The Lightkeeper's Daughter Read Free

fingers spread open. Squid tightens her grip and peers over the side. A strand of kelp, broken loose, is drifting past the ship. “That’s only seaweed,” she says.
    “Coming,” whispers Tatiana.
    “Who?”
    “Hear him,” she says.
    “Who?” asks Squid again. Then Tatiana’s whole weight is suddenly in her hand. The child gropes toward the water, struggling to get closer, to climb between the two chains. Her little red shirt stretches in Squid’s fist.
    “Tat!”
    And up from the sea comes the whale. It’s enormous and dark, wrapped in a cascade of white. Water pours from its mouth, from plates of baleen, down ribbons of flesh that are mottled and brown. And still the whale rises, arching above them, an eye and a throat and a long curving fin that is studded with barnacles all down its length.
    Its breath comes in a cloud, in a rain smelling of old rotting fish. Its eye swivels round, and the whale seems to hang there, higher by half than the height of the deck. Then, with impossible slowness, it rolls onto its back and crashes into the sea.
    “Holy smokes,” says Squid, in a whisper.
    For a long time, nobody moves. The Coast Guard crew stand at their winches, at their ropes and controls. The sea ripples and swirls, and the screaming gulls swoop. And Tatiana, with her eyes closed, trembles all over.
    Hannah sees the humpback coming through the shallows, a huge black shadow on the silver and the gold. She sees Tatiana fling herself against the chain, and then the sea erupts and the whale breaches, blotting out the girl. Its flippers are long and slender, vast as wings. They curl and twist as the whale rolls sideways and plunges down.
    A wave rolls out and breaks against the cliff. It surges on the little sandy beach, climbs two—then three—of the concrete steps. The humpback spouts farther down the channel, and again at the shallow bar toward the sea. Then it is gone, and the gulls go with it, dipping down each time it rises, feeding in its wake. And everything is silent; everyone is still as stone.
    Murray is gazing down with tears in his eyes. Hannah sees him crying and looks away; she can imagine what he’s thinking. There hasn’t been a whale in the shallow waters of the channel since Alastair died.
    “Miraculous,” he says.
    That one word carries her back twenty years, to her first autumn on the island. She remembers how she and Murray sat on the platform at the tower’s top, watching the humpbacks swimming. They swam in a sea of blood at the setting of the sun, surfacing together, breathing together, their spouts joining in a single cloud.
    “Humpbacks sing,” said Murray. “Did you know that?”
    She shook her head.
    “Each year one of them starts a song. Then others pick it up; they lengthen it and change it.” He spoke softly—he always did—looking out to sea and not at her. “By the middle of summer they all know the song. They sing in a chorus over hundreds of miles.”
    She leaned her head against his shoulder. She could feel him breathing, and she tried to do what the whales were doing, and time her breath to his.
    “No one knew,” said Murray. “Until the war. Then someone put a microphone in the water, hoping to hear submarines. They heard this singing instead. And they didn’t know what the hell it was.”
    She pressed herself against him. She was shivering, but he didn’t notice.
    “I don’t understand it,” he said.
    “The song?” she asked.
    He shook his head. “Och, we’ll never understand that. I mean how men could kill them.”
    “No,” she said.
    He sighed. “They’re wonderful things, whales are. They’re miraculous.”

chapter two
    THE SUPPLIES ARE UNLOADED AND FERRIED to shore. Boxes of groceries, barrels of fuel, library books and cans of white paint, they’re all winched up the bluff and onto the landing. Murray makes pyramids from the boxes, and perfect columns from the paint cans.
    He shouts down from his platform, “Is that the lot of it