they worked. The man looked into the screaming purple light without narrowing his eyes. The noise plainly didn’t stop bothering him, although he said nothing about it, so they went back downstairs and played cards in the little living room, propped against the pipes that ran hot from the furnace. He lost good-naturedly and paid his losses in old money, English gold from a button-down pocket of his wet clothes, which were steaming now, draped over the broadest pipe. Joe stared at it and then pushed it back over the table.
‘I can’t take that. That’s fifty francs’ worth of gold, I—’
‘Not here it’s not,’ the man said gently. He slid it back to Joe. Two of his fingers had been broken and set improperly; he couldn’t move them as much as he should have been able to. ‘Just take it. Use francs here and you’ll be lynched. I prefer not to be.’ He didn’t have to show his teeth before the scars around his eyes made it clear he was on his way to smiling. ‘I’m putting you to a lot of trouble, anyway.’
‘There’s nowhere else you can be. The sea isn’t frozen enough to walk on properly yet. What do you expect to do, fly?’
The man opened his shoulders and cast a ball of awareness between them that he knew he looked like a thug and that he wouldn’t have blamed Joe for yelling and shoving him back into the sea. ‘Even so.’
Joe hesitated, because neither of them had introduced themselves yet, and he had an uncomfortable sense that this was not the kind of place where you pulled a mystery man from the sea and just trusted that he was going to be a nice person. There was something about him that wasn’t right. You didn’t get that many scars, and that much strength, from making a living as a stonemason or a bricklayer.
Joe felt very aware of his own voice, and how French he must sound. Lynched if you use francs. He thought of how urgent the sailor had been on the way here, when he slung Joe’s money away before the Saints fighter could see.
Joe hadn’t seen a ship nearby, even from the three-hundred-and-sixty-degree view from the tower. It was hard to hide like that unless you were trying to hide, surely.
‘I don’t mean to sound – but are you from the Saints? Because if you’ve got business round here, I’m not – I don’t want any trouble.’
‘The Saints?’ The man sounded honestly mystified, but it couldn’t have been honest. No one would really have thought it was an odd thing to ask. ‘No.’ But he didn’t say what he was. He was watching Joe with some attention now. His eyes were green, very light. They made him look wolfish.
Joe swallowed. It must have been the isolation of the lighthouse and the ghostly feeling of lifting someone unexplained from the sea, but he had not clocked, before, that it might have been more dangerous to take a man like this inside than leave him in the water. ‘As I say, whatever you’re doing round here, it’s none of my business. I’m just the lighthouse keeper.’
‘I know. I’m not … going to hurt you.’ The man seemed finally to understand. ‘We were smuggling sugar, that’s all. We were on our way out of the harbour when the lamp here came on. It made the helmsman jump, he knocked the tiller, we spun, I fell like an idiot into the rip.’ He was making himself smaller, Joe realised; he didn’t like the idea that he’d frightened anyone. His hands were clamped together in his lap.
The words sounded old in a way that Joe’s own English didn’t. ‘Rip?’
‘A fast current. They’re dangerous, you can’t swim against them.’
‘Oh,’ said Joe. Then he laughed, feeling silly. ‘Right. Sugar – I saw you, when you brought it in. And today, on the beach.’
‘Well-known income supplement round here,’ the man said tentatively, as if he wasn’t sure Joe was ready for a joke yet.
Joe smiled. ‘Well, sorry for that little burst of hysteria. I’m Joe. It’s nice to meet you. I should have said that before.’
The man’s eyes ticked up again, not for long. ‘Kite.’ He didn’t say if it was his first or last name, and Joe couldn’t tell; north of the border, people had strange names, from old clans or kings no one had heard of any more. ‘Can I ask how you ended up being a lighthouse keeper on a