Reading this again after ten years – and after the publication of Labyrinth, Sepulchre and Citadel – I found it interesting to see how I was already trying out themes that were to become so important to me: the connection of history and emotion; the idea that architecture and landscape influences storytelling; the sense that reality can be momentarily suspended.
A version of this story was first published in Woman & Home magazine in 2005.
THE SHIP OF THE DEAD
Finistère, Brittany Coast
November 1930
The Ship of the Dead
Sur le Raz de Sein, au crépuscule, apparaît parfois un bateau qui navigue sans sillage toutes voiles dehors contre vents et marées.
Sometimes at dusk, between the mainland and the island of Sein, a boat appears that leaves no wake, its sails all unfurled, indifferent to wind or tide.
BRETON LEGEND
Although the night was dark – no moon and the sky obscured by cloud – I was able to follow the pale pathway worn by generations of feet in the cliff top. The crash of the waves on rocks and the suck of the tide on shingle far below kept me on course.
The land rose and I followed the track, the flint and chalk faint but unmistakable in the turf. I had walked further than I had intended and I was weary, but at last I reached the summit of the headland and looked out over what I knew to be the ocean. Nothing between me and the Americas.
I sat on a well situated boulder and contemplated my solitude, regretting I was walking alone. I was not – have never been – a clubbable sort. All the same, I enjoyed the pleasure of the right sort of companion. On this occasion, not one of my acquaintances had been available to undertake a walking tour of the Finistère coastline – for me, a return to the happy landscape of my childhood – so I had been obliged to travel alone.
I took out my tobacco pouch alone and smoked a pipe. It is said that tobacco deters insects and that may be true in some climates and latitudes. But here, on the Atlantic coast of Brittany, it had the opposite effect. I was soon beset by a cloud of hovering midges, many of them bloodthirsty, all of them irritating and oppressive. It quite spoiled my mood of contemplation.
I knocked out my pipe on the stone, stood up, adjusted my rucksack onto my shoulders, set my grip firm around my stick of hazel, and moved on.
The descent was no easier than the climb. The path was slippery beneath my boots – not from moisture, but from the small stones and gravel that I sent skittering down the steep slope ahead of me with every tread.
Just then, a pale moon was revealed by a rent in the clouds and I saw I was now walking along the edge of a field, lined with a drystone wall separating me from a substantial drop to a distant beach frilled with foam from the breaking waves. Wondering how deep might be the drop, I picked a stone and threw it as far as I could out into the night. I was able to count full to twelve before I heard a faint click. I have never suffered from a fear of heights nor am I usually prone to flights of fancy, but it seemed to me that a breeze sprang up all at once, a plaintive sound, deliberate and demanding, like a vexed child, provoking in my imagination the idea that I had transgressed by hurling the pebble. That its proper place was among its fellows in the wall, no doubt erected to prevent grazing animals from falling to their deaths. The idea caused me to shiver. All at once, I was keen to be off the cliff-top path and installed in some boarding house or shelter for the night.
At the bottom of the dip was a fingerpost indicating routes in three different directions: one indicating the way I had come, the second a pathway that led inland, and the third, a continuation of the cliff-top path. I suppose that had I taken the route away from the sea, I would have found shelter of some kind, if only a bothy for sheep or goats, but I was inclined to follow the wall and see where it would take me.
The land was rising again, though less steeply, and at the next crest I was gratified to see lights in the distance. The wind grew stronger still as I trudged down the long descent towards the village. The ragged curtain of cloud drew back revealing the stars, allowing my tired eyes to perceive more of the landscape. Something about the play of darkness and sea tides and moonshine imbued everything with a dusty, earthy pallor. Rather than a rich blue in the firmament and grey and charcoal and black of shadows on the land, this part of the world seemed to be clothed in the rough habit of a Franciscan monk.
I focused on the lights of the village and quickened my step. Soon enough I realised I had made a mistake taking this path. It was the hardest walking I had yet undertaken. The village was down on the beach, by my reckoning some one hundred feet below the cliff path. There was a precarious stairway, cut roughly into the escarpment, the steps lined with a mixture of timber and, here and there, flat stones. Even so, I wondered whether the risk was worth the potential reward – a warm bed under cover. But the memory of the strange wailing of the wind persuaded me. I did not want to pass the night on the exposed path on the cliffs.