Lighthousekeeping Read Free Page B

‘modern wonders of the world’. After that, everybody wanted him to build their lighthouses, even where there was no sea. He became fashionable and famous. It helps.
    Josiah Dark had found his man. Robert Stevenson would build Cape Wrath.
    There are twists and turns in any life, and though all of the Stevensons should have built lighthouses, one escaped, and that was the one who was born at the moment Josiah Dark’s son, Babel, made a strange reverse pilgrimage and became Minister of Salts.
    1850 – Babel Dark arrives in Salts for the first time.
    1850 – Robert Louis Stevenson is born into a family of prosperous civil engineers – so say the innocent annotated biographical details – and goes on to write Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
    The Stevensons and the Darks were almost related, in fact they were related, not through blood but through the restless longing that marks some individuals from others. And they were related because of a building. Robert Louis came here, as he came to all his family lighthouses. He once said, ‘Whenever I smell salt water, I know I am not far from one of the works of my ancestors.’
    In 1886, when Robert Louis Stevenson came to Salts and Cape Wrath, he met Babel Dark, just before his death, and some say it was Dark, and the rumour that hung about him, that led Stevenson to brood on the story of Jekyll and Hyde.
    ‘What was he like, Pew?’
    ‘Who, child?’
    ‘Babel Dark.’
    Pew sucked on his pipe. For Pew, anything to do with thinking had first to be sucked in through his pipe. He sucked in words, the way other people blow out bubbles.
    ‘He was a pillar of the community.’
    ‘What does that mean?’
    ‘You know the Bible story of Samson.’
    ‘No I don’t.’
    ‘Then you’ve had no right education.’
    ‘Why can’t you just tell me the story without starting with another story?’
    ‘Because there’s no story that’s the start of itself, any more than a child comes into the world without parents.’
    ‘I had no father.’
    ‘You’ve no mother now neither.’
    I started to cry and Pew heard me and was sorry for what he had said, because he touched my face and felt the tears.
    ‘That’s another story yet,’ he said, ‘and if you tell yourself like a story, it doesn’t seem so bad.’
    ‘Tell me a story and I won’t be lonely. Tell me about Babel Dark.’
    ‘It starts with Samson,’ said Pew, who wouldn’t be put off, ‘because Samson was the strongest man in the world and a woman brought him down, then when he was beaten and blinded and shorn like a ram he stood between two pillars and used the last of his strength to bring them crashing down. You could say that Samson was two pillars of the community, because anyone who sets himself up is always brought down, and that’s what happened to Dark.
    ‘The story starts in Bristol in 1848 when Babel Dark was twenty years old and as rich and fine as any gentleman of the town. He was a ladies’ man, for all that he was studying Theology at Cambridge, andeveryone said he would marry an heiress from the Colonies and take up his father’s business in ships and trade.
    ‘It was set fair to be so.
    ‘There was a pretty girl lived in Bristol and all the town knew her for her red hair and green eyes. Her father was a shopkeeper, and Babel Dark used to visit the shop to buy buttons and braids and soft gloves and neckties, because I have said, haven’t I, that he was a bit of a dandy?
    ‘One day – a day like this, yes just like this, with the sun shining, and the town bustling, and the air itself like a good drink – Babel walked into Molly’s shop, and spent ten minutes examining cloth for riding breeches, while he watched out of the corner of his eye until she had finished serving one of the Jessop girls with a pair of gloves.
    ‘As soon as the shop was empty, Babel swung over to the counter and asked for enough braid to rig a ship, and when he had bought all of it,