Wrecker

I took no notice of her. ‘We need a hand to get him up the hill,’ I called out. I was close to swooning, but tried to hide it, and in no mood to let anyone take the man from me now. Two lads came forward, keen perhaps to show their strength to the wenches round about. One caught the big fellow under his knees and the other under his armpits, and they lifted him up. It was hard work lugging him up the beach and down the quay, and then up the steep lane. The lads had to stop every so often at cottages, and take a drop of water.

It was a good while before we reached the alley into our little courtyard, which was barely wide enough to squeeze through. Mamm looked on aghast as the foreigner was carried upstairs. They laid him out on the bed. Tegen came to the doorway, not wanting to enter a room with a man lying in it.

‘We durstn’t leave him in these wet clothes,’ I said. I kept my voice steady as I could. ‘It will be the death of him.’

‘But we can’t take the clothes off him! Are you mazed?’ said Tegen. She was scarlet to the tips of her ears. I ignored her and went to the chest, pulling a drawer open and taking out some of Dad’s old things.

‘We can dry him with this,’ I said, throwing a shirt onto the bed. ‘And we can dress him in another of Dad’s old shirts till his own be dry.’ I leant over the foreigner and began tugging the cloth up over his body. I called Tegen over. ‘Come here and help me lift him. Look how he’s shivering, we must be quick about it.’ She came over to help, looking away so she wouldn’t see the man’s white skin as the wet clothes were peeled off him.

‘Think of what folk will say,’ she said.

‘Let their tongues wag. Have you forgot the Good Samaritan?’

‘This ain’t a hospital.’

‘You sure? You forget about Mamm, I seem.’

‘The man is a stranger. What is he to you? I don’t follow you at all.’

‘Providence have brought him here. It were me that saw him first. It’s meant.’

We lifted him up, and with difficulty pulled the dry shirt down over his head and shoulders.

‘Who, I wonder, is to do all our work if we have to nurse this man?’ said Tegen.

‘Don’t you pity him at all?’

Tegen looked on him, but there was more of shame than pity in her face.

My head ached and all about me was a fog. I put my palm on the foreigner’s brow. His skin was warm. My hands were ice cold so I rubbed the palms together before touching him again. ‘He has a fever,’ I said. I poured some water into a cup and tried to make him drink, but most spilled down his chin. Tegen left me to it and went downstairs.

I dropped into my chair and let the room turn slowly around me for a little while before it settled. I closed my eyes and was almost gone, but a sudden groan from the bed startled me.

‘Is it come?’ the fellow shouted. ‘Is this the reckoning? Dear Lord, have mercy on my soul!’

I went to the bedside. ‘Forgive you?’ I whispered. ‘Why? What has you done?’

He squinted at me, and I stared into those eyes for the first time, so dark and deep and hard to fathom. His face shook and he let out a strangled cry: ‘Pitiless devil! Leave me in peace, for Heaven’s sake. Why do you still torment me, Molly?’ His strength failed and his head fell back.

‘You are mistaken, Mister, I am not Molly,’ I said.

He moaned pitifully. ‘I have beaten you, Molly. God forgive me, I have hurt you, your face . . .’ My fingers reached up to where his gaze was fixed, and I felt the tender and throbbing bruise on my temple where the barrel had struck me. The foreigner’s eyes closed and he fell into a sleeping fit.

While the man was lying a-bed, I set off up the headland to buy a charm. I picked my way through the copse where Old Jinny lived. Bare winter branches creaked in the breeze, and birds pierced the cold air with their cries, warning me off. Sometimes in the night the old woman was known to take flight and soar over the village herself, not on a broomstick but with her gown open and spread out around her like crow wings. I followed the scent of wood smoke and soon I reached the passage between thickets of needle-sharp briers that led to her door.

It was dark inside, with all manner of objects dangling from the rafters and turning slowly in the draught that followed me into the cottage: dried herbs, tiny bones tied in bundles, wooden dolls, pewter pots and pans. As my eyes got used to the gloom, I saw a jumble of wicker cages piled about, and along one wall a blue dresser, the paint cracked and peeling. A fire hissed in a small hearth and a large warming pan hung over it.

Old Jinny sat in the corner on a high-backed chair with great hawks carved on the arm rests, a little wheel for spinning thread at her side. I jumped at a sudden frantic flapping of wings as a black shape ripped past me to alight in the old crone’s lap. It was a jackdaw and she took it in her hands, stroking it with long twisted fingers that had dirt under every fingernail. The bird cocked its head this way and that to judge me from all sides. I had the curious notion that the bird was Jinny’s own child.

‘Friend or foe?’ the old crone asked in a voice as light as a whistle and reedy as a child’s. ‘What brings you across my threshold?’ The sound seemed not to come from her at all but from elsewhere in the hovel. There was spittle in the corners of her whiskery mouth, and beneath her grubby lace cap her hair clung loose about her neck and shoulders. It was matted and dusty as the cobwebs that were draped in thick layers in the corners of the room. Her nose was hooked and pointed like a bird’s. She wore a gown of faded blue silk, streaked with bird shit like everything else in that place. It was open at the front to show a stained quilted petticoat of faded satin, and over that an apron which looked to have been embroidered with her own needle. On it were dozens of birds – wrens, robins, snipes and choughs. Her sleeves ended in lace ruffles, stray threads hanging from them, which reached almost down to the filthy floor of beaten earth.

Seeing how dazed I was, she laughed, a piercing sound that set my teeth on edge. It was plain the woman was mad as a snake.

‘Don’t boggle at me, girl. Tell me, what is your business here?’ She spoke grandly, like a true snot. She ruffled the pale feathers at the back of the jackdaw’s head with the back of her hand, making the bird shiver.

I swallowed hard, took a deep breath. ‘I need a charm to cure a man in a fever, short of breath. He was at sea a long while, lashed to a barrel. He is asleep mostly, but has bad dreams and sees things before him that aren’t there.’

‘Perhaps he sees things that are there, but which you cannot see? An old man or a young? Big and strong or a weakling?’

‘Not young or old. But big and strong, for sure.’

She opened her hands to let the jackdaw fly free, and clapped in glee. ‘I know the remedy you need!’ She got to her feet, stiffly. She was no taller standing up than she was sitting down, and all the smaller for being so stooped. She put her hand out for payment. ‘Two shillings,’ she said.

‘Two shillings!’ I was dumbfounded.

She nodded, briskly.

I had just enough on me. I counted out the coins and stooped to put them in her hand. She bit each one in turn to see if it was true before putting it in her apron pocket. When she was finished she left the hovel with a queer hopping gait and went to fetch the charm from out the back. A stink of stale sweat and piss hung about after she was gone, and the jackdaw hopped and flapped all about me, shitting on everything, including my hair. Its croak was loud in that little place and had me all of a jitter. The bird could talk, too, but in strange riddles of which I could make no sense.

I waited so long that I wondered if the old woman had died out there. Through a rip in the sacking over the window I saw the hut where she kept the captive birds. Their fretful twittering could be heard all over the wood. Round about me in the shadows of the room were all manner of nasty-looking instruments among the cages. I didn’t care to wonder at their use.

At last Old Jinny came back with one of the poor creatures in her hands, wrapped in a bloody cloth. It made a fearsome racket and set the jackdaw hopping and flapping about in a frenzy. My nerves were frayed.

‘I be thinking I shan’t go through with this matter, after all,’ I shouted above the din.

She burst into shrill giggles. ‘’Tis too late,’ she said, holding the little bundle out to me. ‘I’ve already plucked her.’

‘Plucked her? What do you mean, plucked her?’

‘The bird has to be plucked, my girl, if you want the charm to work.’

‘That be the wickedest thing I ever heard!’

‘I can’t stick the feathers back into the creature, can I?’ she said.

What was I to do? I had already paid her two shillings, a king’s ransom. And the bird would die now, anyhow. I let her put the creature in my shaking hands, and nearly dropped it when I felt its warmth and how it wriggled inside the grubby cloth.

‘A song thrush. A hen for a man, a cock for a woman,’ said Old Jinny, leering at me. ‘Tie it to the rafters in the bed-lier’s room. Twenty-four hours should do it. It might take longer if there is no rash on the man. Once the fever has been spirited from the human to the fowl, the bird will turn black and bloated. And then it will expire.’

I made sure nobody saw me on the way back, which was not easy because the creature was making a din fit to wake the dead. It fair pecked my hands and wrists to pieces. When I got home, Tegen wouldn’t help me so I had to tie it to the beam by myself. I knew the best knot to bind its legs but it was a dreadful fiddle with only one hand spare and the little creature raging to break free of me. Once the thing was tied and hanging, it went madder still, spinning in a flurry, its feeble plucked wings flapping furiously and its screeches deafening me and echoing around the room as it tangled itself in the string. I was overcome with the horror of it then, but it was too late to turn back. The foreigner groaned in his sick bed, disturbed by the noise. When the bird had tired itself, it hung there a moment twitching, its eyes bulging and unnatural, its grey wrinkled flesh covered in bloody pinpricks.

I couldn’t bear staying in the room with the wretched creature, so I fled down the stairs to the kitchen. I sat at the table and took deep breaths, waiting for my heart to slow to its usual beat. Mamm looked away from me and Tegen scowled.

‘Stop looking at me like that,’ I said. ‘It’s only for a day or two. A man’s soul matters more to the Creator than a bird’s.’

Later, on the way back from the well, I passed Johnenry in the lane. He blocked my path.

‘I be in a hurry,’ I said, nodding at the pails of water in my hands. He stood his ground.

‘I suppose you’re in a hurry to get back to that big fellow you fished out of the cove?’ he said.

‘It were only Christian to give him house room until he be better. The fellow was close to death.’

‘You be the last woman I ever thought would turn nurse maid.’

‘It fell to me, as I were the first that saw him.’

‘Well, don’t expect me to carry him to the graveyard when he breathes his last. You be trying my patience, Mary. Think about how things stand, now. You need to make up your mind. A man can keep on fathering children until they nail him in his coffin but a woman’s got to squeeze the beggars out while she still can.’

‘So these be the sweet wooing words you use now you’ve had your way with me?’

‘I used up all my sweet words the other night. And you seemed to like them enough then, the way you was rolling underneath me.’

‘Wash your dirty mouth out.’

‘Let’s not be enemies, Mary,’ he said, more mildly. ‘It heats my blood to think of the way some of they be slanderin’ you, and I want to take care of you, that’s all. To protect you.’

‘I got by fine without a man to protect me all these years, so why would I need one now?’

He stepped toward me as if a hornet had stung his ass. ‘I ain’t got the patience of Job. ’Tis meant, you and me, even if you won’t admit it. Why can’t you lean more to the common way?’

‘Maybe I don’t care to. And you ain’t the master of me, Johnenry. So let me pass.’

He took my arm, twisting it and hurting me, a nasty look in his eyes. ‘What in God’s name be wrong with you?’ he said. ‘Is you sickening?’

I pulled my arm free and half a pail of water slopped over his trousers. I left him standing in the lane looking like he’d pissed himself.

All that night I sat in my chair and kept vigil on the foreigner in the sickly glow of the smoking tallow. On the chest was a pot of herbs that the Widow Chegwidden had given me. Earlier, I had mixed the brew with a little milk and spooned it between the foreigner’s lips. The smell of the potion mingled with the odour of sickness in the room.

My head throbbed fearfully from the blow I’d taken from the barrel. Perhaps some of the sense had been knocked out of me. I thought about Johnenry and what he’d said when I met him. Why had I taken a strange man into the house and risked the mud-slinging that would follow? Perhaps I was sickening after something, as Johnenry said. But I couldn’t help myself. My heart went out to the man, thinking how he’d been thrown this way and that at the mercy of the waves, lashed to that barrel. And my woman’s nature stirred at the notion of this big, dark fellow, at once so strong and yet so helpless. It did trouble me, I own, the hold the foreigner had on me. I consulted with the stone idol, but her face was set in a sulk so I put her on the floor, facing away from the sick bed.

The man’s breathing was quick and fretful. While he slept the bird hung quietly, twitching every so often on its string. Whenever the man roused himself with a groan and twisted in his narrow cot, the bird thrashed around as if crazed, taking on the pains of the man. The foreigner drew the life out of the bird’s body and into his own, and the bird grew more and more sickly as it took on the man’s contagion. I prayed for the bird to breathe its last and there were times when I almost went to fetch a pair of stones to brain the poor creature and bring its misery to an end. But I saw how the man in the bed was repairing, so I gripped the seat of my chair tight, to hold me at my post. Every so often I went over and wiped sweat from his brow with a cloth dipped in cool water. Time passed and the man’s strength returned little by little while the bird’s ebbed away.

In the dead of night such a hush was over the world that the wings of a moth flitting about the flame were loud as sheets snapping in the wind on laundry day. The cottages in our lane were huddled together so close that I could hear the snores of all the neighbours throbbing through the walls. At closing time the footsteps of the men staggering home from the kiddlywink – where men of the worst sort spent their time drinking and gambling – echoed out in the lane, with snatches of song, a quarrel and much profanity. The drunkards disturbed the gulls in their slumber and they made a row of their own over the rooftops.

By the time the first hint of daylight showed in the window, the man lay in a deep and settled sleep. Seeing he was lost in his dreams, I went and knelt at the bedside and took his hand in my own. He had long fine fingers, despite his bulk, soft hands that had never known hard labour. I stayed there a long while, thinking that I would never tire of looking at his face. His strong jaw was dark with stubble now, and his black locks spread out over the pillow. Without warning, his eyes opened and he stared at me.

‘What devil are you?’ he cried, hoarsely. I tried to shush him, fearful he would bring the whole village rushing to the door. ‘Why are you poisoning me? What harm have I done you?’

‘Quiet now, don’t be upsetting yourself, you’re poorly,’ I whispered, my face close to his.

But he shouted again, as loud as before: ‘The boy! Scarcely more than a child, God help him. Is he saved?’

His shouts upset the bird, which began frantically flapping its little bald wings. The foreigner peered into the gloom, searching for whatever was making the sound. Then he gazed at my face as if to find out what manner of fiend had taken him capture. His breath came fast.

‘If you have a single Christian bone in your body, then I beg you to get word to my wife that I am saved,’ he said. ‘Do it quickly to spare her more anxiety.’

‘We has sent for the doctor,’ I said. ‘He shall no doubt speak with your wife.’

He was quiet again. I sat there by the bed in a slump. For a long while my thoughts were at a standstill. In the end, with a great heaviness upon me, I got up and went to my own room, where I belonged.

4

The next day Dr Vyvyan came to see the foreigner. He knew us Blights, because in the months since Mamm had got the chronic he’d dropped in and looked her over whenever he was on his rounds. He spent a little time with her that day, too, before I led him up the stairs. He kept glancing at the yellow swelling on my temple and my bloodshot eye.

I hadn’t expected the doctor to come so soon and hadn’t removed the bird from where it hung in the sick room. I made sure to go in first and stand in front of the poor thing so the doctor wouldn’t see it. The room was dark and close. It smelt of sweat and musty plaster, and stewed herbs. But above all there was the sour rankness of the bird, all but dead on the end of its string. I saw then how it would look to the doctor’s eyes, a pitiful, suffering thing, blackened and covered in weeping boils. The doctor’s nose wrinkled as he stepped into the room. Behind my back, I heard the bird twitching.

‘You are hiding something,’ he said right away, brushing me aside with a movement of his hand. When I was out of the way, he looked upon the bird with utmost horror, and then glared at me. He took a pocket handkerchief from his jacket and covered his nose with it.

‘A barbaric custom,’ he said, his voice muffled by the handkerchief. ‘The bird is clinging to life but already in the first stage of decomposition. This abomination is to be removed. It is undoubtedly carrying mites and I am sure it is distressing my patient.’

‘It’s taken the fever out of him, look. He’s better than before,’ I said. We both looked at the foreigner, lying peaceful enough on the bed.

‘Barbarous nonsense, a rustic superstition to the effect that the infection can be transferred from the man to the bird.’ He went to the bedside and got down on his knees, taking some instruments from his case. ‘What are we to do with these people?’ he said, smiling at the foreigner. His name was Gideon Stone, and it turned out that Dr Vyvyan knew him. He spoke to him now, as if I wasn’t there.

‘I thank you from the bottom of my heart for making this visit, Jonathan,’ said the foreigner. ‘How is Ellie? I know I can count on you to look after her.’

‘She is doing as well as can be hoped.’

‘Let her know I’m better now, much better. Tell her I have a guardian angel who has tended me the whole while I have lain here.’ He looked at me and my face grew hot. The doctor frowned. I don’t suppose I looked much like an angel to him.

‘Whatever possessed you to get into a leaky little boat with two men and a boy in the first place?’ asked Dr Vyvyan.

‘Have you had news of the men who were on the boat with me?’ the foreigner asked Dr Vyvyan. ‘Please tell me they have been saved.’

‘It’s assumed they have perished, I’m afraid,’ said the doctor. ‘What happened to you that day?’

‘I knew Hell. There was just myself, and a man and his son and an old fellow known to them. I wanted to see this place with my own eyes after the recent infamous reports, and see what good I might do here. But when we reached the cove the boat began turning in tight circles. Something was stirring the water from below, I was sure of it, the sea was so lumpy, so slippery.’ His breath grew thicker and faster as he spoke. ‘The current ran in opposite directions on either side of the boat. Unnatural! I swear that something twitched at the boat from underneath. And suddenly tearing, grinding, and a fount bubbling in the hull.’

‘This is enough for now. Save your energies. You can tell us the whole story when you’re home again,’ said Dr Vyvyan. But the foreigner seemed not to hear him. In his fancy he was back on the boat again.

‘The skipper asked me if the Maker would forgive him a life of mendacity if he repented at the last. I told him it was never too late. But it was the boy he wanted to save. The boy was his own son, you see? And I could do naught to save the lad. My prayers went unanswered. Before I could stop them, the pair of them had the barrel slammed into my gut. The father held me while his son coiled the rope about me and tied me fast.’ He fell back on to his pillow, and closed his eyes.

When his breathing steadied itself, Dr Vyvyan spoke to him again. ‘Well, at least you are still with us,’ he said. ‘A less robust specimen wouldn’t have survived. You are the talk of Newlyn, you know. Ellie has had a visit from a correspondent of the Sherborne Mercury, no less. Everybody wants to know how the Methodist minister came to be washed ashore lashed to a barrel.’

The doctor took out a kind of trumpet and put the bell end to his mouth to warm it with his breath. He bid the foreigner to lie on his side, and began to lift his shirt. At that, I fled the room, and waited on the stairs where I could listen to them through the half open door. It was quiet for a time while the doctor took his soundings with the trumpet. Then the bird went into a frenzy of noisy flapping.

‘Will you please remove that hideous item,’ Dr Vyvyan shouted. With a start, I realised he was talking to me.

I went and fetched a rag from below stairs and took it up to the room. The bird was hanging limp on its string. I untied it from the rafter and wrapped it in the cloth. It seemed to weigh nothing at all in my hands. I brought the tiny bundle downstairs and out of the house, leaving it in the courtyard for Aunty Merryn’s stinking cat to maul, before returning to my station on the stairs.

The foreigner was telling the doctor about his ailments. ‘I thought I had passed from this world into another,’ he said. ‘I was tied on some great wheel and flying demons like Furies pushed hot pokers between my ribs. Their huge wings rustled in the darkness and brushed against me.’

‘You have been in a violent delirium brought on by the fever, that’s all,’ Dr Vyvyan replied. ‘There is congestion in the right lung, but the other appears to be clear, which is very fortunate for us. You have pneumonia, I would say. You caught a chill in the sea that made you susceptible to the infection which was carried on the unhealthy vapours of this cove.’ He cleared his throat. ‘May I speak plainly?’

‘You may.’

‘Well then, as soon as I heard about your reckless voyage and miraculous rescue, I cancelled my appointments, at no little inconvenience, and made arrangements to travel here.’

‘I am eternally indebted to you.’

‘As a Penwith man, I know the necessity of hiring a pilot born and bred in this accursed cove to mitigate the hazards. The very reason why this village is so isolated and barbarous is the cove’s unsuitability as a harbour.’

‘I have learned as much, to my cost.’

‘Your tour of benevolence has put your wife under considerable strain, and as you know I hold her in the highest esteem. If I may venture an opinion, your Bible thumping and extravagant religiosity are not the medicine these poor souls need. What is required is a dose of moral reform, attached to material help.’ The doctor’s tone changed as he called out in a loud voice, ‘You can come in now, madam, from wherever you’re lurking.’

It vexed me that he knew I’d been eavesdropping on them, and I didn’t like the way he spoke to me. Especially given that it was me who had saved his patient and not his stupid trumpet. I took a deep breath to cool my temper and stepped back into the room.

‘I am afraid we’re going to have to impose on your hospitality for another couple of days,’ Dr Vyvyan said. ‘I will leave money so you can pay for any purchases you make on my patient’s behalf. A warm meal wouldn’t go amiss. I’ll return in two days, weather permitting, and I’m hopeful I’ll be able to take Mr Stone off your hands and return him to his wife in Newlyn. But before I go, I think I should take a look at that bruise of yours.’