Crimson Shore

Something in Pendergast’s voice silenced Lake’s gathering reply.

“A hundred and thirty years ago, on the night of February third, a desperate group of Exmouth natives — I am not certain how many, but I’d imagine the number was fairly small — led Meade Slocum, the lighthouse keeper, up here and forced him to extinguish the light. It’s possible, of course, that Slocum was a willing conspirator, but his ultimate fate — a broken neck, and the obvious guilt he felt, with his drunken talk of the lighthouse being haunted and the crying of babies — suggests otherwise.”

“Extinguish the light?” Lake asked despite himself. “Why?”

“Because another light was being substituted for it. Out there.” And Pendergast pointed a mile to the south, down the shoreline, where a finger of nasty, jagged boulders known as Skullcrusher Rocks stretched out into the ocean, boiling with surf. “A bonfire.”

“I don’t understand,” said Carole.

“This was following the ‘lean winter’ of 1883, the year Krakatoa erupted. The next summer, crops failed in many places around the world, New England included. Exmouth was starving. The intent of this group was to lure a ship onto the rocks and then plunder it. In one sense, they were successful: the British vessel Pembroke Castle was, I believe, deceived by the false light and foundered upon those rocks. In a larger sense, however, the group failed. Instead of rich cargo, the Pembroke Castle’s manifest consisted of passengers: so-called fallen women from the slums of London, some pregnant, others with small children, bound for a fresh start in Boston at an as-yet-unbuilt home for unwed mothers.”

“The historian,” Lake blurted out. “McCool. That’s what he was researching.”

Pendergast continued. “I do not know what happened to the passengers, though I greatly fear the worst. What I do know is that the captain of the vessel was walled up in your basement, no doubt in an attempt to torture him to disclose the location of the ship’s valuables.”

“My God,” Carole murmured.

“I don’t get it,” said Lake. “Why dig up and remove the skeleton after all these years?”

“Because the captain never disclosed the location of those valuables.” Pendergast paused, looking past Lake toward the cruel rocks and the ceaseless, roaring surf. “Unbeknownst to the marauders, the ship and its mission had been financed by an English noblewoman, Lady Elizabeth Hurwell. She paid for the venture. And to finance the women’s home she intended to establish in Boston, she sent along the so-called Pride of Africa, a fabulously valuable set of rubies, which would be worth several million dollars today. She entrusted their care to the captain. After the wreck, the captain — no doubt seeing the mob on the beach and comprehending that his ship had been deliberately lured onto the rocks — would have done the only thing possible. There was no time to bury the jewels. And so he hid them in the safest place he could.”

There was a pause.

“And where was that?” Lake asked.

“He swallowed them,” Pendergast replied.

“What?” Lake exclaimed.

“Even under torture, the captain never divulged the secret,” Pendergast went on. “His torturers suspected there was treasure on the ship, but they never learned it consisted of rubies — stones that were not much larger than pills. His remains, and their concealed fortune, slumbered in your basement for more than a century, the body’s location known to no one—save for the descendants of the original atrocity. And then, one day, a historian came to Exmouth looking for information on the Pembroke Castle

. In researching a biography of Lady Hurwell, he’d learned that the ‘Pride of Africa’ gemstones were on that ship. And he must have mentioned it… to the wrong people, who in turn put two and two together.”

“Two and two… ” said Lake slowly. “Good Lord… I think I see where this is going.”

“That’s why your wine cellar was ransacked. The descendants of the Pembroke Castle looters learned about the jewels from McCool and deduced they must have been swallowed by the captain. If so, they would still be in the niche with his skeleton, ready for the taking. And they took not only the jewels, but the skeleton as well — the less evidence left behind, the less chance of linking them to crimes both old and new. Unfortunately for them, they missed a single bone.”

Lake took a ragged breath. He felt shocked; horrified; and yet in a strange way thrilled. A fortune in gemstones, in his basement all these years… but, as he considered the story in totality, it began to seem more than a little far-fetched. “This is pretty fancy speculation, Mr. Pendergast. I’m no detective, but do you have any actual physical evidence to support your theory that a ship was deliberately lured and wrecked on our shore, or that its captain swallowed a fortune in gems?”

“I do not.”