The keeper’s daughter
Nobody else wanted the Saturday shift at the Cape Farrow Lighthouse Museum, which was how Zara, fifteen and newly hired, came to be alone in the keeper’s cottage with a box of documents that had arrived that morning from a deceased estate.
“Catalogue them,” Mrs Hendry had said, handing her a pair of white cotton gloves. “Date, description, condition. Don’t read them properly, or you’ll never finish.”
Zara read them properly.
The box held a logbook bound in cracked green leather. The first pages were in a man’s cramped, slanting hand — wind directions, oil levels, ships sighted — the weekly ritual of a keeper in the 1890s. But halfway through, the handwriting changed. It became rounder, younger, pressed so hard into the paper that some letters had torn through.
14 June 1894. Father ill with fever. I have lit the lamp myself these three nights. The oil is heavy and my arms shake on the stairs, but the light has not failed. Mother says I must not write in the log, as it is not my place. I say if I keep the light, I keep the log.
Zara sat back. Outside, the real lighthouse stood white against a sky the colour of pewter, its lamp long since replaced by an automatic beacon that no one needed to climb to. She turned the page.
21 June 1894. A storm from the south-west. The schooner Margaret Ellis passed close under the cape at two in the morning, too close. I kept the lamp turning though the glass rattled in its frame. At dawn she was safe in the bay. I do not think her captain will ever know my name.
The entries went on for seven weeks. The girl — she never wrote her name — recorded every ship, every change of wind, every measure of oil. Her father’s handwriting returned in August, shaky at first, then firmer. Beneath the entry for 3 August, in the girl’s hand, were five words: He says I did well.
Zara looked for the girl in the museum’s displays. There was a photograph of the keeper, stern and bearded, beside a list of every keeper who had served at Cape Farrow, all of them men. There was no mention of a daughter who had carried oil up ninety-two steps for seven weeks while the storms came in.
When Mrs Hendry came back at four, Zara had catalogued three items out of forty. “I said not to read them,” Mrs Hendry sighed. Then she saw Zara’s face. “What is it?”
Zara turned the logbook around and pointed to the rounded handwriting. “Who was she?”
It took the two of them a month of searching old newspapers and church records to find out. Her name was Annie Walsh. She had died in 1961, in a town far inland, at the age of eighty-one. Her obituary said she had been a devoted mother and a keen gardener. It did not mention the lighthouse.
The following spring, a new card appeared beside the photograph of the stern, bearded keeper. It was small and plainly printed, and Zara had written it herself: Annie Walsh, aged 14, kept the Cape Farrow light alone from 11 June to 2 August 1894.