Madgy Figgy wasn’t an ordinary woman. There’d always been a magic about her, it began with the twinkle in her eyes and the dance in her walk, grew to the cackle in her laugh and the spells at her fingertips. She wasn’t a healing kind of witch, she didn’t keep her magic potions quietly for curing ills. Madgy had learned the magic of air and water and she could conjure storms. She was a wrecker too, she had a whole wraggle taggle group of witches and wreckers about her, the St Levan witches. They loved to go flying, swooping over Sennen, skimming the waves, but they didn't have broomstcks, oh no, they flew on ragwort stalks. Madgy's favourite place was a pile of granite boulders at Gwennap Head, looking out to sea. The top rock was large and very comfy, the perfect chair for Madgy who held court there for hours, despite the wind and the damp and the cold. She even had her own set of steep steep steps to reach her cliff top seat, her Chair Ladder.

She sat there one evening, the sea birds calling above her, smelling the sultry sea and cliff top flowers. Her gang surrounded her, drinking, wrestling and playing quoits along the cliffs. That was the day the ship came by, a Portugese Indiaman, she could tell that from afar. Madgy stirred her staff in the wind and she muttered a spell. The wind, charmed by her rhyme, began to swirl and swirl with the motion of her staff. Faster and faster the wind danced and the ocean copied it's every move. The ship came in at Porth Loe Cove where it wrecked on the rocks.

The wreckers came down to the shore to see if any treasure from the ship had washed up with the tide. There was lots, gold and jewels shining in the sand.

‘I’ll ave it!’ said Madgy

‘What’s that?’ said the wreckers innocently.

‘What’s in your pockets. Is all to go in my chest.’

A little of what was in the wrecker’s pockets was given to Madgy. Enough to fill her wooden chest which was heaved up the cliff and into her hut. It was too dark to find anything else, she would come back in the morning.

Next day the sea was turquoise, swirling into playful waves, no one would have imagined a storm. Witch Madgy used a bit of driftwood to move the top layer of sand aside and peer underneath. Using her stick she hooked aside the seaweed and feathers on the strandline, but there was no treasure left, just shells and seaglass. Madgy was about to give up and climb back to her chair, when something glinting in the morning light caught her eye. Was the sun playing tricks on her? She wasn’t sure and leant down and scrabbled about with her fingertips feeling and, sure enough, she felt a chain in her hands. Madgy lifted it into the light and, oh, did it sparkle, a golden chain with jewels of all colours. She had found the real treasure of the ship. She slipped it into her pocket and looked out to sea.

‘You are good to me,’ she whispered to the waves.

Back at her hut, she laid the jewelled chain carefully on top of the rest of the loot in her treasure chest and closed the lid. This would be her secret.

Madgy went to sit on her chair to look out for the next ship. The wreckers and witches played, jostled, and danced about her but Madgy was in a thoughtful mood.

That night, the wrecker gang had dispersed exhausted, one lookout remained on the cliffs. It was he who first saw a light on the beach. The lookout watched as the light made its way up the cliffs toward Madgy Figgy’s hut. He was scared but he bravely followed it to the door and opened it just a crack to see where it went. Snores could be heard from Madgy and her husband in the smelly hut, but the lookout didn’t have to do more than put his head round the door to see that the light had stopped on the top of Madgy’s chest of treasure. There it burned very bright, then faded away. The lookout scratched his head and he pulled his beard and he wondered whether he’d really seen the light at all.

He decided not to tell Madgy about the light, but next night the lookout saw the light on the beach, and it went up the cliff and into the hut and shone over Madgy's treasure chest.

‘Madgy there’s a light bothering your chest,’ said the lookout

Madgy sat on her chair, looking out to sea. She didn’t want to be bothered. ‘Well, I never did,’ she said.

‘A light is travelling from the beach up the cliff and into your hut, Figgy. I swear.’

Madgy laughed. ‘Leave this to me,’ she said.

The light glided up the cliff and into the hut every night for three months. Figgy just ignored it. What was a ghostly light to her, she could conjure the elements,

That afternoon, a stranger walked up the cliff. He couldn’t speak any Cornish so the old witch had to use signs to work out why he’d dared to come up to Madgy Figgy’s Chair. He asked the way to to the cove.

‘He wants to know about the light,’ said one of the witches.

‘Strange thing him knowing about it,’ said another.

‘He’s no business here,’ they all agreed.

‘You leave him be,’ said Madgy and she gave the stranger a cup of hawthorn tea and a wedge of heavy cake.

‘Says his wife were on the ship. Says she had a necklace of value to him.’

‘We’ve not seen no necklace,’ said a wrecker.

But Madgy Figgy had. She waited with the stranger until long shadows grew across the bay and the cliffs glowered down over them like hooded eyes. The sea was rough and the waves relentless. The tide was almost on the rocks but left just enough land for the stranger and Madgy. The witch felt cold, the wind was stinging her eyes, she listened to the gulls and the cormorants, watched their lithe forms swoop by, heading in to the cliffs to roost. Night would soon be with them. They waited and waited, but no light shone in the dusky gloom.

At long last, when she thought the light would never rise, a pulse of gold like a heart rose from the beach. The stranger got up and followed it up the cliff to Madgy’s hut and, hesitating just a moment, he pushed open the door. Madgy watched with interest as he opened the lid of the chest and took out the necklace with the jewels. Then he took out a few more trinkets.

'These belonged to my dear wife,' he said, 'thank you for keeping them safe.' He gave the astonished wreckers a sack of gold for their trouble.

Madgy wasn't surprised at all. She knew why she'd kept the necklace, not sold it. “One witch know another,” she muttered to herself, pleased she had looked after another witch's riches.

Retold by Anna Chorlton and Sue Field 

Source Robert Hunt Popular Romances of the West of England