‘Surely lighthouse keeping and mechanical work are quite different.’
‘No, sir. All lighthouse keepers are qualified to maintain and repair lighthouse engines, and all of M. de Méritens’ mechanics are qualified lighthouse keepers.’
‘Why aren’t they sending someone local, then? There must be qualified people in Glasgow.’
‘I’m cheaper.’
‘Why’s that?’
‘I’m a freedman, not a citizen. I’m on minimum wage.’
It went on and on, for another three hours and well after he’d lost any hope of getting through. There had been a man who was meant to meet him on the other side, with onward passage arranged on a ship up to the islands, but it was hard to imagine he would have waited so long. The questions stopped and they left Joe alone in the little room. The dark came down and the powerful searchlights came on. He saw one of them swing to the right. Then gunshots. He tried not to think about it.
A new trainload of people arrived. Doctors; the checkpoint soldiers let them straight through. They must have been going to the regiments fighting further east. He watched the train pull away, back to Glasgow. In another twenty minutes, the station was silent and empty again.
Joe sank forward against his arms on the table edge and shut his eyes. The lights were too bright. He saw greenish stars behind his eyelids. Carefully, he reconstructed the image of the man waiting for him by the sea. It had some borrowed calm in it.
He wished the Sidgwicks hadn’t told him it might have been real. The thought that the man had been there, really there, only to be lost now, hurt much more than imagining he was just a thing Joe’s misfiring brain had made for itself. Madeline too. But he couldn’t picture her any more.
A younger soldier opened the door. Joe pulled his sleeve over his eyes. The shift must have changed; the man was much more junior than the original officer.
‘You’re staying overnight for more questioning. Come with me.’
Joe felt sick. ‘I have to go. Please. I’m going to lose my job if I don’t get to this lighthouse.’
‘Not my problem,’ the young man said.
Joe pulled out half the money he had for the rest of the whole three months. ‘I’m not trying to say I have no respect for your position, I do. I wouldn’t ask you for anything like this without paying properly.’
The young man looked happy and Joe realised, feeling stupid, that he had been waiting for an offer. ‘All right. I’ll shoot you if you breathe a word to the colonel.’
‘I understand.’
He let Joe take his bag back, then showed him along a dull corridor, to a small door. When he opened it, the lights in the checkpoints were behind them.
Joe dipped his head. ‘Thank you, sir.’
The young man nodded, trying and failing to hide how pleased he was to be called sir by someone twice his age, stamped Joe’s papers, and closed the door again.
Even with the stamp on his papers, it was difficult to walk the stretch of unpaved no-man’s-land between the two borders. A searchlight followed him all the way, throwing his shadow on to the frosted mud in front of him. His spine turned to glass. The night was so quiet that he heard the squeal of the searchlight’s base whenever the soldier behind it moved it to follow his path. He was afraid to breathe, in case he missed the clack of the machine-gun pin.
The Scottish checkpoint was nothing but a wooden hut. Above it loomed a guard tower made mostly of scaffolding. A woman, silhouetted, sat at the top with her arms resting on an old Gatling gun. Joe handed over his stamped papers silently. He could still feel the French machine gun pointing at the back of his neck. The searchlight beamed straight on to them.
‘You’re French,’ the checkpoint guard said, in English. He was having to hold his hand up to block out the light.
‘No, I’m from Londres.’
The man snorted, and glanced at de Méritens’ letter. ‘I don’t speak French.’
Joe translated it. He wished the soldiers on the French side would turn off the searchlight.
‘Ah, the lighthouse,’ the guard said, suddenly cheerful. ‘McGregor! Your man’s here.’
McGregor was the name of the man who was meant to meet him.
McGregor ducked out from the little back room in a haze of smoke and brandy fumes. Before the door creaked shut, Joe saw a slice of what was inside: people sitting on the floor playing cards. McGregor was still holding a drink. It was in a jam jar. He nodded, not as if he had been held up for an unexpectedly long time, and motioned Joe to follow him to where a cart and a sleepy horse waited.
The harbour wasn’t far away. When they arrived, the sea was shushing and the whaling steamer on which Joe’s passage was booked wasn’t even set to sail for another two hours. No one seemed to think he was late and it was only little by little that he understood they hadn’t expected him to get through quickly, and that it was always going to take three hours and a bribe. He couldn’t understand their English well enough to ask why no one had told him that when they’d arranged it all over the telegraph. Maybe it was common knowledge.
He wasn’t the last on to the boat. A young woman came just after him with a gun slung over her shoulder and a tartan scarf. The whalers, all heavyset, gave her a wide berth and anxious looks. One of them pushed Joe into the tiny cabin they’d given him and he jolted backward, but the whaler held up his hands.
‘I’m not trying to hurt you. Are you carrying francs?’ he said urgently. Joe only caught what he said on the second time round.
‘Francs, yes—’
‘Give them to me.’
‘What?’
‘We need to get rid of them, she can’t catch you with francs. Now!’
Joe gave him the diminished roll of notes, fast. He thought he was just being robbed, but the second he had them, the whaler slung them over the side and came back looking shaken, like it wasn’t money he’d thrown away but a live grenade.
‘Why did you—’
‘Shut up!’ the whaler hissed.
The young woman with the tartan scarf glanced at him and the whaler nodded, too polite. When the whaler saw Joe watching bewildered from the doorway, he leaned on the door and whispered to keep inside till after they had dropped the woman off at Fort William.
Joe stayed on the edge of the bunk for a long time, rattled. But he was too tired to demand a different ship now, and eventually he sank back into a dead sleep that lasted, inevitably, only until four in the morning, when he read by candlelight for an hour and a half before he slept again, this time all the way to Lewis and Harris.
Part II
THE LIGHTHOUSE
8
The Outer Hebrides, 1900
The Eilean Mòr lighthouse wasn’t on the coast, but on a tiny spray of islands ten miles from the nearest harbour, shrouded in rain. It was a gaunt tower that rose from the natural slope of the rocks like a whale rib. Even from a distance it looked like it was falling to ruin.
One of the lamp windows was smashed, a colony of white birds hopping in and out. Joe saw it more clearly as they came closer. Greenish streaks stained the side that faced the incoming tide. The steps were worn and barnacled. They plunged right into the sea, and the mooring hoops that should have been around the landing quay had been lost underwater.