by Kelly Powell
Jude stands at the counter, filling the kettle and lighting the stove. He looks more disheveled without his coat and hat. He is a lean figure in the dim, his face tinged pink from the cold, exhaustion darkening his eyes. Since coming down from the watch room, he hasn’t said a word. Over the years, I’ve found Jude predisposed to such behavior. The death of both his parents made him grow up cautious. Though as the kettle boils, he offers me a small smile and says, “I’m afraid I don’t remember how you take your tea.”
I exhale slowly. “Just black, please.”
“Right.” He turns to the stove, only to look back a second later. “Moira—”
I interrupt. “I’m sorry you had to be the one to find him.”
Jude pauses, lips pressed thin. “Can’t be helped, I suppose.”
I rub my thumb over the newest scuff on my violin case and push back another image of Connor—smiling at our last lesson, pleased when I complimented him.
This island would eat you alive, if you let it.
Jude pours the kettle’s contents into a teapot, steam rising in gray coils before disappearing in the light. He tugs at the cuff of his sweater, staring out at the rain. “I saw you playing on the cliff earlier.”
I swallow. My mother’s words over the matter still shine slick as tar, coating my thoughts. Jude brings the teapot to the table and continues. “Is that why you haven’t been at the hall?”
I haven’t played at our local dance hall for two summers now. At the moment the only thing I’m missing is the pay, though my tutoring has done a fair job of shelling out coins to warm my palm. Stiffly I say, “I can play where I like.”
Sitting down across from me, Jude looks a touch uncomfortable. “Of course,” he says. “I meant no ill by it.”
I doubt Jude Osric would wish ill on even his worst enemy. I curl both hands around my steaming teacup and say, “I find it difficult to believe you’ve attended many dances in my absence.”
I mean to be lighthearted, but Jude says, “To quite a few I’ve been,” and sounds almost defensive.
I raise a brow. “I hope you’re not waiting on me. I hear Peter and Flint are managing rather poorly.”
He ducks his head to stare into his teacup. Silence settles between us, but there’s an edge to it, as though we are both skirting around the real topic at hand. Jude’s gaze soon returns to the window. Rain lashes the glass, dim light yellowing the sill.
“A bad one tonight,” he murmurs. “Storm to drown the sirens.”
It’s just a saying, an adage as old as the island, but the comment twists my stomach. Connor’s death isn’t all that’s left unsaid between us. Jude is likely too gracious to ask outright, but he must wonder why I’ve not visited the lighthouse these past four years, why I’ve ignored every invitation offered. Our interactions have narrowed to greeting each other in town, smiling at one another across the street. We are little more than strangers when we were once the best of friends, and I feel the ache of those lost years now, sitting in his company, as keenly as a missing limb. Jude, I realize, must be worse off. I know our separation is by design, but that design is my own doing. Or, perhaps, undoing. I’ve kept secrets from him, secrets I’m too cowardly to share, too self-serving to face directly. If he ever found out—
A knock sounds at the door. Jude flinches, sloshing tea onto the table. “That’ll be them,” he says, adding, “You needn’t accompany me,” when I move to get up.
I ignore this. Together we head for the entrance, and Jude unlocks the door, pulling it open to reveal two policemen on his doorstep. I recognize them both, though I can’t recall the taller one’s name. The pair have donned heavy tweed overcoats against the rain, their shoulder capes dark with damp. The shorter man, Inspector Dale, doffs his hat. “Afternoon, Mr. Osric,” he says. “Miss Alexander.”
“Afternoon,” says Jude. “Did you, ah, receive my wire?”
“It’s the reason we’re standing here,” the taller one says. Thackery, I remember. That’s his name. “You found the boy on the beach?”
“Yes. I—I saw him from the gallery deck. I was doing observations.” Jude swallows. “Do you need me to come along?”
“That’s quite all right,” says Inspector Dale. “If you’ll point us in the right direction, we’ll take it from here.”
Jude gestures to the cliff’s edge as a thin bolt of lightning streaks the sky. “About half a mile down the beach. Near the path.”
Dale replaces his hat, touching the brim. “Much obliged. And were you there as well, Miss Alexander?”
“I’m just visiting.” Irrespective of seeing Connor, I’m not a witness by any means.
“We’ll need a proper statement later, Mr. Osric, you understand,” says Thackery.
Jude nods. “Certainly.”
The two gentlemen step away from the overhang, trudging off toward the cliff path. Jude closes the door and turns to me. “They’ll have it sorted,” he says, like I haven’t been standing here the whole time. A low echo of thunder rumbles through the lighthouse walls.
“Are you all right?” I ask.
“Are you?” He regards me, expression somber. “Connor—he was your student.”
My heart clenches. “Yes,” I say quietly.
Jude rakes a hand through his hair. The action only succeeds in making the curls less tidy. He says, “There’s not been a siren attack around these parts since last summer.”
I bite my lip. Jude’s expression is shuttered, his gaze stripped bare. I know he’ll be recalling the worst, and more than anything, I wish to spare him from it.
We return to the kitchen and sit down at the table, both of us watching the rain outside, sounding as if the sea herself is pressed against the cottage. I wonder if the beacon light still cuts through the blackness.
“I need to check the lantern room,” Jude says, echoing my thoughts.
And as he takes his leave, I look to my violin case. The thought of playing something for him comes to mind unbidden. When we were children, I’d play whatever song I’d learned most recently, and Jude would collect coins for me in his flat cap. It’s a memory that sinks into my heart like a hook. I wonder if he even remembers.
By the time he comes back downstairs, I’ve found a tin of biscuits and eaten three. Jude has soot across his forehead, a pink flush to his cheeks, but he looks better for it, less shaken. I feel he’s glad for having something to do.
“All’s well?” I ask.
“Well enough.” He takes a drink of cold tea, grimacing at the taste. “I really ought to be staying up there, what with this gale, but not—not tonight, I think.”
I picture Jude within the glass lookout of the lantern room, performing that solitary vigil, while Connor’s body lies on the beach below. It’s something he’ll have to write up in his logbook, an inked record of the event, as he would a shipwreck or a drowning.
I swallow. “The police are taking a good while.”
Jude looks toward the doorway, as if he might find the pair waiting in the hall.
“Considering how he was killed, it’s not surprising.” I take a breath in the hopes of keeping my voice level. “Sirens leaving him on the beach, slicing him open—I’ve never seen anything like it.”
At that there’s another knock on the door. Jude goes to open it, revealing Dale and Thackery standing once more beneath the overhang.
“Mr. Osric,” says Inspector Dale, “we’ve just come to get your statement down.”
Detective Thackery glances at me and back to Jude. “If we might speak to you alone.”
Jude meets my gaze. I give a small nod. “In the watch room,” he says. “Can I get you anything else? Tea?”
“Just the statement, please,” Dale says.
Jude nods, brisk, before leading them through the door into the tower.
I’ve nothing to do while I wait. My fingers trace over the knots on the kitchen table as Connor Sheahan slips into the forefront of my thoughts, and I wonder what would’ve drawn him
to the shore in this sort of weather.
Sirens lure people with music that can make one’s ears and nose bleed from the sound. They call their victims to the ocean, dragging them into the depths. They wouldn’t leave a boy like waste on the shore. They wouldn’t cut his throat. Enchantment is enough to silence anyone. Connor’s wounds were clean, sharp, dissimilar from the jagged scrape of teeth and claws.
The sound of a door opening pulls me from my thoughts. Jude appears in the hallway, alongside Dale and Thackery. He says, “Moira,” and I wish I could somehow alleviate the sadness clouding his features.
The police give their farewells. Jude begins clearing the table, gathering our cups and mopping up tea. Outside, it’s black as pitch, the sky only outlined by the occasional streak of lightning.
“Would you like to spend the night?”
I can’t tell whether he asks for my sake or his own. “That’s very kind,” I say, but the words don’t sound as grateful as I feel. I’ve kept myself from the lighthouse for years, and now that I’ve broken the spell, I’ve little desire to return home so soon after.
“I made up the bed in the guest room just this morning.”
“Oh.” I clasp my hands together. “You had company?”
“My uncle,” Jude says shortly.
I raise my eyebrows at that. The last I’d heard of Jude’s uncle, he’d boarded a tender ship to help manage the offshore lighthouse around the other side of the island. For a moment I think of asking after him, before deciding otherwise. It’s been a long while since there was any fondness between the two—indeed, I find it curious his uncle came to visit at all.
We finish setting the kitchen to rights. Or rather, Jude does, waving off every attempt I make to help. He washes tea stains from the cups, places them side by side in a cabinet, and fetches a candlestick holder, striking a match to light the half-melted candle. I gather my violin case and lean against the wall. I trace a thin crack in the plaster—but it does not whisper its secrets to me.
“Moira?”
I look over. Jude stands at the doorway, waiting for me. He holds the candle aloft, his other hand knotted around the fraying cuff of his wool sweater. Together we head into the hall, and he starts up the stairs to the second floor. I’m about to follow when a dull thump echoes from the far end of the cottage. I pause with one foot on the step, eyeing the door, the last before the entrance into the lighthouse.
“That’ll be the pipes,” says Jude quickly. “They creak something fierce when the weather turns.” He takes the stairs two at a time then, and there’s nothing for it but to go up after him.
Four bedrooms occupy most of the space on this floor. Jude opens the door to the guest room, letting me pass, and I see it’s just as orderly as the rest of the cottage. There’s a single bed, a writing desk, and a mirror adjacent to a lace-curtained window overlooking the cliff. Rain strikes the blackened glass in an unremitting patter.
Lonely. If feelings may be used in that way, that is how the room appears. A deep-seated loneliness that has forgotten any other state.
Jude lights an oil lamp left on the bedside table. After, he runs a quick finger over the table’s surface, nervously wiping the dust off on his trousers as he straightens up. “I do hope it’s all right,” he says, glancing in my direction. Though no sooner have I met his gaze than his brown eyes cut away from mine, looking black as midnight in the low light.
“It’s fine,” I say, voice curt. There was a time when softening my words didn’t present such a challenge. “Thank you.”
Jude smiles, close-lipped. He still looks as tired and nervous as before, but he stops destroying the cuff of his sweater, so that’s something. “Right,” he says. “Well, good night, then.”
“Good night, Jude.”
I close the door in his wake, listening as he continues farther down the hall to his own room. Not long after, there’s the soft click of a door opening, then silence. Shutting my eyes, I take a breath, my insides coiled tight in a way that cannot be undone by music.
I wander over to sit on the bed. The sheets are tucked into the mattress in hospital corners, white and neatly pressed. The tidiness is made disconcerting by the storm’s darkness, by the thought of blood staining the shoreline below.
In past times, the lighthouse had been a home. Old books were left open on the counter, children’s toys on the steps. These walls had echoed with my father’s laugh; the floorboards knew his footsteps. He and Llyr Osric, Jude’s father, would sit for hours in the kitchen, studying charts and old bound books I could not yet read.
Rowan sticks were hung above the kitchen window, sea-pink flowers in a vase on the sill. Now it appears Jude Osric is not at all concerned about keeping good luck. The herbs he has are common ones, the rooms smelling only of salt air and wood smoke and floor polish.
Hospital corners—I tug the sheets back and they come free. I set down my coat at the foot of the bed, my violin case on the floor just below. Often, when a storm like this batters the cliffs, I’ll wake during the night to play something low and soft at the window. Not tonight, I think. However much he likes my playing, I don’t believe Jude Osric, with his quiet disposition, would look favorably on violin music conducted at this hour.
I’m staring up at the cracked white ceiling when my eyes begin to slip closed. The events of this afternoon swirl around me like a fog: Jude walking along the cliff, shoulders hunched against the rain; dread like a weight in my stomach, boots slipping on mud as I hurried down to the beach; Connor lying still and cold, buried in wet sand and blood. A shiver creeps over my spine.
Sleep does not come easy. Each crack of thunder booms like a drum. I hear the wind whistling through the night and imagine it sweeping through the moors as a living creature—a wolf howling at the moon.
I’ve no idea of the time; perhaps it’s near morning already. Perhaps my mother is worried sick over my whereabouts, but that’s a slim possibility. She may well pretend, but that’s all it would be: a feigned sort of affection, attempting to play the part of concerned mother. I’m careful to tuck that thought into memory as I turn over on the bed; could be good fodder for a row.
And as I fall farther into sleep, there are footsteps, Jude’s familiar tread on the stairs, and I’m almost certain I hear him talking.
Murmured whispers coming from the room below.
CHAPTER FOUR
SUNLIGHT PAINTS RED ACROSS my closed eyelids. I open them—blinking at white sheets, dust motes drifting above the floorboards—feeling lost and bewildered until my mind snaps to waking as well. I remember the storm and Jude Osric, a bloodstained beach and Connor left to the mercy of the elements.
My heart feels heavy with a grief I’ve no real claim to.
I turn over the affairs of last night once more before getting up out of bed. The sheets are a twisted mess, and I try to put them in some semblance of order. I don’t have Jude’s talent for folding something within an inch of its life, but I feel it’s a good attempt. Outside, pink tints the early-morning sky. The window’s angle makes it difficult to gauge signs of the storm’s passing, but I know the marks it will have yielded—grass flattened by wind, uneven shifts of sand on the beach, clumps of seaweed strewn about, cliff sides gritty with salt.
There will be no sirens, not so soon after such a tempest. I imagine them sheltering in the rocky crevices, in the darkest places of the sea. Turning back to the bed, I fetch my things and consider the possibility of Jude being awake at this hour. Quite likely, as I find a note written in his hand slipped beneath the door’s edge.
Morning, Moira.
You’ll find me in the lantern room or up on the gallery deck.
—J
I fold the note with care, tucking it into the safety of my coat pocket.
At the washstand on the first floor, I splash my face with cold water, pin my brown hair into a tidy chignon, and wrinkle my nose at the mud-spattered hem of my dress. My long coat fares even worse, but I shrug it on nonetheless.
Making my way toward the tower, I pause near the end of the hall. I stare at the closed door of the last room, beyond which I heard voices in the night. It’s a storeroom, I think, or it used to be, before the death of Jude’s parents. I’m unsure of what he could be keeping in here now. I try the knob and find it locked. When I put my ear to the wood, I’m met with only silence.
Perhaps it’s nothing. The cottage is an old structure, after all, afflicted by frequent creaks and groans, as Jude said. I turn away, open the oak door, and head up the iron stairwell that spirals up, up, up, along the sides of the lighthouse. When I reach the gallery deck, a rush of cold air cuts through my coat.
Yet the view is well worth the chill. A panorama of sea and sky and sunlight greets me, the cliff below a sharp black drop, bestowing a scattering of rocks to the sea. The sight is wondrous in a way that makes me want to play something entirely new just for this moment and never again. I grip the rusted railing and feel like shouting for the sake of it, but I swallow the feeling when my eyes find Jude Osric.
He leans back fast asleep in his chair. Without his cap, his curls tangle in the wind, ash and oil staining his hands. He must’ve already visited the lantern room. I take a step toward him and he starts awake, his eyes glassy and unseeing. Half a second later, recognition sets in. Jude blinks, rubs a hand over his face, and gets soot in one eyebrow. He says, “I didn’t mean to fall asleep.”
“I wouldn’t think so.”
Reaching into his coat, he pulls out a pocket watch. The glass over the clock face is scratched and clouded with age, but the hands still keep time. It’s just gone seven o’clock. Jude brushes his thumb over the face, and I turn my gaze on him.
“You look filthy.”
He yawns and says, “Thank you,” so he might still be half-asleep. It’s not hard to guess he’s been up all night, seeing how bloodshot his eyes are. Though whether it was because of his duties as keeper or by choice alone is another matter.