Archie tied his starched cravat carefully, and put on his frock coat. He’d have to come back here and change before they left. More waste of time. He wasn’t looking forward to this morning. He hated dealing with local officials, and in this case there was nothing to say anyway. He wanted to get out to the site. If only they could get away today they’d still have two clear working days before Sunday, which would have given him enough material to start drawing. Archie had no objection to breaking the Sabbath himself, but he couldn’t ask the chainmen to do so: Ellan Bride was hardly in the same league as the Bell Rock. However, as matters stood they’d probably have to leave tomorrow – Friday – unless they went with the tide this evening … The boatman might be willing to stay on Ellan Bride overnight. So even if this Mr Quirk kept him waiting all morning it wouldn’t actually make much difference. And now there was the extra man to be thought of … Damn Scott! Damn him!
No one else was breakfasting at half past six, so Archie had the table in the coffee room to himself. The fire hadn’t been lit, but the sun was streaming in through the window. Wooden clogs clattered in the street as folk hurried to their work. A cart rattled by, its iron wheels grating on the cobbles. A fishwife with full basket was crying her wares, and out of the window he saw the maid at the townhouse leave her clean doorstep to buy fresh herrings. The day beckoned.
But he wasn’t left in peace for long. The landlord brought the coffee himself, and hovered round Archie while he ate his ham and eggs, obviously wanting to talk.
‘Edinburgh,’ Mr Kneen said cautiously. ‘Now that was in the papers too. This terrible cholera! We were hearing the sickness had reached Edinburgh – I was reading that but two or three months back.’ He glanced at Archie anxiously. ‘You yourself will have encountered it, no doubt?’
‘Oh ay, it was bad. But I wasn’t in town then.’ That seemed rather a short answer. Archie made an effort to be friendly. ‘I was working up north when the cholera broke out. Dunnet Head. That’s on the north coast of Scotland.’
‘Ah, you’ll have built some lighthouses up there too, no doubt?’
‘Ay, I’ve worked up there quite a lot.’
‘So you weren’t in Edinburgh for the sickness? They say it’s very catching. Very. You just need to breathe in someone’s breath, that’s all, and you’ve caught it. And then – just in an hour or two – that’s you dead – finished!’
Archie shook his head. ‘Oh no! It’s not infectious. I mean, a traveller from London or Edinburgh, say, couldn’t bring it here. It’s not like that.’
‘You’re sure of that, sir? I heard that when it takes a hold, folk start dying like flies, in their hundreds. Thousands, even, all in the same place. Bodies lying in the streets rotting, and no one to bury them.’
‘Ah, but that’s the point.’ As ever, Archie was drawn into conversation by the technical question. ‘It spreads, but ay in the same place. It’s not infectious – not like plague, for example – where one man could carry it across a continent. It spreads some other way. No one quite knows – they talk about a miasma – a contagion in the air. When the air is polluted, anyone who breathes it is at risk. But humans don’t carry air around with them.’
Mr Kneen still looked worried. ‘It’s these big cities that’s in now. Man wasn’t made for to live in great cities. These city folk think we all want to be like them, but there’s some of us would be happier left alone, and that’s a fact.’ He took a cloth, and began polishing the pewter tankards that lined the dresser. He obviously wasn’t intending to go away yet. ‘But you’ll be a city man yourself, sir?’
‘No.’ Archie added, as Mr Kneen seemed to be waiting for him to speak. ‘Not originally.’
There was a short silence. Mr Kneen adjusted the shining tankards on their shelf. ‘You’ll have been in the lighthouse trade a long time, then? But you’ve not been here before? You didn’t work at the Calf or the Point of Ayre?’
‘No.’ After a short pause Archie volunteered, ‘I worked at the Mull of Galloway, though. I’ve often seen the Isle of Man from there.’
‘Ah yes, I was hearing about the grand new light they’ve put there. You can see it from Peel on a clear night, so a fellow was telling me the other day. So you built that light?’
‘I was one of the engineers,’ Archie corrected him. He became a little more expansive. ‘I hadn’t seen it from the sea since it was lit, though – not till yesterday. I came down on the Mona’s Isle, and I got a good look at it when we rounded the Mull.’ He relapsed into silence. He couldn’t begin to explain the excitement he’d felt when he’d come on deck to see the Mull of Galloway lighthouse from the sea. Gleaming white in the rays of the rising sun, it had looked so familiar, and yet it was strange in its completed state. There was always something extra about the finished thing – something more substantial, a little more like itself, than even its designers had been able to imagine. Odd to think that folk would sail by the Mull light for centuries to come without giving the matter a thought. They’d see it now – as the scattering of folk on the deck of Mona’s Isle had been doing yesterday morning – as if it had been there for ever. No one would even begin to imagine the sweat that had gone into the building of it.
‘So you came down from Glasgow on the Mona’s Isle? They’re telling me all the time how these steamships are actually very comfortable, and quite safe too in all manner of weather. A fellow here was saying the cabins are as well appointed as this inn! Hard to believe, out at sea, but he swore to it. And they can make the passage just the same whatever airt the wind is in. It wasn’t like that when I was a boy. Indeed it wasn’t. But you’ll know all about these great steam engines, sir?’
‘I don’t know anything about steamships. But they did let me into the engine room yesterday.’
‘Now a fellow here was telling me all about that. He’d been talking to one of these steam engineers. A dirty job, and dangerous awful, down in the bottom of the ship with great machines clanking round you all day long. Pitch dark too. It’s an awful big ship too, the Mona’s Isle. And they go at a terrible speed, day and night, like there was no difference between the two! You’d never get out of that engine room if she was to sink, God forbid! I don’t know how big she is, or how fast she goes, but it would make me anxious, and that’s a fact.’
‘Two hundred tons,’ said Archie absently. ‘And up to nine knots. No need to be anxious though: she was built at John Wood’s in Glasgow.’
Someone was shouting from the hall, ‘House! House I say! Is anyone there? Kneen, are you there?’
‘I must go, sir. Will you excuse me?’
Thankful for the interruption, Archie buttered his toast, and seized the chance to look over the notes in his pocketbook. He wrote underneath them in pencil: Watterson. Betsey? Check draught. And then again, as he sipped his coffee: Scott?
Scott was the very devil. Would Mr Stevenson expect him to stand bail for the fellow? They had their own laws out here. God-forsaken ones too, probably. So long as they didn’t decide to transport the fellow: if it was as bad as that Archie would have to intervene. Though why should he? God knew what sort of sentence Scott would get. Maybe God cared; Archie didn’t. He was inclined to leave Scott to rot. He’d brought it all on himself, after all, and Archie had a job to do. But Mr Stevenson might have other views about it. Bound to have, in fact. Did it matter? He didn’t need to please Mr Stevenson any more. Archie had given everything to this job, and it had taken him this long to realise there were no more