The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter

“What’s that you’re reading?” she asks, leaning forward and peering at the cover. “Instructions to Light Keepers. Never heard of it.”

“You wouldn’t have. It’s a family heirloom. Of sorts.” It is, in fact, an ancient volume which explains the operation of lighthouses in great and very boring detail. Passed down to me with the locket, it has idled in a drawer for years, the tell-tale freckles of age quietly multiplying on the unturned pages.

Mrs. O’Driscoll makes an unpleasant sucking noise with her humbug. “Well, I suppose life would be fierce dull if we all liked the same things.” She takes a copy of Gone with the Wind from her own bag. “Scarlett O’Hara. Now there’s a woman to take your mind off a long sea crossing.” She chuckles to herself and opens the book at her marked page, instantly engrossed.

I turn my book over in my hands. The spine is cracked. The embossed title faded. Instructions to Light Keepers. By authority of Trinity House and the light-house board. While the subject of the book has never interested me, the inscriptions inside hold a particular fascination: For dear Sarah. So that you might know. Grace and beneath that, written in a different hand, For my darling Matilda. From Mummy. x Below these inscriptions, several other names record the various recipients of the book over the generations.

To discover there’d been another Matilda in the family had enchanted me. As a child I’d often imagined her, talking to her in my games of make-believe until she became real. When a great aunt had secretively explained that this other Matilda was my great-great-granny Sarah’s daughter, tragically lost in a shipwreck with her brother, I grieved for her as if she were my sister. In a way, she’d become the sister I never had, the playmate I’d never laughed with or whispered secrets to. With so much of my childhood spent alone, and so much of my life having always felt strangely untethered, I found something comforting in the permanence of the book and locket. I’d brought the book with me not because I wanted to read it, but because its freckled old pages somehow anchored me to my past in a way other parts of my life never had. Something once owned by my great-great-grandmother and part of my family’s past, helps me face the uncertain future I am sailing toward.

The transfer across the harbor is mercifully short. As the tender turns around the end of Spike Island I look away from the buildings of the British soldiers’ garrison, refusing to dwell on the murky memories it provokes. I focus instead on the great transatlantic liner that looms dead ahead. My stomach lurches at the sight of it.

Mrs. O’Driscoll stands up, smoothing her coat with a brisk flick of her wrists. “Fierce big, isn’t she. Twice the height of Carrauntoohil if she stood on end. Plenty of space to lose me in, that’s for sure.” There is an almost playful look in her eyes as she unexpectedly takes my hand and squeezes it tight. “You may feel as though you’re making this trip on your own, Matilda, but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”

Her words strike an unexpected blow to my determination to dislike her. Growing up without sisters or brothers, andwith a mother who couldn’t care less what I was doing as long as I wasn’t bothering her, being alone is what I’m used to, and yet I’ve always felt it shouldn’t be. A sense of having lost something follows me like a second shadow, but like my granny when she walks into a room and can’t remember why, I can never quite grasp what it is I’m looking for. Standing here with Mrs. O’Driscoll’s warm hand in mine, I’m suddenly tired of being alone. I stare up at the enormous vessel, blinking away the tears that blur my vision.

“Come along so,” Mrs. O’Driscoll chirps, passing me a handkerchief without so much as a “dry your eyes now.” “We’ve a ship to board, young lady.”

With everyone aboard, the anchor raised, and the engines churning the water far below, three sharp blasts of the whistle signal our departure and we slip peacefully away with a gentle sigh carried in the ship’s wake. We soon pass the Old Head of Kinsale, the proud lighthouse sending us on our way, the endless Atlantic Ocean stretching out before us. I stand at the railing and watch Ireland, my home, disappear behind a light sea mist.

“I’m a little tired, Mrs. O’Driscoll,” I say. “I think I’ll take a nap before dinner.”

She studies me carefully. “Hmm. You do look a little peaky all the same. It might take a few days to find your sea legs. Best have a rest. We’ve an awful long way to go before we see Lady Liberty.”

Lady Liberty. New York. I can hardly believe I will soon see the famous soaring skyscrapers. I’m not as excited to see them as I’d always imagined I would be. The sight of them will signal the start of nothing short of a prison sentence.

I lie down on the bed in our cabin, trying to ignore the increasing sway of the ship as I map out the journey ahead in my mind. From New York I will travel to Providence, Rhode Island, and then on to Newport, to stay with Harriet Flaherty, a distant relative who was triumphantly rediscovered like a forgotten family heirloom as it dawned on my parents that Harriet offered the perfect solution to their problem. Their problem. Not mine. I wasn’t part of their discussions and plans, but I heard enough—Mother’s voice, shrill as a tin whistle; Father’s, turf-thick with quiet disappointment—to understand that Harriet Flaherty was something of a black sheep, so I suppose I will have that in common with her, at least.

The decision made, Mother had related the arrangements to me as if I were a maid being instructed to prepare the guest room. “You’ll stay with Harriet until the child arrives. She’ll help with doctors and appointments and those things. The child will remain in America—your Father will make arrangements—you’ll come home, and we need never speak of it again.” Like a tumor, the unfortunate little creature will be lanced from me, and we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief and carry on as if nothing ever happened.

She made it all sound so simple. Too simple. I wonder at what point her neat little plan will start to unravel.

DESPITE MRS. O’DRISCOLL’S certainty that I’ll find my sea legs, I don’t. Three days into our journey I still spend hours every day hanging over the railings, reproducing my breakfast like a cheap circus act, the locket swinging like a clock pendulum at my neck, ticking away the interminable hours as the ship plunges on and my stomach heaves in endless protest. In this way, the days pass until Ireland becomes a full stop at the end of a long paragraph, impossibly small and far away, and still we don’t reach America.

The farther the distance from home and the greater my sickness, the more I come to depend on Mrs. O’Driscoll. Far from being irritated by her, I am soon grateful for her patient concern, not to mention her endless supply of handkerchiefs and humbugs and reviving tonics. The truth is that in the brief time we’ve spent together, Mrs. O’Driscoll has already acted more like a mother to me than Constance Emmerson has in nineteen years.

I thank her as she helps me away from the railings once again. “I’d be lost without you, Mrs. O’Driscoll. Or lost overboard, more like.”

She bats my gratitude away, but the blush to her cheeks belies her appreciation. “You hush now with all that sentimental nonsense.”

But despite her words, she throws her arms around me and I press my face into the collar of her turf-scented coat, surprised to find that she isn’t as stiff and starchy as I’d imagined. She holds on to me a good while, and I am happy to let her.

“Now, come and sit down,” she says, “and get your breath back. You’re as pale as milk.”

She takes the crook of my arm and leads me, like an invalid, to a deck chair where she tucks a blanket around my knees and tells a passing maid to fetch sweet tea and smelling salts, and to be quick about it because the girl is awful seasick, so she is. I pick at a loose thread on the royal blue blanket and smile to myself, admiring her no-nonsense efficiency.

The maid promptly returns with a silver teapot and the ship’s best china. Mrs. O’Driscoll pours two amber-colored cups of tea, adding two lumps of sugar to mine. She sits with me until I drink it all and the color starts to return to my cheeks.

She places a floury old hand on mine and looks at me. “A few more days, and you’ll be back on dry land and the swaying will stop.” Her gaze drops knowingly to my stomach. “The other sickness will pass, too. You should be over the worst of it soon enough.”

I clatter my spoon around my empty cup and bite my lip. “You know?”

“Of course I know.”

“Did my mother …”

“She never said a word. Didn’t have to. You’ve that look about you, and besides, those sudden American holidays with long-lost relatives? They’re never that straightforward.” Although I’m embarrassed, I’m relieved that she knows; relieved to drop the charade. “I don’t need to be knowing the ins and outs of it all,” she adds. “But I thought you might be glad of a bit of advice all the same.”

I think about my mother’s refusal to talk, how she closed up like the Venus flytraps in her hothouse whenever I broached the subject of what to expect in the months ahead. I’m so used to not talking about it, I don’t quite know what to say. “Were you as sick as this?” I ask tentatively, sipping my tea as I feel myself slowly coming back to life.

“Suffered dreadfully on both my little ones. But it passes, and then …” She drifts off into some distant place of happy memories.

“And then?” For all that I don’t want to accept my condition or know what happens next, a curious part of me does want to know. Very much.

Mrs. O’Driscoll looks me full in the face. Her pinched little eyes sprout an unexpected flurry of tears. “And then your cheeks grow as round as peaches and your hair feels like gossamer silk. Your skin shines like porcelain and you feel as if all the goodness in the world belongs to you. It’s a miracle.”

I stare into my teacup, ashamed to remember how exceptionally un-miraculous this child’s conception was. Forbidden from courting Dan Harrington, the only boy I’d ever cared for but who wasn’t considered good enough for me, I’d decided to show my mother how much worse my choice could have been. A British soldier, a Protestant, was the worst possible man for me to be with, so I went to the bars where I knew the soldiers garrisoned on Spike Island went when they came into town. Except a bit of harmless flirtation, intended to get back to my mother, developed into far more than I’d bargained for. I wonder what Dan Harrington would think if he knew the real reason for my trip to America. I doubt he’d care. It hadn’t taken him long to fall out of love with me and in love with Niamh Hegarty, just like all the boys did, sooner or later.

“No matter how it happens,” Mrs. O’Driscoll continues, as if she can read my thoughts, “it’s still a miracle. When you feel that first flutter of life … there’s nothing like it.”

I stir my spoon around my cup, watching the whirlpools in the liquid. “Were you ever afraid?”

“Oh, yes. Of course! Fear is perfectly normal.” She pats my knee. “Plenty of courage will see you through. It won’t be easy, but it won’t be the end of the world either.” She straightens the blanket across her knees. “You never know, Matilda. Going to America. The child. It might even be the making of you.”

We talk for a long while that afternoon, Mrs. O’Driscoll glad of the opportunity to reminisce about her children as I hungrily devour her wisdom and experience, realizing how starved I am of any real knowledge about what lies ahead. By the time we sit down together for dinner that evening, I’m sorry to have wasted my first few days with her in sulky disregard. There are only two days left of our journey. Suddenly, it doesn’t seem nearly long enough.

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