The Lighthouse Keeper, page 3
James Ducat threw a rope to me from the heaving deck of the tender, and I snatched it with half-frozen fingers and was hauled by him to safety. How shall I describe the feelings that seized me when I took the hand of a fellow man who had risked his own life to draw me out of the shadow of death? Such experiences are not easily rendered into words. The sight of his rain-streaked face, wild and grizzled as the tumultuous sea, filled me with a gratitude and relief that were forged at once into love in my racing heart, and I wept without shame as he held me to his breast before heaving me belowdecks, along with my companions.
As I sat huddled in a blanket, with one of my fellows on one side and a cold hard bulkhead on the other, I trembled in time with the panting of the steamer’s engine, which to my exhausted mind seemed like words breathed by God Himself to soothe away my terror. And as the lighthouse tender cleaved the hungry waves with its prow, heading away from the black, sea-defying splinters that had so nearly become my grave, I vowed to be a lifelong friend to James Ducat, to render him whatever service he should ask of me for the rest of my days. For how many days remained to me on this earth I knew not, save that I owed them to him.
*
My story begins in earnest on the 5th of January 1901, when I returned to my home in Stornoway after spending Christmas and the New Year with friends in the north of England. Amongst the few items of post that were waiting for me, there was a letter. I saw from the return address that it was from the Ducat family.
At first, I felt a warm surge of pleasure, expecting good wishes for the New Year. As I read the letter, however, my mood became darkened by shadows of consternation and sorrow. It was from James Ducat’s wife, Mary, and the news it brought was completely unexpected and unutterably dreadful. I have the letter here beside me as I write. This is what Mary Ducat wrote:
Dear Mr Dalemore,
It is with great sadness that I write to you, to tell you that my husband and your friend, James Ducat, has met with a horrible accident while on duty at the light on Eilean Mòr. I do not know how to describe what has happened, for in truth no one yet knows, save to say that he is gone, along with his fellow Keepers.
The Board does not know either. I received a visit from Mr William Murdoch, the Secretary of the Board, a short while ago. He is a very kind man, and I could see that it pained him greatly to tell me what he knew, which, as I say, is not so very much.
It seems that the light went out a few days ago. Mr Murdoch told me that it was noticed by the captain of a steamer bound for Leith, who reported it by wireless to his headquarters – I believe the ship was of the Cosmopolitan Line. For some reason, this was not reported to the Board, and it was only when the relief Keepers arrived on the 26th of December that they realised something was amiss.
When they went ashore, they found no sign of life. My James, along with his two companions, had vanished as if plucked from the face of the earth!
I hope you will forgive me for writing to you like this, but in truth I do not know who else to turn to, and I am well aware of the high regard you hold for my husband. The Board believes, so they say, that all three of those good men were swept away by a sudden surge of the sea. But I am not so sure. You have tended lights yourself, and you know that this cannot be true.
Forgive me again, Mr Dalemore, but I have a feeling, which I don’t know how to put into words, that something else has happened to my James and the others. Something horrible that cannot be understood by those who love and fear the Almighty. I do not know what can be done, except that something must be done, to try to bring them back from wherever they have been taken.
I still recall with pleasure the visit you paid to our home last year, and the kind and wonderful words you said to my husband, how you owed him your life and would be honoured to call yourself his friend until death should finally take you. I recall the look on his face when he heard these words, and how he struggled to hold back his tears – for he is a good man who feels things very deeply.
It is with an uncertain heart that I come to the real reason for this letter. I beg you to find him, or at least to discover what really happened to him. I know you are an honourable man, who will not feel anger or exasperation towards me for making this request, impossible as it may be. I cannot bear the thought of him lost out there, desperate for the aid of his fellow man, where none may come.
To me, he is alive still, though you may shake your head in sadness at such foolishness. I cannot explain why, but I feel it to be so.
Will you please help, in whatever way you may think best?
With warmest wishes and in fervent hope,
Mary Ducat
I sat there at my kitchen table, my breakfast untouched, and re-read the letter several times while the wind whispered from its cold domain beyond the window. James Ducat, the man who had reached down from the world of light and life into the black maw of death to save me, had been taken from the world by the selfsame ocean which had sought to devour me. How unjust it was! How cruel of God to provide such a darkly ironic reward for selfless bravery.
It was then that my eye fell again on a certain sentence: You have tended lights yourself, and you know that this cannot be true. When I first read those words, they had seemed merely to be the understandable expression of a forlorn hope, born more of wishful thinking than pragmatism. Suddenly I understood what Mrs Ducat meant by them, and I found myself tempted to agree with her. It was a cardinal rule that no lighthouse should ever be left unmanned, and thus it was almost inconceivable that all three Keepers would be outside at the same time, unless the last man was called to attend some dire emergency.
And yet, even if such an emergency had indeed occurred, how could the last man have been summoned to it? I knew the island of Eilean Mòr (I know all that group of islands known as the Seven Hunters, to which it belongs); both landings, to the west and the east, were out of sight and too far away for any signal to be seen or cry heard from the lighthouse.
What had happened to those men?
As I rose from the table and put water on to boil for a fresh pot of tea, strange thoughts began to chase each other through the cheerless twilight of my mind, inspired by the tone of Mary Ducat’s letter. She obviously believed that her husband and his companions had met a fate far stranger than merely being lost at sea. I am not a doctor, and I know little of the intricacies of the human mind, but it seemed to me that the weirdness of the letter’s latter portion pointed to some kind of conflation in the poor woman’s mind: a mixing of grief at the loss of her husband, together with an entirely understandable hope that, since his body had apparently not been found, he might yet be alive, clinging desperately to some fractured tooth of rock somewhere out in the ocean. I have known people who have lost loved ones at sea, and it is a reaction I have witnessed more than once: the absence of a body equates to the possibility, however remote, that the person still lives. How can it be otherwise, since hope’s embers must glow in even the most despondent of human hearts?
And yet, it was clear that Mary Ducat was also entertaining other thoughts – thoughts of an altogether more extraordinary nature. She believed that something other than the sea had taken the men, something ungodly and awful. This thought was not quite as outlandish as it seemed, for superstition clung to the Flannan Isles with as much tenacity as the ocean that smashed upon their jagged shores. It was a custom among Lighthouse Keepers to say a prayer as soon as they set foot on them, whether for Saint Flann, after whom they had been named, or for their own souls it mattered little – save that the prayer was said. It was also said that the Seven Hunters were home to a wild spirit, which was ancient even before Christianity first came to this region of the world, and that the spirit resented the presence of the lighthouse and the men who tended it. This spirit was known as the Phantom of the Seven Hunters, and no one could tell of its true nature, save that it wished nothing but ill towards the living.
The extremely lucky and the extremely unfortunate often have the privilege of being able to point to the precise moment when the course of their lives changed irrevocably, leading them along a path either to happiness or perdition. For me, that moment came when I read the letter a final time (noting the shallow puckering of the paper that could only have been the result of tears falling upon it), and decided that I would do as my friend’s wife had asked.
There and then, I resolved to go to Eilean Mòr and do whatever I could to discover the fate of James Ducat. And if the sea should take me in the attempt, so be it. And if something other than the sea should descend upon me and carry me towards God knew what fate, then likewise I would not flinch nor flee. Then again, if I should be forced to return with my hands and heart empty of any knowledge that could put Mary Ducat’s mind at rest, then at least I would know that I had made the effort.
I had a debt to repay, and I intended, by any means necessary, to repay it.
2
The Stolen Dream
I knew that the Northern Lighthouse Board would be looking for three men to replace the lost Lighthouse Keepers. Even now, there would be men stationed on Eilean Mòr, but they would almost certainly be tending the light in a temporary capacity only, until a new crew could be assigned. Realising that I had little time to lose, I packed some belongings into my battered old valise and left my house, bound for the Flannan Isles Shore Station in Breasclete.
The thirteen-mile journey took me almost directly west across the wild country of the Isle of Lewis, which is not really an island at all, but rather the northern two thirds of the largest of the Western Isles, and is joined by a mountainous tract of land with Harris to the south. As the horse and cart made their way across the green and ochre patchwork of crofts and untamed country, I turned over the contents of Mary Ducat’s letter again and again in my mind. The more I thought about it, the more foolhardy it seemed for me to try to discover the fate of her husband. The Northern Lighthouse Board would conduct its own investigation into the tragedy, probably with Robert Muirhead at the helm, and it seemed impossible that I would be able to contribute anything of use to his work.
And yet, I was bound by an oath of loyalty which was impossible to deny or ignore. Would Muirhead and the Lighthouse Board think me a fool? Should I even tell them of the real reason I intended to place myself at their disposal? Perhaps there would be no need, for this disaster must surely have left them short of qualified men to tend the Eilean Mòr light.
I was not a professional Lightkeeper; I was what is known as an Occasional, my main occupation being that of carpenter. But we Occasionals are not badly regarded by the fraternity of fulltime Lightkeepers, and we are more than glad to offer our services whenever we are needed to help with the tending of the lighthouses scattered across these latitudes.
The countryside passed by as I alternately gazed and dozed, lulled into a state of semi-awareness by the cart’s gentle rocking motion upon the uneven road. Hills rose in the distance on each side, dulled into shades of grey beneath a sky the colour of old milk. The wind moved invisibly among the hills as I passed Callanish, with its ancient standing stones that watched eternally over the land; it sighed and moaned, as if it were not wind at all but the unquiet souls of the dead. Perhaps it did carry their voices, along with those of stranger inhabitants of this timeless place.
Finally, I arrived at Breasclete, and from there it was a short if chilly walk through the smattering of village dwellings to the Flannan Isles Shore Station, which stood upon a low mound overlooking Loch Roag, the sea loch which offers sheltered mooring to the lighthouse tenders. Rising in the distance from its sullen waters, the island of Great Bernera appeared like the humped back of some immense, stranded whale.
The Shore Station was large and solidly built, a comforting sight, and as I walked up the footpath I could see lights in the windows. I knocked on the front door and waited.
Presently it was opened a crack, and the pale, unsmiling face of a child peered out at me. I recognised her immediately; she was Annabella, one of James Ducat’s children. I believe she was eight years old. ‘Hello, Annabella,’ I said, in as warm and friendly a manner as I was able. ‘Do you remember me?’
‘Of course I do,’ she replied. ‘You’re Mr Dalemore. You’re a friend of… of my father.’
A child’s grief is an awful thing to behold, and in Annabella’s wide, dark eyes I saw the desolation of her little world.
‘That’s right,’ I smiled. ‘I am a friend of your father’s. Do you think I might come inside for a while?’
She looked at me as if I had just said something in a strange foreign language. Just then, another voice drifted out from the hallway behind her: a woman’s voice which I also recognised instantly. ‘Who is it, Anna? Who’s there?’
The door opened wider, and Mary Ducat stood there. ‘Mr Dalemore,’ she whispered, and tears started to flow down her cheeks.
‘I read your letter this morning, Mrs Ducat, and I came immediately. I only wish that I could have come sooner, but…’
‘Come inside, Mr Dalemore,’ she interrupted in a voice that was surprisingly steady. It was the voice of one who has become used to weeping and speaking at the same time.
I stepped gratefully from the cold into the warm hallway. Now I was here, I couldn’t think of anything to say beyond the commonplace things that are always said at times such as this. ‘Mrs Ducat, I… I am so sorry…’
‘Take off your coat, do,’ she said, reaching up with trembling hands to help me. ‘Mr Muirhead is here.’ She carefully hung my coat on a peg by the door and then turned and gazed at me in silence for some moments, before whispering, ‘Thank you for coming, Mr Dalemore.’
She led me into the large, comfortable living room, one hand draped protectively on her daughter’s shoulder, before whispering something in Annabella’s ear about helping her sister in the kitchen. The child wandered off along the dark corridor like a little ghost.
A fire burned brightly in the hearth, partially obscured by a tall, tweed-clothed man who stood facing it with his back to the room, his broad shoulders hunched, his head bowed as if in deep contemplation.
‘Mr Muirhead,’ said Mary Ducat quietly. ‘Mr Dalemore is here…’
He turned from the fire and regarded me in silence for some moments, as if trying to recollect who I was, a slightly quizzical expression on his face.
Not knowing what else to do, I walked quickly across the room and held out my hand to him. After a slight hesitation, shook it. ‘Good of you to come, Mr Dalemore,’ he said in a voice deep and resonant with the sadness that had descended upon that house.
‘I was away for the festive season. I only got back to Stornoway this morning. I found a letter from Mrs Ducat waiting for me, telling of what has happened. I… I have come to offer my services as a relief Keeper.’
Muirhead nodded, regarding me with hooded eyes, and for a moment I wondered if he were trying to decide whether to believe me or not. Presently, he replied, ‘And you are most welcome, Mr Dalemore… Alec, isn’t it?’
I nodded, pleased that he had remembered my Christian name – but then Robert Muirhead was well respected by all the Lightkeepers and Occasionals for his devotion to his duty, and to the men in his care. For the first time I realised how utterly devastated he must be to lose three such men in one terrible instant.
‘Won’t you sit down, Mr Dalemore?’ said Mary Ducat, still standing by the door.
‘Yes,’ said Muirhead, ‘have a seat, laddie.’
Annabella came in with a large tray bearing a steaming teapot and cups, and she laid it on a table by one of the chairs. Her mother reached out and stroked her hair; the child gave her a weak, trembling smile before leaving the room again.
Muirhead made to pour the tea, but Mary hurried to the table, filling cups and handing them to us.
The Superintendent returned to his post by the fire and regarded me with furrowed brows. ‘Yes, you are most welcome, Alec,’ he repeated. ‘I hope Mary will forgive me if I set the facts before you. This horrible disaster has left the Board with a serious problem regarding manning. When the Hesperus discovered the… the situation on Eilean Mòr, Captain Harvie left Joseph Moore there, with three others.’
‘I know Joseph,’ I said. ‘He’s a good man, a sensitive sort.’
‘Aye,’ nodded Muirhead, ‘that he is. He was the relief Keeper; the tender was taking him to the island to replace Donald McArthur – an Occasional like yourself – who was doing duty for William Ross, who is on sick leave.’ Muirhead glanced at Mary, and I had the impression that he wished she would leave the room, so that she might be spared hearing this again. But Mary Ducat was strong, as are all the wives of Lightkeepers. She sat down by the fire and offered him a level gaze, her hands folded in her lap, a picture of dignity even in the depths of her grief.
Muirhead gave a barely audible sigh and continued. ‘When they found the Flannan light deserted, Moore knew that he must stay to maintain the place until a full relief crew could be assembled, but Captain Harvie knew that he couldn’t do it alone, so he asked three of his crew to keep the lad company and take their turns seeing to the equipment. They were seamen Archie Lamont and Archie Campbell, and the Buoymaster, Allan McDonald. They’re good men, but they’re not Lightkeepers like Moore; we need qualified men there as soon as possible. But now…’ He hesitated.
‘Now there is a shortage.’
He nodded. ‘Aye, there’s a shortage, which is why you’ve come not a moment too soon. We’ve one other Keeper on his way. We’re expecting him on the Hesperus shortly. He’s John Milne, Principal Keeper at Tiumpan Head; young Joseph will return to his position as Assistant as soon as Milne arrives on Eilean Mòr. But a third Keeper is needed, and Daniel McBride, who was to have gone, has met with an accident and broken his leg.’
