The Wreckers (2 page)

“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.

T
he 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 slipped 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.

I wanted to cry out, but dared not. These men weren’t rescuers. They hadn’t come to save us, but to kill us. And I could only watch as Cridge’s hand came free from the mussels, came groping up to claw at the man’s rolled-down boot top. His other hand swept up, streaming water, and clutched on beside it. His legs thrashed and kicked.

But the man didn’t move. He only stood there and put more of his weight on that foot, and the water bubbled around his boot through a mat of snowy hair. Old Cridge flailed and splashed in the shallow pool, his motions growing frantic, and then subsiding. But the man paid the drowning sailor no more attention than he’d give to a dog pawing at his foot. He took a pipe from his pocket, tamped
the bowl with his thumb, and then shook the stem toward the wreck of the
Isle of Skye
.

“Right square on the Tombstones,” said he. “Bad bit of luck there.”

“We brought her in, Caleb,” said the man on his right.

“Oh, we did that. But half a cable on either side, and she’d be lying high and dry, and there for the picking.” Then he clucked and spat, and the caped men stood ragged in the wind, their backs toward me, staring at the wreck.

In a flash I was up. I shook off the last tangles of kelp, cast away the slats from my wrist. I took a step back, another. One of Cridge’s hands slid down the man’s boot, and I saw the fingernails torn away, the smears of blood they left on the oiled leather. The man they called Caleb pressed harder, but with no more thought or care. He just pushed with his boot as he shook his pipe and talked.

“Still, with this sea running, she’ll be down to splinters and chips by nightfall,” he said. “Won’t be nothing left but the ballast stones.”

I turned and ran. It was no more than five yards to the rocks, but it seemed a mile. My boots sank in the sand. I stumbled, caught myself, stumbled again. I kicked at the sand, grabbed at it; I half crawled and half ran. At every moment I expected a shout behind me, a cry of alarm. And then I was up among the rocks, into a crevice at the cliffs, and when I looked back the men were still standing in the shallows. Poor old Cridge floated at their feet like a straw man. Then I saw with dread the tracks that I’d left, the marks, as though a whole regiment had fled along the
beach. And without a second’s pause, I turned and tackled the cliff.

The rocks were slick with rain and spray. Three times I nearly fell; twice I hung by my fingertips from bare nubs of stone, my feet swinging in air sixty feet above the sand. Once I sent a little spray of pebbles skittering down, and pressed myself against the rock, waiting for that shout from below.

As I climbed, the bay opened below me. I saw the fires, still burning, women gathered around them in billowing shawls. Where a rutted track emerged from the gully, wagons were drawn up on the sand, wild-haired ponies standing in slack harness. Men labored back and forth, carrying boxes and barrels and armfuls of wood, staggering back-bent under piles of linens and clothes. One hauled up a sailor’s sea chest over his shoulder. Another dragged a long snake of rope. They dropped their things in haphazard piles, and at each stack a child sat guarding the treasures, as though these men who plundered the wreck might also steal from each other.

Then I reached up my hand and felt, not rock, but a warm stubble of grass. And I pulled myself to the top, and crouched on a narrow ridge. It dropped nearly as steeply on the other side, down to a harbor and a little village on its far shore. The buildings there were whitewashed, roofed with thatch or with copper turned green by the salt air. A cart went weaving up a narrow lane, and beside it, with her load of sticks, walked a woman in ivory shawls. Boats lay dry on the tide, each reflected in the shallows of a river that came down under a bridge of arched stone. On
the hill above the village stood a church. There was safety there, and rescue, if only I could reach it.

The wind pulled me and pushed me; it swept like a scythe through the yellowed grass and on from there—forever, it seemed—across a desolate moor. Wave after wave of low, barren hills marched to the sky, and not a single tree stood among them. Yet a pair of ponies grazed just a hundred yards from the clifftop, hobbled and heads down.

I took a step toward them. They lifted their heads, manes streaming back.

And then it came. A shout of anger, a shrill cry of alarm. One voice at first, and then many. And on the beach below, two men started up the cliff. I ran. I raced across that narrow ridge, up toward the moor, on toward the ponies. I heard the creak of wagon wheels, the crack of a whip. Horses snorted, and hooves pounded on the road.

The ponies gazed at me. They turned toward me, and on their sides I saw lanterns hung by leather straps, the glass on one tinted green, the door swinging open. And I knew then what I’d seen from the ship, the beacons that had led us to the Tombstones. They were the lights of wreckers, borne by ponies across the hilltops. These men had carefully, willfully, led our ship to its doom.

And then from the ground behind the ponies, from a hollow in the hills, the wagon came sailing up from the moor in a cloud of frothing dust.

The driver sat hunched forward, his arms lashing with the reins. He looked like a bird, like a raven. The wagon careened around a bend and came straight toward me. The
horses were black as tar, glistening with sweat. I could hear their breaths, the thunder of their hooves now on the roadbed, now on the grass.

Ahead was the moor, vast and empty. On each side and behind, the sea stretched from headland to headland, from sky to sky, flecked with the whitecaps of great rolling waves. I had nowhere to go.

The wagon came rushing on. And the men burst from the clifftop behind me, staggering up the slope with their hands pumping at their knees.