Caught in a Cornish Scandal by Eleanor Webster (best books for 20 year olds TXT) 📕

Startled, Millie lost her grip on the wood, bobbing under the water. Water shot into her nose. Coughing and retching, she grasped at the wood. A second shot ran out. With increased urgency, she scanned the shore.

‘What’s happening?’ Garrett shouted, his voice hoarse from the water he had swallowed.

Millie stared past the wreckage. She saw a torch flicker. A man was crawling from the water, his silhouette briefly outlined as he moved up the beach on all fours, like a hound. She heard another crack and then, with an awful unnatural movement, the man’s arms flung upwards before he fell forward, quite still.

‘Dear God. They’re...’ Her incoherent words petered into silence as she watched at the panicked confusion on shore.

‘They’re being shot. We have to do something.’

But, as quickly as it had begun, the shooting stopped. The pause lengthened into silence. Instinctively, Millie froze in place, holding her breath and waiting for another scream or pistol crack. She heard nothing save an eerie, deafening quiet, broken by wind and wave, but no human voice or cry.

Millie counted the seconds. Time passed, unmarked save for the lightening sky and the gradual smoothing of the waves.

‘We have to go in,’ Mr Garrett said. ‘We can help.’

‘What if they are still here?’ she asked through stiff lips, although she had no idea who ‘they’ were.

‘I see a something...a light.’

She peered towards the shore. She could see the dark shape of the land and a light, like a firefly, winding up the shoulder of the cliff. ‘I see it.’

They waited, watching the faint light until it disappeared, either hidden by the landscape or the dawn.

‘We have to try to get to shore. If we stay here, we will die from the cold. And the tide has turned. It is rising,’ he said.

‘You cannot swim.’

‘I’ll kick and hold on to these.’ He nodded to the planks clasped in his hands. ‘At least we’ll have a chance.’

Somehow, they had made it. It was well past dawn and the scene was lit with the dull grey light of a winter morning. The wind had dropped and the tide was coming in, creeping up the rocky shoreline. Finally, her feet were no longer hanging into nothingness. She felt shale, smoother than the barnacles, and slippery tendrils of kelp—or perhaps seaweed—twisted, snake-like, about her feet and ankles.

Crawling on all fours, they inched closer. On either side, she saw the bodies of the drowned men, twisted, half-submerged and moving eerily with the water’s ebb and flow. Her gaze scanned the shore as she listened for any sound: the click of the trigger, the rustle of movement or exhalation of breath.

‘This is evil.’ His expression reflected her own horror.

The carnage continued, men sprawled, their faces contorted into expressions ranging from surprise to anguish. The dull grey light reflected in the puddles of sea water, now blood red.

‘You think they have gone?’ she asked, although she knew he had no way of knowing.

‘They would not have let us get this far if they were still here.’

Millie nodded. They crawled from the water. She held her breath, still half expecting a shot to shatter the quiet. Her trousers clung in cold, damp folds. Her limbs moved awkwardly, numb and stiff, so that she lurched unsteadily, stumbling on the shale. The cold was intense. She wrapped her arms about herself as her body was racked with painful shudders that were almost violent.

Slowly, as if drawn by a force beyond her control, she went to each crumpled figure.

Jem was the third body.

She found him face down and spread eagled. She went to his inert shape. The back of his head was gone, a bloodied mess. Strangely, his face remained untouched.

How was she to tell Sally? The Lansdownes’ maid, Flora, was her aunt and Millie had grown up with Sal—they were friends. Bile and vomit pushed into her throat. She swallowed it down.

‘He was not a bad person. He just wanted a different life,’ she said.

Beside him, she recognised the old man from the night previous, his face contorted into a toothless grimace.

She shivered. The cold inhabited every part of her as though generated from a frozen core. ‘We cannot just...leave them.’

‘We’ll get the authorities.’ He looked over the scene. ‘I’m sorry about Jem.’

They stood beside each other in the grey morning, on the grey beach. Sam still wore evening clothes, his tattered cravat fluttering in the wind.

‘We have to go,’ he said.

In a distant part of her brain, Millie knew he was correct and yet she felt reluctant to move. Her limbs were imbued by that heavy, hopeless lassitude.

‘But who? Who did it?’ she whispered.

‘Wreckers,’ he said.

‘What?’

‘They lure ships. Then grab the cargo.’

‘On...on purpose?’

‘Yes.’

‘And Sally? How will I tell Sal?’

‘You will find the words.’ He put out his hand to her. She took it. ‘You will tell her that he was brave. He saved our lives. If he hadn’t untied us, we could not have escaped.’

She nodded. Like it or not, she and this man were each other’s best chance of survival. And like it or not, there was nothing she could do for Jem or the others now.

‘We will get through it,’ she said.

Every bone, sinew and muscle hurt in Sam’s body as he pulled himself up the steep embankment. They were bare footed and stones pushed painfully into their soles. Occasionally, one of them would slip, sending a tinkling waterfall of rocks tumbling down.

Neither of them talked. Indeed, Sam was conscious of a numbness, part-shock and part-exhaustion. It felt surreal to realise that he and this woman were the only survivors. Why had a Cornish bay become a slaughter house? And how had he ended up in the sea in the first place? And how the hell were they going to get out of this alive?

The image of those bodies flickered before him. He remembered the rhythmic crack of the pistol. He felt the prickling of goose pimples on his skin.

‘Mr Garrett?’

They had reached a slight levelling of