The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence Read Free Book Online Page A

was this?” I asked.
    “Seven years ago,” said she. “I was only a child.” She closed her eyes. “We lay in a row along the cliffs and watched that ship. The waves were breaking right over the decks, and we could hear the sails blowing out—
boom, boom
—one after the other. It was Caleb Stratton who said, ‘Show them a light.’ I remember him standing when everyone else was flat on the ground, standing in the rain and the wind, with that big black beard of hislike a mask on his face. ‘We done it before,’ he said. ‘Show ’em a light and they steer straight for it.’ Uncle Simon would have none of it—I remember him shouting—and most of the people felt the same way. But Caleb had a power and a strength, and there were always a few who would follow him. Stumps—he still had his legs then, though not for long—ran off to fetch a lantern. They tied it to the tail of a pony that they walked across the cliffs. I remember the way it flared in the wind, the way the men laughed. Those poor wretched sailors; they must have thought they saw the masthead of a ship going into harbor. And they followed like lambs. Right to the Tombstones.”
    “Did you see that?” I asked.
    “No. They sent us home, the women and children.”
    “And your uncle?”
    “He stayed at the cliffs.” Mary lay back and put her hand over her eyes. “The storm blew all night. And Uncle Simon came home in the morning, all bloodied and bruised, soaked with salt water. He had tried to stop them, he said. He had tried to put out the light, and they attacked him.”
    “He told you this?”
    “And I believed him,” said Mary. “He poured a huge glass of brandy. It shook in his hands. Then he told me how the ship drove up on the rocks and how the masts fell, sails and all. The men were standing on the clifftop, Caleb and the others, laughing and dancing like boys at a game. And Uncle—this is what he told me—followed them downto the beach and took up an axe. And in the darkness he—” She stopped, breathing softly.
    “What?” I asked.
    Mary spread her fingers and peered at me between them. “That was the night Stumps lost his legs.”
    Suddenly the day seemed very cold. I could imagine the scene as Mary described it, Stumps writhing on the ground as the axe rose and fell. But just as easily I could imagine a cable cinching on his legs, Simon Mawgan wielding a lantern instead of an axe.
    “A lot of men drownded that night,” said Mary. “And since then my uncle’s made sure that they never again used the lights.”
    “But they do,” I said.
    “Oh, no,” she said. “They don’t.”
    “I saw them.” I turned to her, almost pleading. “I saw them from the ship.”
    “It’s quite impossible, John. You must have seen stars, or maybe—”
    “I saw the ponies on the cliff. They had lanterns on their backs.”
    “Are you sure?” said Mary. “Maybe they were boxes. Maybe they were—”
    “They were lanterns,” said I.
    “Oh, dear.” She closed her eyes. “Uncle Simon will be very angry to hear this.”
    “Angry?” I laughed. “He did it. He wrecked the
Skye
, and he wrecked others before her.”
    “No!” said Mary.
    “Look at his house. All those things.” I thought of my bedroom. On the wall hung a quadrant that a sailor had used to find his way from the stars. In Simon Mawgan’s house, it was a rack to hold socks.
    “You judge him too harshly,” she said. “He’s not an evil man; he’s really not. He only takes what the law gives him—a payment, or a share, from the wrecks that God brings about.”
    “God wrecks the ships?” I asked.
    “If not Him, then who else?”
    “It was men who wrecked the
Isle of Skye,”
I told her.
    “And it was my uncle who saved you from it,” she said. “And edn’t that the truth? Edn’t it? If he did wreck your ship, then why did he help you?”
    I had no answer for that. But still I wasn’t sure. “Where was he when it happened?”
    “With Parson Tweed. He