Читать книгу Lighthousekeeping - Jeanette Winterson - Страница 11

the church seated 250, and was almost full at 243 souls, the entire population of Salts.

On 2 February 1850, Babel Dark preached his first sermon.

His text was this: ‘Remember the rock whence ye are hewn, and the pit whence ye are digged.’

The innkeeper at The Razorbill was so struck by this sermon and its memorable text that he changed the name of his establishment. From that day forth, he was no longer landlord of The Razorbill, but keeper of The Rock and Pit. Sailors, being what they are, still called it by its former name for a good sixty years or more, but The Rock and Pit it was, and is still, with much the same low-beamed, inward-turned, net-hung, salt-dashed, seaweed feel of forsakenness that it always had.

Babel Dark used his private fortune to build himself a fine house and a walled garden and to equip himself comfortably there. He was soon seen in earnest Biblical discussion with the one lady of good blood in the place – a cousin of the Duke of Argyll, a Campbell in exile, out of poverty and some other secret. She was no beauty, but she read German fluently and knew something of Greek.

They were married in 1851, the year of the Great Exhibition, and Dark took his new wife to London for her honeymoon, and thereafter he never took her anywhere again, not even to Edinburgh. Wherever he went, riding alone on a black mare, no one was told, and no one followed.

There were disturbances at night, sometimes, and the Manse windows all flamed up, and shouts and hurlings of furniture or heavy objects, but question Dark, as few did, and he would say it was his soul in peril, and he fought for it, as every man must.

His wife said nothing, and if her husband was gone for days at a time, or seen wandering in his black clothes over the high rocks, then let him be, for he was a Man of God, and he accepted no judge but God himself.

One day, Dark saddled his horse and disappeared.

He was gone a month, and when he returned, he was softer, easier, but with plain sadness on his face.

After that, the month-long absences happened twice a year, but no one knew where he went, until a Bristol man put up at The Razorbill, that is to say The Rock and Pit.

He was a close-guarded man, eyes as near together as to be always spying on one another, and a way of tapping his finger and thumb, very rapid, when he spoke. His name was Price.

One Sunday, after Price had been to church, he was sitting over the fire with a puzzlement on his face, and it was finally got out of him that if he hadn’t seen Babel Dark before and just recently, then the man had the devil’s imprint down in Bristol.

Price claimed that he had seen Dark, wearing very different clothes, visiting a house in the Clifton area outside Bristol. He took note of him for his height – tall, and his bearing – very haughty. He had never seen him with anyone, always alone, but he would swear on his tattoo that this was the same one.

‘He’s a smuggler,’ said one of us.

‘He’s got a mistress,’ said another.

‘It’s none of our business,’ said a third. ‘He does his duties here and he pays his bills and handsomely. What else he does is between him and God.’

The rest of us were not so sure, but as nobody had the money to follow him, none of us could know whether Price’s story was true or not. But Price promised to keep a look out, and to send word, if he ever saw Dark or his like again.

‘And did he?’

‘Oh yes, indeed he did, but that didn’t help us to know what Dark was about, or why.’

‘You weren’t there then. You weren’t born.’

‘There’s always been a Pew in the lighthouse at Cape Wrath.’

‘But not the same Pew.’

Pew said nothing. He put on his radio headphones, and motioned me to look out to sea. ‘The McCloud’s out there,’ he said.

I got the binoculars and trained them on a handsome cargo ship, white on the straight line of the horizon. ‘She’s the most haunted vessel you’ll ever see.’

‘What haunts her?’

‘The past,’ said Pew. ‘There was a brig called the McCloud built two hundred years ago, and that was as wicked a ship as sailed. When the King’s navy scuttled her, her Captain swore an oath that he and his ship would some day return. Nothing happened until they built the new McCloud, and on the day they launched her, everyone on the dock saw the broken sails and ruined keel of the old McCloud rise up in the body of the ship. There’s a ship within a ship and that’s fact.’

‘It’s not a fact.’

‘It’s as true as day.’

I looked at the McCloud, fast, turbined, sleek, computer-controlled. How could she carry in her body the trace-winds of the past?

‘Like a Russian doll, she is,’ said Pew, ‘one ship inside another, and on a stormy night you can see the old McCloud hanging like a gauze on the upper deck.’

‘Have you seen her?’

‘Sailed in her and seen her,’ said Pew.

‘When did you board the new McCloud? Was she in dry dock at Glasgow?’

‘I never said anything about the new McCloud,’ said Pew.

‘Pew, you are not two hundred years old.’

‘And that’s a fact,’ said Pew, blinking like a kitten. ‘Oh yes, a fact.’

‘Miss Pinch says I shouldn’t listen to your stories.’

‘She doesn’t have the gift, that’s why.’

‘What gift?’

‘The gift of Second Sight, given to me on the day I went blind.’

‘What day was that?’

‘Long before you were born, though I saw you coming by sea.’

‘Did you know it would be me, me myself as I am, me?’

Pew laughed. ‘As sure as I knew Babel Dark – or someone very like me knew someone very like him.’

I was quiet. Pew could hear me thinking. He touched my head, in that strange, light way of his, like a cobweb.

‘It’s the gift. If one thing is taken away, another will be found.’

‘Miss Pinch doesn’t say that, Miss Pinch says Life is a Steady Darkening Towards Night. She’s embroidered it above her oven.’

‘Well, she never was the optimistic kind.’

‘What can you see with your Second Sight?’

‘The past and the future. Only the present is dark.’

‘But that’s where we live.’

‘Not Pew, child. A wave breaks, another follows.’

‘Where’s the present?’

‘For you, child, all around, like the sea. For me, the sea is never still, she’s always changing. I’ve never lived on land and I can’t say what’s this or that. I can only say what’s ebbing and what’s becoming.’

‘What’s ebbing?’

‘My life.’

‘What’s becoming?’

‘Your life. You’ll be the keeper after me.’