Chapter Text
On the third dusk of November 1931, Caitlyn Kiramman has but one question for herself and the powers which operate around her, never with her:
What has she ever done to merit this?
In all of her life, at a glance, there is nothing. Not one single ordinance which would, in any reasonable world, set her along this course of cruel and unjust punishment. One which she has selected for herself willingly, but which has been passed into her hands nonetheless.
The boatman had moored just off the coast and helped to slough her bags into ruddy wet sand. There is no boathouse or dock, so she is left to dredge herself in civilian clothes through bitterly cold water at knee-depth. Above her, the cliffside looms, a masonry spire stark against a temporarily clear sky.
Caitlyn’s boots clog with each trudging step, and she shouts her stiff gratitude over her shoulder to the young recruit who had brought her this far. The thought persists to hurl herself back onto the motorboat and never return. Her logical mind knows that she has accepted this fate, rather, she should think herself lucky for it, and so she continues until the stone and driftwood splints beneath her are more sound.
The cliffside has no lift, only a pulley rig equipped for supply crates. Caitlyn takes a moment to catch her heaving breath and faces the one horrible avenue before her, which comes in the form of a rocky pathway weathered by the raw sea air.
Caitlyn hoists her duffel over her shoulder and sends forth.
***
Upon cresting the path, and through a litany of horrible curses, Caitlyn first lays eyes on the lighthouse.
The picture Blackcliff Light cuts into the night sky can easily be illustrated with one word: imposing. The lantern flashes isophase at an interval of about three seconds atop it, and the air is utterly silent, save for crashing waves and the coastal winds. Caitlyn is no stranger to maritime architecture, and by that measure, she had hoped that this post would do her well.
She finds herself succumbing quickly to regret.
At the top of the hill, there is a figure swimming in a worn oilskin, who watches unmoving as Caitlyn struggles to keep her footing. Her partner, she presumes, calls out over the gale:
“You want me to take that bag for you?”
Caitlyn lifts her head from the wet stone face, a deep crease in her brow. “I’ll manage,” she shouts back after a haggard breath. A raucous laugh follows from up there, and Caitlyn feels compelled to bolster her pace, boots scraping on the loose rock with her frustration.
It’s a production, altogether, and rather humiliating, but Caitlyn eventually battles her way through the beachgrass with all her luggage in tow. The path flattens out to a sandier straight, and she’s allowed her distance as she rights herself, soaked up to her waist and through her socks.
“What a performance that was,” the woman muses beneath the hood of her coat, drawing closer to lean on a weathered post. “Thought you’d never make it. Had half a mind to send a rescue party.”
Caitlyn glances up from shaking out her sleeves, sand and seagrass whipping away uselessly in the wind. “I wouldn’t want to trouble you,” she says, the utter disgruntlement of the ascent creeping in. “You seemed so comfortable standing there.”
Caitlyn draws herself up, switching the larger of her packs to the other arm to relieve some strain on her bad shoulder. There’s no further acknowledgement for her snark, a resigned “Come on, then,” instead. It’s followed by a jerk of the woman’s chin to the other side of the rock. Caitlyn follows with her eyes to a sorry-looking shed, and were she not so thoroughly exhausted she might complain further.
Thin smoke trails from the chimney of the hut, and the shutters rattle with the wind but cling stubborn to each small window. The woman unlatches the door and ushers her inside, muttering “Don’t need you to drown standing up,” and plenty of digs which Caitlyn cannot find it within herself to oblige.
The whole of the room is visible from the entryway, no longer than fifteen paces and dimly flickering with the light of the wood stove. Just more than half of the space is in disarray, cluttered with rags and different oddities. Some are organic and salvaged from the coast, others foreign, with one wall plastered in textiles above the unmade bed.
Caitlyn drops her duffel atop her crate which had shipped out no more than a week ago, and all her body has for her is a tired sigh. Well. It has all four walls, and a roof, mostly. Caitlyn has made do with worse.
“You’re looking at years of fine craftsmanship,” the keeper says as she bolts the door against the wind. “Excellent ventilation, year-round.”
Caitlyn grimaces and turns to her, curtly crossing her hands over her stomach. Instead of focusing on the material situation at hand, she pivots and hopes to recover her first impression. “You must be Violet.”
“Vi’s fine.”
“Very well.” Caitlyn would offer her hand, but the formality seems to be lost. She half-bows in a dip of her head. “Caitlyn Kiramman. I suppose we’ll be working together.”
It summarizes the arrangement well enough – though of course, the Royal Navy will always have a way of complicating matters. She’s been shipped off with the notion of overseeing regulatory standards, denoting conditions, and keeping up with standard maintenance. On paper, nothing was demanding about it, and the risk of isolation hadn’t much weighed on her. If anything, her exile could serve as respite.
An awkward silence lingers, and Caitlyn clears her throat, figuring Vi has already worked the conditions through with the notice posted before. In an attempt to regroup, she says, “I don’t expect our operating relationship to be overly personal.”
Caitlyn crosses the room to the range, and the suffusing warmth does very little for the chill in her legs. Vi quips, “It’s a little late for that,” while wringing sea water from her pink head of hair. “We’re already bunking together.”
“Yes,” Caitlyn mutters with barely restrained irritation. Turning her hands above the stove, she sighs for the umpteenth time on this wretched, dreary evening. “Quite so, I suppose we are.”
Vi, effortlessly as she has painted herself, brushes off the concern and makes once again for the doorway she has hardly stepped out from. “You’ll be fine,” she says. “Just don’t trip over anything. Emphasis on the ocean.”
Caitlyn laughs with what meager levity remains in her.
“I’ll let you settle in. Long season ahead, yeah?”
Vi leaves no room for protest before she’s off once again, with naught in her wake but a chilly draft and a debasement that surely will find Caitlyn dead in the water.
***
Surely she’s been too dramatic, too quick to judge the circumstances of her newly acquired position. Surely, Caitlyn thinks, it cannot all be so bad or this position would not have been filled at all, not by anyone ever.
Then again, there are many in Hastings and Scarborough who live only to scale and gut fish. This perspective, rolled like molasses in Caitlyn’s mind, is the one thought convincing her that maybe it’s not all bad. Or, at the very least, it could be worse.
On her first night, she does not sleep. The trip from England had been straightforward, and allowed her a preliminary reminder of sea life itself, but also left Caitlyn out of sorts. She had spent more than sixteen hours awake and another six or so upon arrival, only drifting off when the wind had calmed, all with no sign of her partner.
That is, until the cottage door opens for grey light to pour into the room, and Caitlyn has no choice but to confront what she is being paid, barely, to do.
Vi takes her up to the lighthouse after she’s dressed. The lantern is at rest for the daylight hours, and the morning sky is clear of fog, which allows a clearer picture of the scenery. In the direction of the sea there is that menacing penitentiary of a lighthouse, painted in black over the stone, and further inland are their quarters. Caitlyn now wonders how the shack hadn’t blown off if last night was only her first taste of the season. Beyond that, there are insurmountable cliff faces. Not a port or harbor in sight – the one Caitlyn had sailed from wrapped around the back of the peninsula and had an outlet to the shipyard.
Inside the lighthouse, the stairwell is damp and woefully cold. Service rooms allow passage to the upper watch room, one floor short of the lantern.
And to speak of the watch: Caitlyn would be happier leaping immediately from the nearest window, hoping to become one with the wastage beneath it. It’s nightmarish, a small room in disarray that would’ve had Caitlyn steaming from both ears when she was in service. Months of logbooks and journals are strewn carelessly across surfaces, with a small clearing for the communications and monitoring panels.
“This is hardly workable,” Caitlyn grits, her hand finding her temple and then her one good eye, still droopy with sleep. “Do you ever tidy up?”
“Oh, I tidy plenty,” Vi replies with cheer, leaving her perch on the stairs and gesturing about the place. Shelves line what Caitlyn will dub the ‘back’ of the room. They contain a wealthy supply of wicks, oil, and cleaning supplies, all relatively neat. Sensing a latent fixation on the state of the transcripts, Vi chimes in, “You know they don’t check those, right?”
“Then why bother,” Caitlyn muses, not questioning but dry. There’s a stitch in her side from the stairs and her legs ache.
“My point exactly.” It’s dipped in a thick coating of sarcasm, which warrants a twitch in Caitlyn’s eye. “You want it your way, knock yourself out. Don’t let me stop you.”
“Believe me, I won’t.”
Caitlyn comes to the day one conclusion that Vi lives and breathes only to give her hell. It strikes a fond resemblance to her days in training, back when her cadets hadn’t feared the consequences of larking about. This fondness does not abate the headache of it all.
For all of her teasing, Vi eventually shows Caitlyn around the lantern room and lists out her expectations. Formally, Vi is in charge. It’s not reflected by her attitude, but Caitlyn can split the difference.
Mainly – and for this she holds a great deal of relief – Caitlyn has been put to pen-pushing and keeping the light. In her hardier days, she had been more suited to the rugged side of her work. Both handing out orders and servicing intricate machinery had come with no struggle. Now, though, her body is in a constant pain cycle and the thought of even lifting a revolver is maddening.
So, as Vi slinks off to the housing with a final “Holler if you find anything life-changing,” Caitlyn sets to pushing the pen as far as her frayed patience will allow.
***
Late morning on her third day, Caitlyn is tasked with hauling rainwater for bathing. She lists to the side with the full pot as she hoists it onto the woodstove, cringing at the cloudy color. Strolling up behind Caitlyn and peering around her shoulder, Vi leans to flick a sand flea from the surface of the pot.
“If you want fresh water, you’re welcome to head down the cliff,” Vi says, heading to her corner to shuck her jacket. Her sweater underneath is worn, sage wool patched at the elbows. “Just mind your step. And the tides. And the rocks.”
Caitlyn scoffs.
With her uniform up to dry, Caitlyn is dressed down to pleated trousers and a soft-collar shirt. Her crates remain mostly untouched at the foot of her cot, which has left her side of the room in a dismal blue state. It’s in stark contrast to Vi’s half, which is decorated in pressed flowers and books from overseas.
Feeling rather spurred to amend the sight, Caitlyn pries the lid from the first crate with her knife, the potent smell of cedar wafting up from the shavings. Most of her life up to this point is contained easily inside: several spare canvas blues folded neatly, an extra pair of polished boots, and yellowed manuals. She digs deeper, brushing past a wool scarf, and exhumes a small trinket box from beneath.
She sets it on the drawing table and begins rifling through, pulling from it a photograph wrapped in wax paper and smoothing it over the surface. The captured moment is bleak but comforting, with her parents stiffly smiling in front of the family estate. Caitlyn’s there, too, a girl of sixteen bracketed by a pair of sporting Dobermans. She had been straight-backed and serious, even then.
Vi is minding herself, staring at the ceiling from her bed as Caitlyn continues to arrange the belongings. She hadn’t brought anything worth much – an unworn glass eye, her father’s broken monocle, a pocket mirror chipped at one edge. It catches her reflection for a brief moment, face wind-bitten, her hair drawn up unkempt and salty.
At the bottom of the case, one final ornament peers up at her: a badge. Caitlyn had not meant to bring it, or rather, could not bring herself to leave it behind. The insignia is tarnished now, flaked paint cradled by the bronze circle, and Caitlyn thumbs over a serif ‘Aegis’ beneath the naval crown.
Vi cuts through the quiet, her bunk creaking as she sits up. Teasing but light, she asks, “Brought half of proud England with you?”
Caitlyn hastily returns the badge to the velvet bottom of the box, clasping it shut and pushing it to the wall. “No crime in sentimentality,” she defends.
“Never said there was.” Vi’s stretching her arms over her head when Caitlyn pivots to her, rolling her neck. “It’s nice to see you getting comfortable.”
Caitlyn hums, absent, going over to pull the water from the stove and pour a small amount into the metal wash basin. She’d managed to pack toiletries enough for the winter; a bar of lye soap wrapped in parchment per month, and several tins of lotion and lanolin cream. Vi watches her but says nothing, not until Caitlyn begins to button down her shirt.
“I could step out,” she offers, but there is something half-joking to the statement which quirks Caitlyn’s eyebrow. “Give you some privacy?”
“Why would you?” Caitlyn inquires with an unimpressed glance. The sarcasm lingers beneath it.
Vi tries to shrug, propped up on her elbows. “Dunno. Didn’t think you’d be keen on stripping in front of a stranger.”
“Stranger? That’s what you’d have me think?” Caitlyn feigns injury, turning up her sleeves to check the water a second time. Vi makes a quiet noise, unbothered, so Caitlyn shifts her approach. “The Navy provided little in the way of lavish bathhouses.”
“Navy, huh? Hadn’t figured.”
“What had you figured, then?” Caitlyn asks, absent as she wrings the water from her flannel and lathers it with jasmine soap. It’s lukewarm against her arms and throat, neither unpleasant nor luxurious. She’s peeved by the way Vi observes her every move, but there should be no concern or quarrel – it’s perfectly typical for two women to share housing. Equally typical for privacy to be abandoned thereafter.
Vi takes a moment to consider her response, settling on a second “dunno.” She itches her nose but doesn’t move otherwise. “Thought maybe you were born sneering at my kind a mile away.”
“That came much later,” Caitlyn replies cooly, and does not bother unpacking what Vi’s kind might entail – she doesn’t care to. Vi barks a laugh in response.
Forcing an air of indifference, Caitlyn freshens the water and begins to rinse her face. She pauses upon reaching her eye and hesitates a moment, turning her shoulder. Rationally speaking, she will not have warm water for another four days and should be leaping at the opportunity to feel clean.
Caitlyn washes her eye quickly, with more concern for necessity than cleanliness. Steam faintly curls from the basin as she turns the patch back down, collecting her belongings from the small vanity. It takes concentrated effort to ignore the feeling of Vi’s stare.
“What’s that smell? Lavender?” Vi asks, though she’s clearly uninterested in further detail.
“Jasmine,” Caitlyn corrects. She doesn’t spare another look, fixing her shirt and closing up the crate.
Vi flops over on her cot, yanking a wool blanket across her lap. “Can’t even wash yourself without making a show of it.”
Caitlyn snorts. “Would you prefer I didn’t wash at all?”
“Didn’t say that.”
***
For the following week, a routine settles in, punctuated by the cliffside wind and disjointed periods of rest.
Caitlyn sends her first order for provisions and works through a variety of books. So far, the shifts have run at adjacent intervals, where Vi will tend to the first half of the night and Caitlyn the latter, with occasional shared sleep during the day. Caitlyn is meant to keep detailed bi-hourly reports of the weather and respond to any correspondence, while Vi tends mainly to cleaning and repairs.
The ritual of it all becomes a small comfort after a few days. Teamwork is altogether bearable, with a few tense silences giving way to a functional partnership. They break bread together in the evenings and exchange pleasantries, but as Caitlyn promised, it remained surface and practical. Most of their shared time comes around dinner; Vi has cooked four nights now. Caitlyn has yet to ask if she’s happy to do it, or if she had only taken pity.
By Thursday of Caitlyn’s second week, the chill that rolls off the water carries fresh dread. In a gruesome display of their schedule, the time at two hours, Caitlyn leaves the cottage to take her watch.
She crosses to the lighthouse, battling winds determined to shove her back inside. She has sat in wait for the last while, clinging to the warmth of the shed and Vi’s woodchipper snores with a novel in hand. Now irritable and damp, she makes her ascent of the creaky stairs and heaves herself into the watch with a tired groan.
The generator hums beneath her. It had been filled before sundown and should make it to morning, which leaves Caitlyn with just one task: making order of the rathole.
So far, Caitlyn has two binders of her own, one for ships and incidents and the other for weather spreadsheets. By that logic, she begins to sort the logbooks into two categories and later chronologically. It’s mind-numbing and obsessive work, with the old clock on the wall ticking too loudly over the lashing wind. Something about the noise is off, only mitigated with busywork.
Caitlyn takes her first break to roll a cigarette and set the phonograph to an American jazz recording. It breaks up periodically with static fuzz but helps somewhat to drown out the clock.
Following the intermission, with the logbooks in order and later sent off for the back shelves, Caitlyn turns to the weather charts. They are a mess of nearly illegible scrawlings, scribbled over and stained with whatever the previous keeper had left. The most recent log, which summarizes the final week of September, is indecipherable. Her eye lingers on a wide blot of ink like a deep bruise.
Through disjointed timestamps, Caitlyn jots in her own penmanship what she can glean from the transcript. There are ample reports to amend, and then every surface will need dusting.
***
Caitlyn dreams of a watery death.
Whether she is pulled beneath or thrown in, lashing around or accepting her fate, she knows that she has drowned. It had been tangible and left her throat aching with the dregs of slumber, her teeth grinding in the last moments of it.
It comes to her mid-afternoon and wakes her with cold sweat, dry-eyed and reeling as she glances quickly around the bedroom. Caitlyn has been keeping note of these instances in a journal, separate of course from the incident logs as they pertain only to herself. Dreams, unfortunately, are a quick and easy track to the edges of her mind which had worn thin long before abandoning her shared flat in England.
She’s yet to breach the discomfort with Vi, but after splashing herself with cold water and heading for the privy, she thinks long enough and makes her decision.
Finding Vi is not difficult. More often than not, she has a paintbrush in hand. Today, she’s halfway up a ladder, layering strokes over the bottom of the tower, daymarks worn from salt. It’s miserable work with nature against her, so Vi will paint from the hours of ten to twelve at least twice weekly.
“Morning, sunshine,” Vi calls over the distance, catching Caitlyn from the corner of her eye.
“I had a night terror,” Caitlyn states, and does not match the pleasantry. The air is ominously still and her interjection cuts straight through it, but Vi does not stop painting. “I had drowned, I think.”
“Sorry to hear,” Vi says after a moment, dipping the brush again in thick black paint. She glances down once, then back to the tower. “You should see about sweeping the shed today.”
“Right.”
Caitlyn lingers a moment longer, staring at Vi, before trudging off to the house with her tail firmly between her legs.
***
The first true storm of the season roars outside, loud enough to rattle through the walls of the house. Rain scrawls frantic rivulets down the glass, backlit by the periodic flashes of the lighthouse. Vi sits slumped at her desk, one boot propped in a rung.
Occasionally, she glances at the cabin’s monitor. It’s a simple interface, easily understood by a green light which was to remain lit at all times. Really, Vi should be more fussed than she is, but her first year for all she remembers hadn’t given her much trouble.
There’s an excuse, too, for her drifting attention: Caitlyn.
She’s curled up facing the room, knees drawn to her chest. The silhouette of her is drawn by an oil lamp burning low. Caitlyn hadn’t moved for the last half hour – not that Vi could tell, anyway – but there was a tension in her shoulders and each deliberate breath that told Vi she was not asleep.
Vi runs a hand through her hair and leans back on the feet of her chair. She can’t blame Caitlyn. Vi’s first months hadn’t been easy, either, but she might have expected more from a former naval officer.
Without giving it much thought, Vi crosses the room and nudges Caitlyn’s shoulder, kneeling at the side of her bunk. “It’s not gonna get any quieter, you know,” she says, soft enough not to startle her. Caitlyn doesn’t respond, her head tucked against her arm.
The quiet stretches long enough Vi thinks about letting it go. Maybe Caitlyn wanted to be left alone, or she’d fall asleep eventually, and Vi didn’t need to push.
As she’s about to pull away, Caitlyn shifts, grasp tightening on the edge of her blanket. “I can’t,” she murmurs, muffled by the fleece and almost swallowed by the storm. She’s been running herself ragged for days. Vi knows she can handle things alone if she has to, but still, Caitlyn just looks so sad. The little furrow in her brow deepens when the wind picks up.
With a stout exhale, Vi stands, nudging her again. “Scoot over.”
Caitlyn peeks from her blankets enough to frown her suspicion.
“Come on. I’ll even leave my boots on if it makes you feel better,” Vi mutters, tugging at the blanket.
It earns a small twitch of her lips, not quite a smile. “Do not,” Caitlyn scolds, even as she shifts reluctantly to face the wall. Vi chuckles and heels her work boots off onto the runner, slipping into the narrow space Caitlyn leaves her. She props herself on the single pillow with one leg off the bed, wrestling with Caitlyn for the edge of the quilt.
Caitlyn’s still stiff as a board, but she stretches out to make room, feet hanging off the bed.
“Relax a little. I don’t bite.” Vi moves to tuck the blanket beneath Caitlyn, whose arms are tucked to her chest. “Not unless you snore,” she adds.
“I don’t snore,” Caitlyn murmurs, barely clinging to the realm of the living. “You snore.”
“Yeah,” Vi says, mentally tacking on the remark a more wakeful Caitlyn would add – And you’re proud of that, are you?
It’s quiet for a while after, the rain and lashing wind outside lulling Vi into her own thoughts. A pretty drab place to be, if you ask her. Caitlyn takes a while to thaw out, her breaths slowly evening with the minutes. Vi positions herself such that the entryway monitor is visible – all part of the job. Caitlyn’s personal space will have to take the blow.
“I’m taking the second shift,” Caitlyn says after a while. She’s barely conscious enough to do it, and Vi has to keep herself from chuckling.
“Sure thing.”
Vi holds vigil through the storm, and when the clock strikes two, she does not wake Caitlyn.
***
New England’s first frost reaches the peninsula towards the end of the month, and Caitlyn can only sigh when she steps out to see it. Off the tail end of her morning watch, it’s nearing eight now. She’d stopped by the cottage to put on tea without waking Vi, who could likely dream through a steam locomotive reducing her bunk to rubble.
Caitlyn stands on the porch, the early chill biting at her fingertips as she lights up a smoke. It’s eerily silent – even the waters had been empty all night long. Now, the frost clings to everything, glistening on scapes of rocks and the freshly painted light tower. The beachgrass shimmers with the faintest breeze, and it feels as if not only the earth but the air itself has been blanketed in peace.
Sweet tobacco and pekoe on her tongue, Caitlyn takes a deep breath and looks out over the horizon, peach and orange tones bleeding into dove grey. Her breath leaves her in a thick plume of fog, and it reminds her, distantly, of mornings standing watch as a cadet.
It’s easy to recall how the wind had bitten through her uniform, and orders barked over the raging wind. There had been a satisfaction then in earning her stripes, sharpened in her mind with the sting in her lungs. She’d cling to railings with numb fingers but unshaken resolve, and it had all been to prove herself.
Now, she glances down at the steam curling up from her tea, and it doesn’t feel like a challenge. England had not been so kind to her as this. It’s a brief respite, allowing the world to turn without rushing to meet it.
Perhaps, in a much different way, this is a test. Not in the way of skill, but a deeper trust – trust that the light will hold, that the frost will thaw with the sun, that Caitlyn will start to understand who she’s supposed to be here.