Wrecker Page 19

Across the aisle, Tegen rose to her feet and stood there, as if stranded, in the middle of her row. Head down, she squeezed past the line of women and reached the end of the bench, whereupon she tried to step into the aisle, but fell headlong onto the ground. I was sure the woman at the end of the row had stuck out her foot to trip Tegen. One or two neighbours moved to help her, Tobias among them, but Nathaniel got there first. He helped Tegen to her feet, looking into her eyes with a tenderness I hadn’t seen in him before. She dusted herself off, straightened her bonnet and pushed her hair from her face. I was on my feet and would have gone to her side, but she called to me, ‘Stay where you are, Mary!’

  Nathaniel glared at the culprit, who sat at the end of the bench with her arms folded, her face turned away. ‘I am all right, Nat,’ said Tegen, softly. ‘Go and sit down now.’ Then, instead of taking her seat, she looked all around at the faces surrounding her. ‘I have something to say,’ she said. ‘I wasn’t minded to testify tonight, for I was too afraid, or perhaps too proud. But now I might as well tell my news. Brothers and sisters, I have come under conviction these last few weeks.’

  ‘Thank the Lord!’ shouted one of the men. Others answered with ‘Amens’ and the like.

  ‘I have kept it to myself until I was sure, but a great hope has filled my heart,’ she said, her voice stronger with every word. ‘For the first time in my life I’ve understood that God sees worth in all his children, however humble. And having that faith has made it easier to bear the hardship that Mary and me have known of late. There. That is all.’ She went and took her place at the end of the same bench where I sat.

  ‘Thank you, Sister Blight,’ said Gideon. ‘I am greatly heartened to hear your testimony. It seems a good moment for me to come down from this pulpit and let Tobias lead our meeting. Tobias, come forward now and take your place!’ Gideon stepped down from the pulpit, as Tobias took his place before the communion rail. Tobias would never go up to the pulpit, because he wanted to show he was one and the same as the rest of us. But my sights were on Gideon. Usually, he would sit in the front row of the men’s benches when Tobias led the meeting, but that night he walked down the far side of barn on the women’s side. When he came to my bench, he turned and came to sit down right beside me. This got them whispering down on the front benches where the bettermost sat. Millie Hicks rose to her feet. She was the staunchest ally of Grace Skewes and Aunt Madgie, and one of the biggest donors to the new chapel. I thought she meant to walk out of the barn in disgust, but instead she made the long walk down the aisle and sat down on the bench right behind me. I turned and looked at her and got a nod and a prim smile from her as she settled her sewing basket in her lap. All around me were smiling faces.

  The good will was quickly cut short by three loud whacks, Aunt Madgie banging her crook against a wooden bench at the front. The old woman moved into the aisle, but would not stand at the rail where I’d stood. She looked out at the hearers, but where was her usual cold stare? She looked wounded, like an injured old crow. ‘If someone could give me a little water,’ she said. Grace Skewes ran forward and put a cup in her shaking hand.

  ‘I am truly sorry that I was not in attendance at the meetings before now, friends,’ she said. ‘But I am an old woman and have been unwell of late. And I must confess I have been troubled by all I’ve seen and heard this night. I had never thought to hear so much dissent in a parish where we women have always held by one another.’ She took a sip of water and stooped to put the cup on the floor.

  Alongside me, Gideon rose to his feet. All turned to look at him, and my face burned. He took a handkerchief from a pocket and mopped his brow. ‘We greatly appreciate your attendance here and you are welcome at all of our meetings, Sister Maddern,’ he said. ‘I think you have misunderstood the enthusiasm of your neighbours. None of us wants to sow seeds of discord. This is a Lovefeast, and you are bidden to celebrate God’s divine love with all of us present. We have tea and bread.’

  ‘One moment, sir, if it pleases you,’ said the old woman quietly. ‘Others were permitted to testify so I only ask if I may say a few words. You will forgive me if my voice is less strident than some.’ There was a burst of clapping from the bettermost at the front, and shouts urging her on from others around the room.

  Gideon sat down again, sighing and folding his arms.

  ‘As I said before, we women have always been bound up in one another hereabouts,’ said Aunt Madgie. ‘Some of you young ones may not yet know that in this village we prevail against hardship because each knows his own place. Together we are as strong as the granite cliffs that shelter us. But if unity breaks down, then all will perish.’ She spoke with her true voice now, hard as gravel. ‘So, you want a revival in this village, do you, neighbours? Well, this is a nice kind of revival, I must say. I see one young fellow here tonight who has come for no other purpose than to moon at a maiden he’s taken a fancy to.’ People followed her gaze to where Davey Keigwin sat. His young friends grinned at him and he was abashed.

  ‘This has always been a village of God-fearing parents and dutiful and obedient children,’ she said. ‘Rectors have come and gone, and we have had to abide drunken priests betimes, just so we could take the Sacrament on Holy Days. But we are a proud people hereabouts, and will not bend before an ecclesiastical overlord unless he first wins our trust. We will hold with a good minister.’ She smiled at Tobias, who stood over at the communion rail. ‘And for my part, I enjoy nothing better than a good invigorating fire and brimstone sermon. I must confess, though, that I am not so taken with Lovefeasts or other new uplong notions. Nor do I like the sight of a woman parading about like a saint in light. Pride goes before destruction, a haughty spirit before a fall. Proverbs 6.18.’

  Gideon tried to rise to his feet but something held him back. I felt pulled along with him as he moved, and thought I must be sitting on his coat-tails. ‘Sister Maddern, let God be the judge of all of us,’ he called from his seat. ‘If you are finished your exhortation, perhaps now would be a good opportunity for us all to pray together.’

  ‘I have one last thing to say,’ said the old woman. All waited, silent and rapt. ‘Those who hanker after what does not belong to them are breaking the bond that has held this village together all these years. Uppish women are an abomination here. Lustful pride will be punished.

  ‘An unmarried woman is a danger,’ she cried, all but shouting now. Tobias stepped in front of her and held up his hands, but her voice rang out clearly. ‘Without little ones, women are worse than monsters. I have no need for Lovefeasts, nor tea, nor buns. It is not this life we should look to, but the next. Christ suffering on the cross is my constant inspiration.’

  Some of the women among the bettermost called out: ‘Blessed be His name!’ and ‘Praise the Lord!’ Others left their seats and stepped into the aisle. The women alongside me were angry.

  ‘She’ve said enough!’ said Cissie Olds.

  ‘Somebody stop her mouth!’ shouted Martha Tregaskis.

  ‘Get down on your knees in submission before the throne of King Jesus,’ hollered Aunt Madgie, looking up into the rafters as if the roof might open and molten rocks hail down upon our heads. Gideon sat fixed in his seat, as if the old devil had turned him to stone. ‘Beg the Redeemer’s forgiveness and bend to His will,’ she cried. ‘I will fight to the last breath to stop this village going to the devil. We will weed out wrongdoers and shine Our Saviour’s holy light on their secret vices, their wanton ways and depravity.’

  She was drowned out by fractious voices. Half the congregation had spilt into the aisle. Some gathered around the old woman and cheered, while others quarrelled and jostled one another. Tobias went among the hearers, pulling apart those about to come to blows.

  Gideon began to rise from his seat, and as he did so I found myself dragged up alongside him by some magical force. I fell forward and almost brought Gideon with me, but he took hold of me to keep me on my feet. All eyes were on us, as we held onto each other.

  �
��Please, let us have order!’ he shouted. I tried to break free of him, but could not. We seemed joined together. ‘Are we to have a ruction where there should be peace and loving kindness?’ he shouted. Everyone gathered in the aisle and stared at Gideon and me. I tried to peer over my shoulder and find out what was amiss, and as I did so, Gideon jerked even closer to me.

  ‘They be stitched together, see,’ shouted a young boy. He had squeezed through the throng to get a better view. Gideon took off his coat and then everybody saw what had happened. Someone had taken up a needle and thread and sewn a piece of cloth to my dress and stitched the other end to Gideon’s coat. The Lovefeast was in uproar, with my enemies howling with laughter. Millie Hicks, who had sat behind us with her sewing in her lap, was nowhere to be seen.

  III

  HARVEST TIDE

  16

  One morning, a week after the disastrous happenings at the Lovefeast, Tegen came rushing into the cottage. ‘What a to-do there is down in the harbour,’ she said. ‘There are notices up all over the quay. A hundred guineas reward, would you believe, for information on that devil they call the Porthmorvoren Cannibal.’

  ‘A hundred guineas?’ I cried. ‘Can that be right?’

  ‘A tidy sum, but it’s right, for sure. I saw it with my own eyes,’ said Tegen. ‘I’ve always said there’d be a price to pay for wrecking. Take a look at this.’ She put the Sherborne Mercury on the table. ‘See here,’ she said, her finger on a column on the open page. The words swam before my eyes. ‘They’ve raised a campaign to match the fifty guineas the duke put up, and now respectable people from all over Penwith have put their hands in their pockets.’

  ‘Pity the snots didn’t raise a few guineas for poor people hereabouts,’ said Mamm. I went over to plump her cushions, in part because I didn’t want Tegen to see my face, for she’d surely have seen the panic in it.

  ‘This Lord S— has lost three other ships this year alone, and two of them in Cornwall,’ said Tegen. She sat at the table, leaning over the newspaper. ‘It says so here. Every one of them plundered by wreckers.’ She shook her head, then began reading out the names of the ships. ‘The five-hundred-ton brig, The Caroline of Brunswick. The Neptune, an eight-hundred-ton cutter. The Lady Lucy. No wonder they mean to make an example of that cannibal! There’s a rumour doing the rounds that someone in the cove saw what happened.’

  ‘But nobody in living memory has ever snitched on a neighbour,’ said Mamm. ‘Of course, nobody’s put up a hundred guineas before now.’

  ‘With money like that, you could live like a queen, far away where nobody in the village would ever find you,’ said Tegen, a dreamy look in her eyes.

  I went to the door, wrapping my shawl round my shoulders.

  ‘Off to see for yourself?’ Tegen called, as I shut the door behind me.

  At the bottom of Downlong Row, I stopped to read one of the notices pinned to a post. It was the very same as the one I’d seen in Penzance that day with Mrs Stone, only the reward had been doubled.

  ‘The constable was here at daybreak, putting them all up,’ said a voice right behind me. I turned to find Martha Tregaskis standing there. Her nose had a bend in it, having not set straight after the blow she got from Pentecost in the kiddlywink. ‘Gave me a fright, it did,’ she said. ‘You too, I seem. You look as if you’ve seen a ghost, Mary.’

  ‘I’m under the weather, that’s all.’

  ‘Ain’t been so much jawing about anything round here since your minister washed ashore,’ she said.

  ‘He’s not my minister.’

  ‘No of course he ain’t, my lamb, but you know what I mean.’ She moved closer, frowning. Although it was early, I smelt liquor on her breath. ‘To think whoever did it is living in one of these cottages! The cannibal, I mean.’

  I nodded. I was frantic to get away from her, but afraid of looking guilty.

  ‘The dead lady’s husband is a fine lord and they reckon he’ll stop at naught to find the wretch,’ said Martha. ‘If you think about it, a gentleman like that ain’t going to let some country woman get away scot free.’

  ‘Woman? What makes you say a woman did it?’ I said.

  ‘Well, only . . .’ She put a shaking hand to her face. ‘Only because that’s what folk be saying.’

  ‘Who’s saying?’ I needed to know if Aunt Madgie was behind this.

  ‘Well, I had it from Dolly Stoddern, if I remember right. Anyway, whether it be woman or man, I wouldn’t want to be in their shoes.’

  ‘I’d better be off,’ I said.

  ‘If I hear any news, I’ll be sure to let you know,’ Martha called after me.

  I muffled my face with my shawl and walked to the quay, briskly so nobody would bother me. Though I kept my head down, out of the corner of my eye I saw that every barn in the harbour had a reward notice pinned to it. I told myself that nothing had really changed, the story had been all over the coast for weeks. Yet it seemed to me that every neighbour I passed gave me a wary look. Dolly Stoddern had told Martha the cannibal was a woman, and Dolly was close to Grace Skewes, Aunt Madgie’s own daughter. And Betsy, Dolly’s daughter, was the best mate of Loveday Skewes. If Aunt Madgie was to falsely accuse me to anyone, it would be to one of them.

  All that day I couldn’t sit still in the cottage, but kept going out to walk up and down the lanes. In the afternoon a squall sent a batch of the handbills whirling around the village. They got caught up in bean plants and in roof thatch, wrapped themselves around hogsheads in the harbour and the masts of boats, stuck to the cobbles of the quay and got covered in muddy footprints. Some just blew round and round in little eddies in the lanes. That night, as I lay awake in bed, I had a mad notion of rushing out and picking up as many of them as I could and putting them out of sight.

  The following morning, I took the stone idol out of the drawer where she’d been hidden since Gideon’s arrival in the cove. The idol was wrathful after being left in the dark so long. When I tried to summon answers to my problems, she was silent. I began to think she really was a cold and senseless rock, as Tegen had always said. But perhaps I was not making myself plain. There were things I could not speak of in the cottage, perhaps dared not even think. I put the idol in my basket and set out for Tombstone Point.

  In the orchard above the village the boughs creaked under the weight of ripe apples and I stumbled over windfalls, brown and riddled with wormholes. The lark trilled on high, but it was a forlorn and empty sound she made now that her young had left the nest. A great brown spider crouched in a trembling web, the pattern on his back richer than any embroidery. I passed through the narrow lane of grimy cottages where the miners lived and reached the headland. All around me vast black clouds were hurled across the heavens by the gusts, and down below the grey and heartless ocean stretched clear to the Americas.

  I reached Tombstone Point, and sat myself down upon cold granite covered in lichen and moss and crow droppings. Off across the headland, trees huddled in a dip, keeping an eye on me. The high branches floated silently in the wind as if underwater, beckoning me to another world than this. Down below, the sea called me into its depths.

  I asked the idol what I should do to bring my troubles to an end. She frowned. ‘Tell me!’ I pleaded. ‘I suppose you judge me because you think I meant to steal a married man from his wife?’

  The idol’s face clouded. I got to my feet and shook her in my hands. She grew heavier, so that my arms ached. ‘You think me weak and selfish,’ I said, stepping closer to the cliff edge. I thought of Lady Rosemount in the novel I’d found under Ellie Stone’s bed. She too had stood upon on a precipice, ready to throw off all restraint. Did the idol want me to leap off the cliff? She glowered at me, reading my thoughts. A heat came off her and her face glowed red as the sunlight that was just then streaming through the clouds. All the while a screaming sound rang out of her, maddening to the senses. She began to shake with such a passion I could barely keep a grip on her. Her powers pulled me closer to the cliff edge. I l
ooked at the sheer drop, my mind as wild as the violent waves that raged and broke against the rocks below. Another step and all my fears would come to an end — but so would all my hopes.

  The world became a chamber of echoes, gulls screeching as they bore themselves on the gusts, the wind soughing in the bent and stunted trees that clung to the stony earth, rocks singing their ancient song. Fine hairs grew out of every part of me, too fine to be seen by human eyes. They probed like snail horns into the unknown, quivering with every new sound or movement. I lost all form as if I was made of water and held apiece only by my will.

  It grew dark, even though it was not yet midday. I gasped for air, opening my watery mouth and letting out a mournful sea lament, swathed in thick white swirling mist that poured from inside me and covered the ground so I couldn’t see where the cliff top ended. The ground beneath me began to pitch and roll. When I saw the water raging far below I closed my eyes. And I threw the idol over the cliff.

  A week later, Tegen and I were working on the squire’s farms. There was no let up, as the longer it took to bring the harvest home the more likelihood of bad weather spoiling the crop. For long hours we followed a staggered row of men who hacked at the brown barleycorn with their scythes, the backs of their necks black with the sun under their billycock hats. Whenever they reached the end of the field, they walked back and started again at the other side, and on and on it went. The giant Pentecost set a killing pace for the rest of the men, and ribbed them mercilessly if they couldn’t keep up. There must have been four score women behind them, some who would never see fifty again and others as young as six. We toiled and moiled, bent double and scorched by the sun. Tegen and I had no breath spare for talking. We needed all our strength to scoop the corn into sheaves and twist the straw binders round them. The barley was tough and spiky and left scratches all over our arms. As the day wore on, our tempers got more and more frayed.