Page 2 of Dauntless

I walked into the village every day, but usually just to stretch my legs and give Hiccup a run.Wednesdays were grocery days, when—weather permitting—Young Harry Barnes did a run to the mainland and restocked Mavis’s inventory.Mavis generally didn’t have the new stock out until Thursday morning, but she made an exception for me because Amy had worked at the shop before going away to the mainland for school.And because I was a Nesmith, and that meant something on Dauntless Island.

After collecting my order, Hiccup and I walked down the main street.It was lined with sandstone cottages and ended at the harbour wall in a cluster of heritage buildings, including the church, the local museum, and the joint tourist information centre and souvenir shop.The tourist information centre was closed and wouldn’t re-open until summer.There were a few bed and breakfasts as well, mostly people’s houses, but there were no tourists staying in them right now.Dauntless was a ghost town in the colder months, and I preferred it that way.

Hiccup and I walked down to the statue of Josiah Nesmith that marked the end of the street, and I stared out past the harbour wall.The jetty jutted into the water, pointing south.

Hiccup sniffed around the bronze statue for a while.Josiah Nesmith stood on a plinth, his face pockmarked with verdigris, and stared imperiously over the water as though he was personally daring the British Navy to come for him.If so, he was facing the wrong way.

The plaque on the plinth was weathered and difficult to read, but I knew the words by heart:

Erected in commemoration of Josiah Nesmith, the hero who delivered the people of Dauntless Island from the tyrant George Hawthorne.

I nudged Hiccup away with my knee when she looked like she was considering pissing on the plinth, and then we headed back up the street and up the long, winding track towards home.

* * *

Imade baked beans on toast for dinner and ate them in front of the TV while Hiccup drooled hopefully on my socks.The rain hit halfway through the news, and the satellite reception grew choppy.I turned the TV off when the picture fractured and froze into pixels.I spared a thought for Eddie Hawthorne camping out in this weather.

The lights flickered as the rain picked up, but the power stayed on.One benefit of being the lighthouse keeper was that the cottage was on the same self-contained grid as the lighthouse itself—an industrial solar installation with a diesel backup.I had the most reliable electricity on the island, and I didn’t have to pay a cent for it.

I did my rounds at nine p.m., tugging on my oilskin coat to traverse the yard between my cottage and the lighthouse.Hiccup, who usually came with me into the yard, very sensibly waited inside.I pushed open the lighthouse door and climbed the stairs to the lantern room out of habit more than anything else—if the light was out, I would have spotted it the moment I left the cottage—then noted the time on the log and returned to the cottage.

Would be nice, I thought sometimes, to have someone to share these quiet evenings with.

I stayed up for another hour or so, listening to a bit of back and forth on the marine radio in the kitchen, and then went to bed.

I lay awake for a long while, Hiccup a warm weight on my feet, as the storm broke and the lightning flashed all around.

* * *

In the morning, I saw Eddie Hawthorne again.At first he was just a small red speck on the steep seaward side of the point, but he was clearly making his way up towards the lighthouse.Hiccup took a while to notice him—she was distracted by a grasshopper—but when she did, she let out a bark of delight and bounded down the hill towards him.

I snorted at her and kept working in the garden.

The vegetable garden had been Amy’s pride and joy, and it was in a pretty sorry state.If I couldn’t get anything to grow in it before Amy returned for the summer, at least I could dig the weeds out, right?But the internet had promised me I could grow carrots and onions and beans in winter, so I was going to try that.Better than paying island prices for frozen supermarket vegetables from the mainland.

“Hi,” said a voice from behind me—just when I had almost forgotten he’d been climbing the hill.“So, you actually live at the lighthouse?That’s amazing.”

I stood up and turned around, brushing my dirty hands on my pants.“Yeah.You go okay in the storm last night?”

Eddie didn’t look like a drowned rat.

“I don’t think I slept a wink,” he said, and I noticed the dark smudges under his eyes.They didn’t detract from his smile though, which was as brilliant as I remembered and did hopeful twisty things to my stomach that I didn’t want to dwell on.“But it turns out my tent is well worth what I paid for it.Not even a leak!”

“That’s good.”The words came easier today, like water trickling from a rusty tap: I’d struggled to turn it yesterday because it had been a while, but today it shifted without much trouble.

Eddie stretched, his jacket and shirt riding up to reveal a sliver of skin.“Wow.This view is incredible.”

“Yeah,” I said, tearing my gaze away from Eddie’s abdomen.

From the lighthouse, the hill fell away sharply toward the rocky beach far below us.And from there, nothing but the ocean.It was grey and choppy this morning, the wind from last night’s storm lingering, but some days it was as bright and smooth as glass all the way to the distant horizon.

“This isn’t what I was imagining when I thought of a Pacific island,” Eddie said.

I nodded.

It was a common misconception.People thought of palm trees and white sand beaches when they imagined the Pacific, not pine trees and rocks.Dauntless was no Tahiti.It was something else entirely.It was wilder, older, and its winters were unforgiving.

“So, you’re a Nesmith, you said?”Eddie asked.

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