Free The Wreckers by Iain Lawrence Page B

something in the barrels, boy. Your father’s a smuggler.”
    “He’s not!” I said.
    It couldn’t be true. Father a smuggler? No, it wasn’t possible. I’d seen him follow every law and every rule, cheating no one of so much as a farthing. Ever since I could remember, he’d drummed into me the importance of honest work. A
duty
, he’d called it: “It’s the duty of man to earn his living by harming no soul.”
    But the sawdust … how had it gotten into the bilge of the
Skye
and clogged the pumps if it didn’t come from the barrels?
    Father had built up his business from nothing. He started as a petty clerk, and in a few short years came to own a fine house and two ships and a carriage and …
    How had he done that? I’d never wondered before. And if he was a smuggler, what better way to smuggle gold—or anything else—than to roll it right past the eyes of the excise men in false-bottomed barrels, avoiding all taxes and duty? But Father wouldn’t do that; it made no sense.
    Then why did we load the barrels at night?
Skulking about like thieves
.
    Mawgan watched these thoughts passing, in frowns and teary eyes, across my face. Then he touched me gently on the arm. “Well, come, come. Don’t look so downhearted, lad. Your father’s not the first smuggler, nor the last, I’m sure. Nothing wrong with a bit of smuggling, the way the taxes are these days.”
    The coast was rife with smugglers, it was true. Only a brave man poked about the shore on a moonless night. Butmy father? He liked to boast that every drop of tea he ever drank had the duly paid. So if Mawgan was right, then Father’s whole life had been a sham and a farce. If Mawgan was right, then greed had wrecked the
Isle of Skye
. And greed had put us on the same side of the law as the wreckers.
    “So what happened to it?” asked Mawgan suddenly.
    “To what?” I asked.
    “To the gold, boy! To the gold. Or whatever it was.” The anger was building in him again, darkening his face like a squall. “You passed Gibraltar, did you not?”
    “Yes.” It had been dusk, and an English squadron had been making for the harbor.
    “And then you turned north,” said Mawgan. “And sometime between there and the Channel, someone shifted it—didn’t they?—from the barrels to a different place. The bilge, I would bet.”
    “But Uncle,” cried Mary. “You said that—”
    “Sawdust!” snapped Mawgan. “That’s all there was. Tobacco would have floated. So would tea or coffee, chocolate or bottles of gin; even sugar or salt would have floated in their packets. But gold would still be there—wouldn’t it?—lying out on the Tombstones.”
    He was breathing heavily. I found myself squeezing my glass match so hard that it could have broken in my fist. I slipped it in my pocket and held out empty hands. “I don’t know what was in the barrels,” I said. “Whatever it was is gone forever.”
    “Not quite,” said Mawgan. “Because your father will know where it is.”
    The truth of this stunned me. If Caleb Stratton thought there might be gold—or anything else—on the Tombstones, he would get it. If not from my father, then from me. I doubted that he would sit and listen, as Mawgan had done, to my story. And then another thought formed, and swirled in my mind like troubled water. Was this why Mawgan had saved me? To find for himself the secret of the false-bottomed barrels?
    “For myself, of course, I don’t care about the gold,” said Mawgan, as though he’d read these thoughts in my mind. “But the wreckmen are talking about it, John. From the night on the Tombstones, when barrels came ashore broken and spilling sawdust, they’ve been thinking on this. Your father’s the key. If Stumps knows of it—”
    “He does.” I told Mawgan what Stumps had said:
I’m that close to having more gold than I’ve ever dreamed of. A passage up the coast, one night at sea
.
    “And straight to Execution Dock,” said Mawgan. “That’s my