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!”
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.
Chapter 18
MEN OF FIRE
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 Ca
leb’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.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
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.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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.
The Wreckers Page 14