The Keeper of the Light – Part 1: Storm Watch

The lighthouse stood on a black headland with the Atlantic breaking on the rocks below, and for two nights it was theirs. The tour company had gone home. The lamp turned, the gale rattled the lantern room, and a stove burned in the keeper's cottage at the foot of the tower.

Morwenna was forty-five, a harbour master with a voice that carried across a quay. Elliot was thirty-eight, a ferry engineer, gentle and strong, who had asked her, after a long storm watch last winter, whether she would be the one in charge for once.

In the cottage kitchen she laid a sheet of ship's paper on the table. His limits, hers, in a firm round hand: no marks, nothing painful, no real humiliation, nobody else. The word was Harbour.

"Say it."

"Harbour."

"If you say it, the Keeper goes home. I make tea."

"Yes, Keeper."

"Not yet." She pulled on an oilskin coat and a woollen cap, and her voice dropped, slow, weathered and absolutely level. "Assistant. The light has been neglected on your watch."

"I am sorry, Keeper."

"You will be." She led him up the iron spiral to the lamp room, where the great lens turned in its bath of light, throwing a white beam into the dark. "Stand here. Hands behind your back. You will look at the sea until I give you leave."

He stood. The wind howled. Spray hit the glass. She walked a slow circle round him with her hands in her pockets, not speaking, until he felt the whole storm settle in his chest.

"Are you content?" she asked.

"Content, Keeper."

"Good. The night is long."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Dawn Watch.