The Lightkeeper Read online

  “What’s wrong with starting here, I ask you that?”

  “What?” he sputtered. “I’ll tell you what. I didn’t ask you.”

  “Well!” She turned in a swirl of skirts and indignation. “Supper’s ready.”

  Despite his anger at having his house rearranged, Jesse was starving. Grimly he removed the jar of wildflowers from the table and whipped off the frilly table runner. He and Mary glared at each other.

  “Put it back,” she said between her teeth.

  “No,” he said simply.

  She glared at him for another moment, then sniffed as if he wasn’t worth the trouble. “Have it your way, then, bodach.”

  “What’s bodach?” he asked, stumbling over the foreign phrase.

  She sniffed again. “’Tis the Gaelic version of what you called me when you first saw the curtains.”

  Feeling curiously and inexplicably better, he washed up while she set out plates of salmon and potatoes and baked apples. There was an awkward pause while Mary gave thanks, then Jesse dug in ravenously.

  “I appreciate the supper,” he said after inhaling half the salmon. By way of apology, he added, “It’s delicious.”

  She studied him as she took a few bites of her meal. “Palina came to visit this morning. She said my leaving would be a mistake. Said it was the law of the sea that I should stay.”

  “Palina’s full of more sh—nonsense than a bull moose.”

  “You don’t believe in the legends of the sea?” A speculative gleam came into her eye. “You don’t believe in destiny?”

  “I don’t believe in anything at all.”

  “Ah, Jesse.” She smothered her baked apple with cream. “What happened to you? What made you like this?”

  Her question was a painful fist of intrusion. Damn the woman. “Palina probably gossiped enough for you to know.”

  “She said the sea took something away from you. That you’d have to tell me yourself. Was it someone you loved, Jesse? Did you lose someone in a boating accident? Or a—”

  “It’s none of your goddamned business.” His throat felt suddenly raw, and he slaked his thirst with a long pull from his mug of beer. “Tomorrow, Magnus will take you to town and see about finding a proper place to stay.”

  As if she hadn’t heard him, she gazed at the glass fishing float on the mantel. Tiny flames from the grate reflected on its underside. Mary smiled wanly. “You know, that’s surely the most extraordinary gift anyone’s ever given me.”

  “It was just to prove a point,” he said ungraciously.

  “Even so, thank you.” She pushed back from the table and carried her dishes to the sink. “I feel tired all of a sudden. I think I’ll go to bed.”

  She hadn’t really agreed with him about going to town, Jesse noticed uncomfortably. He watched her shuffle out of the kitchen and close the door to her bedroom. In the crack beneath the door, he could see her bare feet. He heard a soft thump as she leaned back against the door. He imagined he could hear her even softer sigh as she let out a long breath. He pictured her pressing against the door, her eyes closed, weariness pulling at her dainty Irish features.

  Well, why wouldn’t she be weary, after spending the day disrupting twelve years of solitude? And why in the world should he regret making her feel small and intrusive and useless?

  He should have felt a deep satisfaction in getting her to see reason at last. Instead, he felt as if he had just stepped on a puppy.

  * * *

  “What the hell are you still doing here?” Jesse said the next evening.

  Mary stood at the top of the yard where the path led to the lighthouse station. She had gone there to wait for him to finish his chores. He was on watch tonight and would have just a short time for his supper.

  “Yes. Still here,” she said, thrusting aside a feeling of guilt. She had to stay. He wouldn’t understand, but she had to.

  “Magnus was supposed to take you to Ilwaco,” Jesse said.

  She searched his face, trying to read what he was thinking. His eyes were sapphires encased in ice; his mouth was set. For the life of her, she couldn’t tell what was going on in the man’s head.

  “The road is blocked. We were on our way down in the buckboard, but we had to turn back. A great tree has fallen across the road.”

  And may the Lord God forgive me entirely, she thought. She herself had come across the storm-damaged tree that morning, had seen it leaning precariously. It had been a sin for certain to ask Erik to give it a few extra heaves until it fell across the roadway. But she couldn’t go to town. She couldn’t leave this place where she was safe and hidden.

  “Magnus said it was caused by the storm,” she explained, though she strongly suspected Magnus, too, was in on her deception. “The Russians were able to climb over and walk to the village, but Magnus wouldn’t hear of me doing so in my condition. He couldn’t get the buckboard or even the horses around the tree. It was an act of God, surely.”

  “I see.” Jesse started toward the house. “And did he spend the day clearing the road?”

  She followed him, taking two steps to each of his one. Lord, but the man had long legs. “Not exactly. He said you’d have to get some sawyers from town to cut the tree—that huge, it is. A Douglas fir.”

  Jesse stopped walking. “All right. Just tell me. What exactly were you and Magnus up to all day?”

  The sharp suspicion in his voice sounded ominous. “What makes you think we were up to anything?” she fired back.

  For the second time in as many days, she thought he was about to smile. But his lips merely tightened, and he reached out and ran a finger with surgical precision down her cheek. “Because, dear heart, your thoughts are as clear as a Japanese fishing float.”

  His touch was curiously compelling, though she was certain it wasn’t meant to be. “That transparent, am I?”

  “That transparent.”

  She grabbed his hand, holding it tightly so he couldn’t snatch it away. “You’ve found me out. Come, then. I’ll show you.”

  “I can hardly wait,” he grumbled.

  Sunlight made a dazzling display on the lawn as she drew him along the path. She could feel the tense reluctance in him, the way he leaned back and barely refrained from wrenching his hand out of hers. If he dug in his heels, she wouldn’t be surprised.

  “Someday I must tell you about Mulligan,” she said over her shoulder.

  “Who is Mulligan?”

  “The mule we had back in Kerry. So contrary Da used to threaten to use him for crab bait.” She gave Jesse’s arm a firm tug. “I just happened to think of him.”

  He walked next to her at a less recalcitrant pace. “I see.”

  She squeezed his hand. “I thought so.”

  A brisk wind swept the area. The budding leaves in the trees chimed like wild bells. Mary inhaled deeply of the air, redolent of the new, green season and the ever-present sea. “How lovely it is here,” she said. “Most especially now.”

  “Why now?”

  She brought him around a bend in the path, into the yard of the keeper’s house. “That’s why.”

  “Shit.” He stood there and stared at the front of the dwelling.

  “Perhaps you could be a little more stinting in your praise, Captain Morgan,” she said, trying not to feel the sting of his displeasure.

  “You planted flowers.”

  “Aye, that I did.”

  “Everywhere.”

  “Pretty much.”

  “I don’t like them. Take them out.”

  “No. Flowers are beautiful. Does it mean anything at all to you to have beauty in your life?”

  “No,” he said starkly.

  She flinched. “Then I feel sorry for you.” She was tempted to launch into a tirade, but she
stopped herself. A fit of temper would be no more than he expected. “I had a good day, Jesse. A lovely, magical day. Going out and getting the flowers from Palina’s place. The larkspur is so rich and blue, and the primroses look just like smiling faces. And I found the roses.”

  “Roses?” he choked out. He strode across the lawn and glared at a trim bush of tender, pink buds. “How the hell—”

  “They were here all along, but you never noticed. Never knew you had them. Someone must have planted them years ago, and then they were neglected.” She bent and patted the soft bark loam she had used to mulch the main flower bed. “Even neglected roses will struggle to survive, Jesse. These have been struggling for years in spite of your neglect.”

  She gazed thoughtfully at the colorful garden. Her hand caressed her growing stomach. “A rose belongs to the one who tends it. Not to the person who planted it and left long ago.”

  She heard his breath hitch as if he had taken a blow. For a moment, a heartbeat, the blink of an eye, a sharp and unexpected yearning suffused his face. She had found it at last. A chink in the armor.

  “I wonder why the roses kept struggling even though they were ignored,” she said. “It seems so much simpler to dry up and die.” She strolled between the beds Magnus had patiently dug, bending now and then to touch a shy blossom or tamp the dirt around the roots. “Roses tended with care will flourish—you watch. By the autumn, they’ll be rioting here.”

  “In the autumn,” he said softly, “they’ll be neglected again, because you won’t be here to tend them.”

  CHAPTER NINE

  Jesse wondered if Mary had guessed how close she had come to breaking him. Through the first hours of his night watch, he tried not to think, not to feel. But no matter how hard he worked to take his mind off Mary, the explosion of newly stirred emotion wouldn’t leave him alone.

  As she wouldn’t leave him alone.

  Devil take her. Devil take her and her infernal meddling. What was it about the woman? Why did she feel she had to dedicate herself personally to the wholesale disruption of his life? How much clearer could he be with her? How could he make her understand that there was no life for her here?

  He was an empty shell of a man. A hermit hiding out, and he wanted it that way. He had nothing to offer a woman like Mary Dare.

  Moving with the automatic precision of long habit, he went to the mezzanine level of the lighthouse and gave the equipment a grind. Every four hours, this had to be done. The machinery drove the movement of the light. With a pattern as regular as a heartbeat, the beam swung from horizon to horizon, all night long, every night.

  Often the light was the only thing that stood between ships at the bar and total disaster. The number of hulks and sunken vessels attested to its imperfections, but the treacherous shoals had caused fewer accidents since the lighthouse had been installed some twenty years earlier.

  Jesse was manic about keeping the beacon lit. Not once in his tenure had the lamp gone out or even blinked. Before he had taken over this post, the light had indeed gone out. Twelve years earlier, as the ship carrying Emily had attempted to cross the Columbia bar, the beacon had been extinguished. The loss of the light had caused the ship to run aground.

  There had been an investigation, of course. The lightkeeper in charge had been devastated, claiming a gentleman from Portland had given him too much to drink and challenged him to a friendly game of cards. Caught up in the whiskey and the gaming, the keeper had grown careless.

  The tragic consequences of that failure had driven Jesse to the remote bluff, where he served out a life sentence, determined never to waver in his duty. He imagined himself doing this for the rest of his days. Growing old and dying right here in these cramped quarters—but only after his turn at the watch was up.

  Moving like the ancient man he felt he was, he made his way to the tiny clerk’s desk in a cubbyhole of the mezzanine and turned up the flame of his lantern. He opened the station log, selected a pen from the shallow drawer of the desk and unscrewed the cap on the bottle of ink.

  As he opened the book, a stray breeze, sneaking in through a window, ruffled the pages. For a moment they all flipped past him, a bleak record of his days here, rustling like dead leaves tumbling along the ground.

  For some reason, the thought depressed Jesse more than he cared to admit. He had a fleeting urge to go out along the bluff for a walk, but he decided to stay in the tower. It was his last sanctuary since Mary had arrived. She had disordered every other aspect of his life. At least the lighthouse had been spared from her intrusion.

  “Yoo-hoo!”

  Jesse jumped so abruptly that ink sloshed out of the bottle, splashing over his hand in rivulets like black blood. “Damn, damn, damn,” he said between clenched teeth.

  “Are you there, Jesse?” a voice called brightly from the bottom of the stairs.

  “No.”

  Her laughter wafted up the tower like a stray wind. Then he heard the strange musical bong of her footsteps on the iron grille of the stairs. While the sound of her approach crescendoed, he muttered a string of curses under his breath, soaked a rag with linseed oil and scrubbed the ink from his hands.

  And from the surface of the desk.

  And from the planks that covered the floor.

  He didn’t even attempt to get the stain out of his pant leg.

  By the time her bright moppet’s head of curls appeared in the doorway to the mezzanine—the next to last room before the beacon room—he had stored up several choice invectives to hurl at her. But she smiled at him, and he forgot everything in the world. Everything except a promise she had made to him the day before.

  Someday, Jesse Morgan, you’ll kiss me back.

  Would today be the day? he wondered.

  “Hello, there,” she said. In the light of the lantern on the desk, she shone like a new copper penny. She set down a tin pail. “I brought you some refreshments.”

  Tired, that’s what Jesse was. Tired of fending off her relentless, cheerful, unapologetic intrusions. He decided, just for tonight, to surrender. It was less taxing than setting up a resistance.

  “Fine,” he said in quiet resignation.

  She froze in the act of taking out the teapot. “What did you say?”

  He took the can from her and set it on a small round table in the middle of the room. “I said, fine. Thank you. It’s quite...thoughtful of you.” The polite phrases tasted foreign on his tongue, like exotic fruit.

  She leaned very close to him. His instincts warned him to step away before she kissed him again, but she didn’t kiss him. She sniffed the air delicately.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “I wanted to see if you’ve been drinking.”

  “I don’t drink when I’m on watch. Why would you think I’d been drinking?”

  “Because you were nice to me. Polite. It’s simply not like you.”

  “Madam, you don’t know me well enough to know what I’m like.”

  She unwrapped a linen napkin to reveal still-warm slices of some sort of bread. A subtle smile curved her mouth. “Ah, but I do. I find ‘madam’ rather grand and to my taste, thank you very much. This is Irish soda bread. Have you ever tried it?”

  “No.”

  “It’s delicious with tea.” She fussed around the table, setting out the bread and pouring the tea. He simply sat back and let her. His impulse had been right. It took less energy to let her have her way. Resisting her was wearing him out. An unexpected feeling of contentment filled him as he sipped from his mug of tea. It was delicious—warm, undeniably strong and just a little sweet.

  Like Mary.

  He frowned into his mug, trying to rein in his thoughts, hoping she didn’t read him as well as he read her. She strolled around the tiny, octagonal room, inspecting the weather instruments. “
What is this one?” she inquired.

  “A self-registering patent thermometer. The temperature is fifty-two degrees Fahrenheit,” he said.

  “How does it know?”

  “The relative temperature of the air creates a pressure that pushes the liquid mercury up the glass tube.” He couldn’t help the patronizing note that crept into his voice. Surely weather and astronomical instruments lay far out of her range of knowledge.

  She touched her finger to the reservoir bulb in the bottom of the tube and watched as the line of mercury nudged upward. “Well, I think it’s magic.”

  “It’s science.”

  “Ah,” she said with a sage nod. “And is it science, too, that explains why the North Star isn’t perfectly north at all?” She pointed an old-fashioned sextant out the window and sighted Polaris. “Your compass gives one reading for north, but the star gives the other.”

  Chastened, he helped himself to a slice of soda bread. “The compass is drawn magnetically to a point that is not true north.”

  “A magnet, is it?”

  “A magnet, not magic.” He watched her put away the sextant. “Most people don’t even know there’s a difference.”

  “I think you’d be amazed at what I know, Captain Morgan.” She went up the ladder to the beacon room and stood with her nose pressed to the glass, looking out with a wonder expressed by every fiber of her being, from her eager palms on the window to the tense set of her shoulders.

  “It’s wonderful,” she said, her breath fogging the glass. “How can you stand to look at a sight so wonderful without bursting?”

  “I try to restrain myself,” he said.

  “See the way the beam swings, like a bird made of light, with shadows chasing in its wake.”

  “I suppose so.”

  She touched the door latch. “May I?”

  Since the wind was low and the night perfectly clear, he nodded. “Just hang on to the rail. It’s a long way down.”

  Eagerly she went outside, and again he went with her, telling himself he needed to keep a sharp eye and a restraining hand on her. She held the rail and looked out at black eternity. The breeze lifted her hair from her neck, and when the beam swung past, he could see how pale the skin was there, how delicate.