Joe arranged his now-wet coat over the near end of the engine instead, where it would catch the heat, and kept his back to the man.
‘It’s a strange place. When they first built the tower,’ the man said, in a careful way that sketched out forgiveness, ‘there were all sorts of stories. If you looked from the land, you could see the men building it. If you looked from the sea, the works looked like ruins.’ He brushed Joe’s elbow to say he was dressed again. Even out of the water, there was something foreign about him and his clear precise English, which wasn’t Scottish, or the Londres pidgin, or the bracken violent kind they spoke at the stations north of York. His voice was young; in fact, he was much younger than he looked, Joe realised, closer to thirty than forty.
‘You’ve seen it too?’ Joe said, absurdly grateful. ‘I thought I was going mad. No one in town would tell me about it.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it plenty,’ the man said, cutting his eyes to one side with a kind of wry tolerance. ‘They’ve nothing better to do in town than be mysterious.’
Joe laughed, and felt far safer than he had an hour ago.
Once they had eaten – salmon, no less, from the cold stores – Joe gave him a tour, ending in the lamp room. The man came in slowly and hesitated in the doorway, skittish at the noise of the carbon rods. Joe showed him how they worked. The man looked into the screaming purple light without narrowing his eyes. The noise plainly didn’t stop bothering him, although he said nothing about it, so they went back downstairs and played cards in the little living room, propped against the pipes that ran hot from the furnace. He lost good-naturedly and paid his losses in old money, English gold from a button-down pocket of his wet clothes, which were steaming now, draped over the broadest pipe. Joe stared at it and then pushed it back over the table.
‘I can’t take that. That’s fifty francs’ worth of gold, I—’
‘Not here it’s not,’ the man said gently. He slid it back to Joe. Two of his fingers had been broken and set improperly; he couldn’t move them as much as he should have been able to. ‘Just take it. Use francs here and you’ll be lynched. I prefer not to be.’ He didn’t have to show his teeth before the scars around his eyes made it clear he was on his way to smiling. ‘I’m putting you to a lot of trouble, anyway.’
‘There’s nowhere else you can be. The sea isn’t frozen enough to walk on properly yet. What do you expect to do, fly?’
The man opened his shoulders and cast a ball of awareness between them that he knew he looked like a thug and that he wouldn’t have blamed Joe for yelling and shoving him back into the sea. ‘Even so.’
Joe hesitated, because neither of them had introduced themselves yet, and he had an uncomfortable sense that this was not the kind of place where you pulled a mystery man from the sea and just trusted that he was going to be a nice person. There was something about him that wasn’t right. You didn’t get that many scars, and that much strength, from making a living as a stonemason or a bricklayer.
Joe felt very aware of his own voice, and how French he must sound. Lynched if you use francs. He thought of how urgent the sailor had been on the way here, when he slung Joe’s money away before the Saints fighter could see.
Joe hadn’t seen a ship nearby, even from the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view from the tower. It was hard to hide like that unless you were trying to hide, surely.
‘I don’t mean to sound – but are you from the Saints? Because if you’ve got business round here, I’m not – I don’t want any trouble.’
‘The Saints?’ The man sounded honestly mystified, but it couldn’t have been honest. No one would really have thought it was an odd thing to ask. ‘No.’ But he didn’t say what he was. He was watching Joe with some attention now. His eyes were green, very light. They made him look wolfish.
Joe swallowed. It must have been the isolation of the lighthouse and the ghostly feeling of lifting someone unexplained from the sea, but he had not clocked, before, that it might have been more dangerous to take a man like this inside than leave him in the water. ‘As I say, whatever you’re doing round here, it’s none of my business. I’m just the lighthouse keeper.’
‘I know. I’m not … going to hurt you.’ The man seemed finally to understand. ‘We were smuggling sugar, that’s all. We were on our way out of the harbour when the lamp here came on. It made the helmsman jump, he knocked the tiller, we spun, I fell like an idiot into the rip.’ He was making himself smaller, Joe realised; he didn’t like the idea that he’d frightened anyone. His hands were clamped together in his lap.
The words sounded old in a way that Joe’s own English didn’t. ‘Rip?’
‘A fast current. They’re dangerous, you can’t swim against them.’
‘Oh,’ said Joe. Then he laughed, feeling silly. ‘Right. Sugar – I saw you, when you brought it in. And today, on the beach.’
‘Well-known income supplement round here,’ the man said tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure Joe was ready for a joke yet.
Joe smiled. ‘Well, sorry for that little burst of hysteria. I’m Joe. It’s nice to meet you. I should have said that before.’
The man’s eyes ticked up again, not for long. ‘Kite.’ He didn’t say if it was his first or last name, and Joe couldn’t tell; north of the border, people had strange names, from old clans or kings no one had heard of any more. ‘Can I ask how you ended up being a lighthouse keeper on a rock that’s nearly in the Arctic?’
‘I didn’t end up, I applied,’ Joe said. He paused. He had been going to say something bland about it just being his job, but he had a peculiar urge to be honest. ‘I, um … long story, but I lost my memory a couple of years ago. Epilepsy seizure. And then someone sent me a postcard, of this lighthouse. It was mad; it had been held at the post office for a hundred years, and this place wasn’t even built then, but it had my name on it. It must be a hoax, but I don’t know why. I’ve got it here.’ He pulled it from his pocket and handed it over. He must have sounded a lot less casual about it than he’d hoped, because Kite took it in the way he might have touched someone else’s rosary. ‘It’s signed M, and I … sort of remember a woman called Madeline. I think she was my wife. So I hunted out the engine workshop that made the parts for this place. Started work there. Then a week ago we got a message to say there was a fault here, so I volunteered. I wanted to see … well, if any of it seemed familiar. So here I am.’
‘And does it? Seem familiar.’ Kite gave the postcard back as carefully as he had taken it. He had studied it front and back, even the postmark, his expression neutral. He was kind enough not to snort, or to agree that it had to be a hoax.
‘Sort of,’ Joe said wryly. ‘I feel like I’ve been around here before. But epilepsy gives you raging déjà vu.’
Kite nodded slowly, still neutral. It was, Joe saw now, the breakable neutrality people aimed at the very ancient or the nascently lunatic.
‘You’ve got the only mad lighthouse keeper in Scotland,’ Joe said, wishing he hadn’t said anything. He could feel himself going red with exactly the same boiling shame he’d had at the engine workshop. All he had to do to cope with the epilepsy was not run after strangers or blurt out random bollocks. It shouldn’t have been this difficult.