The Lighthouse Keeper's Daughter

• Chapter 1: The Salt and the Stone
• Chapter 2: Echoes in the Fog
• Chapter 3: The Fury of the Nor'easter
• Chapter 4: Cast Upon the Rocks
• Chapter 5: Breath in the Shadows
• Chapter 6: Unspoken Names
• Chapter 7: Tending the Flame
• Chapter 8: Fragments of Memory
• Chapter 9: The Language of Silence
• Chapter 10: Storm Glass and Sea Glass
• Chapter 11: Footprints in the Shingle
• Chapter 12: Whispers in the Gallery
• Chapter 13: The Tide's Return
• Chapter 14: Tangled Ropes
• Chapter 15: A Hidden Truth
• Chapter 16: Between Two Shores
• Chapter 17: The Watch at Midnight
• Chapter 18: Currents of the Heart
• Chapter 19: Secrets in the Driftwood
• Chapter 20: Shadows on the Mainland
• Chapter 21: The Threat of the Gale
• Chapter 22: Anchored
• Chapter 23: The Beacon's Call
• Chapter 24: A Choice in the Tempest
• Chapter 25: Cleared Skies
• Chapter 26: The Guiding Light

The wind off Penobscot Bay had teeth, even in late September. It carried the sting of brine, pulverized granite, and the faint, bitter scent of dying bladderwrack stranded above the high-water line.

Eileen Moore hitched the galvanized tin pail higher onto her hip, leaning her weight into the northeasterly gust that tried to peel her wool shawl straight off her shoulders. The granite stairs leading down to the cistern were slick with sea spray, worn smooth by sixty years of government boots and three generations of Moores who had spent their lives making sure boats didn't shatter against the spine of Gull Rock.

Her father, Thomas, had laid the lower courses of the steps himself when he was appointed head keeper under President Lincoln. Now, Thomas was buried beneath six feet of dry gravel behind the chapel on the mainland, dead three months of a congested lung and a heart that simply gave out midway through hauling a barrel of lard up from the skiff.

Eileen stopped at the threshold of the fog-bell shed, her breath puffing white against the slate-colored horizon. Across the six-mile reach of gray chop, the mainland was reduced to a smudge of spruce and distant, mocking woodsmoke. Out here, there were only the stones, the screeching gulls, and the white brick column that rose eighty-two feet into the sky like an accusing finger.

The Lighthouse Board had not yet officially confirmed her appointment, though she had sent three letters to the district inspector in Portland via the mail dory. The replies—when they came at all—were curt, stamped with official seals, and signed by clerks who had never smelled lamp-oil soot or scraped guano from an air vent in twenty-knot gales. Miss Moore, the last dispatch had read, a replacement will be posted upon the arrival of the tender Iris before the onset of the winter freeze. In the interim, you are directed to keep the light burning, for which the customary assistant's stipend of three hundred dollars per annum shall be disbursed.

"Customary assistant's stipend," she muttered to the salt air, setting the pail down on the bench with a tinny clatter. "While doing the head keeper’s work."

She kicked the fog-bell house door shut behind her, cutting off the teeth of the wind. Inside, the heavy brass clockwork mechanism stood silent, coiled like a brass spring, waiting for the mists that invariably crept off the Labrador Current to shroud the entrance to the bay. She inspected the counterweights, checked the cable for fraying, and wiped down the gears with an oily rag. The smell of sperm oil, tallow, and iron was comfortingly thick. It smelled like work. It smelled like every day she had known since she was seven years old, running up the spiral staircase with tins of tripoli powder to polish the brass astragals.

Work had its uses. It left no space for the hollow ache in her ribs that had opened up the night her father had died, his hand going limp in hers while the lamp in the tower overhead sputtered in an easterly squall.

She wiped her grease-stained fingers on her coarse apron, picked up her bucket, and headed back outside toward the tower. The keeper’s cottage was attached to the light by a covered granite walkway, a necessity designed to keep a keeper from being swept into the boiling surf during winter gales. It was forty paces from the kitchen door to the base of the tower stairs.

Inside the lantern room, seventy feet above the surging tide, the world narrowed to glass, brass, and fire. The heart of Gull Rock Light was a third-order Fresnel lens, manufactured by Henry-Lepaute in Paris, its brass framework holding concentric rings of hand-ground prisms that bent the yellow flame of the central wick into a piercing, white beam visible eighteen nautical miles out to sea.

It was an exquisite machine, and a relentless tyrant.

Eileen set down her tools, slipped off her heavy sea-boots, and stepped onto the clean duck-canvas runners she kept on the lantern room floor. Even a grain of coarse sand ground underfoot could scratch the pristine prisms. She took up a dry chamois cloth and began her afternoon ritual.

First came the sweeps: wiping the interior of the sixteen flat plate-glass storm panes that shielded the lens from the elements. Moisture condensed constantly against the glass, driven by the heat of the central lamp fighting the cold Atlantic air outside. If left alone, it would freeze into a blinding rime of frost come November. Next came the prisms themselves. Each glass rib had to be rubbed until it squeaked, clear of every trace of soot, every rogue fly that had managed to bake itself against the brass framework during the warm noon hours.

She moved with an efficiency bred of habit. Up on the wooden stool, down again to shift its position, her shoulder blades working beneath her flannel bodice. Her reddish-brown hair, escaping its pins, fell into her eyes; she blew it aside impatiently with a short puff of air.

"Steady on, old girl," she murmured, patting the cold brass support of the pedestal. "We have an easterly brewing, if the barque off the shoals was any judge."

She glanced through the south-facing pane. Three miles off, running reefed sails before a stiffening breeze, a two-masted schooner was beating hard toward Rockland. The sky behind it was the color of a bruised plum, flat and swollen with water. The barometer in the watchroom had dropped two tenths of an inch since breakfast. A proper autumn nor'easter was building down in the Gulf of Maine, gathering strength over the warm water before throwing itself against the cold spine of the coast.

It was four in the afternoon. Sunset would come just after six, but the gray light was already failing under the belly of the oncoming clouds.

She descended to the watchroom, one level below the lantern, to trim the wicks. She selected three spare burners from the tin cabinet, using a pair of curved scissors to snip the charred black cotton from the edges in a smooth, gentle curve. A ragged wick produced a ragged flame, which generated smoke, which fouled the prisms, which weakened the beam. In the service, an uneven wick was considered a moral failing; her father had treated an off-center wick as a personal insult from the manufacturer.

"Keep the line straight, Ellie," he used to tell her, tapping the shears against her knuckle. "A ship’s master doesn't care if you have a headache or a broken heart. He only cares if the light is bright enough to keep his keel off the granite."

"I know, Father," she said aloud, her voice sounding small against the muffled thrum of the wind vibrating through the iron tie-rods of the tower.

She set the trimmed burner into the reservoir, poured a measured pint of winter-strain lard oil into the feed tube, and checked the draft dampers. Everything was in order. It was always in order. A woman keeping a light had to be twice as clean, twice as vigilant, and twice as silent as any man holding a commission from the Treasury Department. If she let the flame falter so much as once, the inspector would have her off the rock on the next tide, her few trunks loaded into the tender's dory while some retired boatswain's mate from Boston took over her kitchen, her garden, and her father’s chair.

She couldn't leave Gull Rock. There was nowhere on the mainland for a thirty-year-old spinster with callused palms and an unladylike knowledge of mechanics to go, except into the domestic service of some cousin in Bath, or into the cold charity of the town poor-ward. Here, at least, the stone under her feet belonged to her duties, if not her name.

She descended the eighty-four spiral cast-iron steps, their hollow ringing keeping time with her descent. At the bottom, she stepped into the covered way and through the door into the keeper's cottage.

The kitchen was cold. The fire in the black iron cookstove had dwindled to red cinders beneath a layer of gray ash. Eileen knelt on the braided rag rug, poked up the coals with an iron rod, and tossed in two split lengths of birch from the woodbox. She pumped an inch of water into the kettle from the small indoor hand pump connected to the cistern, set it over the direct heat of the eye, and rubbed her hands over the warmth that soon began to radiate from the stovetop.

A solitary place, the kitchen. A drop-leaf pine table, two chairs—one of which sat perpetually pushed against the wainscoting, unused—a cupboard with a meager half-dozen blue-and-white transferware plates, and a wall clock that ticked with a slow, heavy clack-whir that could drive a nervous person to distraction.

Eileen was not nervous. She had learned long ago that loneliness was like damp salt: you simply lived with it, learned to shake it out before using it, and never let it ruin the soup.

While she waited for the kettle, she went to the small sea-chest under the window where the station logbook was kept. She opened the calfskin ledger, dipped an iron-nib pen into the inkpot, and neatly printed the day's entry:

September 28, 1878.
Wind NE, freshening to Force 6 by mid-afternoon. Heavy swell running from the south. Barometer 29.80 and falling. Sky overcast, visibility six miles. Cleaned third-order lens, wiped storm panes. Fog bell mechanism wound and checked. Schooner passed south, running for Rockland, 3:30 P.M. Supply tender overdue eight days. Miss E. Moore on duty.

She blotted the page with fine beach sand, tipped the grains back into the wooden shaker, and closed the book.

The tea was weak and tasted faintly of the iron pipes of the cistern, but it was hot. She took a hunk of hard ship’s biscuit, spread it with salt butter from the crock in the pantry, and ate standing by the kitchen window, watching the sea turn from lead to slate, and then to an oily, impenetrable black. The whitecaps were rising now, flashing like the bared teeth of a hound against the darkening water. The gale was coming in fast, bringing the tide with it, funneling the vast weight of the Atlantic into the narrow guts between the islands.

She had work to do before the dark completely swallowed the day.

Wrapping herself in her father’s heavy oilskin coat—it smelled of tobacco, linseed oil, and forty years of salt fog, swallowing her frame until the sleeves had to be doubled back twice over her wrists—she stepped out into the yard.

The wind nearly took her off her balance. It came screaming across the low scrub of the island, whistling through the wire stays that anchored the stovepipes. Gull Rock was barely four acres in extent, shaped like a sleeping turtle: a hump of barren pink-gray granite with a pocket of thin, peat-like soil in its center where her meager vegetable patch struggled against the brine.

She checked the latch on the chicken coop, tossing a handful of cracked corn to the six brown hens that huddled inside, ruffled and miserable. She secured the chain on the dory hoisted high on the patent slipway above the spray line; a loose boat in an easterly meant being cut off from the world until next spring.

As she rounded the corner of the oil-house, a spray of cold saltwater blew clear over the western headland, twenty feet above the tide line, and slapped her across the face. She wiped her eyes with the greasy hem of her cuff, tasting the sharp, metallic tang of deep water.

"Blow, then," she shouted into the rising roar. The sound of her own voice was instantly whipped away, swallowed by the drumming of the surf against the outer ledge.

The sky had shut down completely. It was five minutes past five, nearly dark already under the smothering belly of the cloud deck. It was time.

She made her way back into the tower, closing and barring the thick iron door behind her, dropping the heavy latch into its keeper. The sound of the wind muted to a deep, resonant rumble, like the sound of an organ pipe played four octaves below hearing, vibrating through the massive granite blocks straight into the marrow of her bones.

She took her brass tin of matches, a clean cloth, and climbed.

Eighty-four steps. Her breath was even; her thighs had carried this weight up these steps ten thousand times. Up through the storeroom, up through the watchroom, up the short, steep iron ladder into the glass cage of the lantern itself.

The wind here was magnificent and terrifying. The iron dome overhead groaned against the gale. Outside, the world was gone, erased into a swirl of spitting rain and flying foam.

She pulled the matches from her pocket, struck one against the underside of the brass railing, and cupped the tiny, fragile yellow spark inside her curved palm. She opened the glass door of the lamp enclosure, slipped the match inside, and touched the wick.

The cotton caught with a faint fiss, a blue circle of fire leaping around the edge of the circular burner before blossoming into a rich, golden crown. Eileen adjusted the draft wheel until the flame climbed three inches, solid and white, without throwing a whisker of smoke. She closed the draft door, watched the light catch the first prism, then the second, until the entire lens exploded into radiant, blinding geometry.

A shaft of pure white brilliance shot out into the howling dark, slicing through the spray, touching the crests of the black rollers that surged toward the ledge.

The light was lit. The watch had begun.

Eileen stepped back onto the duck-canvas runner, folded her hands into the deep pockets of the oilskin coat, and watched the beam slowly turn, steady as the ticking of the clockwork, throwing its pale arm over the empty, hungry sea.

By nine o’clock that night, the ocean had ceased to look like water and instead resembled an undulating floor of greasy slate. The wind had dropped its initial screech, settling into an ominous, hollow drone that drew a low whistling note from the cowl vent above the lantern. With the drop in wind came the fog—not the delicate sea mist of August that burned off by mid-morning, but the thick, sodden blanket of late September that smelled of cold mud and crushed kelp.

Eileen leaned against the gallery railing inside the lantern room, watching the white beams of the Fresnel lens strike the encroaching bank. Where the light should have reached out to the shoals, it now hit a sheer wall of wool, scattering back in a blind, silvery dazzle that made her temples throb. The world outside Gull Rock had shrunk to an envelope of damp gray no wider than the island itself.

It was time for the bell.

She descended the spiral stairs to the watchroom, taking the cast-iron steps two at a time with the practiced unconsciousness of an acrobat. In the cupboard beside the spare burner mantles, she kept a thick woolen muffler and an extra pair of sheepskin mittens. Wrapping the cloth twice about her throat, she went down to the base of the tower and out through the covered way to the fog-bell shed.

The fog-bell machinery was an obstinate beast of brass, pig iron, and coiled hemp. To set it running, Eileen had to haul a three-hundred-pound lead counterweight up through a wooden chute that pierced the floorboards into the cellar below. She seized the crank handle with both hands, set her boots against the cleated floor, and threw her weight into the turn.

Clack. Clack. Clack.

The pawl clicked over the ratchet teeth with an agonizingly slow rhythm. The weight rose inch by inch in the darkness below, straining the fibers of the hemp cable until they creaked. Her breath came in short, raspy gasps, frosting the ironwork before her eyes. By the fiftieth turn, the muscles between her shoulder blades felt as though they were being branded with hot iron, but there was no letting go. If the handle slipped her grip, the weight would plummet, spinning the crank like a saw blade and shattering whatever bones it met on the way.

"Seventy... seventy-one... seventy-two," she counted through gritted teeth, until the lead head bumped against the stop-beam beneath the timber ceiling.

She flipped the retaining catch, slipped the crank handle into its wall leather, and threw the engaging lever.

Outside, perched on its wooden gallows above the roof of the shed, the twelve-hundred-pound bronze bell stirred. The hammer lifted, poised for a heartbeat against the dripping sky, and then fell with a resounding TONG that shook the shingle under Eileen’s feet.

The sound was not an echo in the shed; it was a physical blow that rattled her molars and resonated in her breastbone. It struck once every twenty seconds—the prescribed characteristic for Gull Rock Station, distinguishing it from the double-stroke of Heron Neck and the continuous hand-tolling of the lightship five leagues to the southwest.

TONG.

She waited inside the shed through four strokes, watching the heavy escapement wheel tick back and forth, its oiled teeth catching the pallets with a crisp, oily snap. The machine had been wound. It would give her two hours before the weight reached the sand bucket in the pit below, at which point she would have to turn the crank all over again.

Stepping back out onto the granite path, she paused, her hand resting against the rough whitewashed masonry of the oil-house. The air was dead, heavy, and wet. It had that curious stillness that often comes ahead of a true gale, when the cold air from the north meets the wet breath of the Gulf Stream and settles over the coast like a damp funeral shroud.

Then, through the dying chime of the bronze bell, she heard it.

It was faint, muffled by the wool of the fog, but distinct: a low, resonant groan, followed by the wet thrashing of canvas.

Eileen froze. Her eyes strained against the gray blankness that hung twenty yards offshore. The sound had come from the eastern ledge—the Shark’s Fin, a submerged rib of black stone that sat two fathoms below the surface at high tide, waiting to rip the bottom out of anything drawing more than twelve feet of water.

"Ahoy!" she called out, pitching her voice low and hard beneath the chime of the bell. "Keep off! You’re on the ledge!"

Only the slap of the swell answered, followed by the dull, booming impact of water filling a sea cave on the north point.

TONG.

The bell struck again, drowning all else in a basin of bronze vibration. When the tone faded, she heard nothing more. No cries for help, no creak of steering gear, no splintering of spruce timbers. Just the blind, stupid fog drifting past the rocks like sheep moving through a pasture.

"Nerves," she muttered, turning back toward the kitchen door. "Seeing ghosts before the kettle’s even on."

Yet her pulse remained elevated. She knew the coast; she knew that sound had not been a calved piece of driftwood or the coughing sneeze of a harbor seal hauled out on the weeds. A vessel was out there, blinded by the drift, smelling the granite without being able to see the spark seventy feet above her spreaders.

In the kitchen, the warmth from the stove had driven out the worst of the chill, but it could not dispel the feeling of heavy, suspended time that hung over the island. Eileen stoked the fire, adding three lumps of anthracite to give a lasting bed of coals. She did not sit down. Instead, she took her father’s brass marine spyglass from its velvet-lined box on the sideboard, rubbed the brass tube with her apron hem, and carried it back up the tower.

The watchroom was quiet save for the heavy pendulum of the clockwork that drove the lantern rotation. The gears turned in their brass cases with a steady, rhythmic ticking: tock-click, tock-click.

She climbed the iron ladder into the lantern room and stepped out through the low service door onto the open gallery that circled the tower’s exterior.

The cold hit her like a wet towel slapped across the mouth. The gallery was narrow, scarcely two feet wide between the iron storm-rail and the curved glass of the lantern. The wind was beginning to pick up again, no longer an easterly draft but a hard, rising push from the northeast, bearing the unmistakable smell of snow. Not winter snow, but the harsh, pelting graupel that tore the leaves from the mainland maples and froze the rigging of the coastal fleet into stiff, useless ropes.

She leveled the spyglass over the railing, pressing the cold brass ring to her right eye.

She swept the glass slowly across the eastern arc. Nothing. Only the gray, swirling density of the vapor, tinted pink-orange for a single second each time the great lens overhead swept its beam through the cloud. In that brief, repetitive flash, she could see the white curls of foam leaping ten feet into the air as the deep swells threw themselves against the offshore boulders.

Then, just on the outer perimeter of the light's reach, the fog parted for the space of two breaths.

It was a rift no wider than a barn door, torn open by a sudden down-draft of cold air. Through it, she saw a dark, vertical line—a mast, canted at a sickening angle of forty degrees, its fore-staysail shredded into ribbons that whipped like pennants in the squall. She saw the pale gleam of a deckhouse, the black curve of a schooner's hull pinned hard against the outer spine of the Shark's Fin, and then the white surge of a breaking sea that buried the vessel to her crosstrees in a smother of foam.

"God Almighty," Eileen whispered, the brass glass slipping half an inch in her gloved fingers.

The rift snapped shut. The fog rolled back in, thicker and colder than before, swallowed the wreck, and left only the blind, blank wall of white.

She lowered the telescope. Her knuckles were white against the brass tube.

The vessel had struck. She was on the outer reef, half a mile out, with the tide running full flood and the wind backing into the northeast. No skiff from Gull Rock could live in that surf; even her father, who had pulled an oar in the lifesaving crews at Cape Elizabeth in his youth, would never have dared to launch the dory into a sea breaking five fathoms deep over the flats.

She had to make the mainland see.

Eileen stepped back inside the lantern room, pulled the heavy iron door tight against the rising wind, and threw the wedge bolts into place. She ran down to the watchroom and seized the lanyard of the distress signal—a small brass carronade mounted on a timber sled beside the gallery door, kept primed for the arrival of the district inspector or the rare horror of a shipwreck.

She found the powder tin and the dry wad in the lead-lined chest beneath the chart table. Her hands were steady now; the numbness of shock had given way to the cold, mechanical efficiency that was the only thing that kept men and women alive on this spit of granite. She measured the black powder into the muzzle, rammed the tow-wad down with three sharp strokes of the hickory rammer, and primed the touchhole with a pinch of fine English rifle powder from her father’s flask.

She pushed the door open once more, knelt behind the little iron gun, and touched the glowing slow-match to the vent.

CRACK-BOOM.

The sound was sharp and vicious, echoing off the iron dome above and flatting out into the heavy soup of the bay. A cloud of sulfurous, yellow-gray smoke belched into the fog, instantly torn to shreds by the northeast wind.

She waited.

One minute. Two minutes.

Across the water, six miles away through the murk, lay the village of Port Clyde. On a clear night, the report of the four-pounder would bring the dories out from the fish houses, twenty men with callused hands and long oars pulling in unison toward the sound of the gun. But tonight, the wind was blowing from the north-northeast—directly toward Gull Rock, carrying the sound of the blast south into the wide, empty wastes of the open Atlantic.

The mainland would hear nothing. Not through this wind. Not with the surf drumming against the headlands like a thousand muffled field pieces.

They were alone. The schooner out on the Shark’s Fin was alone, with the tide rising two inches every ten minutes, lifting her against the granite only to drop her down again with the full weight of three hundred tons of salt oak upon the rock’s spine.

Eileen set the rammer down against the parapet wall. The smell of black powder lingered in her woolen muffler, sharp and dry against the brine.

She looked down at the courtyard far below. The lantern’s light skimmed over the roof of the cottage, over the small patch of dead potato vines, and hit the slipway where the dory hung from its iron davits. The boat looked small, fragile as an eggshell, its white cedar lapstrake hull painted with lead-white that gleamed like bone in the periodic flash.

"You can't," she said aloud, her voice flat and cold against the iron railing. "You can't leave the light."

Rule Seven of the United States Lighthouse Establishment Regulations, bound in blue buckram and kept in the desk below: The keeper shall under no circumstances leave the station without the express permission of the district inspector, nor shall both the keeper and the assistant be absent from the light at the same time during the hours of darkness.

There was no assistant. There was only Eileen, and if she took the boat into that surf, she would either drown within thirty yards of the slip or be carried out past the islands into the great gray drift toward Monhegan. And if she drowned, the lamp would run dry by midnight. The clockwork would stop. The wicks would char down to the metal, the glass would foul with thick black soot, and any other vessel seeking the entrance to the bay would find only darkness where the government chart promised a third-order light visible eighteen miles off.

She turned her back on the sea and went into the lantern room.

She took up her chamois. With deliberate, forceful strokes, she began to polish the southern quadrant of the lens, wiping away the condensation that had formed from the damp air leaking past the astragals. The brass felt cold under her palm, unyielding as the rock beneath the tower.

TONG.

The fog bell clanged from the yard below, a mournful, indifferent sound that neither helped nor hindered the souls dying five hundred yards away in the gray churn of the Shark’s Fin.

She worked for three hours in silence, her mind locked into the narrow orbit of her duties. She inspected the level of the oil in the brass font; it had dropped two inches, perfectly according to measure. She trimmed a quarter of an inch of black crust from the secondary wick with her brass shears, steadying her fingers against the rim of the burner to keep the cut true.

By one in the morning, the character of the weather began to shift again. The fog did not lift, but it grew thin and wild, torn into ragged streamers that flew across the lantern glass like the ghosts of white birds. The northeast wind was finding its full voice now. It had stopped humming and begun to roar, that deep, hollow bass that Eileen knew had traveled all the way from the ice-packs off Newfoundland, gathering the weight of the sea before it like a snowplow.

The nor'easter had arrived.

The rain came with it—hard, square pellets of sleet that rattled against the northern storm panes like handfuls of buckshot. One of the iron ventilators in the lantern roof began to shriek, a high-pitched whistle that pierced through the roar of the surf.

Eileen set down her tools and wiped her face with the sleeve of her flannel bodice. Her skin was sticky with whale oil and cold sweat.

She looked out through the seaward glass. The rift had closed entirely, but she did not need to see the reef now to know what had become of the vessel. At the turn of the tide, the full weight of the outer rollers would have broken her back. By now, the schooner was no longer a ship; she was a graveyard of floating timber, severed cordage, and loose barrels rolling in the backwash of the ledge.

And then, down on the narrow crescent of granite shingle that formed the only landing place on Gull Rock—a spit of broken stone no wider than a dory's length, wedged between two vertical walls of gray ledge—something caught the lantern's beam.

It was not a spar. Spars floated low, their spruce timber soaked through with green water, wallowing like dead porpoises.

This was white. A flash of white that moved against the rhythm of the rollers, tossed into the froth of the surf, swallowed by a wave, and then cast up onto the slick, seaweed-draped stones at the foot of the slipway.

Eileen stepped close to the glass, her breath clouding the pane until she wiped it clear with her palm.

The white shape did not wash back out with the undertow. It had jammed among the boulders, pinned beneath a tangle of dark bladderwrack and the splintered stem-post of a broken yawl.

She didn't run down the stairs; she dropped down them, her skirts gathered in one hand, her boots barely touching the iron treads as she rounded the endless corkscrew of the tower. Her heart was beating not in her chest, but in the back of her throat, hot and metallic like the taste of brass.

The lamp was burning. It had six hours of oil in the font. The counterweights were good until dawn.

She reached the iron entry door, threw the bar back with a dull clonk, and stepped out into the fury of the gale.