The Night Warden of Marrow Island – Part 1: The Rounds

The fort on Marrow Island had been built to hold smugglers. Its cells, cut into the seaward wall, still had their iron-studded doors. A narrow causeway joined it to the mainland at low tide and drowned at high, and the tour company that rented it out had left a handwritten note on the gatehouse table: The tide will be in from nine to five. Please enjoy your stay.

Thessaly stood on the gallery above the cells, looking down the long stone corridor, with her keys in one hand and a lantern in the other. She was forty-four, a harbour pilot with a voice like a foghorn and a genius for command. At the foot of the stair waited two men in their own clothes, each holding a small bag.

Cormac was thirty-six, a lifeboat engineer, broad and calm. Nye was forty, a yacht rigger, thin and wry. They were colleagues, and brothers in nothing but an unspoken wish that she had made them each put into words, separately, three weeks earlier.

At the gatehouse table, by the light of a single lamp, they had signed the Regulations. Two pages. No marks. Nothing painful beyond what each had written. No real humiliation, no photographs, no one else on the island. The cell doors had plain brass latches on the inside. Cormac's word was Slack Water. Nye's was Bearing. Hers was Harbour.

"Say your words."

"Slack Water."

"Bearing."

"If either of you says it, the Warden stands down for that man. I take off the coat, I sit with him, and there is tea."

"Yes, Warden."

"Not yet." She put on a long navy coat with a high collar and a peaked cap. When she looked down from the gallery again, her face was flat and her voice, low, level and absolute. "Prisoners. Up the stair. Walk in file. Do not speak."

They came up in single file, bags in hand, and she walked behind them down the stone corridor, her boots slow and measured. At the first cell she stopped.

"Cormac. In."

He went in. The door swung to with a hollow boom that rolled through the walls. He stood in the middle of the stone floor and listened to it fade, and put out a hand and found the latch, and his whole body sighed.

"Nye. Next cell."

She walked him ten paces further and closed his door. The corridor was quiet. The tide boomed against the foundations.

"You have been brought to Marrow Island," said Thessaly, through the grille, "for crimes against the Crown. You will serve one night. You will keep silence unless spoken to. You will obey the Warden."

"Yes, Warden," said two voices, one on each side of the wall.

"Are you content, Cormac?"

"Content, Warden."

"Are you content, Nye?"

"Content, Warden."

"Good," said the Warden. "The tide is rising."

Continue the story: Part 2 – Harbour.