The Kingdoms

one seemed to think he was late and it was only little by little that he understood they hadn’t expected him to get through quickly, and that it was always going to take three hours and a bribe. He couldn’t understand their English well enough to ask why no one had told him that when they’d arranged it all over the telegraph. Maybe it was common knowledge.
He wasn’t the last on to the boat. A young woman came just after him with a gun slung over her shoulder and a tartan scarf. The whalers, all heavyset, gave her a wide berth and anxious looks. One of them pushed Joe into the tiny cabin they’d given him and he jolted backward, but the whaler held up his hands.
‘I’m not trying to hurt you. Are you carrying francs?’ he said urgently. Joe only caught what he said on the second time round.
‘Francs, yes—’
‘Give them to me.’
‘What?’
‘We need to get rid of them, she can’t catch you with francs. Now!’
Joe gave him the diminished roll of notes, fast. He thought he was just being robbed, but the second he had them, the whaler slung them over the side and came back looking shaken, like it wasn’t money he’d thrown away but a live grenade.
‘Why did you—’
‘Shut up!’ the whaler hissed.
The young woman with the tartan scarf glanced at him and the whaler nodded, too polite. When the whaler saw Joe watching bewildered from the doorway, he leaned on the door and whispered to keep inside till after they had dropped the woman off at Fort William.
Joe stayed on the edge of the bunk for a long time, rattled. But he was too tired to demand a different ship now, and eventually he sank back into a dead sleep that lasted, inevitably, only until four in the morning, when he read by candlelight for an hour and a half before he slept again, this time all the way to Lewis and Harris.

Part II
THE LIGHTHOUSE


8
The Outer Hebrides, 1900
The Eilean Mòr lighthouse wasn’t on the coast, but on a tiny spray of islands ten miles from the nearest harbour, shrouded in rain. It was a gaunt tower that rose from the natural slope of the rocks like a whale rib. Even from a distance it looked like it was falling to ruin.
One of the lamp windows was smashed, a colony of white birds hopping in and out. Joe saw it more clearly as they came closer. Greenish streaks stained the side that faced the incoming tide. The steps were worn and barnacled. They plunged right into the sea, and the mooring hoops that should have been around the landing quay had been lost underwater.
It was hard to believe the surveyors could have been so wrong about the sea level or the weather, to have built something that fell apart after just two years. He would have to do a decent study of the thing, but if there were no windows, he couldn’t stay for the season. Dismayed, he wondered what he was supposed to do then. Report to the Lighthouse Board, probably, but he didn’t know where that was.
A deep part of him hated finding it in ruins, having seen it etched whole on that postcard for so long.
All along the shore of the mainland, points of light shone among the watchtowers, hundreds of feet up from the beach.
Joe had heard about the Harris Wall, which was even more ancient than Hadrian’s, but he hadn’t ever seen a picture. He stood up when he saw the real extent of it. All along the gullied cliffs, there were towers and walls. In some places they had been built from stone, and in others, the masons had cut into the cliff-face. Where the cliffs petered out, more walls bridged the gaps. Lookout towers stood in different stages of decay, some still with their roofs and some tumbled. He looked back out over the water. The next land on from here was America. He couldn’t remember what it was the builders had been trying to keep out.
Someone shouted and the ship slewed to the right, which knocked him off balance. When he looked back, the captain pointed from the cabin to something beyond the rail. There were two pillars in the water, taller than the ship. They must originally have been rock stacks, but they had been carved smooth. Joe held onto the rail as they looped around. They hadn’t needed to; they would have cleared the pillars easily, sailing between the two. It was an exaggerated horseshoe of a manoeuvre to go round the other side. Maybe they marked underwater rocks.
The harbour was on the west side of Lewis and Harris, looking out over the dark sea towards the pillars and Eilean Mòr. On the map, the town was called Aird Uig, but Joe couldn’t work out how you were supposed to pronounce that. The whalers called it the Station. It crouched among the ruins of the wall, looking vulnerable.
One of the whalers told him that there should be rooms at the sailors’ boarding house, which was also the pub, if he could commit to not swearing for the night. The landlord was strict. The whaler stopped, because Joe was staring at him hard, concentrating.
‘What?’ he said.
‘Sorry. My English isn’t so good,’ Joe had to say. It seemed politer than ‘Are you certain you aren’t speaking Norwegian?’
The pebble beach smelled of seaweed and iron. A stairway led up to the boarding house, but the rail had rusted to nothing and someone had left an anchor there to hold on to instead. Joe, who had never been acquainted with any anchors before, was surprised to find it was at least three times as long as a person, and quite well-suited to its new job.
Music came from inside. When the door opened, heat rolled out. Joe and the whalers stopped in the broad entranceway to pull off their coats, slick from the