Kitabı oku: «The Deepwater Trilogy», sayfa 3

She snapped the opal box shut. No. He would never change his mind and she’d not lock the damn krakenskin coat away with her other failures. She would wear it, defiantly and proudly. She shared something with Mr Riven’s wife, after all. She too had been betrayed by someone she loved.

Arden stood up from the steamer trunk, the photograph still in her hand. Walked woodenly to the fireplace and threw it in. The flame leapt green, the paper crisped black. His eyes, twinkling and knowing. Eyes saying, do what you like, lantern girl. It’s really because of me that you are out here.

The eyes were the last to burn.

4
As was the custom

As was the custom in the old aristocratic families, she changed clothes for the main meal. Wore a grey linen shirt with no ruffles, a narrow dress that finished in a fishtail at the top of her boots. Bound her hair in severe knots upon her head. She headed down the bare wooden stairs towards the shabby velvets of the Justinian dining room, quite prepared to continue the argument about her new coat. Despite Mrs Sage’s pronouncements and the Dowager’s warning, she was feeling combative.

Mr Justinian arrived back from his Coastmaster meetings in the languid sort of mood that comes when one has had those meetings in the Black Rosette tavern over seaweed spirit cocktails, and in the presence of somebody generous with their affections.

He took off his coat – a slate-grey plesiosaur leather he could still ill afford on both a Coastmaster stipend and the dregs of a faded title. He sat at the table with a flourish. Arden huffed an understated disapproval. Mr Justinian knew what he was doing. A war of garments. His coat was an affectation that in Lyonne would have been vulgar, like something a slumlord crime boss would wear to impress the poor tenants. The tanned material had the tough grain of a shark or a ray. Less unfinished versions tended to take away a layer of skin against the poor soul unfortunate enough to brush against it.

Her fellow guests, a man and his wife from South Lyonne, glanced at the plesiosaur coat and kept their own counsel.

To pay running costs, the old Manse ran as a guest house for other important merchants and businesspeople who might wish to make profit off the Darkling Sea. Perhaps it did not make as much of a profit as was required, for to save on fuel not every lamp was lit, so instead of bright, cheery galleries, the large rooms became crepuscular, full of shadows and damp. The old tablecloths, laundered to transparency, were held together by little more than browning claret stains. The silverware would have better been called mottled nickel with silver-plate patches, and a century of cigar smoke now blackened the plaster ceiling roses with a dour velvet. In more than one corner, water-rot frayed the plaster walls and caused a drooping of the faded stripe wallpaper. There were not quite enough glasses to fill the display cupboards, and none of the tableware arrangements ever quite made a full set.

Altogether, a house in decline. The guests, already unsettled by the Baron’s mobster coat, glanced awkwardly at Arden’s fingerless gloves. She rubbed her hands. The bloodletting coins snagged in the oblique arches on the side of her palms. Twanged each time she closed her fist.

‘New gloves, Madame?’ the husband asked her quietly when Mr Justinian left the table in search of a better wine than the cloudy vinegar they’d been served.

He showed her his Guild pin as he spoke, a railroad degree. Though he himself was not gifted with any endowments, the Permanent Way required many sanguis disciplines, from ferrum to pondus and vaporis. A genteel way of telling Arden that even though he was commonblooded he was familiar and sympathetic to her kind. It had been the reason the trade guilds had originated, to unite their labours into one brotherhood, a fraternity of workers despite their wildly different means.

‘I’ve had my coins about a month,’ Arden admitted. ‘I’m only now getting used to having them in my skin.’ She recalled the little Guildsman who had watched with a clear, genial gaze as the nervous phlebotomist inserted the tools of her new position into her hands. Mr Lindsay, his name was. He had been a small, delicate fellow in the tweedy suit of a clerk, and wore a golden pin in the shape of a rose. He’d also been the one to bring the orders to her father.

For the railwayman’s benefit, and because she did not want to treat them as shameful or remarkable, she rolled her gloves up slightly and showed him the silver buttons set between the heart and the head lines. Her skin was still a little tender at the edges, and she suspected would not ever truly heal.

‘Why in the hands?’ asked his wife. ‘Isn’t it dreadfully more painful to cut your hands?’

Arden nodded. ‘I suspect they want us to feel pain. To remind us that power doesn’t come without a cost. Hands … well they are symbolic in a way no other body part is.’

‘I could think of one other symbolic body part,’ the wife giggled, before hiccupping wine. Arden saw that in anticipation of another awkward dinner the woman had pre-emptively gotten rather drunk. ‘The body part they always mention in those funny little Deepwater rituals, ha! I had that strange Mrs. Sage tell me all the stories of what goes on among those deviant brutes …’

The railroad man patted his wife’s hand and took the glass off her, before returning to Arden and attempting conversation again.

‘You must miss Clay Portside, Lightmistress. I’ve been there many a times, seen the air-harbours stretch out as far as the eye can see, sanguis zephyrim making the aerostats fly and the pondus who anchor them to the ground. Produce and trade from all over the world, the menagerie of animals, the babel of tongues! Of all those wonders, this place must seem like the colour has been taken from your eyes.’

She nodded, relieved at the admission. She could have never said such a thing to her hosts. ‘I do miss home. One does whatever the Guild asks. Especially if you’re sanguis, and there’s duty involved.’

‘Ah,’ he said, as if she had confirmed a suspicion. ‘I wondered why a grown sanguis woman should be getting such protection on her flesh when it’s the preserve of children. Isn’t eleven the most usual age?’

She gave them both a tight smile. ‘My blood tithings never required much from me before.’ She slid up her dress-sleeve to show the calluses on the back of her arm. ‘A cut here would last the better part of a week, and I had no symbolic act required of me.’

‘But now your work requires more blood, I see. Hence the disks to protect your skin from the knife.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the Lions follow you here, Mx Beacon?’ he asked.

A sudden question. His wife pretended to sip her thistledown wine, but Arden could feel her listening on with harp-string tension.

‘Lions?’

In her mind she saw the little Guildsman Mr Lindsay smile. Arden took a swallow of her claret, to buy seconds and still the sudden shake of her hand.

‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’

‘The Lyonne Order. The Eugenics Society’s attack-dogs.’ With his fingers the railwayman made the sign of teeth. ‘Did they follow you to Fiction?’

Arden went for her claret again and found she had finished the glass. She knew exactly what he meant. Businessmen in Fiction were not at all keen on coming across Lions of the human kind. She was a sanguis invested late into her profession. Such a thing had the stink of Order activity, their skulking and investigations and sudden disappearances. One would think the powerful Eugenics Society would concern themselves only with policing sanguis folk, but they frequently expanded their purview into the citizenry as well. The guests viewed her with no small suspicion.

‘No, was on instruction of the Seamaster’s Guild that I take up position here,’ Arden replied.

‘All the way out here? In Fiction, where the blood has faded?’

‘Well, the lighthouse is under the navigation chain of the Lyonne sea-road. It’s still a blood light, so it needs a sanguis ignis to maintain the flame.’

The wife spoke next, and despite her high spirits she was not as generous with her trust. ‘Why not install a petrolactose lamp in that tower? Or a natural gas, which is plentiful here. Why deal with such esoteric chemistries as yours? Whenever there are sanguis, there are always Lions. The blood attracts them.’

‘See, it is …’ she drifted off, and paused, for she didn’t know either. ‘I’m sure it’s very mundane,’ she capitulated. ‘Keeping the trade and Guilds of our two countries aligned through the sea-road navigation chain. My family has always maintained the Vigil light. It would be a loss to lose a station from sheer neglect, even an unimportant one.’

The wife pondered, then visibly relaxed. Arden’s explanation seemed sound. If her posting was just a matter of navigation, then there were no Lions about.

The husband drained his wine in one gulp.

‘Ah then, let us drink to the trade Guilds, the great fraternities of Lyonne.’

They might have been at ease, but there was already an ill cast to the night. Did the Lions follow you here? The Order worked in the shadows and bore no oversight. They should not be meddling in the mere business of keeping a navigation road safe.

It’s not for Fire they’ve called you, warned the father in her mind. And Arden shivered, even though the room pressed in oppressively close and far too warm.

A fourth guest joined them then, a man of middle years and a certain overbearing pomposity. His voice came before him, echoing from the foyer, a complaint about the condition of the roads, the driver who did not give him deference of title.

Mr Justinian called Arden’s attention as he re-entered, guest in tow.

‘Mx Beacon,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to meet Mr Alasdair Harrow, the Postmaster and Magistrate of Vigil.’

Despite the size of his voice, Mr Harrow was not particularly tall, had fallen into middle-aged stoutness, yet still possessed the domineering characteristics of his youth. The broad, heavy shoulders of a brawler, a pug nose, a cauliflowered ear. She thought his hair was white, but on closer examination in the gloomy light he was a faded blond.

‘A shared title, Postmaster and Magistrate?’ Arden inquired as she shook the new guest’s meaty hand. She wondered that Mr Justinian should be so keen as to introduce her to this fellow when he had never presented Arden to anybody else. The day’s excursion to town notwithstanding, Mr Justinian had kept Arden all to himself in the same manner as a dragon might sit jealous upon its hoard. If he could not have her for a night in his bed, then she should be walled up within brickwork isolations of his own making.

‘It is difficult to find men suited to all the offices of authority,’ Mr Harrow said in a barking pronouncement, not talking to Arden but rather a central place in the room where a silk arrangement of artificial flowers collected dust. ‘Especially here, in this town. So, I must fulfil my duties by occupying both roles.’

And drawing a double stipend from the Coast Office, Arden added silently. She gave Mr Harrow a nod and returned to her meal, busied herself in chewing the most inoffensive slice of potted meat, so she would not have to fight for her place in the conversation.

‘Miss Beacon here intends to take over the lighthouse operations that old Jorgen abandoned,’ Mr Justinian said, dragging her back in. ‘A request from the Seamaster’s Guild themselves.’

Caught drinking, Mr Harrow coughed mid-swallow. ‘What’s that you say?’

‘Jorgen Beacon. This is his niece, a Beacon scion and sanguis ignis from Clay Portside, sent all the way from our air-harboured capital city to bring some culture to our humble hamlet, and to keep the old promontory flame alive.’

Mr Harrow stabbed a pink cube of fish. ‘I’d not allow it, if it were up to me.’

‘Well, it is not up to you,’ Arden said.

Mr Harrow did not respond to her. She might have been an empty chair for all that she had spoken. ‘More fools in the world than there are decent ideas, Vernon,’ he grumbled.

‘I have my opinions too,’ Mr Justinian said, flicking a look Arden’s way. At least he recognized that they were speaking as if she were not there, though presumably because a woman angry was not a woman who would be amenable later. ‘But the Guild was adamant she fill the position.’

‘She’ll be dead within the week, her corpse twice-ravished, mark my words.’ Mr Harrow shoved a grape-melon in his mouth, and the juice ran down his chin. ‘Give her a rifle and make sure she knows how to use it. I’ll not be called out to the promontory to pick up her body like a damned fool.’

Arden stood with a crash, rattling the tableware. ‘Gentlemen, I can manage my own business. I’ve worked harder docks than this pissant bit of rock!’

Mr Harrow started laughing, barks of laughter. ‘They served her up for the slaughter Vernon. To the fucking slaughter. Wasn’t for her blood they wanted a woman out there. The Guild pimped her to the monster on the promontory, and Riven will rape her bloody and thank them for it.’

The house staff came in at that very moment bearing plates of a flavourless broth that would never have been conscionable to serve in Portside, and in the meantime Arden fumed. The gall of these men. The unmitigated dreadfulness of their words.

A server-girl came by with nothing but cow-eyes for Mr Justinian, and spilled claret on Arden’s sleeve with a smirk. Between her jealousy, Mr Harrow’s gleeful predictions and Mr Justinian’s knavish gloating, Arden was twisted up into a knot of frustration so painful it made her want to scream.

‘Excuse me,’ she said through a rage-strangled throat. ‘I’m not feeling well. I need to get some air.’

She fled the crushing mood of the dining room and ran down the murky corridor, finished in what was either a large study or a small ballroom, a gloomy expanse of sapwood parquetry and mildewed corners.

Past the curtain-rags, a cold moonlight spilled across the polished floor. Arden hauled open the double doors, fell out onto the balcony where the frost clawed her face and her breath steamed. All the menace the night could give was immensely preferable to the atmosphere inside, the terrible delight of men savouring that she be in harm’s way.

She sucked down salt air until the tremor in her limbs stopped and her breathing slowed. Gooseflesh sprang on her bare arms, and she welcomed that clean discomfort.

Someone stepped into the room behind her, and imagining it one of the guests who had watched on in deep disquiet at Mr Harrow’s performance she said, ‘I can’t stand it, those uncouth—’

‘Then I apologize. It was not my intent to harm.’

Arden startled. If she had gained a modicum of relief by going outside, the feeling was gone. Mr Justinian stood behind her.

Had Arden been of a more histrionic nature she might have considered throwing herself off the balcony, only this balcony was at ground level and the act probably lost much of its meaning when one landed safely on the other side.

‘Perhaps I’d prefer ravishment by this Mr Riven than being subjected to your snide gossip upon my sense and my work. At least he’s honest in his dreadfulness!’

Mr Justinian huffed. ‘All right then. You’re welcome to him, and him to you, just please come inside. These chills might not seem so much, but they can kill a man.’ He tilted his head towards her. ‘Or a woman.’

‘One may be surprised how resilient I am.’

‘But I am not quite as cold-blooded as you. Allow me to explain our trespasses inside. Please. Please.’

Mr Justinian gestured beside him. She shook her head. They were at an impasse. He threw his crumb.

‘Postmaster Harrow’s her father.’

‘Her?’

‘The woman whose coat you now own. Let me explain.’

Truth be told, the night was infernally cold, and she wanted to know about this Harrow daughter; in the same way hearing of another’s misfortune made one’s own life easier to bear. She stepped into the warmer surrounds of the study and closed the doors behind her. On cue, a servant ran in bearing a jug of tea, deposited the tableware and departed as silkily as a shadow.

The large, dark study had the air of a mausoleum viewing area, the books in the shelves gone dusty and unread. When she had first attempted to pass the time in this neglected library, most of the tomes were reference manuals of one permutation or another, lists of shipping indexes, dry histories. If there had been any books read for pleasure, they were sequestered elsewhere, or never existed at all.

Trapped by circumstance, Arden circled a daybed and a chaise longue as big as a small skiff before her attention was caught by a wrinkle of light in the shadows. A gallon-sized specimen jar, containing the formaldehyde-pickled coils of something aquatic and otherworldly – something octopoid somehow. She tapped the glass, experiencing equally the suffocations and convolutions of the poor beast inside.

‘My ancestor kept a Wunderkammer before he died. A collection of oddities,’ Mr Justinian said. ‘If you would believe it, a woman gave birth to that thing. Nobody but Great-grandfather Alexander wanted that abomination in here, but we were rather forced to keep it.’

She left the pickled monster and returned to him.

‘Don’t change the subject, Vernon. You say Mr Riven’s wife was Postmaster Harrow’s daughter.’

‘Yes. Mr Harrow is a man grieving.’

‘I’m sure he is.’

‘He is a wellspring of bitterness. He is too keenly aware what lies in wait for you upon that promontory, having seen it up close, and to someone he loved.’ Mr Justinian poured himself a snifter of brandy, but did not offer the same to Arden. The liqueur left runnels upon the glass in the firelight. ‘We also must talk of what happened today, else it will always fester in our minds.’

Arden exhaled. ‘You were quite adamant I should not have the coat. Murdered whore, you said.’

‘I acknowledge that.’

‘Marrying a monster does not make one a harlot, Mr Justinian. If what you say is true, then it was her husband’s fault that she was trapped in the marriage, not hers. You disgrace the dead by your blame. What you said today towards me was unconscionable.’

Mr Justinian stared at his shoes, affected a hangdog expression. ‘It upset me to lose such a fine young lady to such a miserly end, that is all.’

‘So she is fine, now?’

‘She was beautiful, and fierce and somewhat intelligent in her own way, and did not deserve what became of her. Reduced from vibrancy to a shade. My guilt at not stepping up to save her, my cowardice, is constant. I chose the pejorative out of my own grief.’ He glanced about, clearly hoping a voice might pipe up and rescue him, as it usually did when the servants were about. ‘But Bellis made her decision to help her father by prostituting herself to Riven when there were other ways out of her predicament.’

‘Bellis Harrow,’ Arden said. ‘So she has a name of her own, then.’

The brandy displeased Mr Justinian. He threw the liquor into the fire, causing a blue spirit to rise from the coals. It reminded Arden of her own arcane fire, starving in its glass in a far lighthouse, waiting to be fed.

Mr Justinian spoke to the fire, and not to her.

‘A hundred years ago a family was procured from the Sainted Isles. The Rivens, they were called. Or at least they received the name because they were shorefolk, sea-savages, not sophisticated enough to understand the concept of familial lineage. It didn’t matter that they were brutes and inbreeds. Alexander Justinian, my great-grandfather, needed hands to process kraken-flesh and saurians in his factories upon the promontory. Who minded if the Rivens were illiterates and barely human? Thankfully they were not suited to the modicum of civilization Vigil provided and mostly remained upon the promontory, away from town. Within the span of a century the Rivens fought and sliced and incestually pared themselves down to one disgusting remnant individual.’

Mr Justinian made the sign of the krakenskin crucifix upon his chest before adding, ‘Your lighthouse neighbour. T’was he that killed his family in an orgy of ritual and violence nearly twenty years ago. Slaughtered every man, woman and child on that promontory in one night. His own blood, gone.’

‘I see,’ Arden said. ‘But if all this brutality did happen, shouldn’t he have been hanged in punishment?’

‘Oh, Riven was punished indeed. Charged and pleaded guilty to killing his family, sent away to the hulk prisons of Lyonne. Rotting boats on Harbinger Bay, converted to hold the worst reprobates and degenerates ever disinterred from the social sewage.

‘But then some syphilitic judge had a weak-minded moment, and over a decade later returned the animal to this town. That is not the tragedy. Fifteen years of imprisonment merely sharpened the criminal’s hunger, made his sexual urges tend to the obscene. Riven was ill-content in wallowing out on the promontory among his factory ruins. He came into town, forced a local girl to wife. Mr Harrow’s daughter.’

‘Forced?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now there,’ Arden said tartly. ‘There is the strange part. The heart wants what it wants and it takes two to marry. If he wanted to marry anyone, then they would have had to at some stage consent to it, to allow it. Before witnesses.’

‘Allow? Allow? You speak about request and consent upon this brutal shore?’ Mr Justinian laughed with an adult’s condescension towards a child. ‘The woman was stolen, just as you would steal a hog or an unsupervised cure of meat. Dragged her screaming to the Sainted Isles, where illegal unions can be effected as easily as an attack in the dead of night. She came back with both eyes blackened, and never spoke for nearly a year afterwards. Not even to her father.

‘Her last year alive she spent in abject horror and torment inside those factories and in his stinking bed. Escaped only once, whittled down to skin and bone and scar. Wanted an abortifacient for the monster curled in her womb, and Mr Sage gave her a tea that …’

‘I have had experience with such a tea,’ Arden snapped. ‘You do not need to explain in detail what Mrs Sage already has. Continue, if you decide this salacious horror is what I must hear to make my informed decision.’

‘Riven came back for Bellis that night, threatened Mr Harrow. Assaulted him, even as he tried to protect his daughter. A month later she was dead. All that was left was her coat, washed onto the beach. The Rector of our church was to make a statement to the magistrate about her death, for it was to him that she had confided. Our Rector himself went to Riven, to beg that he confess for the salvation of his holy soul. He never returned, his body was never found. Without evidence of death, the mongrel could not be charged or convicted. Two deaths within days. But let us merely agree as to who did both.’

‘Circumstantial, still …’

‘The Rector was your cousin, Arden Beacon. Rector John Stefan, the son of Jorgen Beacon, the Lightkeeper.’

Arden’s heartbeat quickened in her chest, the rush of panic that any thought of unfair violence brought. Her cousin she remembered only vaguely, for their meetings had been so long ago, a slender, dark youth with the same soft-smoky hair as Andrew and soulful eyes. He had been her age, Stefan Beacon, ungifted in blood but touched in other ways – deeply sensitive, accepted into a religious seminary and visiting his family in the North. Arden remembered more her step-mother’s exclamation. Stefan and Arden could have been brother and sister, how similar their looks!

Her cousin, murdered, along with the woman.

She needed to keep calm, for such tales were not just for her safety. Her fear was a coin that could buy Mr Justinian several more weeks of her time.

‘Surely such a performance as a literal kidnapping by the bogeyman of Vigil would have risen one or two men to heroics. You say all this happened to her, and to Mr Harrow, that you yourself stood by and watched?’

‘You don’t understand. Riven cannot be killed. The devils of the sea keep him safe, for all that he cut off his cock and fed it to them for his protection.’ In the candlelight Mr Justinian’s face darkened, and pearls of sweat sprang up from his brow. ‘And he makes money! Money for foreign businessmen who purchase his kraken hides and will not allow harm to come to him.’

He snatched at the mantelpiece, held himself there shaking, before the brandy decanter called to him once more. ‘I am sorry. For you. For her.’

‘Are we done in the telling? Is this all I must know?’

Mr Justinian nodded. ‘It is what you must know.’

‘Coastmaster, regardless of whatever went before you must sign my release papers. I must go to my lighthouse.’

‘You need not hurry. Mr Harris can—’

‘Mr Harris is not qualified to keep a lucent flame alive and the season of summer storms will be upon us. A perpetually burning flame is still vulnerable to going out, and a sanguis ignis needs to maintain the light.’

‘You cannot yet go,’ Mr Justinian insisted. ‘Not so soon. Not while Riven still lives out on that accursed promontory! He will come to you in the night, come prowling with lust in his black heart!’

Arden sniffed. ‘It will not be the first time I’ve been in situations with lustful men. Anyway, didn’t you say he fed his manhood to the devils for his protection? What is he meant to do to me without it?’

He did not take her scoffing bait. ‘I cannot release you! My guilt over Bellis’ fate prevents me.’

Arden had one play left to her. Such a play could only be used but once, and she had to take a deep breath before she deployed it.

‘If you do not sign the papers, Mr Justinian, I will have no recourse but to return to Portside with your so-called essential list. I will present such evidence to the Seamaster’s Guild and there will be an investigation. They may do more than investigate me, and cast their eyes on other parts of your business. Good night to you.’

As she turned to leave, Mr Justinian grabbed her arm. His fingers dug hard into the muscle, with the clear intent of leaving an imprint of himself upon her.

‘It is not safe.’

‘Safer than here, perhaps.’ She pulled free. ‘You cannot keep me from my lighthouse.’

‘All right then, damn you.’

He strode to the desk, unlocked it and pulled out a sheaf of papers from a leather binder, the certificates that completed the Guild transfer. ‘I have tried to warn you of the creature who will be no further from your doorstep than the east wing of this Manse from the right. This thing I do will condemn you to danger.’

‘The danger is mine to face,’ Arden said. ‘Otherwise what good am I as a Lightkeeper anywhere?’

He met her steady gaze with something approaching panic. His nostrils flared like a horse sensing the harness.

She held the gaze, until he broke first, picked up his heavy fountain pen from the inkwell and signed both copies with such violence that Arden winced for the paper and the wood of the table beneath.

He held up the certificate. She held out her hand.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Perhaps she was too subtle. The certificate never went her way.

‘One condition.’

Arden frowned. ‘I am not happy with conditions.’

‘Allow me to court you.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I am a Coastmaster with a barony to my name. You are an interim member of the Seamaster’s Guild, the youngest ever. By winter you yourself would hold a full Guild degree, marry whom you wish. A good couple we would make. Our mating would be well-matched. The Eugenics Society will allow it, for we may yet breed some as yet unheard of talent.’

Unbidden, Richard Castile stepped into the halls of her mind. His smart uniform. His rakish cap. His handsome face taking her breath away with yearning. To touch him. To wrap herself up in a body that was not her own.

She shook her head firmly to rid herself of the association.

‘I have no interest in eugenics or breeding. Besides, in the interest of fleeting pleasure – which I am quite forbidden to pursue openly – I barely know you.’

‘Then come to know me. Allow me the chance to court you and present my case. The Society is favourable to a high lineage such as mine. You could receive a marriage dispensation at the very least. Non-breeding of course, but the operation to remove womb-horns is often quite successful.’

Arden exhaled. She shouldn’t shout. Would be unprofessional, but still, the gall of the man!

‘Mr …’

He moved to the fire, the certificate still in his hand. She saw the leaping flames, the devouring of her freedoms, the going home, the censure of the Guildmaster who might have to come out here and mediate this mess. Maybe even Mr Lindsay, whose owners even the Portmaster of Clay feared.

They would find in her favour, but the taint of being a Lightkeeper who could not handle their own business would remain. She would not keep her degree, not even the associate one. Her signal post had already been reassigned. She would be …

‘Stop!’

‘Well? What say you, Mx Beacon?’ He shook the paper. ‘I am a man alone in this cursed, misbegotten peninsula courtesy of my great-grandfather’s sentimentality. How am I to meet any woman of my equal among these inbreds of the coast? How will my family be redeemed if I marry into worthless muck?’