The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online

she found Simon Mawgan shouting at me in the doorway of the house. She listened in silence, her knees drawn up and her arms around them.
    “So I can’t tell anyone,” I said. “Or Stumps will kill my father. And I don’t know what to do.”
    “Uncle will know,” said Mary.
    “But he’s one of them!” I cried.
    Mary laughed. “You don’t know my uncle.”
    “I know he’s a wrecker,” I said.
    “He’s not.”
    “They all are.”
    “And then so am I?”
    “Well, maybe not,” I said. “But Tommy Colwyn—”
    “Stop it!” Mary leapt to her feet. “It’s not the people, John. It’s this country. This wasteland.”
    I shook my head.
    “The men of Pendennis were miners once. They went down in the ground for a shilling a day, down so deep that the sea rushed in at their feet. And in the days of rain and floods they couldn’t work at all, and they’d go for weeks without earning a farthing. Others went fishing; all day they spent out in the fog and the storms for a bucket of pilchards. That was all a boy could hope to do. He could drown in the mines or drown in the sea.”
    She wrung her hands, then buried them in the folds of her skirt. “You’ve seen the land. Most of it won’t grow potatoes, and it won’t graze sheep. There were people so hungry that they scraped up limpets from the Tombstones. But the Mawgans were wealthy. They had Galilee, and they owned the best of the mines. The Mawgans never suffered like the rest.”
    She took a breath. Her eyes seemed as round as the ponies’. “Once in a while—in a very great while—a ship would come to ruin on the rocks. And there would be food then, and wine, and huge heaps of things just waiting to be carried off and sold for pounds and pounds. And for once it was the Mawgans who suffered.”
    “Because no one was left to work the mines?”
    “Not only that.” Mary bunched her skirt in her fists. “By law the Mawgans had ‘right of wreck.’ We still do. Any ship that comes ashore in the great arc of St. Elmo’s Bay—anywhere between Wrinkle Head and Northground—legallybelongs to my uncle. His father had right of wreck; his grandfather did before that. The oldest man in Pendennis can remember a Mawgan standing in the ruins of a tea wreck, swatting at men who came for the chests, yelling that they were his, that it all belonged to him.”
    Mary turned toward the sea. “Only rarely did ships come ashore on the Tombstones. They might wreck
there
”—she pulled a hand free and pointed to the east—“or there, or there, or there. So the people followed them. Whenever a ship was caught on the lee shore, the whole village—women and children and men—tracked it along the coast. For days they wandered with it, back and forth, back again. And they prayed, John, they knelt and prayed that the poor ship would meet its end before it got to the next village, before it met the crowd that had set out from there with their own axes and picks.”
    She was staring at the gray waters of the Channel. Her voice dropped, and she shivered. “The law said that anything that came from a wreck was free for salvage. But for it to be a wreck, no one could survive—not man or beast. If one person—if so much as a dog—made it safely ashore, then it weren’t really a wreck at all. ‘The wreck edn’t dead,’ is what they’d say. So it was the law, John, that made the devil’s work of wrecking.”
    “Because,” I said, “they killed the people who got to shore.”
    “Yes. It came to that.” She sat again, close beside me. “But it got worse. It got much worse.”

Chapter 6

T HE H AUNTED C OVE
    M ary sat on the grass, her face to the sea. Her voice grew faint and faraway, as though she talked from a different place and a different time.
    “I only once saw them use the false beacons,” she said. “It was the night of a terrible storm. You could hardly stand in the wind, it was that strong. And a ship came running down toward the shore.”
    “When