The Lightkeeper Read online

  #1 New York Times bestselling author Susan Wiggs sweeps readers away to the past in this classic tale of buried secrets and second chances.

  Jesse Morgan is a man hiding from the pain of his past, a man who has vowed never to give his heart again. Keeper of a remote lighthouse along a rocky and dangerous coast, he has locked himself away from everything but his bitter memories.

  Now, the sea has given him a second chance.

  A beautiful stranger washes ashore, the sole survivor of a shipwreck. Penniless and pregnant, Mary Dare is a woman who carries painful memories of her own.

  With laughter, hope and joy, Mary and her child bring light into the dark corners of Jesse's world. But when their friendship turns to passion and passion becomes love, secrets from the past threaten to take it all away.

  Originally published in 1997.

  THE LIGHTKEEPER

  SUSAN WIGGS

  CONTENTS

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  CHAPTER ONE

  Washington Territory

  1876

  On Sunday, something washed up on shore.

  The morning had dawned like all the others—a chill haze with the feeble sun behind it, iron-colored swells gathering muscle far offshore, then hurling themselves against the huddled sharp rocks of Cape Disappointment. The rising sun looked like a wound trying to break through the clouds.

  All this Jesse Morgan saw from the catwalk high on the lighthouse, where he had gone to extinguish the sperm-oil lamp and start the daily chore of trimming wicks and cleaning lenses.

  But it caught him, the sight down on the strand.

  He wasn’t certain what made him pause, turn, stare. He supposed he had always looked but rarely paid attention. If he gazed too long at the gray-bearded waves slapping the fine brown sand or exploding against the rocks, there was a danger that he would remember what the sea had taken from him.

  Most days, he didn’t look. Didn’t think. Didn’t feel.

  Today he felt a disturbance in the air, like the breath of an invisible stranger on the back of his neck. One moment he was getting out his linseed oil and polishing cloths; the next he was standing in the bitter wind. Watching.

  He experienced a sensation so subtle he would never quite understand what made him go to the iron rail, hold tight with one hand and lean out over the edge to look past the jut of land, beyond the square-jawed cliffs, down onto the storm-swept beach.

  A mass of seaweed. Strands of golden-brown kelp shrouding an elongated shape. For all he knew it could be no more than a tangle of weeds or perhaps a dead seal, an old one whose whiskers had whitened and whose teeth had dulled.

  Animals, unlike people, knew better than to live too long.

  As Jesse stood staring at the shape on the beach, he felt...something. A dull knife-twist of...what? Not pain. Nor interest.

  Inevitability. Destiny.

  Even as the foolish thought passed through his mind, his booted feet clattered down the iron spiral of stairs. He left the lighthouse and plunged along the flinty walkway.

  He didn’t have to watch his step as he followed the winding, rocky path to the desolate strand. He had made the short trek a thousand times and more.

  What surprised him was that he was running.

  Jesse Morgan had not been in a hurry for years.

  Yet his body had never forgotten the feeling of pumping thighs and of lungs filling until the sharpness hovered between pain and pleasure. But once he reached the object on the strand, he halted. Stock-still and afraid.

  Jesse Morgan had been afraid for a very long time, though no one ever would have guessed it.

  To the people of Ilwaco, to the two thousand souls who lived there year-round and the extra thousand or so who migrated to the shore for the summer, Jesse Morgan was as solid and rugged and uncompromising as the sea cliffs over which he brooded in his lighthouse.

  People thought him strong, fearless. He had fooled them, though. Fooled them all.

  He was only thirty-four, but he felt ancient.

  Now he stood alone, and the fear scorched him. He did not understand why. Until he saw something familiar within the heap of seaweed in front of him.

  Oh, God. Oh, sweet Jesus. He plunged to his knees, the chill of the sodden sand seeping through his trousers, his hands trying to decide, without consulting his head, where to start. He hesitated, awkward as a bridegroom on his wedding night, about to part the final veil that draped the sweet mystery of his bride.

  The strands of kelp were spongy and cold to the touch. Clinging thick and stubborn to— To what?

  He encountered a piece of fine-grained wood. Smoothed, planed, varnished. Part of a ship. A section of mast or bowsprit with rope lashed to it, the tarred ends trailing.

  Stop, he told himself, already anticipating what he would find. The old horror, still raw after all these years, reared up inside him.

  Stop now. He could stand and turn his back this moment, could climb the path, wend his way through the woods and rouse Palina and Magnus. Send the assistant lightkeepers to investigate.

  But his hands, still the eager, persistent hands of a bridegroom, kept digging and pulling at the slimy shroud, digging and pulling, finding more and more of the mast, the broken-off end, the— A foot. Bare. Cold as ice. The toenails like tiny seashells.

  He drew a harsh breath. His hands kept working, the movement frantic, a rhythm pumped by his own pounding heart.

  A slim calf. No, skinny. Skinny and dotted with freckles, stark against the lifeless ivory skin.

  Jesse was swearing through gritted teeth. Fluent phrases spat past a clenched jaw. He used to talk to God. Now he swore to no one in particular.

  Each passing second stood apart in time, crystallized by the knowledge he had been fleeing for years. He had come to the very ends of the earth to escape the past.

  He could not escape it. Couldn’t help thinking of it. Of what the sea had stolen from him.

  And of what the sea had brought him today. A woman, of course. That put the final twist of cruel irony on it.

  He quickly moved upward, uncovered the face. And almost wished he hadn’t, for when he saw her, he knew why he had felt so compelled to run.

  An angel had died on his beach this morning. Never mind that her halo was fashioned of kelp and endless tangled strands of dark red hair. Never mind the constellation of freckles scattered across her cheeks and nose.

  This face, this pale face with its lavender bow of lips, was the one sculpted by every artist who had ever tried to turn marble to poetry.
The face envisioned by hopeful dreamers who believed in miracles.

  But she was dead, back in the realm of angels where she belonged, where she never should have left in the first place.

  Jesse didn’t want to touch her, but his hands did. His idiot bridegroom’s hands. They took her by the shoulder and tugged gently, at the same time rolling the mast to which she was still tied. He saw her fully now, head to toe.

  She was pregnant.

  Rage charged like a thunderbolt through him. It was not enough that a beautiful young woman had been taken. But the sweet, round swell of her stomach, that dark mystery, that whispered promise, had been claimed, too. Two lives had been snuffed out by the merciless breath of the wind, by the wall-size waves, by the uncaring sea.

  This was the start, Jesse thought as he unbound the ropes and gathered her in his arms, of a journey he had no desire to undertake.

  The corpse flopped forward like a rag doll. A cold hand clutched at Jesse’s arm. He reared back, leaving her on the seeping brown sand.

  She moaned and coughed out seawater.

  Jesse Morgan, who rarely smiled, suddenly grinned from ear to ear. “I’ll be damned,” he said, ripping off his mackintosh. “You’re alive.”

  He settled the plaid wool coat around her shoulders and picked her up in his arms.

  “I’m...alive,” she echoed in the faintest of whispers. “I suppose,” she added, her head drooping forward, “that’s something.”

  She spoke no more, but began to shiver violently, uncontrollably. She felt like a large fish in its death throes, and it was all Jesse could do to keep from dropping her.

  Yet even as he bore his burden up the impossibly steep slope, running faster than he’d ever run in his life, he knew with stone-cold dread that this day had brought something new, something extraordinary, something endlessly fascinating and frightening, into his world.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Panic rushed over him in huge, nauseating waves. Why him? Why now? He held her very life in his hands, yet saving a stranger and her unborn child was the last thing he was prepared to do.

  At the same time, he knew he must rescue her. Twelve years ago, he had dedicated his life to watching over the shoals and keeping the light burning. He had taken an oath as head lightkeeper. He had no choice. No choice.

  He ran swiftly, mounting the sinuous path toward the station, then racing down the other side of the promontory and into the woods where the lightkeeper’s house was located. The dead weight of her dragged at him. He took the steps two at a time, pounded across the porch, shoved the door open with his shoulder.

  Plunging into the dimness of the quiet house, he brought the woman to a room off the kitchen and deposited her on the bed. The mattress was musty with disuse, the ticking worn and yellowed. He plundered a tall cabinet, finding a few old quilts and a tattersall blanket that had seen better days.

  He covered the woman. She didn’t stir. He tried to get her to drink something—water, whiskey—but the liquid merely trickled over the sides of her mouth and down her neck. She was out cold.

  He rushed to the porch to ring the big brass bell, summoning Magnus Jonsson and his wife Palina from their bungalow a quarter mile down the woodland path. He stirred the banked coals in the kitchen stove and filled a kettle with water, setting it on to boil. Then, bracing himself for the task ahead, he returned to the woman.

  He had to get the wet dress off her. Had to touch her. Gingerly, he lifted the layers of blankets. His hand shook a little as he brushed aside a sodden strand of hair and found the top button of her dress.

  The act of disrobing a woman felt alien to Jesse. Yet at the same time, it seemed unbearably familiar, as if he were that bridegroom once again.

  He set his jaw and undid the row of buttons. She lay unconscious, oblivious to his clumsy manipulations as he peeled off one sleeve, then the other, rolling the flimsy wool garment over her arms and legs, dropping it on the floor.

  Beneath it she wore a simple shift that had once been white. Her breasts and belly stood out in pale relief against the thin fabric. With his teeth tightly clenched, he forced himself to honor her modesty and cover her, working the shift off by touch alone. Yet he didn’t need his eyes to detect her graceful curves, the smooth texture of her skin.

  Her skin was dangerously cool.

  In his blind haste, he tore the shift as he finished dragging it down the length of her. He added it to the pile on the floor, tucked the blankets more securely around her and stood up.

  He was shaking from head to foot.

  Back in the kitchen, he filled canteens and bottles with hot water and placed them around her, insulated by the blankets. That done, he leaned against the rough-timbered wall of the room and closed his eyes briefly. Finished. That phase, at least, was over. The difficult part lay ahead.

  The lightkeeper’s house was less a home than a refuge. The one-and-a-half-story dwelling, embraced by a towering forest, had been enough for Jesse, who needed little except to survive from one moment to the next. Yet now, with the light spilling through an east-facing window and slanting across the unmoving form on the bed, the house felt small, cramped. Dingy, even.

  The birth-and-death room off the kitchen was designed with the idea that a patient lying abed should be close at hand, where the heart of the house beat the strongest. In all the years Jesse had lived here, no one had occupied this room, this bed.

  Until now.

  She lay unmoving beneath the blankets and quilts. Her face was pale and serene. Her dark red hair fanned out in untidy hanks, stiffened by salt. She held one perfect hand tucked beneath her chin. Her delicate eyelids were webbed with faint blue lines.

  I’m alive. I suppose that’s something.

  The words she had uttered so quietly on the beach whispered through his mind. He had thought he detected an accent of sorts, a lilting inflection that was hard to place. She hadn’t opened her eyes.

  He caught himself wondering what color they were.

  “Who are you?” he whispered, his voice harsh. “Who the hell are you?”

  She was Sleeping Beauty from the fairy tale. Her bed should be a sunlit arbor entwined with roses, not a crude bedstead with a sagging mattress. She should awaken to Prince Charming, not to Jesse Kane Morgan.

  He forced himself to turn away. It hurt to look at her, the way it hurt to look directly into the sun on a summer day. Better for all concerned if she were simply whisked away, still unconscious, never knowing who had pulled her from the sea.

  Yet he had an urge to sink to his knees beside the woman, to grab her by the shoulders and plead with her to live, live.

  He began to pace, wondering what was keeping the Jonssons. Trying to shove aside a jolt of urgency, Jesse observed his house through new eyes, trying to see it as a stranger would. Sturdy pine furniture, hand-hewn. A plain wag-on-the-wall clock, its long pendulum measuring the moments with unrelenting reliability. The shutters were open to the morning. Palina had offered to make curtains, but Jesse had no use for frills.

  The longest wall in the keeping room was lined with books. Novels by Dumas, Flaubert, Dickens. Essays and stories by Emerson, Thoreau. When Jesse left the world behind, the only possessions he’d brought along were his books. He read constantly, voraciously, escaping into worlds of make-believe. In the early years, after the tragedy had first happened, he had clung to the books like a lifeline. The babbling voices of fictional characters had blocked out the howl of emptiness that
screamed through his mind. The books kept him from going insane.

  Lined up neatly on shelves in the kitchen, jars and cans and crocks were stacked by height so he always knew where his supplies were. The Acme Royal stove had been well maintained, blacked over and over again throughout the years he had been here.

  The years he tried his best not to count.

  Impatience drove him out to the porch to ring the bell again. He gave the rope pull a quick jerk, but he needn’t have. He could hear Magnus and Palina coming.

  Their voices took on a hushed quality in the strange green wilderness that surrounded the Cape Disappointment Lighthouse Station. The forest floor was paved with layers of brown needles, cushioning their footfalls. They spoke in their native Icelandic, animatedly, like old friends who had just met again after a long separation.

  It never ceased to amaze Jesse, the way they found constant interest and delight in one another, even after some thirty years of marriage. They had a grown son, Erik, who was simple but beloved of his parents. Strong as a young bullock, Erik spent his days working in contented silence around the station.

  The Jonssons appeared around a bend in the forest path. The morning sun, filtered through lofty boughs of the soaring cedar and Sitka spruce trees, was kind to their aging faces, giving them a soft glow as they smiled, lifted their hands in greeting and hurried toward him.

  Magnus Jonsson had a fisherman’s deep chest and broad shoulders, the result of decades spent hauling nets and cranking winches. He had retired after an injury had taken his left hand. When most men would have lain down in defeat and died, Magnus had willed himself to heal.

  Beside her adored and adoring husband, Palina looked dainty, though she was as sturdy as any pioneer in the prime of life. She had bright eyes and prominent teeth, and in her face there was an unexpected depth that hinted at a keen, quiet intelligence and a vivid imagination.

  “Good day, Jesse,” she said, a light singsong in her voice. “And look at the fine morning Odin has given us.” She encompassed the small clearing with a sweep of her arm, showing off her bright orange shawl. On the slope below, the horse pasture shone in the radiance of the sun.