The Wreckers Read Online Free PDF Page A

silver as mist.
    He asked my name, and where I came from. And when I told him, he grunted. “You don’t look like a Londoner,” he said. “You’re not so pale and pasty-faced as that.”
    We talked of the city as we rode through a maze of narrow streets. From cobblestones to dirt; along a twisting lane; through a gateway and up a path barely wider than our knees. Higher we rose, and the buildings spread below us, roof after roof in a solid, jagged field.
    “I’ve been to London,” said Simon Mawgan. He turned his head enough to show me his profile. “I like it better here. Room for a horse to run.”
    The village seemed deserted. Not even a puff of smoke rose from the chimneys. The road turned and climbed again more steeply. And at the top of the hill was the church I’d seen from the far shore, a huge gray building of buttressed walls and a bell tower three stories high. In the arched windows of leaded glass, the faces of saints gazed down at me, their hands clasped and their heads in halos.
    We followed a wall past a little graveyard with headstones in staggered rows. Then I saw a movement by the church, and a man stepped out from a side door. He wore black robes that covered him from the neck down, a collar, and spectacles; his head was small and white, like a skull. He stopped in the sunshine—he was smiling—and put on a black hat with an enormous round brim.
    “That’s the parson,” said Mawgan. “Takes his afternoon walk every day in the churchyard.” He reined in the horse and adjusted his bulk in the saddle. “Good day to you, Parson Tweed.”
    The parson waved back, then moved—so gracefully that he might have been a lady—down between the headstones, right up to the wall beside us. He rested his hands on top of the stone.
    “Is this the boy I’ve heard about?” he asked.
    “It is,” said Mawgan. “I’m taking him to Galilee.”
    The parson nodded. His gaze flicked over me and away again. “Keep him close to you, Simon. It is providential that you found him before the others could.”
    “The others
did
,” said Mawgan. “Stratton had a knife at his throat.”
    “Oh, my!” said Parson Tweed. He looked right at me, his eyes dark under the huge brim of his hat.
    Mawgan twisted in the saddle. “Stratton is the worst of them all,” he told me. “He binds the rest of them together the way a barrel hoop holds the staves. Without him, they would fall apart.”
    Parson Tweed had a kindly face, but the shadows made it gaunt and sinister. He leaned forward over the wall. “And when those staves come away, what’s in the barrel? Hmmm? What’s in the barrel then?”
    He stared at me, and the wind set little waves rolling across his hat brim. There seemed to be some sly double meaning in his words, but I could make no sense of it.
    Then he winked. “We shall see that soon enough.” Suddenly he straightened. “Take care of him, Simon.”
    “I will,” said Mawgan. He flicked the reins, and the horse stepped sideways and forward. The parson watched us go.
    Mawgan steered the horse onto a dirt lane. “We’ll take the sea road,” he said. “It’s a bit longer, but you’ll like it.”
    At a canter, we circled round the back of the village, then over the stone bridge. In a moment we were up on the moor, and the sea breeze tasted of salt. We didn’t pass so close to the cliffs that I could see the Tombstones or the wreck of the
Isle of Skye
. But soon we were right at the Channel, and the road twisted from headland to headland. For a mile or more we rode like that, plumes of dust rising from the hooves. And at each bend, as the cliffs dropped to a patch of sand and rows of wild, wind-driven breakers, Mawgan spoke a few words over his shoulder.
    “That’s Tobacco Cove below,” he said at one. “The
Gehenna
wrecked here in seventy-nine, inbound from the Indies.
    “We call this Sheep Cove,” he said at the next. “Here the
Northern
, inbound from the Hebrides, came ashore three years