The Lightkeeper

“Is she?”

Palina nodded, smoothing her hands down the front of her white apron. “With plenty of attention and care, she and the little one will be just fine.”

He almost flinched at the mention of the baby, but he forced himself to remain stoic, emotionless. “We can use the flatbed cart to get her to your place,” he said.

“No,” said Palina.

“Then I’ll carry her—”

“Not so fast, my friend.” Magnus held up his good hand. “The woman is not coming with us.”

“Of course she is. Where else—”

“Here,” Palina said with brisk finality. “Right here, where she can heal and grow strong in the care of the man who found her. The man for whom the gift was intended.”

“We must be practical,” Magnus added. “You have plenty of space here. We have but two cramped rooms and a loft for Erik.”

Jesse forced out a dry bark of laughter. “That’s impossible. I don’t even keep a dog, for chrissakes. I can’t keep a—a—”

“Woman,” Palina said. “A woman who is with child. Can you not even say it? Can you not even speak the truth when it is right here before you?”

Panic flickered to life inside Jesse. The Jonssons were serious. They actually expected him to keep this stranger. Not just keep her, but tend to her every need, nurture and heal her.

“She’s not staying.” He tried to keep the edge out of his voice. “If you won’t tend her, I’ll take her to town.”

Magnus spoke in Icelandic to his wife, who nodded sagely and touched her neat kerchief. “Moving her would be a terrible risk after the shock she has suffered.”

“But—” Jesse clamped his mouth shut until his jaw ached. He pinched the bridge of his nose hard as if trying to squeeze out a simple solution. If Palina was right, and something terrible befell the woman as a result of moving her, he would feel responsible.

Again. Always.

“It is the law of the sea,” Magnus said, running his weathered right hand through his bushy hair. “God has given her to you.”

They stood together on the tiled hearth in front of the massive black stove, Palina absently tugging at a thread on Magnus’s empty white sleeve. Yet her gaze never left Jesse’s, and he saw again a spark of faith, ancient and obstinate, in the depths of her eyes.

Faith.

“I don’t believe in the old sea legends,” he said. “Never have.”

“It does not matter what you believe. It is still true,” Magnus said.

Palina set her hands on her hips. “There are things that come to us from beyond eternity, things we have no right to question. This is one of them.”

Every aching fiber that made up Jesse Morgan leaped and tensed in painful denial. He would not, could not, accept this stranger into his house, into his world.

“She can’t stay.” Fear turned his voice to a whiplash of anger. “I can’t give her anything. Can’t give her help or hope or healing. There’s nothing here for her, don’t you understand that? She’d stand a better chance in hell.”

The words were out before he realized what he was saying. They came from the poisoned darkness inside him, and they rang with undeniable truth.

Magnus and Palina exchanged a glance and some low words. Then Palina tilted her head to one side. “You will do what you must for the sake of this woman. This child.” Her eyes sharpened with insight. “Twelve years ago, the sea took from you everything you held dear.” Her words dropped heavily into the silence. “Now, perhaps, it has given something back.”

The couple left the house. Jesse had no doubt that Palina was aware of what she had just done. She had breached the bounds of their association. In twelve years, no one—no one—had dared to speak to him of what had happened. That was the way he had coped—by not speaking of something that lived with him through each breath he took.

He stalked out to the porch. “Get back here, goddammit!” he yelled across the yard. He had never yelled at these people, never sworn at them. But their stubborn refusal to help him set off his temper. “Get the hell back here and help me with this—this—”

Palina turned to him as she reached the bend in the path. “Woman is the word you want, Jesse. A woman who is with child.”

“Can you believe this, D’Artagnan?” Jesse asked in annoyance. He dismounted and tethered his horse to the hitch rail in front of the Ilwaco Mercantile. “The Jonssons think I have to keep that infernal woman because of some legend of the sea. I never heard of such a damned cockamamy thing. It’s about as crazy as—”

“As talking to your horse?” asked someone on the boardwalk behind Jesse.

He turned, already feeling a scowl settle between his brows. “D’Artagnan gets skittish in town, Judson.”

Judson Espy, the harbormaster, folded his arms across his chest, rocked back on his heels and nodded solemnly. “I’d be skittish, too, if you named me after some Frenchy.”

“D’Artagnan is the hero of The Three Musketeers.”

Judson looked blank.

“It’s a novel.”

“Uh-huh. Well, if the poor nag is so damned nervous, you ought to let me take him off your hands.”

“You’ve been trying to buy this horse for ten years.”

“And you’ve been saying no for ten years.”

“I’m surprised you haven’t caught on yet.” Jesse skimmed his hand across the gelding’s muscular neck. D’Artagnan had come into his life at a low point, when he had just about decided to give up…on everything. A Chinook trader had sold him the half-wild yearling, and Jesse had raised it to be the best horse the territory had ever seen. Over the years, he’d added three more to the herd at the lighthouse station—Athos, Porthos and Aramis completed the cast of the Musketeers.

He joined Judson on the walkway. Their boots clumped as the two men passed the mercantile. As stately as a river barge, the widow Hestia Swann came out of the shop. Touching a bonnet that was more flower arrangement than hat, she lifted a gloved hand with a tiny wisp of handkerchief pinched between her thumb and forefinger.

“Hello, Mr. Espy. And Mr. Morgan. This is a surprise.” She hung back, keeping a polite distance.

Jesse didn’t take offense. He was a stranger to most of these people, even after twelve years. He didn’t blame them for being wary of him.

“Mrs. Swann,” he said, lifting his oiled-canvas hat.

A smile forced its way across her lips. Famous for her social pretensions, Mrs. Swann was unfailingly cordial to him—because of his family in Portland.

As if that mattered anymore.

“How do, ma’am?” Judson said. Jesse started to edge away.

She waved the handkerchief limply at her face. “Not so well, Mr. Espy, but bless you for asking. Ever since Sherman was lost at sea, I’ve been suffering from melancholia. It’s been two years, but it feels like an eternity.”

“Sorry to hear that, ma’am. You take care, now.” Judson turned to Jesse as they started walking again. “What’s this about you keeping a woman at your house?”

He’d raised his voice deliberately; Jesse was sure of it. Hestia Swann, who had been heading for her Studebaker buggy in the road, stopped and stiffened as if someone had rammed a broomstick up the back of her dress. With a loud creaking of whalebone corsets, she turned and bore down on them.

“What?” she demanded. “Mr. Morgan’s got a woman at the lightkeeper’s house?”

Judson nodded. Mischief gleamed in his eye. “Ay-uh. That’s what he said. I just heard him telling his horse.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake. Why would he be talking to his horse?”

“Because he’s Jesse Morgan.”

“And he’s not deaf,” Jesse said in irritation.

“You hush up,” snapped Mrs. Swann. “This is serious business, keeping a woman—”

“I’m not keeping her—”

“Ah! So there is a woman!” Mrs. Swann exclaimed.

“What’s that?” Abner Cobb came out of the mercantile, his apron clanking with its load of penny nails and brass tacks.

Jesse fought an urge to jump on D’Artagnan and head for the hills to the south of town.

“Jesse Morgan is keeping a woman at his house,” Hestia Swann announced in her most tattle-sharp voice.

Grinning, Abner thumped Jesse on the back. “’Bout time, I’d say. You haven’t had female company since we’ve known you.”

“She’s not company,” Jesse said, but no one heard him. A babble of voices rose as others came out to the boardwalk to hear about this extraordinary development at the lighthouse station. Abner’s wife joined them, closely followed by Bert Palais, editor of the Ilwaco Journal.

“Where’d she come from?” Bert asked, scribbling notes on a sheet of foolscap.

“I found her on—”

“Oh, I imagine the big city,” Mrs. Swann proclaimed, her prominent bosom rising and falling with self-importance. “Isn’t that right, Mr. Morgan?”

“Actually, she—”

“Perhaps she was someone he knew in Portland,” the widow decided, then nodded in agreement with her own deduction while a few more people joined the group. “Yes, that’s it. Jesse is one of the Morgans of Portland.” She leaned over Bert’s shoulder. “His family owns the Shoalwater Bay Company. They have connections well down into San Francisco, did you know that?”

“Of course I know that,” the newspaper editor said. Not to be outdone, he added, “Mr. and Mrs. Horatio Morgan left in April for a grand tour of Europe.”

“I remember reading about that big society wedding a few years back,” Mrs. Cobb remarked. “Annabelle Morgan and Granger Clapp, was it?”

Hestia’s chin bobbed like a wattle as she vigorously agreed. “Jesse’s sister. It was the wedding of the decade, to hear people talk. Now, I wonder, is this woman a friend of Ann—”

Jesse didn’t stay to hear more. He walked away, feeling like a carcass being picked clean by buzzards. Ordinarily, he did his business in town in a perfunctory fashion and got out, attracting as little attention as possible. No one except Judson, who hurried to catch up with him, seemed to notice that he had broken from the crowd.

“Much obliged,” Jesse said through his teeth. He turned down an alleyway off Main Street.

“Where’re you going?” Judson asked.

“To get Doc MacEwan.”

“The woman needs a doctor?”

“Uh-huh.”

“So, she sick or something?”

“Or something.”

Judson scowled in frustration. “Well, what the hell is it, then?”

“She’s pregnant.”

Judson struck himself on the forehead and stumbled back. “Well, I’ll be. You devil, you, Jesse—”

“And if you breathe a goddamned word of this,” Jesse warned him, “I’ll—”

He was too late. Judson was already running back around the corner. “Hey, everybody!” he bellowed to the crowd on the boardwalk. “Guess what?”

Jesse took hold of the brass handle on the door to the doctor’s surgery. He stood for a moment, wondering what had happened to his quiet, isolated existence. Then he thumped his brow against the door once, twice, three times.

It didn’t help.

Dr. MacEwan reveled in being a source of constant controversy. A proponent of radical medical ideas garnered from a fancy eastern college, the physician was aggressive, compassionate, outspoken and undeniably skilled.

Still, many in the close-knit community of Ilwaco regarded Dr. Fiona MacEwan with deep suspicion. Perhaps that was why Jesse felt a vaguely pleasant kinship with her.

He waited in his kitchen while Fiona examined the stranger from the sea. Despite a trying morning in town, Jesse let himself relax a little. By threatening the harbormaster with a large fist, he’d finally managed to get his point across. He told Judson to check his records for a ship that was due in the area. Before long, they would know the identity of the woman.

And now the doctor was here. In just a short time, Dr. MacEwan would take the stranger off his hands and his life would return to normal.

To normal. To its normal hellish loneliness.

Jesse gritted his teeth against feeling, because feeling had been his downfall. This lonely life, his exile, was his fate.

He looked out the broad front window of the house. The days were growing reasonably long, so he didn’t have to worry about getting the light burning for several more hours.

Then the solitary vigil of night would begin.

Hearing a step behind him, he turned to see Dr. MacEwan coming out of the birth-and-death room. Fiona had a broad face and hands that were as sturdy and work-worn as any farm wife’s. She wore her thick, graying hair in a haphazard bun held in place by a pencil or a knitting needle or whatever happened to be at hand. Today it looked as if the object of choice was a crochet hook.

“Well?” Jesse asked.

“She’s semiconscious.”

“What does that mean?”

“Drifting in and out of sleep.” Fiona removed her stethoscope, placing it in its black velvet pouch. “Did you notice she’s wearing no wedding ring?”

“Not everyone wears one.”

“It opens some interesting possibilities,” she said. “She could be a widow—”

“Or a fallen woman.” It was easier to think the worst of her.

“Why is it always the woman who falls?” Fiona mused. “And not the man?”

“For all we know, he’s fallen into the sea, so she’s better off than he is.”

“True.” Fiona lifted her immaculate white pinafore over her head and took her time folding it. “I got her to drink some water and use the necessary. But she’s endured a terrible trauma and is still in danger.”

“Is she…hurt in any way?” Jesse told himself he was asking because he wanted her well and out of his life. The sooner the better.

“I think her collarbone is bruised, so you’ll have to be careful with that.”

“I’ll have to be careful?” A familiar dread crept like a spider across Jesse’s chest.

“Yes. It seems tender there.” Without asking permission, Fiona went to the larder and helped herself to a finger of brandy from his bottle on the shelf. “The right side.”

“Seems to me you should be talking to the people she’ll be staying with.” Even as he spoke, Jesse felt a thump of suspicion in his gut.

Fiona tossed back the brandy, closing her eyes while a look of pleasure suffused her strong, handsome face. Then she opened her eyes. “She’s staying right here. With you. Jesse, you saved her. She’s your responsibility.”

“No.” He strode to the kitchen, slapped his hands on the table and leaned across it, glaring at the doctor. “Damn it, Fiona, I won’t have—”

“You won’t have,” she mocked. “It’s always about you, isn’t it, Jesse Morgan? You see everything in terms of yourself.”

“How else am I supposed to see it?”

“In terms of that poor creature in there, you great thickheaded lout!” Fiona sloshed more brandy into her glass. “I said she has no visible injuries other than minor bruises and abrasions. But that doesn’t mean we can drag her from pillar to post, man. She’s in a bad way, and don’t fool yourself that she’s not.”

“You have to take her away.” His voice was a low rasp in his throat.

“I’ll do nothing of the sort.”

“She can’t stay.”

“You kept that Mexican sailor for six weeks last year.”

“That was different.” Jesse had rescued the sailor from a lifeboat in the surf. “He slept in the barn, and he was able to send a telegraph for help.”

“And he didn’t speak English,” Fiona said as if it were Jesse’s fault. “So he didn’t intrude on your solitude.”

“Since when has it been a crime to want solitude?”

“It’s a crime when you put someone in danger because you’re afraid of having her under your roof.”

The accusation chilled Jesse’s blood. “That was a goddamned low blow, Fiona.”

She sipped her brandy. “I know. I learned to fight dirty back in medical college. And I’ve never been beaten. Certainly not by such a creature as a man.”

Jesse shoved himself back from the table. “What about her reputation? She’s probably a decent, God-fearing person. Mrs. Swann’s probably spreading lies about her all over town. It’s not right for a woman to live under the same roof as a man she’s not married to.”

“Once I explain to everyone the condition she’s in, only the smallest of minds will dare to think there’s anything improper going on.”

“You have enormous faith in your fellow man,” Jesse said. “They’ll flay her alive with their gossip.”

“Since when does Jesse Morgan care about gossip?” Fiona asked, finishing her brandy and fastening the clasp on her large brown leather bag. “I’ll stop in to see how she’s doing. If she tries to talk, find out where her family is, how we can contact them.”

Jesse followed her to the door. “Don’t do this, Fiona. Don’t leave her with me.”

He could almost hear the snap as her patience broke. She glared at him, her eyes bright with outrage. “You’ll keep this woman safe, Jesse Morgan, and you’ll help her get well, I swear you will. She’s pregnant, in case you hadn’t noticed.”

“I noticed.”

“Pregnancy is always a risky proposition, even for a woman who hasn’t suffered a major trauma. If she lost her family in the shipwreck, then the baby will be all she has left. It’s only right that we do everything we can to make sure she carries the infant to term, which, unless I miss my guess will be four months from now.”

After she was gone, Jesse stood for a long time listening to the wag-on-the-wall clock ticking away the moments. And in the room off the kitchen, the beautiful stranger slept on.

Three

Darkness. The rasp of her own breathing. Images and flashes of things that had come before. The face of a stranger. The feel of strong arms around her.

The ball of shame in her belly that she couldn’t help loving.

It was the thought of the baby that brought her to full wakefulness. Beneath her, the bed was surprisingly soft, a welcome luxury after the cramped discomfort of the ship.

What’ve we here, then? A stowaway? I’ll have to report this bit of baggage to the skipper.

Shuddering from the memory, she blinked slowly until she could make out vague, dark shapes in the room. The small square of a window with the shutters drawn. A washstand and sea chest. A tall piece of furniture, a cupboard of some sort.

A strong but pleasant smell hung in the air. Lye soap, perhaps. And coffee, though it had not been made recently.

Safe. She felt safe here. She had no idea where “here” was, but she sensed something vital in the atmosphere that protected and insulated her. Safe at last. Anywhere felt safe compared to the place she had fled.

As soon as the thought crossed her mind, she ducked from it. She wasn’t ready to think about that yet. She must not. Perhaps there was a way for her never to think about the past again.

Her hand curled over the gentle swell of her belly. No. There was no chance of forgetting.

“Hello?” she whispered into the darkness.

No answer. Just a low, constant growl of sound in the distance.

Gingerly she lifted the covers, wincing at a pain in her shoulder. She was wearing a gown of some fine stuff—thick cotton flannel such as she would have welcomed as a girl, shivering in her loft above the family cottage and wishing the peat fire gave off better heat.

Feeling the way with her hands, she moved along the wall toward the door, which was slightly ajar. A splinter of rough wood pierced her hand, but she barely flinched. After all she had been through, a splinter was hardly cause for notice.

In contrast to the door, the floor was worn smooth as if by years of pacing. She paused in the doorway, trying to get her bearings.

It was the sea she heard, the throaty basso call of waves on the shore. She had lived by the sea all of her life, and it was a good, strong sound to her ears. Even the shipwreck had not soured that pleasure for her, the sense that, no matter what happened, the sea never ceased, the sound never died.

Faint heat emanated from a huge iron stove that dominated the kitchen. The room gave access to a larger area, a keeping room or parlor. She creaked open the door of the stove so the embers would give her some light. A warm orange glow painted the sturdy furnishings and a narrow stairway. She went up the flight of stairs and looked through an open door. Within the shadow shrouds, she could make out a large tester bed, its four posters stark and bony in the dimness.

The bed was empty.

What sort of place was this?

Though each movement caused a wave of dizziness, she felt the need to press on, to answer the questions swirling in her mind. Unsteady on her feet, she descended the stairs, stepped outside and found herself standing on a veranda with a railing around the front.

The waves boomed as loud and rhythmic as a heartbeat. High clouds glowed in the distance, and a strange light silvered their underbellies so that they resembled fat salmon swimming through the sky.

That light. She shook her head and grasped the porch rail, feeling nauseous. Her injured shoulder throbbed. She spied a small outhouse fronted by lilac bushes. The necessary room? Yes. She was glad to have found that. As she stumbled across the lawn, the ground felt chill and damp beneath her bare feet. When she finished and made her way back, she noticed that the grass had been cropped or scythed.

Again the silvery light drew her. Slowly, she made her way up a slope covered by spongy grass to the top of the yard. Beyond a thick stand of towering trees, a stately silhouette stood out against the night sky. That was it, then. A lighthouse.

A memory drifted back to her. The sickening lurch of the ship’s hull on the shoal. The groan and crash of boards breaking apart. A seaman shouting raw-throated at her, tossing her a rope. The solidity of a mast or yardarm bobbing free of the wreck, floating. She had used the rope to secure herself. She recalled looking up, scanning the horizon.

As the sea swallowed the four-master—Blind Chance, it was called—like a hungry serpent, making a great slurping sound, she had spied the light. She’d known it wasn’t a star, for it lay too low on the horizon. She had followed the light, kicking toward it for hours, it seemed. The water, though cold, was bearable. With a rhythm as faithful as music, the rotating beacon had drawn her closer and closer: a long, thoughtful blink followed by a second or two of darkness.

When dawn tinged the sky, exhaustion had overcome her. The last image in her conscious mind had been that light. She remembered thinking that it was rather lovely for one’s last vision on earth.

Now she stood amazed that she had survived.

But what of her rescuer?

She wondered if she should go and find him. She stood in the shadow of a huge tree, feeling the moist springy earth beneath her feet and trying to decide.

It was then that she saw him.

Her first impulse was to run and hide, but surely that wasn’t necessary. Surely he couldn’t see her.

He stood on the skeletal iron catwalk and faced out to sea. She could tell that his hair was long, for when the light rotated to the left it illuminated a dark, windblown tangle. There was something about the way he stood that caught at her. He kept his hands crammed in his pockets and his shoulders hunched as if it were cold.

But it wasn’t cold. Cool, perhaps, but a lovely night.

There was a stillness about him. As if he were carved in stone, as immovable as the tower upon which he stood. It was eerie the way the light passed over him as it swung in one direction, then the other.

The light moved, but he didn’t.

She watched for what seemed like a long time. But she, not the stranger, was the first to move. Fatigued, she returned slowly to the house and crawled back into bed. She barely made it; she was weaker than she thought.

In moments, she was falling asleep again. Falling asleep and, for the first time in too long, unafraid.

It was time to bid the night farewell.

Jesse always savored the endless moments between dark and dawn. The smells of damp earth and evergreen mingled in the air. The cormorants, nesting in the cliffs, released their distant, plaintive calls. It was a gray, nothing period of time when all the world fell still. Night was gone and a new day was coming. But for now he was alone.