them with something like horror. Only later would I learn what he saw in those shavings, what terrible message was written in the sawdust. At the time, I thought only of the pumps.
“Can you clear them?” asked Stafford.
“We’ll try.” The rag was the man’s cap. He wrung it out and put it on as he staggered forward again.
The ship hurtled on. Spray swept over the deck like a series of rainstorms, blinding the men at the helm. But above them, in the shrouds, I could see the shoreline and the glimmer of breaking waves.
And then the lights.
There were two of them, one above the other, like golden eyes shining in the darkness. I sprang from the shrouds and raced down the deck. “Lights,” I cried, and tugged my father’s billowing cape. “Lights.”
He was angry at first, furious to see me. Then he understood, and he grabbed my arm. “Where?” he said.
“There!”
He sighted along my arm, and Stafford did the same. The brig rose from a trough, and the lights were nearly dead ahead. Then a third appeared, tossed by the wind, as though from the mast of a ship.
The captain frowned. “Now what the devil is all this?”
“A beacon,” said Father. He laughed. “A harbor.”
“Maybe,” said Stafford. “But which one?”
“Plymouth!” Father cried.
Riggins stomped up the slope of the deck. He winked at me, then put a huge hand on his beard and squeezed out half a pint of water. “T’aint Plymouth,” he said. “I was born and raised thereabouts, and I’ll tell you that much. T’aint Portloe neither, nor Salcombe nor Fowey.”
“Damn your eyes!” my father roared. “What does it matter where it isn’t?”
Poor Riggins reared back as though Father had hit him. “It’s nowhere, is what I mean,” he mumbled. “Nowheres I know.”
My father gave him an awful stare, full of fear and anger. In London he would never have raised his voice like that, not to the lowest of clerks. The wind swirled his cape around him.
“Make for the harbor,” he said.
Captain Stafford touched his arm. “We’ll have daylight in an hour, Mr. Spencer. We could stand off and wait—”
“Or sink like a stone,” said Father. “We’ve got torn sails and a bilge full of water and no pumps to lift it out. And now we’ve got a beacon to guide us.”
“I don’t like it,” said Stafford. A sheet of spray hurled against us. “I haven’t liked this voyage from the start. Loading cargo in the dead of night. Skulking like thieves. I don’t know what you’re up to, Mr. Spencer, but—”
“Watch your tongue!” snapped Father. We were making leeway by the second. The sound of surf rolled like giant drums, louder and louder still. “This is my ship, and you’ll do as I say. Now, I’m telling you to take it in.”
Stafford turned away. He wasn’t happy, but he would do it. He put his hands to his mouth and shouted his orders. “Hands to sail stations! Square to the wind!” The helmsmen cranked the wheel around, hand over hand on the spokes.
“Wear-O!” yelled Stafford.
The Isle of Skye swung quickly round until her gaunt finger of a bowsprit pointed straight at the beacons.
Riggins frowned. Then he saw me watching, and fixed a smile in place. He always had a smile for me, though never before so grim as that.
“Aloft with you, John,” said Stafford. “You’re our eyes now.”
I watched those lights as though they marked the gates of heaven. I stared so hard that my eyes ached. And when the uppermost light seemed to slide off to one side, I cupped my hands to my mouth and shouted at the helm. “Starboard!”
The bowsprit jogged across the clouds. “Steady as you go!” I sang out.
Cridge peered at the compass and scratched his wooly head.
The band of surf swept closer, a headland jutting out. We flashed past it and reeled on toward the beacons, across a bay where fires burned along the shore. Then, as I watched, the lights parted, though the brig had strayed not at all from her course.
“This isn’t right,” said Cridge.
We heard the beat of surf again, but from ahead this time. And a different sound now, a rumbling avalanche that grew louder by the moment.
And then I saw it, we all did, a patch of sea turned white by foam and spindrift. The waves broke on jagged slabs of rock roaring and bursting high in spouts of spray.
“The Tombstones,” cried Riggins. “God save us! We’re on the Tombstones.”
“Put the helm down,” the captain shouted. “Luff up or she’s lost!”
The brig rolled as the bowsprit swung below the beacons. In the eerie glow of a burning dawn I saw figures up along the clifftop, and a line of land that almost ringed our little ship. She was turning quickly, rounding up to the wind. And she was almost at the eye when she struck the rocks with a jolt that knocked me from the shrouds.
The ship bounced free, then struck again, so hard the topmast broke. It toppled slowly at first, then hurtled down in a tangle of rigging. The wheel spun madly.
The first wave crashed broadside into the ship, flinging chunks of rail high into the rigging. The second carried away the longboat and shattered the windows of the stern cabin. The poor Isle of Skye groaned like a living thing.
My father, up to his knees in water, struggled toward me with his hands held out before him. The third wave fell across us, and dragged me down the deck. I reached up. “Help me,” I said. I couldn’t swim. Then I was tumbling down in a cold black wave, sucked backward to the sea.
Chapter 2
A DROWNING
The sand was cold against my cheek, and gritty. It felt a bit like my father’s beard, and I suppose I’d been dreaming of him when I came awake. I was lying on my side, high up the beach, and the ground shook from the surf that hammered down along the shore. It was full daylight, but gray and somber, and I had no idea how much time had passed. It hurt to move, to even breathe—my throat was burning from seawater. But I pushed myself up on one elbow and looked round.
The sky was filled with gulls. They soared in huge, lazy circles, overlapping like the wheels and cogs of an engine. There were scores of them, all crying as they dipped and twirled.
I was nestled in a mass of bull kelp, the thick cords slick and wet against my bare arms. And when I shifted, they went slithering over my skin like giant eels. My jacket had been torn away, and two slats from a chicken coop were bound on my wrist like a flimsy manacle. There were scraps of wood all round, and heaps of barrel staves from our cargo of wine.
The beach formed a half circle of glistening sand, a cove broken by reefs and backed by precipitous cliffs. I lay just above the water and just behind a rocky ledge that broke the surf along my bit of shore. Behind it, in an arc along the beach, the combers rolled in—lines of pale green water with streaks of sand in them. And beyond that, the hull of the Isle of Skye lay upon a shelf of twisted rocks that jutted up like rows of gravestones.
It was an awful sight to wake up to. The masts were broken stumps, the deck a shattered ruin. Half the planks had been torn from the hull, and in places I could see right through the ribs to the insides of the ship. My father’s cabin lay split apart, his ledgers and books spilling from the table, his chest and chairs and carpets heaped against the hull. The deckhouse was gone, or most of it, and the brig’s massive bones stood above the bay like the skeleton of a rotting whale, black against the sky. On the lee side, topmasts, yards, and bowsprit drifted alongside the wreck in a snarl of rigging. Barrels bobbed all across the bay.
In the surf a cable’s length away, a body rolled in the waves. He wore seamen’s clothes, striped and patched; his hair was pigtailed and tarred. As each wave came in, the dead man rose up the beach, then slippe
d away, tumbling down the sand. Then he turned and lay supine, fixing me with a horrid, toothy grin.
It was a sailor I’d known as Tom, and he’d taught me how to splice. His fingers, strong as marline spikes, now were bent and swollen. When the next breaker came in, up he went again, arms waving as though he were beckoning me to join him. Many times I had sat with Tom, but now I shuddered and turned away.
There were other bodies in the sand, scattered here and there, each a dark and huddled shape that was once a friend of mine.
And then I saw the men, across the bay, three of them coming toward me. They wore coats with big shoulder capes that flew about them like battle flags. They were kicking at the wreckage, bending down sometimes to pick up bits of flotsam, nudging at the bodies as though looking for survivors. And above them, the seagulls circled like a swirling cloud.
I tried calling out, but only a gurgle came from my throat, a strangled sound and a dribble of water. But they were coming to help, if I would only lie and wait. And I watched as they paced along the beach in a ragged, windblown line. They stopped at the body of a sailor lying sprawled on the sand. One of the caped men—he had a black beard square as a shovel blade—bent down and raised the head by its tousle of hair. I swallowed and coughed, and tried again to shout.
“This one’s dead,” said the bearded man. He opened his fingers and let the head drop back to the sand. “Is that the lot of ’em, then?”
I tugged and pulled at the kelp. I kicked at it, afraid they would pass me by.
One of the men pointed. He shouted, “There’s another.” But instead of coming toward me, they angled off to the water’s edge, down to a sheltered pool behind a reef of jagged rock. A sailor lay there, not quite ashore but not quite afloat, one band fixed like a claw to a clutch of mussels. When he raised his head I saw it was old Cridge with his white hair plastered down, his eyes swollen and red. He hadn’t the strength to pull himself from the sea—he could barely hold his mouth above it—and his legs swung to and fro in the surge of water.
The men waded in, their big seaboots kicking up white froth, their coats streaming back, the oilskin thrumming in the wind like slack jibs. They stood in an arc round him, their hands on their hips. When Cridge looked up at them I saw on his face an expression of utter, wretched fear. And then the man in the middle raised his boot and set it down on Cridge’s head. He did it slowly, deliberately; he put his heel on the crown of the mate’s head, and pushed it under the water.
The Wreckers Page 1