coat and put it round the man, quickly at first, but the man shied and Joe had to lift his hands to show what he was doing, then try again more slowly. If the man had ever had a coat, the sea had stolen it. His shirt was translucent from the water. Although he was powerful from the ribs up, his bones were near the surface. It was the hunger strength that miners and boxers had, not the healthy kind. There was already ice in his hair. When he did let Joe put the coat round him, he couldn’t move his hands enough to fasten it, and only crossed his arms to lock it closed.
‘Where did you come from?’ Joe said, bewildered. The empty horizon was interrupted only by the lumps of forming sea ice.
The man was shivering too much to talk a lot, but he managed to say, ‘I fell.’
Joe hurried him ahead, worried that he would collapse. Their shadows spun as the lantern swung. The man held his hand out to help Joe up the last stretch of steps, which had mainly crumbled away. His fingernails were blue, but he did manage to grip. That had to be a good sign.
‘It’s warm inside,’ Joe promised. ‘The furnace is going.’
He shoved the door shut behind them both and let his breath out, because the quiet roared after coming in from the wind. ‘Let me find …’ He trailed off and turned away to hunt out a towel and some dry clothes. ‘Go downstairs and stand by the steam engine, it’s hot. Follow the noise.’
‘Y-es,’ the man said uncertainly. He looked apprehensive.
Joe didn’t understand at first, but then wondered if perhaps people round here weren’t used to machinery. The boats had engines, but the chances were that hardly anyone between here and Glasgow ever saw an industrially sized one, with a generator. Generators were unsettling things; the fan belts moved fast and the magnetised cogs were thick, spiky, and full of the potential to fly off. He could remember the first one he’d seen at M. de Méritens’ workshop. He’d been nervous of it, for sure. ‘It’s all right, it’s just an engine. It powers the generator. It’s safe. And warm, go, go.’
When he met him there, the man was standing by the furnace, the window in the scuttle partially ajar and his back to it. Joe put the towel around him and made an uncertain sound about the size of the clothes. The last keepers had left everything and it was all still there in the dresser, ironed and smelling of wood.
‘Thank you,’ the man said.
‘Welcome. I’m glad you’re here.’
The man smiled. ‘Have you been here long?’
‘No, but the last keepers vanished and I spook more easily than I should.’ Joe watched him change, because he was covered in marks. The worst were the burns. They went across one side of his face, right down his neck, his shoulder, his arm. Joe only noticed he was staring when the man flinched, self-conscious.
Joe arranged his now-wet coat over the near end of the engine instead, where it would catch the heat, and kept his back to the man.
‘It’s a strange place. When they first built the tower,’ the man said, in a careful way that sketched out forgiveness, ‘there were all sorts of stories. If you looked from the land, you could see the men building it. If you looked from the sea, the works looked like ruins.’ He brushed Joe’s elbow to say he was dressed again. Even out of the water, there was something foreign about him and his clear precise English, which wasn’t Scottish, or the Londres pidgin, or the bracken violent kind they spoke at the stations north of York. His voice was young; in fact, he was much younger than he looked, Joe realised, closer to thirty than forty.
‘You’ve seen it too?’ Joe said, absurdly grateful. ‘I thought I was going mad. No one in town would tell me about it.’
‘Oh, I’ve seen it plenty,’ the man said, cutting his eyes to one side with a kind of wry tolerance. ‘They’ve nothing better to do in town than be mysterious.’
Joe laughed, and felt far safer than he had an hour ago.
Once they had eaten – salmon, no less, from the cold stores – Joe gave him a tour, ending in the lamp room. The man came in slowly and hesitated in the doorway, skittish at the noise of the carbon rods. Joe showed him how