Maidenstone Lighthouse

by Sally Smith O'rourke

  Generally I am not too fond of extreme heights.

  We entered the damp, chilly interior of the lighthouse tower through a heavy steel door. An electric motor hummed softly somewhere high over our heads. The gloom of the place closed in on me almost immediately and I shuddered under the massive bulk of the black serpentine stairway that filled the tower and obscured most of the wan light filtering down from a hundred feet above.

  Dan pulled the outer door shut with a loud clang that echoed through the enclosed space. “Well, how do you like it so far?” He grinned.

  “It feels like a tomb,” I replied, pulling my jacket tighter around me and trying to think of a good excuse to return to the cottage.

  “Ah, but wait ’til you see that view again.” He laughed, bounding away up the stairs and disappearing around the first twist before I could protest. “Come on. You’ll love it.”

  I craned my neck helplessly, trying to catch a glimpse of him. But except for the hollow ring of his footsteps on the metal treads I might as well have been alone. So, wondering exactly how I had gotten myself into this fine predicament, I gripped the cold iron railing and started up after him.

  Ten minutes later, huffing like an elderly asthmatic, I stepped into the small white chamber at the top of the tower.

  “Your face is red,” Dan observed with amusement. When I did not reply his smile faded and he reached out to touch my perspiring brow. “You okay?”

  I nodded and unzipped my jacket, feeling the heat rise off my chest. “I’m afraid I’ve been neglecting the gym lately,” I puffed, looking around the small space while I waited for my heart rate to slow to normal. The afternoon sun was streaming in through the circle of spotless glass panes that surrounded the room, casting dazzling reflections off the huge lenses suspended on polished brass fittings in the center.

  “It really is a beautiful piece of work, isn’t it?” I was gazing in fascination at the intricate clockwork mechanism of the old beacon.

  He ran a hand fondly over the satiny finish of the massive gear wheel supporting the light. “We seldom give our ancestors enough credit for their technical accomplishments,” he agreed. “This beacon weighs almost a thousand pounds. It projects a beam forty miles out to sea. And this same hand-machined gear has been turning it precisely once every forty-five seconds for over a hundred and sixty years without a single breakdown.”

  “Amazing,” I said, stepping closer to examine the polished gears and counterweights suspending the mechanism.

  “Makes you wonder how long your car would last if it had been made by the guys who built this thing, doesn’t it?” Dan pointed to a spidery engraving on the metal wheel. “See here, the man who made this gear signed it. Arthur Thackeray, Greenwich, England, 1846.”

  “Pride of craftsmanship was everything in that time,” I said, bending to peer at the inscription. “It’s one of the things I love about working with antiques. You can feel the sheer joy that went into crafting something especially beautiful and enduring.” I straightened and shook my head. “Nobody cares about things like that anymore.”

  “Oh, some of us still care deeply.” Dan’s voice was filled with fervor and I turned to look at him. Through the broad window at his back I could see the cold waters of the Atlantic that stretched endlessly to the horizon, their color in the sun exactly matching the shade of his clear green eyes.

  The absolute perfection of the scene clutched at my heart. Suddenly I felt a wave of dizziness sweeping over me. I closed my eyes and reeled forward into his arms. He caught me effortlessly. “Sue, what’s wrong?” he asked with concern.

  “Nothing,” I murmured, feeling extremely foolish. But I did not immediately open my eyes, savoring for just a moment the feeling of being held…the way that Bobby had once held me, I dimly realized.

  No sooner had that thought come into my mind than I understood what was happening to me. I shook off the feeling and pulled free of his embrace, embarrassed.

  “I’m afraid I have a little vertigo issue,” I said, indicating the dazzling vista of sea and shore that lay beyond the windows.

  “Why didn’t you say so?” he asked, pulling a stool from a small desk containing nothing but a black emergency telephone. “I would have never brought you up here if I’d had any idea…”

  I sat down, feeling the hot blood coloring my cheeks. “No, I wanted to come up here again,” I insisted, forcing myself to look outside. Far away, at the base of the stone causeway, the line of stately Victorian homes dominated the shoreline. I could clearly see my bedroom turret above the outlines of the denuded trees.

  “This is exactly the reverse of the view from my bedroom window,” I observed, pointing.

  Dan nodded absently. “I know,” he replied.

  I swung my head around and stared at him. Behind him the barrel of a large brass telescope gleamed in the sun. He followed my gaze to the instrument, which was pointed in the general direction of my house, and understanding slowly registered on his tanned features.

  Dan raised his hands disarmingly. “Oh, no, Sue,” he protested. “You don’t think I’ve been sitting up here at night spying on you.” He saw the shock in my eyes and realized that he had put into words exactly the first thought that had popped into my mind. “Good God, no,” he spluttered. “Actually I was just remembering something I read about your house when I inventoried some of the museum’s papers last year.”

  I gave him a blank stare.

  “There’s a series of entries in one of the old lightkeepers’ journals,” he hurried to explain. “They were all written around the time your ancestor fell to her death from this tower.”

  “My ancestor?” My voice was a hoarse whisper.

  Dan nodded. “A young woman…Surely you heard the story from your family.”

  I shook my head slowly. “I never heard any story.”

  Dan paused, considering his next words carefully. “Well, maybe they wouldn’t have told you. I mean, it wasn’t exactly the kind of thing the Markses would have wanted spread around, especially back in 1910. I’m sure they probably preferred to forget the whole thing.”

  “What happened to her?” I asked, feeling my mouth go suddenly dry.

  Chapter 15

  Dan Freedman lifted a big canvas-bound book from a stack of similarly bound ledgers on my coffee table and placed it in his lap. “The journal of Amos Carter for 1909 and 1910.”

  It was dark outside and we were sitting before a roaring fire in Aunt Ellen’s old parlor. Unable to recall all the details he had read more than a year earlier, Dan had not attempted to relate to me from memory alone the full story of Aimee Marks’s death.

  Instead, we had come down from the lighthouse and dug out the old journal from a huge cache of documents stored in the attic of the lightkeeper’s cottage. Without telling me why, Dan had insisted on searching for three other journals as well. By the time we finally found them all the sun was going down. So we’d placed my moped in the back of his truck and returned to the house, where I had prepared an impromptu supper of canned soup and cold sandwiches.

  Now, with our sandwiches eaten and mugs of freshly brewed coffee before us, Dan was ready to proceed.

  “Amos Carter was the keeper of the Maidenstone Light from 1905 until 1913,” he began, thumbing through the lined pages of the thick handwritten ledger. “And, like all lighthouse keepers of the time, he was required to keep records of everything that affected the light.”

  “Like a captain keeps a ship’s log?” I asked with interest.

  Dan nodded. “Exactly like a ship’s log,” he answered. “The idea was to put down important information concerning the operation of the light. But there were no hard rules about what had to be written, so journals might also include other information, such as daily weather reports, descriptions of shipwrecks along the coast and almost anything else you can imagine.”

  Dan found the entry he was seeking and looked up. “In many cases, depending on how detailed he wanted to get, a lightke
eper’s journal might contain the only accurate historical record of local events. Of course,” he added, “many lightkeepers entered only the absolute minimum information required.”

  He showed me a double page crammed with small, neat handwriting in faded blue ink. “But Amos Carter seemed to have spent a great deal of time working on his journal. In fact, it’s a regular gossip column about life in turn-of-the-century Freedman’s Cove.” He took back the book and scanned it with distaste. “And it seems that Amos was also something of a Peeping Tom and self-appointed moral guardian,” Dan said. “He describes several times in his journals how he kept his eye on the whole town through that big brass telescope up in the tower.”

  “Which is how you happened to know all about the view of my bedroom window,” I interjected sheepishly.

  He nodded. “Amos Carter had been watching your ancestor Aimee Marks for a long time and he wrote it all down.”

  I took a deep breath as Dan placed his finger on the page.

  “For instance, here’s an entry Amos wrote in July of 1909, more than a year before the girl’s death:

  “Weather unseasonably warm, sea dead calm. Saw young Aimee in the high turret window of the big Marks house again tonight. Figure if I can see her flaunting her naked bosoms before the whole town there must be others who see her as well. It is a disgrace to the community. The shameless girl stood for fully ten minutes brazenly gazing my way.

  “Will watch her closely each night now for further incidents and leave an anonymous note for her father when I row over there for supplies on the Saturday.”

  “Dammit!” I angrily exclaimed. “Do you mean to say that this lecherous bastard was deliberately spying on her night after night without her knowledge?”

  “All in the worthy interest of protecting public morals,” Dan said sarcastically.

  “That is such bullshit,” I retorted. “It was a hot summer night and the girl came to her window, which does not, by the way, face the town. She was probably only hoping for a breath of cool air. Amos Carter was undoubtedly the only one who could even see her.”

  “Hey, I didn’t write it, I’m just reading it,” Dan replied defensively. He flipped through several more pages of Amos Carter’s cramped handwriting. “But if you liked that,” he said, “you’re going to love this. Here’s another entry, dated August of the same year:

  “Spied the Marks girl on South Beach around dusk today with a stranger, some visiting New York dandy who claims to be an artist. Observed much unseemly touching before the two settled in behind the rocks, where they remained for an indecent interval of time. Something will have to be done. I shall write again to her father, and perhaps send a note to the town council and the church elders as well.”

  “No wonder poor Aimee ran away to New York,” I said, pitying the long-dead girl for the cruel injustice she had suffered at the hands of the sanctimonious lighthouse keeper.

  “Life in Freedman’s Cove must have become a sheer hell for her,” Dan concurred, “with Amos secretly scrutinizing her every move and sending anonymous poison-pen letters to her family and God knows who else in town.” He flipped to several more journal entries for August of 1909, all detailing Aimee’s increasingly intimate liaisons on the beach with the same nameless artist.

  Then, in mid-September, the stranger suddenly disappeared and Amos Carter had returned to spying on Aimee through her bedroom window. In a final entry, posted in early November, he wrote of observing “a fearful row” between the girl and her father, an argument that left Aimee alone and weeping in her room.

  “My God,” I whispered when Dan had finished reading, “the wicked bastard must have destroyed her reputation and forced her to leave town.”

  “Well, something happened,” Dan agreed, “because there’s no further mention of Aimee Marks in Carter’s journal until late the following year, when she turns up dead here at the lighthouse.”

  He looked up from the book with a frown. “You say she went to New York?”

  I quickly related the few sketchy details that I had gotten from Aunt Ellen about Aimee and the anonymous New York artist.

  Dan listened thoughtfully. “So she ran off to New York to live with a painter,” he marveled. “I can see how that would have scandalized your average straitlaced New England family of the time. Do you think this painter’s interest in her was romantic or professional?”

  I went to the bookcase and retrieved the group photo of the girl as a teenager. “You be the judge,” I said. Dan regarded the picture for several moments.

  “She was very beautiful,” he said at last. “Not just conventionally pretty, but truly beautiful.” His green eyes left the picture and met mine. “For a minute I was sure I’d seen that face before.” He smiled. “Then I realized why she looked familiar. I suppose you know that you look a lot like her,” he added softly.

  I took the picture from his hand and stared at it, aware for the first time that there was indeed a strong family resemblance between me and the girl perched on the antique bicycle. “Well, I’ll never see sixteen again,” I said, trying to make a joke of it.

  Dan’s eyes hadn’t left mine. “You’re still the prettiest girl in Freedman’s Cove,” he said, reaching up to touch my cheek. “I remember wishing that you were a year or two older, back when we were teenagers…”

  The touch of his fingers was electric on my skin and I recoiled in shock from the unexpected surge of emotions that suddenly welled up within me, emotions I hadn’t experienced since…Bobby.

  “Well, I probably couldn’t have competed with Debbie Carver back when you two used to drive out to the island together,” I quipped, in a poor attempt to cover my acute discomfort.

  Almost before the cruel words had left my lips I regretted them, for Dan’s face had turned suddenly dark.

  “I’m sorry, Dan,” I stammered. “I had no right to say that.”

  “It’s okay,” he said, picking up the journal and searching for another entry.

  “No, it’s not,” I moaned. “You just paid me a lovely compliment and I repaid it by hurting your feelings. I feel like such a jerk.”

  Dan carefully set the book on the coffee table. “Sue, I know what people in this town always thought and said about Debbie and me,” he said evenly. “And after all this time it doesn’t really matter that none of it was true.” His mouth curved into a wan smile. “Both of us have managed to survive.”

  I shook my head vigorously. “What I said was positively unforgivable,” I insisted, thinking of the long-ago summer night when I had secretly watched his old Mustang driving slowly out to Maidenstone Island and wished I was the one with him. “As unforgivable as icky old Amos Carter spying through his telescope and spreading his poisonous rumors about Aimee Marks. I have absolutely no idea what kind of relationship you and Debbie Carver had,” I concluded lamely. “Nor is it any of my damn business.”

  “Debbie and I were the best of friends,” Dan said quietly, “two outcasts from the wrong side of the tracks who clung to one another when things got rough. Mostly we talked about escaping from Freedman’s Cove…She wanted to be a singer, you know.”

  “Please, Dan,” I pleaded, feeling even worse than before. “You don’t have to explain anything to me—”

  “Oh, but I want to,” he whispered, taking my hand in his. “I really do want you to understand, Sue.”

  Then, without warning, our lips were touching and the electricity had been turned back on. I felt it reaching down into my soul and let it carry me away, heedless of my guilty realization that Dan Freedman was not entirely to blame. For, like two magnets placed too close together, we had been irresistibly drawn together at the same instant.

  An image of Bobby’s smiling face flashed through my mind and I abruptly pulled away.

  “I’m sorry. That was my fault—” Dan began.

  I waved my hand, dismissing the apology. “No,” I said, slightly breathless. “It happened and it was wonderful—”

  “But?�
� He left the question hanging between us.

  “This is just a very bad time for me,” I said evasively. “It’s complicated…”

  “Let’s just leave it there for a while, then,” he said with a smile. “We’ll just say it was a very nice kiss between friends—”

  “No,” I corrected, “it was a great kiss. And I hope we can have another one sometime soon.”

  Dan grinned at me, then took my hand and gave it a firm shake. “Deal,” he said.

  “Now,” I resumed, clearing my throat to regain my composure. “What about my poor ancestor Aimee? Are you going to let me in on the rest of the details or not?”

  Dan picked up the journal again and turned to a page he had already marked. “I thought it was important for you to understand everything that went on between Aimee and Amos Carter the previous year,” he said. “Because this is the entry that Amos made on the night that she died:

  November 6th, 1910. Light snow followed by clearing skies. Retired to bed at the end of the midnight watch. Was roused around two a.m. by the sound of a woman’s scream. Went out to find Miss Aimee Marks of Freedman’s Cove lying in the yard, having evidently fallen from the light tower. Checked for signs of life but she was beyond help. Commended her soul to the Almighty and covered the body with my coat. Rowed across at daylight to fetch the town constable.”

  Dan closed the journal and placed it back on the coffee table with the others.

  “That’s it?” My voice was a hoarse whisper.

  “That’s all he wrote,” Dan confirmed. “Amos Carter never mentioned Aimee or the incident again. He stayed on as the keeper of the light until 1913…when he leaped off the tower to his own death.”

  “Christ,” I breathed.