The night was dark, in a brooding pall
With thunderheads at its core,
But only the sound of heaving swells
Were heard to break on the shore.
The headland dark where the Lighthouse stood
With not a glimmer of light,
It hadn’t been lit for a hundred years
But a beam would stream that night.

The sea was grumbling in its deeps
Cast heaps of **** on the sand,
Much like a drunken Cornishman
Disgorging his contraband,
The swell, built up as the squalls came in
Made the sea erupt from its depths,
Casting an age old Barquentine
Up high, on an angry crest.

Shook free from its hundred year old bed
Untangled from miles of ****,
The Barquentine with its forty dead
Had finally now been freed,
A flag that carried the fleur-de-lis
Hung limply down from the mast,
And tangled up in the rigging was
The body of Captain Jacques.

An aura shone round the Barquentine
In a pale, blue ghostly light,
Caught in a time warp, in-between
They rose as a man that night.
They gathered up on the rotting deck
Each cannon, covered in rust,
And glared at the lighthouse on the hill,
A light that they couldn’t trust.

A wraith of a woman, stood that night
By the keeper, looking down,
The face of a woman, creased in fear
As the Barque had come aground,
She had been the wife of Captain Jacques
Had been left ashore, and fled,
Up to the keeper of the light
Where she shared his meagre bed.

‘I didn’t think he’d be back so soon,’
She’d stood by the light, and cried,
‘If he finds us both alone up here
It’s better that we had died.’
The keeper held her trembling form
As the storm built up that night,
‘I’d never allow him to bring you harm,’
He said, as he struck the light.

The crew looked up at the Lighthouse
And they heard a woman scream,
From up on the headland, deep in fright
As the keeper lit the beam,
And Jacques looked up, and he saw his wife
Lit up by the sudden light,
‘My God,’ he cried, ‘that’s Jacqueline,
There was infamy that night!’

The pair looked down as the men had leapt
To shore, with their swords held high,
They’d waited over a hundred years
But knew that their time was nigh.
He’d struck the light when he saw their ship
Head in to threaten his *****,
And watched as the ship had broken up
In Eighteen fifty-four.

There are nights when the light of former wrongs
Returns to visit the shame,
To balance eternal justice for
The centuries, left in pain,
The ghostly sailors dragged them down
To the Barquentine, at last,
And as the sea had reclaimed the ship
They hung them both from the mast.

David Lewis Paget