told her that beacons had been washed clean away from Wolf Rock before that spike of granite dared house three brave men at a time. There was no way that she could go home. Not now.
The lifeboat crew came rushing, hurried and poorly dressed. Not long afterward, Mr. Anderson came chasing down the road, still battling with the buttons on his coat. She hoped his blood pressure held out. The idea of Mrs. Anderson, alone and worried, came to her. What would she do without him to fuss over for the next few hours?
“Yours out there too?” said a woman who arrived alongside her, wrapped in a thick dressing gown, her hair in rollers with a scarf tied around it. It was Mrs. Nichols from down the road, who let her spare rooms out to tourists. Rain drummed on her umbrella, which she placed over their heads, but Elizabeth was already wet through. “I can’t stand it when I hear that bloody flare.”
“He’s on Wolf Rock. He’s one of the keepers.” Mrs. Nichols turned then, regarded Elizabeth with a keen eye, trying to work out what she knew, what she might have heard. A soft smile crept onto her face, recognition of what it meant to stand on the shore and wait for a person you love. “I don’t know anything,” Elizabeth said.
Mrs. Nichols pulled her gown in close around her chest. “I heard that the light went down sometime just after midnight.”
Elizabeth’s breath caught in her throat, and she could feel her cheeks flushing with worry. “How do you know that?”
“My Joe spoke to the station officer at Penlee last night.” That was the lifeboat station just a little way around the coast. “Said he’d never been out in conditions like it. Pulled two men from a fishing vessel, but they lost a third.”
“That’s awful,” Elizabeth said, her mind already elsewhere. Rough seas and a broken lighthouse. The waves would have to have been monstrous for them to break up parts of Wolf Rock. Only a sea boiling with fury. And how could a man withstand it, if a structure of that magnitude could not? And with that she couldn’t hold them back, and tears began to stream down her face.
“Come on, love,” Mrs. Nichols said, wrapping her arm around Elizabeth’s shoulders. She looked close to tears too. “Somebody called the coastguard, remember, and it’s most likely the keepers on the light.” Elizabeth wiped her nose. “It gets easier to watch them leave, you know? Easier to spend time apart.”
Elizabeth used the tissue to dab her eyes. “I hope so,” she said, but she doubted that Mrs. Nichols’s words would ever be true for her.
* * *
Those who had managed to sleep through the events of the night before were waking to word of the storm. People were beginning to rally around, including a team of young men balanced on the upper rungs of precarious ladders, patching up Old Man Cressa’s roof. Others were sweeping the sea’s detritus from the streets, or bailing water from their homes, and Elizabeth made tea for the workers. Doors were opened for folk to come and go, a place for a brief hiatus, to get warm. James and her father arrived not long after first light, awaiting the wounded.
And right then she heard somebody shouting in the distance, the commotion of hurried feet, before she saw the Susan Ashley returning to shore. The first accounts of what had happened began to ripple through the crowd: five crew members had been rescued from a beached fishing lugger, which had run aground on the plug of volcanic rock that housed the lighthouse. A sixth had been lost in a fall. Wolf Rock had failed; a rogue wave drenched the lighthouse, bringing with it all manner of oceanic debris, and a piece of driftwood no bigger than a teacup had taken out one of the windows, and subsequently the light. Two of the keepers had abandoned their posts to attend the stricken vessel, leaving another in charge of the fog gun, but who stayed and who ventured to help was unclear right up until the lighthouse crew came ashore. Rescued crew members from the lugger disembarked with a range of injuries: cuts to the face, a broken arm, and another with a severe-looking wound to the leg, which had drenched the lower half red. Only one casualty had cause to be transferred by stretcher, carried by the other two members of the lighthouse crew.