Lighthousekeeping Read Online Free PDF Page A

and thereafter he never took her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh. Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare, no one was told, and no one followed.
    There were disturbances at night, sometimes, and the Manse windows all flamed up, and shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects, but question Dark, as few did, and he would say it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as every man must.
    His wife said nothing, and if her husband was gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his black clothes over the high rocks, then let him be, for he wasa Man of God, and he accepted no judge but God himself.
    One day, Dark saddled his horse and disappeared.
    He was gone a month, and when he returned, he was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his face.
    After that, the month-long absences happened twice a year, but no one knew where he went, until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is to say The Rock and Pit.
    He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near together as to be always spying on one another, and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.
    One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his face, and it was finally got out of him that if he hadn’t seen Babel Dark before and just recently, then the man had the devil’s imprint down in Bristol.
    Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing very different clothes, visiting a house in the Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him for his height – tall, and his bearing – very haughty. He had never seen him with anyone, always alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this was the same one.
    ‘He’s a smuggler,’ said one of us.
    ‘He’s got a mistress,’ said another.
    ‘It’s none of our business,’ said a third. ‘He does his duties here and he pays his bills and handsomely. What else he does is between him and God.’
    The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody had the money to follow him, none of us could know whether Price’s story was true or not. But Price promised to keep a look out, and to send word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.
    ‘And did he?’
    ‘Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn’t help us to know what Dark was about, or why.’
    ‘You weren’t there then. You weren’t born.’
    ‘There’s always been a Pew in the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.’
    ‘But not the same Pew.’
    Pew said nothing. He put on his radio headphones, and motioned me to look out to sea. ‘The McCloud’s out there,’ he said.
    I got the binoculars and trained them on a handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line of the horizon. ‘She’s the most haunted vessel you’ll ever see.’
    ‘What haunts her?’
    ‘The past,’ said Pew. ‘There was a brig called the McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King’s navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that he and his ship would some day return. Nothing happened until theybuilt the new McCloud, and on the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.’
    ‘It’s not a fact.’
    ‘It’s as true as day.’
    I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek, computer-controlled. How could she carry in her body the trace-winds of the past?
    ‘Like a Russian doll, she is,’ said Pew, ‘one ship inside another, and on a stormy night you can see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the upper deck.’
    ‘Have you seen her?’
    ‘Sailed in her and seen her,’ said Pew.
    ‘When did you board the new McCloud ? Was she in dry dock at Glasgow?’
    ‘I never said anything about the new McCloud,’ said Pew.
    ‘Pew, you are not two hundred years old.’
    ‘And that’s a fact,’ said Pew, blinking like a kitten. ‘Oh yes, a fact.’
    ‘Miss Pinch says I shouldn’t listen to your