Читать книгу Wrecker: A gripping debut for fans of Poldark and the Essex Serpent - Noel O’Reilly - Страница 15

6

I got to the chapel, breathless after the climb from the beach, and put the basket of pebbles down. My shoulders ached and the palms of my hands were scored and red from the basket handles. The minister was on top of a ladder in his shirt sleeves, the cloth sticking to his back as he skimmed the mortar over the bricks with his trowel. Watching the play of the muscles in his broad shoulders sent me into a whoozy waking dream. But just then the huer’s shout of ‘Hevva, hevva!’ was heard up on the cliff top. I looked up and saw him standing outside his shack, waving a great bush in each hand so all would know the pilchard shoal had arrived. The little fleet of boats had been at anchor on the horizon the last four days, and now out at sea the men were shooting their nets. You could see the shoal in the distance, a dark cloud of broken water that grew till it was hundreds of yards long and, in an instant, shrunk to a small inky stain.

I left my basket and ran down to the strand. The whole village was there, from the elderly and lame to the smallest children. The copper-coloured sails were already slowly heading for shore, cork floats bobbing all along the width of the cove where the nets were slung between the boats. Already the mesh was swollen with fish, enough to feed a multitude. We waited, cheering and waving, as they inched towards the shore, the fish teeming in the nets, some leaping up and twisting in the air.

Before long, there were more than three hundred souls wading in a blaze of silver and blue on the strand, as the fish thronged and thrashed around us five deep. The fish and people seemed one and the same, the hands and forearms of the men, women and children glittering with fish scales. Boat after boat came to the shallows to empty their baskets onto the beach, not only the sacred pilchard, but ling, turbot, whiting and other barbed and whiskered monsters that you wouldn’t want to see on your dinner plate. Little children wrestled with pollocks as big as themselves. I heard the minister’s voice not far away and my pulse quickened.

‘This is a sight to behold!’ he cried. ‘What could be more ennobling, friends, than the exertion of hard physical labour.’ He came among us, throwing himself into it, rolling up his sleeves, scooping armfuls of fish and throwing them into the boxes to be carried up to the village. ‘Who would not marvel at this testament to the fertility of the sea and the wonder of God’s creation?’ he called, his dark eyes shining, his hair blowing into his face. In his zeal he was like a boy, the world all new to him, a breed apart from the men of the village, so beaten down and sly.

The very air was enchanted that day. A fine rain, no more than a soft mist, hung over us, with the sun showing through the haze. Further out at sea the clouds had broken to show the blue heavens, and a shimmering rainbow made a perfect arc over all. I saw the minister gaze about him, hands on hips, proud as Moses leading his children to the Promised Land.

‘Seeing how you labour together . . . I truly believe I’m seeing you all for the first time, how you throw in your lot with your neighbours for the good of all, putting aside petty resentments and rivalries, acknowledging your dependence on one another with open trust.’

As time passed I drew nearer to the minister, until we worked side by side, and I might have reached out and touched him. If he caught my eye, he smiled. He didn’t turn a hair when fishwives walked along the quay barefooted, their bedraggled skirts gathered at the thigh with no thought to decency. On other years I’d have done the same, but I kept myself covered that day.

Horses and carts and pack-saddled mules led the fish from the quay up through the village lanes which ran with blood, putting me in mind of Pharaoh’s land during the massacre of the innocents. Every wall and door was gritty with salt and spattered with fish scales. Fish swill rolled down the gullies in the lanes down to the quay, making the ground slippery for the stout men who carried large boxes with pole handles at each corner, crammed to the brim with fish. They hauled the boxes up the steep hill to the cellars where we women stood waiting with arms folded. The banter between the women and the fishermen wasn’t fit for respectable ears, but the minister seemed not to mind it. The cellar doors in the courtyards were thrown open and once the fish were tipped out, children handed them to the women down below so we could lay them out in tiers.

Herring gulls scrapped noisily for spoils and gannets swooped down to where offal lay in mounds of glistening crimson and purple, with a thick cloud of flies hovering over all. Scrums of hissing cats raked the air with their claws to shoo away the birds, and darted away to skulk in a corner and gobble their trophies. The air, always warm and sticky in the cove, felt thicker than ever that day, and even the odd gust from the ocean brought a stench of fish. Out at sea the boats were already tucking another shoal within their vast nets and I wondered if the village would be mired under fish before long.

Work carried on in a frenzy until the sun had set and the lights of the fleet twinkled far out in the darkness, not to return till daylight. We womenfolk worked away in heavy shadow lit by flickering candles, our sacking aprons smeared with blood. Walls of fish mounted around us and glinted like jewels in a vault. We squabbled and joked, and now that the children were abed, our foul-mouthed chatter went beyond even that of the men, as we packed the pilchards into the walls.

A shadow fell over me. Glancing up, I saw the tall figure of the minister standing above us looking down into the cellar. I couldn’t see his face against the light of a lantern on the wall behind, but I felt his gaze upon me. What a picture I must have made, flushed from hard work, my arms, fingers and face slimed with fish juices. I brushed a stray lock from my face with the back of my wrist, but all this did was smear more fish scales into my hair.

‘Well now, is that you, Miss Blight?’ My heart thumped hard under my filthy apron. A hush fell over the smirking women, who continued to salt and pack the fish. ‘If only I could do something to help,’ he said, ‘but I fear I’d only get in your way.’

Nancy Spargo was sitting alongside me. ‘It don’t belong to a man of your station in life to come down here and get mucky with us women,’ she said, with her gap-toothed grin. ‘Besides, you has done enough for us already, parson. This great catch is all down to you. It be God’s blessing, I seem, on account of how you has brought so many of us under conviction.’

‘You has outdone King Jesus,’ I said, seizing my chance. ‘We has more fish today than at the Sermon on the Mount, and the shoal have come weeks before it were due.’

‘The shoals has been poor these last two years,’ said Nancy. ‘It be Divine Providence, for sure.’

‘You saw the rainbow, minister? That means a new Covenant, as it did for Noah,’ I said, growing bolder. I knew the other women were giving me looks, but I hardly cared at that moment.

‘I am pleased you know your Bible so well,’ he said. Did he think I was laughing at him?

‘I have it almost by heart.’ I closed my eyes and summoned up the first bit of Scripture that came into my head. ‘Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.’

‘Blessed indeed!’ cried the minister, with heat. ‘What a day this has been! I’m beginning to see the Almighty’s design in the events of these last weeks. You were the one who hauled me out of the sea that day, were you not?’ he said to me. ‘Surely Providence has driven me onto this shoreline. I feel God’s spirit working powerfully within all of us tonight. This day I discovered the loyal and heroic natures underneath all of your rough exteriors. You are made in the Almighty’s image.’

He was interrupted right then by two men, the giant Pentecost and Davey Combelleck, who dropped a box of fish right at the minister’s feet.

‘Not on my f— toe, Davey!’ shouted Pentecost. ‘You do that one more time and I’ll stick my cock in your ear and f— some sense into you.’ The women cackled. I looked up to see how the minister had taken it, but he had gone.

At the crack of dawn the next day, we threw open the cellar doors in the courtyard and climbed down the ladder to get back to work. The cellar was an airless tomb, with walls of fish packed in row after row, their heads poking out and their red-rimmed eyes gazing at us. At first the stink of the fish almost made me faint, but I got used to it soon enough. We women worked alongside one another, elbow to elbow, salting and bulking, half mazed with lack of sleep, watching the wall slowly rise before us until we could no longer see over the top. We were of every age from Cissie Olds, who was barely in her sixteenth, to the Widow Chegwidden, who must have been in her sixtieth at least. Our boots splashed about in the slurry that drained off to the pit in the middle of the cellar. A fine moist dust came off the fish which cloyed your throat and made some poor women breathless. Overhead, dark clouds raced across a sky that was tender, promising rain before the afternoon. For now, I welcomed the gusts of cool air on my face.

‘I don’t like standing on my feet all day like this,’ moaned Martha Tregaskis. ‘My corns be killing me.’ She took a good glug from the pot of Jamaican rum from the recent wreck that was being passed down the line. ‘All we’ve got at home is parsnip wine and I never could abide that swill,’ Martha said, belching. ‘This be more to my liking.’

Martha was a dreadful slattern, and more than partial to a drop of hard liquor. It showed in her blotchy skin. Few would blame her for it, though, as she was married to the giant, Pentecost, that big bully. Her left eye was ringed with a fading yellow bruise.

‘Corns be a sign of foul weather,’ said the Widow Chegwidden. There was always a soothing air about her, with her lulling voice and rosy cheeks, and her hair pure and white as lambs’ wool against the black cloth of her dress. ‘I know a sure remedy, my dear,’ she said. ‘Gather nine bramble leaves and place them in spring water, and afterwards pass them over the soles of your feet. If that should fail, rub a piece of meat flesh on them, then bury the flesh and let it rot and by that time the corns will have gone.’

Martha offered the rum to the widow, but she shook her head. I was next in line and took a good swig before handing it to Cissie Olds, who stood between me and Tegen in the line. I was fond of Cissie and knew that she looked up to me. I watched her, wiping sweat from her face with her forearm, and I thought her too young and comely for such filthy work, with her fair hair and blue eyes. Her hands were red and raw, already seasoned by hard labour. When it was Tegen’s turn with the bottle she shook her head and passed the pot on to Martha Tregaskis, who took a big glug.