Devil's Rock - Chris Speyer [17]
‘See your father’s allowin’ you to neglect your edification again,’ said Grandad. ‘What’s your mother going to say?’
Zaki studied the steam rising from his tea. He wished his grandfather hadn’t raised the subject of his mother.
‘Does she know about your arm?’
‘Don’t think so,’ said Zaki. ‘She didn’t phone at the weekend.’
‘Couldn’t you phone her?’
‘Dad says she’s really busy and we shouldn’t worry her.’
Grandad frowned. ‘So, when’s she comin’ home?’
‘Don’t know. She says soon, but she says it’s difficult to know when.’
He felt that what his mother was doing wasn’t fair. She shouldn’t have stayed away so long. ‘This job in Switzerland is just temporary,’ she’d said. Temporary. That was only a short time, wasn’t it? That’s what he’d thought. That’s how they’d made it sound. Now, whenever he tried to talk to his father he’d say something like ‘We did all discuss it before your mum took the job’, as though they’d offered him a choice – like ‘Do you want your mum to go away or not?’ Well, nobody had ever asked him that.
‘Expect you miss her, don’t you?’ said Grandad.
‘There aren’t any jobs like that here in Devon,’ said Zaki, feeling compelled by family loyalty to defend his parents. ‘Dad says it’s an opportunity. They had to borrow a lot to buy number forty-three and this’ll put us back on our feet.’
‘Been quite a long time, though,’ said Grandad.
It had been a long time. It had been much too long for Zaki.
The cat jumped up on to Zaki’s lap, almost spilling his tea.
‘That cat’s taken to you,’ said Grandad.
Zaki seized the chance to change the subject.
‘You know the Orme . . .’ he began.
‘I ought to, number of times I’ve been in there.’
‘Did you ever hear about a cave or a smugglers’ passage, or anything like that?’
‘Why do you ask?
‘I just thought, since smugglers used the river, you know – there might be one.’
‘There was somethin’.’ Grandad took a pencil from his shirt pocket and stirred his tea thoughtfully. He took another sip from his mug. ‘Did you sugar this?’
Zaki nodded.
‘Could’ve been sweeter.’
‘About the Orme,’ Zaki prompted.
‘There was a lot of smugglin’ went on . . .’
‘And?’
‘Excise turned a blind eye to most of it. I’m talkin’ maybe a hundred and fifty, two hundred year ago. Course it still goes on today.’
‘And the cave?’
‘I’m comin’ to that. Would you like a biscuit?’
‘Thanks.’
Grandad fetched the biscuits, blew the dust off the packet and offered them to Zaki, who took two.
‘There was a man named Maunder, so the story goes – time of my great-great-grandfather. This Maunder wasn’t from round this way, but ’e was the ringleader. Led the others on, so to speak, from smugglin’ to wreckin’. There was always wrecks on this coast, plenty of ’em. Did you ever consider why they called that great stone off the Orme Devil’s Rock? Some say it’s because in a certain light you can see the devil’s face in it. But I never seen a face. More likely it’s on account of the number of souls it’s taken to hell. It’s an easy thing, if you’re runnin’ from a storm on a black night, to mistake one harbour entrance for another and plenty of skippers mistook the Devil for the Mew Stone and turned into the Orme thinkin’ they was off the mouth of the Yealm, especially when some fiend lit a beacon to mislead ’em.
‘What came ashore from a wreck was considered property of they that found it. They was meant to pay duty on salvage but nobody took too much notice of that, it was the landowners, not excise, caused the problems for the wreckers. The landowners laid claim to anything that washed up on their foreshore and the land around the Orme was owned, at that time, by a family called Stapleton, and Robert Stapleton took exception to Maunder and his gang clearin’ out the wrecks on his property.’
Grandad dipped his biscuit in his tea and Zaki stroked the cat while he waited for him to continue.
‘Grandad?’
‘Hold your horses, boy – I’m tryin’ to call to mind what happened next.’
Grandad nodded slowly as though agreeing