The Buccaneers (24 page)

I steered for the end of Wrinkle Head, into the wind and the seas, into a current that swept us north. The waves broke on the point in a mournful drum, and I knew we'd never round it.

I looked at the Tombstones coming closer, at the cliffs behind them, where I'd once climbed from the beach to escape the wreckers. At the top were people, dark figures that hadn't been there earlier. Women and children and men, they gathered along the cliffs’ edges like crows flocking to a rooftop.

Dasher waved. “They've come to watch us pass,” he said.

I shook my head. “They've come to see the wreck.”

They'd come from Pendennis, up to the moor and south to the sea. They'd come as they'd done for decades, to watch a tiny ship struggle against the enormous sea, to watch her lose in the end. They'd be wondering now what she carried, a ship as small as this, and what fine things
would wash ashore when the wind and the seas overcame her.

“Ready about,” I said.

Dasher and Mudge went forward to tend our little jib. I turned the wheel and the
Dragon
swung into the seas, round through the south. The sails emptied and flogged, then filled again, and we tacked to the east as all of Pendennis followed on the cliffs above us.

We sailed right to the Northground Cape, fighting for a bit of sea room. But the waves pushed us back, and the wind moaned in the rigging, and we were no farther from shore when I shouted again, “Ready about.”

The
Dragon
heeled up to the wind, and for a moment it seemed that she wouldn't turn. She hung there with her sails shaking, the waves sweeping over the bowsprit. She came to a dead stop, and the crowd on the cliffs pressed closer to the edge. In a moment she would start to drift backward; in another she'd be into the surf. But a crested wave hammered on the bow and gave her the mere little push that she needed, and back we went to the west: the ship; her crew; the people on the shore.

We needed more sail, but we hadn't men enough to set it. We could only hope that the wind would change before the topmast broke, that it might ease enough to let us round the point. We could only hope for a bit of luck. But it seemed we'd had none of that since Horn had gone over the side.

I steered the
Dragon
west again as the topmast shook and bent. Wrinkle Head came closer. The waves rolled below us, then on toward the shore. They shattered on the Tombstones, and the spray soared up to the tops of the cliffs, to the people waiting there.

“A boat!” cried Dasher. He shook my arm and pointed.

I saw it too, a tiny thing tilting over a crest. Rowed by a man and a boy, it staggered through the waves, coming east around the point. The boy, in a black sou'wester, rowed for all he was worth, then stopped to bail the boat. The man was huge; he worked his little craft through the waves and surf, and the current bore him on.

“Bless their hearts,” said Dasher. “They've come to help us.”

“Help us wreck,” said Mudge. “They'll slit our throats and steer the ship ashore, and who's to tell it happened? Not those vultures on the cliff.”

“It's not like that,” I said. “Not anymore. Not here, at least.”

But Mudge would never be convinced. He feared the wreckers more than the Tombstones, and he begged me to turn the ship around.

“They'll kill us,” he said.

But I kept my course. For all my life I'd wanted to be a seaman, and from childhood it had been my wildest dream to sail a ship that I commanded, to take her far and bring her home again. And now I
was
a captain, though on a ship with a toppling mast and a usable crew of only two, with a storm-tossed shore so close at hand that I could almost spit upon the cliffs. But I made my decision, and I kept my course.

The
Dragon
shouldered into enormous waves and shook from her trembling mast. The little rowing boat burst through a plume of froth two crests away, and the man turned toward me as he skidded to the trough.

“It's Simon Mawgan,” I said.

“Mawgan!” shouted Mudge. “The Mawgans are the worst of them.”

“Not anymore,” I said. That I was still alive was due in part to Simon Mawgan.

He was a powerful rower. He turned the little boat so that he'd meet the
Dragon
as she passed, and the boy rowed with him, stroke for stroke. But the boat was heavy, and the seas swept over it, bow to stern. The boy shipped his oars and bailed; he bailed by the bucket as the water rushed in by the gallon.

“Just who needs saving here?” asked Dasher.

“Take the line when they come alongside,” I told him. “Mudge, you cast off the sheets when I luff.”

“Luff?” he said. “Don't. Not here.”

“Go,” I told him.

The boat skittered across our path. I turned the
Dragon
up to the wind, and the jib snapped and flogged as the sheets came loose. Mawgan's boat—above me one moment, below me the next—came flitting from crest to crest as the waves slopped over the rail. The boy held a coil of line, and Dasher was ready to catch it. But the boat rocked and skidded sideways, and the
Dragon
heeled toward it. Mawgan backed his oars; then I lost sight of his boat past the curve of the deck. I was certain that we'd crush it under the hull. But again he rose beside me, rowing furiously ahead, and the next wave picked up the boat by the stern and swept it over the rail. Mudge hardened the sheets, and the
Dragon
bore off to the east, and there the boat sat as the water fell away, flat on its keel on our deck.

I would never have planned to do that; I couldn't have managed if I'd tried. Even Mawgan was taken by surprise,
and he sat in the boat with the oars in his hands. He gazed around, wide-eyed, as though he'd been dropped suddenly from the stars. Then he saw me at the wheel.

“By the saints!” he cried. “John Spencer!”

The boy turned his head. He took off his sou'wester, and I saw it wasn't a boy at all. It was Mary, Simon's niece. She leapt from the boat and ran to meet me. We hugged each other as the
Dragon
raced along.

Dasher laughed. “If I'd known the fishing was like this, I'd have brought a net,” he said.

Mary was wet as a sponge, but I didn't care. She was two years older than last I'd seen her, and even prettier than before. I squeezed the water from her, and could have stood like that forever, I thought. But Mawgan stamped up from the waist, and the
Dragon
rolled the water from his little boat. I saw a long cable coiled in its bottom, the fluke of an anchor reaching out.

“You were coming to Pendennis,” said Mary. Her lovely Cornish accent hadn't changed. “You were coming to see me. Edn't it true?”

“ ‘Course he wasn't,” bellowed Mawgan. “He lost his way. He's got a topmast near to breaking, and he can't round the point for the weather.”

Mary gazed up at me.

“Yes,” I said. “We lost our-way.”

“Where are your men?” Mawgan shouted. “Where's the rest of the crew?”

“We're all that's left,” I said. “We've had fever and gun-fights and storms. The ship was taken, and taken back again. The captain's down below, and there are two hands
in the fo'c's'le, and we're all that's left—Dasher and Mudge and I.”

“Yet you kept her afloat?” Mawgan smiled. “You've done well, for a Londoner. Now let's get you safe and sound.”

He pulled Mary away. We wore ship and headed west, punching through the waves. He put Dasher and Mudge to work, and the cable was uncoiled from his boat. It was led forward, outboard of the shrouds, and bent to the capstan. Then the anchor was hauled from the boat to the rail, and Mawgan came back to the wheel.

“Steer for the Tombstones,” he said.

I could scarcely believe I'd heard him right. “The Tombstones?” I asked.

He nodded. “Can you see them?” he said. “ ‘Course you can. A blind man would know they were there.”

It was true enough. The surf on the Tombstones was a heavy, muffled thunder, the sound of a thousand guns in a broadside that never ended. I turned the ship toward it.

The seas grew bigger and steeper. They pitched us forward and went rumbling on to break their backs on the spikes of rock.

“Closer,” Mawgan said. “Closer still. You want to nearly touch them, John.”

All of Pendennis watched us from the cliffs beyond the Tombstones. It was the hardest thing I'd ever done to point the
Dragon
at that wild white water. I lived all over again the horrors of the
Isle of Skye
as the thunder of the Tombstones grew loud enough to shake the air. I watched the bowsprit rise and fall, the spouts shoot up and whirlpools open. I saw Dasher, in the waist, tighten the cords on his wineskins, and
Mudge look up with fear in his eyes. Even Mary seemed frightened; she had seen many wrecks in her life.

But Mawgan might have been sailing down the Thames for all the concern he showed. He held on to the binnacle with one hand, staring around at the sea and the shore. I was nearly maddened by his nonchalance, until I saw his fingers. They were white, and locked like talons on the wood.

Then the breakers were all around us. The
Dragon
heaved herself toward the rocks, and heaved herself away. The spray and the spume made a fog that was thick as wool. We went tearing through it, into a blinding whiteness, and that roaring filled my ears. A rock rose up, seething with foam; it stood square before the bowsprit.

“Left!” shouted Mawgan. He pushed on the spokes. The
Dragon
wove between the breakers. She tilted nearly onto her side; the topsail yard touched the sea, and a shroud parted with a crack.

“Now right!” cried Mawgan. Again we turned the wheel.

The broken shroud tumbled down, snaking in the wind. It tangled in the trysail sheets and drummed against the guns. The mast bent like a feather, then straightened as the starboard shrouds went taut. The waves battered at us, and Mawgan cried, “Let the anchor go!”

Mudge heaved it over the rail. Fifty pounds of iron tumbled over the side, and the cable bounded after it. I felt a tug as it touched the bottom, another when it bounced.
Hold
, I thought. But we dragged the anchor on, out from the fog of spindrift, toward the cliffs and the beach below them.

Then the anchor caught. The wheel was snatched from my hands, and the
Dragon
rounded up with a dizzying
speed. Every timber creaking, the cable so taut that it crackled, the
Dragon
settled head to wind in a circle of calm in the lee of the Tombstones. And there she stopped, amid blankets of writhing kelp, barely twice her length from the beach.

The waves rolled in, broke along their tops, shattered into spray and froth. But they reached us tamed to a gentle swell that was flattened by the kelp. And among the dark shapes of the Tombstones hung a score of rainbows that shimmered in the spindrift.

Mawgan clapped me on the back. “Well done,” he said. Then Mary came up to the wheel, Mudge and Dasher too, and we stood together watching the rainbows form and disappear. It seemed impossible that we'd sailed through there.

“I didn't think the anchor would stick in the sand,” I said.

“It didn't,” said Mawgan. “We hooked onto the wreck.”

“What wreck?”

“The
Isle of Skye.”

I felt a shiver, a prickly twinge in my spine. The wreck that had once nearly taken my life had now saved it, as though a great and mysterious circle had been completed. When I was washed from that beautiful brig, I'd been a landsman, and now I clung to her bones as a sailor, as the captain of another ship. What a long way I had gone to get back to where I had started!

We would wait there, swinging over the drowned ribs of the
Isle of Skye
, for a fair wind to blow us home to London. My uncle Stanley would recover from the fever, as would Freeman and Betts. Dasher would slip away to his home in Kent, and one day—I was sure—-would sail back to the West Indies to find his barrel of silver. I would think often
of Horn and his chest of doomed vessels, for his bottles would travel with me over the years, from ship to ship.

I stood beside Mary and wondered if she might join me, if we might not voyage together to all the oceans of the world. It was on my lips to ask her that. But she spoke before me.

“John,” she said. “Will you come home to Galilee?”

I thought of her house beyond the cliffs, her garden of flowers that remembered old wrecks and people that she'd known. I thought of the stable, of the pony she rode wildly on the moor. And I saw that while I had changed, she had not. Mary was a match for any oarsman, but she was as rooted in the Cornish soil as the flowers she tended. And she could no more leave the land than I could settle on it.

She sighed and leaned her head against me. “You have to stay with the ship,” she said. “Edn't that the way it is?”

“Yes,” I said. We had to furl the sails and fit new shrouds; we had a hundred things to do. That would always be the way it was.

Mary smiled. “You can't stay, can you, John Spencer?”

“No,” I said. “But one day I'll be back.”

And I meant it then. I meant it with all my heart.