Chapter Two - The First Keeper

The snow came sideways that night, flung by a wind sharp enough to shear skin from bone. There had been no stars for days, only the pale smear of daylight that arrived like a rumour and vanished before the eye could catch it. The men had stopped marking the time; their pocket watches ticked, but meant nothing. Somewhere aft, beneath layers of frost-thick canvas, one of the officers was still speaking to God. Another had gnawed through his own glove while sleeping. The air inside the ship was colder than the air without, breath hung long and low like rope, and every surface stank of damp wool, old meat, and something sweeter that no one wished to name.

Below deck, someone was weeping - slow, rhythmic, relentless. No one acknowledged it. They had made an unspoken pact not to intervene in matters that did not directly concern survival. That was the word now. Not duty, not expedition. Survival. One of the deckhands had taken to sharpening a bone needle into the shape of a tooth. For protection, he said. From what, he never explained. Each morning brought fewer footsteps. Each night, the ice shifted beneath them in ways it had not before — not cracking or booming as it had in earlier months, but sliding, rearranging itself like a creature settling into sleep. Once, the hull had lurched so violently the stove slid six feet and two of the men screamed before they could stop themselves. One claimed he saw movement in the galley. Not a rat. Not a man. Something lower. He did not describe it again.

Gray did not speak much in those days. He had learned early that the men who narrated their suffering rarely lasted. He kept to himself, mending ropes that would never see the sea again, sharpening knives with nothing left to cut. He wrote in a small book, though the pages froze stiff by night and had to be thawed with his breath. The others gave him space, partly out of respect and partly because he did not blink often enough. He had seen one of them try to eat snow laced with lamp oil. Another boiled down his own boots, insisting the leather still had strength in it. Once, when rations ran thin, a carcass was shared among them - meat they pretended not to recognise. Gray took notes on it all, not out of morbid curiosity but because he feared forgetting. It was not the death he feared, but the dimming.

One night - or what passed for night - he woke to the sound of tapping beneath the floorboards. Not the usual strain of timber in cold, but something deliberate, measured. Seven taps. Pause. Three more. Then silence. Then again. It followed him when he moved. Others heard it too; you could tell by the way they froze mid-step, eyes fixed on nothing, as if listening might make it stop. One of the younger sailors broke first. He swore he’d seen movement under the frost, shapes gliding slow as fish in milk. The surgeon sedated him. By morning he was gone, leaving only his boots, upright at the foot of the ladder. After that, the surgeon stopped sleeping. Gray took his place on watch, though there was little to watch but a darkness that seemed to lean closer each night. The tapping did not fade with the cold - it grew patient, waiting for pauses in speech, for the moment before breath. When he pressed his ear to the timber, he swore he could feel warmth against it.

By the time the ice thawed enough to make retreat possible, months had passed and only a handful remained. Fewer still could speak. Fewer still remembered their own names. Gray did not look back when they stepped off the ship. He carried a single pack, no coat, and a length of frayed rope he would not let anyone touch. One of the survivors claimed he had carved a set of symbols into the mast before leaving. Another swore his eyes had gone pale - not from frost, but something older. They reached civilisation in stages: outposts, then harbours, then headlines. He refused all interviews. All inquiries. When Trinity House sent word two years later, offering an isolated post on a barren rock with no snow, he accepted within the hour.

***

The letter reached him in late autumn of 1851, its paper warped by salt air, the seal smudged where damp had worked its way through. It bore the crest of Trinity House and the slow, officious grammar of men who had never seen the sea.

Mr Finnegan Gray is hereby appointed Keeper of the Light at Grimleigh Rock, Dogger Bank, effective upon completion of construction. Duties to include the daily winding of the regulator, inspection of the bell-wire assembly, and the maintenance of a continuous log to be submitted quarterly. Ten pounds per annum, with provisions to be delivered seasonally.

There was no mention of rotation or relief. The phrasing softened the truth - single-manned station - as if solitude could be made respectable through hyphenation. The clerk who countersigned it could not have known the kind of man his ink had conscripted: a survivor of the Arctic silence, a ghost of Franklin’s failed expedition, the Irish seaman who had walked home from the white edge of the world without a word.

Gray read the letter once and did not bother with it again. He folded it, slid it into the lining of his coat, and by dawn had left his rented room by the docks. What money he had went to a used oilskin, a pair of boots, and a coil of hemp rope knotted seven times. He carried no keepsakes. The few who had tried to speak with him in the years since the expedition had given up; he met every question with a silence that felt deliberate, not defensive. Perhaps he mistook stillness for peace, or perhaps he had come to believe that a man could only outrun what followed him by standing still.

The cutter that bore him north was small and quick, a coastal vessel half-rotted with tar and superstition. The crew were civil in the way sailors are to men they fear. They spoke around him, not to him, and no one offered tobacco. The captain, a wiry man with windburned eyes, addressed him only once. On the second evening, as mist began to settle like ash, he pointed towards the horizon - a thin black tooth breaking through the pale water.

“Grimleigh,” he said, and spat over the rail. “She don’t take kindly to being watched.”

Gray said nothing. He had heard the phrase before. The sea had many such warnings — nonsense given weight by repetition, and he had no faith left for charms. Yet later, when the men went below deck and the cutter fell quiet, he felt it again: that small, rhythmic pulse through the planks beneath his boots. Tap. Tap. Tap. Seven in a row, then stillness. The motion of the water could have caused it. So could memory.

They reached the rock at dusk on the fourth day. The tower rose from the mist like something built to be forgotten, windowless for the first thirty feet, its base slick with salt and weed. The captain offered no farewell. He touched his cap, turned the cutter about before the mooring line had been fully cast off, and was swallowed by fog before the echo of his oars had died. Gray stood for a time at the landing, listening to the sea gnaw at the stone. The air smelt of metal and rain. A narrow path led up the slope to the door, where the mortar still bore the pale fingerprints of the men who had built it. Inside, the air was dry and bitter with limewash. A rope, a pair of empty oil casks, and a ledger lay stacked beside the stairwell. He placed his pack beside them and struck a match. The flame guttered, steadying itself against the draught. From the gallery he could see nothing of the mainland, only the faint smear of grey that might have been sky or water. The tower groaned with each gust, its joints settling into a rhythm that might almost have been breathing. He unwrapped his notebook - the one he had carried through the ice, and set it beside the new, red-leather logbook waiting on the desk. For a moment he looked between them, unsure which to open first. When he finally lit the lamp, the great lens turned obediently, scattering light through the fog like glass through milk. The mechanism ticked, slow and even, a sound that could almost be trusted. He wound it fully, made his entry, and signed it with a steady hand.

April 1852 – Light engaged at 18:40. Wind south-by-east. Bell tested; sound carries oddly through the stone. Suspect moisture in the housing. Will inspect again at dawn.

He closed the book, set the pen aside, and lay down on the floor beside the regulator, the rope coiled near his hand. The sea tapped against the outer wall in its long, indifferent rhythm. Somewhere within it, softer than the surf, another tapping kept time.