Salt and Lantern

TThe Morvoren came up out of the sea at a quarter past ten on a Monday morning in October, a grey needle on a black rock, five miles off the cliffs of West Penwith, with the swell breaking white all round its foot.

Mara sat in the stern of Enoch Treloar's boat with a canvas kitbag between her knees, a new Trinity House cap pulled down against the spray, and watched it grow. It did not grow quickly. For an hour after leaving St Ives it had seemed to stay exactly the same size, a pencil line on the horizon, while the coast fell away behind into a blue haze of cliffs and fields and engine houses with their chimneys standing up like broken teeth. Then, all at once, it was close and enormous: a hundred and ten feet of dovetailed granite rising straight out of the rock, banded with the stains of twenty-five winters, with the lantern at the top catching the sun like a crown of glass.

"There she is," Treloar said, round the stem of his pipe. He was a broad, slow, brown-faced man of sixty with a fisherman's jersey and hands like oak roots. "Morvoren. Means mermaid, in the old tongue. Pretty name for an ugly bit of rock." He nodded to the west, where a long black reef ran out from the lighthouse rock under the swell, showing here and there as a hump of weed and a burst of foam. "And that's the Carns. Keep off the Carns."

Mara was twenty-eight, with auburn hair cut short under the cap and green eyes that had been watching the sea since dawn. Seven months on the supernumerary list had meant seven months of other men's lighthouses: a fortnight here, a month there, filling in for keepers who were sick or on leave, learning the lamps and the lenses and the long rules of the service at stations from the Thames to the Scillies. This was the first post of Mara's own. Assistant Keeper, Morvoren Rock. A pension at the end of it, and a uniform with buttons, and a place.

The boat brought them in under the lee of the rock, where the swell was only a heave, and lay off a stone landing stage cut into its side, with an iron ladder going up and a derrick crane above it on a ledge.