The Dog's Teeth

Chapter One: The Light That Should Not Be

The bullock was not worth dying for, but nobody had asked Will Roskilly what he thought.

He went up Vellan Head in the last of the light with a rope over his shoulder and the wind coming at him like a hand on his chest. April, and the gale had been building all day out of the southwest, dragging a filthy grey ceiling over Trelow and pushing the sea up the cliffs in slow white explosions. By four o'clock the mine had knocked off. By six the fishing boats were hauled above the wrack line and lashed with chain. By seven every door in the village was shut and every window shuttered, and Widow Vingoe had discovered that her bullock had walked out through a gap in the hedge and gone wandering along the top of the cliff.

So they sent the boy. They always sent the boy.

Will was seventeen and built like a boat's rib, long and thin and hard to break. He climbed the stile at the top of the burrows and leaned into the wind and let it hold him up. Below him on his right hand the sea was doing what it did in a southwesterly, which was to come in without shape and go out without mercy. On his left the moor ran black and empty up to the engine house of Wheal Ruan, where a single lamp still showed because the pumps never stopped even when the men did.

In his coat, buttoned under his arm where the rain could not find it, he carried his father's chart-book.

He carried it everywhere. He had carried it to church, to the mine, out fishing, up to the bal-maidens' floors to sell pilchards; he had slept with it under his neck for twelve years. Forty pages of rag paper sewn into a limp calf cover, and on those pages, in a hand as small and neat as a seed drill, everything Peter Roskilly had known about eleven miles of the deadliest coast in England. Soundings in fathoms and feet. The set of the tide at each hour on the flood and the ebb. Marks — the chapel gable brought in line with the tip of Carn Gwyn; the leaning stone on the head over the third gorse brake; the way the Nanhale church tower opened out from behind the cliff at the exact instant you must put your helm over or die.

Forty pages. It was the only pilotage in the world that could bring a laden ship past the Dog's Teeth and into the deep-water quay at Nanhale on a night tide, and Will Roskilly knew it the way other boys knew the Lord's Prayer: not by reading but by having it inside him.

His father had drowned doing it. Twelve years ago, February, a night nobody described the same way twice. He had gone out in his gig to fetch a ship in past the Teeth and the sea had taken him and the ship both. Weather, they said. Terrible weather, the worst in thirty years. Will had been five. He remembered a smell of wet wool and his mother's hands shaking on a comb.

He found the bullock a quarter mile along, standing in a hollow of thrift and old bracken with its rump to the wind and an expression of profound stupidity. It let him get the rope on it. It even let him lead it a dozen yards. Then it planted its feet and became four hundredweight of anchor, and Will swore at it in two languages and settled down to wait it out.

That was when he saw the light.

It was away to the south of him, low down, near the brink where the head shouldered out over the reef. A yellow eye that opened, drifted slow to the left, and closed. Opened again. Drifted right. Closed.

Will knew that rhythm the way he knew his own pulse, because he had watched it a thousand times from the burrows: the harbour light at Nanhale, an iron cresset in the gable of the old chapel above the harbour mouth, shown by the harbour man on nights when a ship was expected. Swung low and slow, left and right, three times and rest. Any master on the packet run from Falmouth to Bristol knew it. Bring that light on your starboard bow, keep it swinging, hold your course north-northeast, and the water under you was clean.

But the harbour light was at Nanhale. Nanhale was a mile and a half north, around the bend of the cliff, and you could not see it from here at all.

This light was on Vellan Head. A quarter of a mile south of the true mark, and a hundred and forty feet up, with three acres of black granite teeth underneath it.

Will stood with the rope slack in his hand and the rain running off his chin, and for four or five heartbeats he did not understand. Then he understood so completely and so coldly that his knees went soft.

He let go of the bullock and ran.

He ran south along the cliff with the wind shoving him sideways, jumping the low banks, and as he ran he was doing sums the way his father had taught him. Top of the tide in an hour and ten minutes. Wind southwest, hard. Any ship coming up from Falmouth on this wind would be running, and running fast, and glad of it, because in a gale like this a master wants a hole to crawl into more than anything in the world. She would see the light. She would trust the light. She would put her head straight at the swinging yellow eye and drive, and eleven minutes later —

"No," Will said out loud, uselessly, into the wind. "No, no, no —"

He came up over the last rise and saw them.

There were men on the head. He could not count them, but he could see the shape of them, hunched in a row along the shelter of a hedge bank, and he could see the lantern. It was not being carried. It was slung on a pole eight feet long, and a man swung the pole in that patient rocking arc: down and out and back. There was a horse tethered lower down with something pale on its back — a blanket, a sheet, something to make a shape in the dark, and Will's mind supplied the reason, because a shape moving on a horse looked, at three miles, like a ship's stern light shifting in a swell. Anchored ship. Safe road. Come in.

He went flat behind a boulder without knowing he had decided to.

From there he could see out to sea, and out to sea he saw her.

She was already close. Two topsails reefed down small and hard, grey-white against the black, leaning, coming on with a bone in her teeth. A little vessel, quick and low and beautifully handled; and Will, who had lain on this head all his life watching the packets go up and down, knew her at once. The Speedwell, out of Falmouth. Sixty-eight tons. She carried mails and cabin passengers and whatever freight would fit, and her master's name was Dyer, and Will had once sold him a hatful of crabs off the quay at Nanhale for fourpence and a wink.

On the head, the man with the pole swung it low, and slow, and steady.

Out on the water, the Speedwell answered. A light showed at her bow, held up and dipped twice: I see you. I have you. Thank God.

And she came about a point to port and put herself directly at the Dog's Teeth.

Will got up. He got up because a thing was happening in front of him that could not be permitted to happen, and he shouted; he screamed into the gale until he tasted blood at the back of his throat, and the wind took every syllable of it and threw it inland over the moor where there was nobody at all.

He scrambled twenty yards nearer. He could hear the men now, snatches of them, easy and unhurried, the way men talk on a job they have done before.

"Steady, steady. Don't hurry it."

"She's coming."

"Course she's coming."

And one voice above the others, dry and level and carrying, a voice Will had heard at the mine counting-house on pay Friday saying that a man's tribute was docked for wet ore:

"Let her strike before you douse. Not before. Bunching at the water's edge is how men get seen."

Aaron Sleeman. Steward to Sir Humphrey Lanyon.

Will turned and looked out to sea again, because he could not help it, and so he was watching when the Speedwell hit.

There was no crash. That was the thing that stayed with him. He had expected a crash, some great noise to match the size of it, and instead the sea simply lifted her and set her down, and she stopped. The two topsails went on for an instant as though nothing had happened and then folded forward and sideways together, and her mainmast came down across her bow in one slow lean, and the next sea broke over her whole length in a burst of white that Will could see even at that distance, even in the dark.

He heard the ship break. Not the strike — the breaking, afterwards, three separate long groans of timber giving way, like a barn door being opened by something enormous.

Then the lantern on the pole went out.

All along the hedge bank the shapes stood up. They came past Will's boulder at a trot, thirty of them, forty, with sacks and axes and coils of rope, and they went down the cliff path towards Ravens Cove as easily as men going in to supper, and nobody was carrying a life-line, and nobody was carrying a blanket, and nobody said one word about a boat.

Will lay in the wet bracken with his father's chart-book pressing against his ribs and listened to them go.

Then he got up and followed them down.