Wrecker. Noel O’Reilly
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NOEL O’REILLY was a student on the New Writing South Advanced writing course. He has worked as a journalist and editor at the international business media company RBI, and is now a freelance writer. This is his first novel. He lives in Brighton with his wife and children.
An imprint of HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.
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London SE1 9GF
First published in Great Britain by HQ in 2018
Copyright © Noel O’Reilly 2018
Noel O’Reilly asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
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Ebook Edition © July 2018 ISBN: 9780008274535
‘God moves in a mysterious way
His wonders to perform;
He plants his footsteps in the sea,
And rides upon the storm.’
William Cowper, Hymn (1773)
‘Myreugh orth an vorvoren, hanter pysk ha hanter den.
Y vos Dew ha den, yn-lan dhe’n keth uta-na crygyans ren.’
‘Look at the mermaid, half fish and half human. That
He is God and man, to that same fact let us entirely give credence.’
Louis T. Stanley, Journey Through Cornwall (1958)
To Sally
PENWITH, CORNWALL
TEN YEARS AFTER THE FRENCH WARS OR THEREABOUTS
Contents
Chapter 7
II: WHITSUNTIDE
Chapter 8
Chapter 9
Chapter 10
Chapter 11
Chapter 12
Chapter 13
Chapter 14
Chapter 15
III: HARVEST TIDE
Chapter 16
Chapter 17
Chapter 18
Chapter 19
Chapter 20
Chapter 21
Acknowledgements
About the Publisher
I got to the beach too late to find anything of real worth. The gale had moved inland, leaving an icy breeze in its wake, and there was a sea stench as if the ocean bed and all its secrets had been torn out overnight and dumped on the strand. All about me the dead from shipwrecks past muttered and moaned in the tongues of their own lands. Having shaken themselves free of their unblessed graves, they shuffled about in search of some lost thing. Look upon them too long, and they’d fade into the mist that sailed across the strand.
A dead wreck it was, all hands drowned. Sounds of hacking and wrenching floated over to me on the gusts, as my neighbours took the ship apart, plank by plank. All that was left was the bare ribs of the hull, stuck between Jack and Jill, two rocks that stood like monsters’ teeth at the western end of the cove. The ship’s bottom was torn out and her timbers lay in piles. Alongside, casks and boxes waited, and ponies and carts laden with plunder filed from the ship up the steep track to the headland. It wasn’t the first time I’d seen a ship picked clean in a single tide.
I rubbed the grit of sleep from my eyes and tied back my hair, casting my gaze all about me to make sure I was alone. On the sand a few passengers lay among the dead, but my neighbours had already stripped the corpses for the most part. Among the bodies lay cabin furniture and fittings, lengths of pipe, a binnacle and other nautical instruments of some use unknown to me. Jellyfish lay all over, like plates of glass with the grey sky trembling inside them. Queerest of all were the hundreds of oranges scattered among the corpses as if they’d rained down from the heavens. They were all the more vivid in a world grey and tired as an old garment with the colour washed out. I took my kerchief