Summary
Moonlit granite tors crouch like petrified gargoyles above a Cornish fishing hamlet where Caleb Porter’s taciturn revenue cutter captain patrols a liminal shoreline—half salt-spray, half shadow—tasked with snaring whisky-smugglers whose lanterns wink beneath the Atlantic swell. The plot is less linear narrative than chiaroscuro fever: a contraband skiff glides ashore carrying Francis Innys’s dissolute artist, Henri De Vries’s granite-quarry magnate and Nadja Ostrovska’s fugitive violinist, each fleeing a private tribunal of guilt. Malvina Longfellow’s lighthouse-keeper’s daughter, eyes sea-green as drowned glass, keeps a logbook of shipwrecks and heart-wrecks; she alone deciphers the storm-borne Morse of a blood-red moon that predicts the village’s next casualty. When Roy Byford’s excise sergeant is found throttled by a hawser, suspicion ricochets between cliff-top chapel, tide-carved smugglers’ vault and a derelict tin mine whose lode once paid for London sins. The scenario, co-forged by Eden Phillpotts’ pagan fatalism and Gerard Fort Buckle’s West-End cynicism, spirals into a nocturne of mistaken identities: the corpse revives long enough to whisper a woman’s name, a second body disappears at high water, a third confession is written in luminous plankton across wet sand. In the final reel Sydney Seaward’s Methodist preacher, Edward Sorley’s mute orphan and Mary Brough’s ale-house virago converge on the headland where a gibbet post becomes both pulpit and proscenium; dawn finds only footprints vanishing into the surf, while Porter’s cutter—now unmanned—drifts seaward beneath a sky the colour of tarnished pewter, leaving the audience to decide whether justice, mercy or merely the tide has reclaimed the guilty.
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