The Wreckers: Chapters 12–18

The parson dropped his pistols into his voluminous pockets and helped me down from the roof.

“Nothing time won’t heal,” he said. “Though I'd venture a guess the bruises will fade before the memory does.”

The villagers sat wrapped in tarpaulins, and behind them, on a churning dark sea, the ship glided through cloud banks.

And we lay in the sparse grass, watching the ship beating to windward.

In a flurry of capes, he grew from a speck to a regal figure on a fine black horse.

The Widow chanted in a keening voice, and the wind came tearing over the sea, flattening the breakers, flinging spray high over the cliffs.

“Put him back in the sea. Put him back in the sea that he came from, or you'll rue the day you let him live.’’

Brandishing his axe, Caleb shouted, “I know where he is! Find the girl, and you’ve found the boy.”

The sky to the west, over the farm, exploded into a frenzy of rooks. And a cry came to us, a bloodcurdling shriek, then the sounds of the birds—their wings and their rattling voices.

We walked through the house, the kitchen and larder and dining hall.

In Simon Mawgan's room was a great four-poster bed hung with luxuriant drapes.

The walls were lined with bureaus and tables, their tops covered with basins of delicate china and all manner of brushes and combs.

He was large as life, or slightly larger, and the paint had faded until he seemed unearthly pale.

You're like a horse with blinkers, going blithely along without seeing what happens around you.

I stoked a fire in the room’s little hearth.

Mary came back with a few yards of muslin and a bowl full of oatmeal.

I stood to pull back the covers, and she started laying the poultice over Eli's chest.

Simon Mawgan was sprawled in a huge chair, his feet splayed on the hearth, hands in his lap.

His head rested on his left shoulder, and his jowls quivered as he breathed huge snoring breaths.

He hung from a gibbet in loops of great chain that tingled and clanged, that whistled with the wind.

There was an old skiff covered with tarpaulins, and I sat on its gunwale and cried.

The tide was already on the ebb, the swollen river rushing past in eddies and swirls.

But I stuffed the tarpaulins down in the bilge and rocked the boat up on its keel.

I swung the oar round and dropped it in the groove.

I crawled into the drain, through the torrent of runoff, with the tow rope in my hand.

There was a gouge in the metal, a groove no deeper than a ha'penny's width.

“Proverbs nineteen: 'A foolish son is the calamity of his father.' It would appear that I've arrived none too soon."

He blanched at the sight of Father's rat-bitten foot, then looked at me with a scornful frown.

“All we were doing was buying second-rate wine from a third-rate vintner. And they cheated us, John. Those Spaniards made us load at night, and gave us false-bottomed barrels. I knew it as soon as the sawdust showed up in the pumps.”

Somehow, though he was wet and shivering, though his clothes were tattered and stank of the cistern, he looked proud and elegant.

Before we gained the hilltop, the signal came. Three shots in quick succession, they floated across the moors and cliffs, through the valley and the sky.

“But what can we do? It's best if we bring others," he said. "We can find a magistrate, a—"

Like a shimmer of mist, faint and indistinct, she looked no bigger than the Isle of Skye.

The blacking on his face was mottled by the rain, and his skin showed through like a skull.

The man never moved at all, but his arm flailed as the boat heaved and wallowed in the waves.

The pony's hooves squelched on the grass, then vanished in the boom of surf.

I was racing it, running with no inkling of what would happen, thinking only of the men aboard her, of Mary.

Then a roiling smoke wrapped round him, and when it cleared, he was gone.

The packet turned sluggishly, sails hanging slack, and drifted on toward Execution Dock.

Never again will a sailor look up from a storm-tossed deck and see the false beacons gutter and burn.