Robson set the collar down with care. “That’s weeks.”
“It is.”
“And the lantern sits dark while we wait?”
The keeper straightened and met the smith’s gaze. The words tasted of ash, and the wrongness of them sat upon his tongue like a lie told in church. But the flaw was real. He had to believe it was real, however invisible to the hand, however elusive under inspection. There was a physical cause, and a physical remedy, and the collar was the most rational candidate among the components he could not verify by eye alone.
“I will manage the coast until it arrives.”
Robson wiped his hands upon his apron and began collecting his tools. “I’ll write to Heaton’s. They’ll know the maker.”
“I will write the letter myself. I have the specification from the original commissioning. But I would ask—” He stopped, and the hesitation cost him something, because he was not a man who managed other men through half-truths. “—that you let the village know it is a matter of parts. A worn collar. A replacement ordered.”
Robson studied him. “That’s what it is, then? A worn collar?”
“It is what can be repaired.”
The smith held his gaze a breath longer, then folded the leather around his tools and tied it. “I’ll tell ‘em. Parts is parts. They’ll understand parts.”
He carried his bundle down the stair without further question.
The keeper stood alone in the lantern chamber and listened to the smith’s boots descend—the familiar rhythm of the spiral, each step falling half a second after the last. When the lower door scraped open, he turned back to the collar and picked it up again.
There was nothing wrong with it.
He knew that. He had known it before Robson arrived, before Clark, before any of them. The bore was within tolerance. The seating was true. He could feel the perfection of it beneath his fingers even now, and the knowledge sat like a stone behind his ribs.
He set it down.
Some flaw must exist. It had to. Too small for perception, but it must be there. The alternative—that the apparatus was sound, the fuel clean, the draft correct, and the flame still would not hold—was not an alternative at all. It was superstition dressed in silence, and he would not permit it.
Footsteps echoed on the stair. Lighter than Robson’s, and without the mason’s even pace. Sandy boots grinding against the stone.
Hugh Calder came through the door still wearing his oilskins, his white-streaked beard damp with spray. He did not knock. He never did. The fisherman took in the room—the disassembled wick, the cloth of parts, the dark lens overhead—and his mouth set into a hard line.
“Three nights, Wickie.”
The keeper only nodded.
“Saw a brig two evenings past stand too near the line.” Calder moved to the window and rested both palms upon the sill. His eyes followed the water toward the reef, invisible beneath the swell but as familiar to him as the floor of his own boat. “She altered late. Another quarter mile and I’d have been pulling bodies off the rocks come morning.”
“I know.”
“You’ve half the village in a state,” Calder said, still watching the water. “Not the frettin’ kind. The other kind.”
“It is a matter of parts. A collar has worn beyond its tolerance. A replacement will be ordered from Newcastle.”
Calder turned from the window. His eyes were sharp, and they did not leave the keeper’s face. “Parts?”
“Yes.”
“And Robson agreed to that?”
“It is what Robson confirmed.”
The fisherman let the air go from his lungs slowly, neither convinced nor willing to press the matter further in the keeper’s own chamber. He looked up at the dark lens. “She’s never gone three nights. Not in my time, nor my father’s.”
“No.”
