The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence

to the beach, he said. He wasn’t scared of a few little lights. But he was never seen again, John. They say the ghost ship carried him off.”
    “And the lights?” I asked.
    “Uncle Simon used to tell me if I stayed out at night, the corpse lights would get me.” Mary smiled. “All children are told the same. And a month ago there was a ship embayed. She came in the night, and the men were waiting with lanterns. But they saw the corpse lights right there on the beach.”
    Mary pointed down the cliff. “It was one light, moving along. Caleb Stratton was there, and Jeremy Haines, Spots, and the others. And they all ran away; Caleb tried to stop them, but he couldn’t. In the morning the ship was gone. Some people said it was never there at all. It was the
Virtue
come back, they said, and she was looking for crew. They say the corpse lights are dead men. Dead men alive.”
    I looked down at the sea, and I thought of old Riggins, who’d told me stories of specters and ghost ships as the
Isle of Skye
sailed on a rolling sea. And I longed for those days, and wished I could live them again. I ached to ride a tall ship through the night, with the sails rising above me like patches over the stars. I had felt I would die if Father doomed me to work in the dusty prison of an office. Iremembered him saying—he loved to say it—“You’ll never make a seaman.” Our voyage had been a lesson, to teach me that he was right. “Too many dangers by half,” he had said, hoping to save me from the very thing that had befallen us. I looked down at the sea, and I sighed.
    Mary tugged my sleeve. “Come on, John,” she said. “I’m tired of the sadness here.”
    As we backed and turned the ponies, a gust rose up the cliff and tangled their manes.
    “I’ll show you my garden,” said Mary. “My secret garden.”
    It wasn’t far. Nestled between the cliffs and the road, it lay in a little gully hidden by a tangle of bush. There, in a patch of soil about the size of a door, Mary had planted wildflowers.
    “I call it my memory garden,” she said. “For each wreck, I’ve started a plant.” She turned her head away and crouched suddenly on the ground. “It’s silly, really, edn’t it?”
    “No,” I said. “It’s not.” The flowers grew in rows, twelve abreast, filling the space. A little farther down the gully, she’d cleared the ground for a new plot. The soil was broken but empty, waiting like a fresh grave.
    “They grow so well here,” said Mary. “It’s a funny thing. I never water them, never weed them.” She groomed the flowers, arranging them on their stalks. “I can’t explain it. But it’s sort of like magic, don’t you think?”
    She wasn’t looking at me. She stroked each flower, then touched its leaves, as though these were little people she hovered over.
    She lifted her skirts and held them clear of the flowers. “There’s so many. So many flowers. And each time I plant one, I cry.” She walked on her toes between them, up to the top of the garden. “Sometimes I imagine this whole bluff”—she spread her arms, and her skirts tumbled loose—“all that you see, covered with flowers, each for a wreck.”
    We made our way back to the ponies. As though by agreement, we didn’t ride them, but led them instead up toward the road.
    “Sometimes I can’t bear it,” said Mary. “I can hear it from the house, the screaming.”
    The wind gusted past us. I heard a distant sound of horses and leather.
    “I want to stop it,” said Mary.
    “You couldn’t,” I said. “It would be you against all of Pendennis.”
    She shook her head. “It edn’t the whole village, John. It’s just a few of the worst. Like Caleb Stratton and Jeremy Haines. Without them, the wrecking would stop. Without them, people would come to save the sailors, and not to kill them.”
    I said, “Parson Tweed told me Caleb is the leader.”
    “It looks that way,” said Mary. “But I think there’s someone else, someone