The Kingdoms

there were armchairs and little heaters in the round sitting room, and someone’s jumper folded over the back of a chair. The kitchen still smelled of baking. There were dense fruit cakes on a rack by the cold stove, beside an open bottle of brandy. He went in to see. All the cooking paraphernalia was still out on the drying rack. A jar of dried fruit and a scattering of currants on the worktop. When he touched one, it was still sticky. He opened the stove door. There were more cakes inside, burned. It was good to think that the man’s last thought had a decent chance of being, not family or money or anything heart-rending, but bugger I left them in the oven. But not so good to think that whatever had happened, it had happened so fast that someone had run straight out of this kitchen with the oven still going, midway through clearing up.

At the top of the stairs, the lamp room was dark.

In the middle of the room was a small steel ladder that led up into the lamp. When he climbed up, he found that the lamp’s two carbon rods had burned to black stubs. The clamps that held the rods in place were stiff, and he had to lean hard on them before they gave. The replacement rods were in a cardboard box by the ladder. They looked like javelins. Once they were into the clamps, he got them aligned, then threw the switch.

At first, the only sound was the clicking of the clockwork that would keep the rods at the same distance apart as they burned down. It took a minute or so for the electricity to heat the carbon enough for it to react. It began as a vague glow, then a hissing, and then an electric arc jumped between the rods. The hissing turned to cracking, and light brighter than any daylight flooded the lamp chamber. He smiled at nobody and felt better. The place felt more like his now that he’d fixed something in it. And now there was light, real light, the idea that someone else might be here didn’t seem so looming.

Built into the lens was a narrow strip of red glass. It was a fixed light, not rotating; the red part of the beam was aimed back towards the mainland. He frowned, because there had been no dangerous shoals or sandbars that he’d seen on their way in. But he knew what it was pointing towards even before he went out onto the gantry. In the red strip stood the pillars in the sea.

Since it seemed better to do it sooner rather than later, he went back downstairs for water and then up again to clean the lamp-room windows. The wind screamed outside. He had to keep ducking back in to breathe, which was annoying, because for opaque reasons the door handles were wooden and the cold had already cracked them, so his gloves kept catching. Once it was done, he sank down at the table and puzzled over a box of four new wooden door handles, all neatly turned.

‘Or you could just use … metal ones,’ he said aloud. Feeling picky about the windows now, he scratched off a mark on the inside and then hissed when he burned himself on the steel frame. It was so cold it tore off a rag of skin. ‘Or wooden handles,’ he said, feeling stupid. He put his gloves back on and changed the door handles. The last keepers had left a screwdriver in the box.

While he teased out the screws, the sea whitened. In the distance, the land was grey; the silhouettes of the ruined towers along the wall reached up into the weather, roofs invisible. Inside, though, the arc lamp made the little room warm.

Once the handles were done, he remembered about supplies. In that at least, the Lighthouse Board had been thorough: there was a pantry stocked with everything he could have needed and a good deal more. Fish in a generous icebox, smoked meat hanging along the rafters, jars of oats, barley, rice, ordinary basic things, but a lot of them, and seeing it gave him a rush of security that made him see afresh how close to the edge they always lived at home. This was three months’ worth of food, all assured. He couldn’t remember when he’d last felt sure about three months’ time.

All at once it seemed less likely that anything odd was going on, and something in him relaxed. The night was twenty hours long now, so he moved a set of bedding up to the watch room and arranged it on the iron grille floor so that he would know if anything went wrong with the lamp. He took out The Count of Monte Cristo, basking in the quiet. He could feel it would make him edgy before he got used to it, but for now, the novelty was heady.

Something moved downstairs. It sounded like a chair being dragged across the floor. Without giving himself too much time to think about it, he went straight down, away from the noise of the lamp and into the gloom. Voices came from the bedroom. Not voices that might have been the mumbling of the sea or a chance of the wind around the ledges; close. He couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he could hear that it was English. The door was open. He tapped on it anyway and went in. No one was there.

He stood in the empty room for a long time. The voices stopped at first, but then they began again. He spun slowly, trying to find where they were loudest, but couldn’t decide. There was a smell too – rum, salt, wet clothes.

Maybe the sugar smugglers. It would make sense for them to stop here, if they were going any distance in that miserable little boat.

‘I can hear you,’ he called. ‘Look, there’s no need to hide,