The Lighthouse Keeper’s Daughter. Hazel Gaynor
my traveling bag. Mrs. O’Driscoll sits in the chair directly beside me, despite the fact that there are a dozen others she could take.
“I’m not going to fall in,” I snap, a little more harshly than I’d intended. “You can leave me as soon as we’re out of Mother’s sight.”
A shrewd smile crosses her lips as she raises an eyebrow in a knowing arch. “Well now, Matilda. You see, I promised Constance—your mother—that I would see you safely to America, and I intend to do just that. The sooner you accept that I’m here for the duration, the better the journey will be for the both of us.” She rummages in her handbag and lifts out a small paper bag. “Humbug?”
I shake my head, and then wish I hadn’t. With a tired sigh I tell her I will take a humbug, thank you.
She makes a satisfied harrumphing sound and passes me the entire bag. “Keep them. They’re a great help with the seasickness.”
A recently widowed bridge-playing friend of my mother’s, traveling to visit a relative on Long Island, Mrs. O’Driscoll had been appointed as my traveling companion despite my insistence that I didn’t need anyone to accompany me, especially not a turkey-necked woman with a taste for tweed coats and velvet hats. Of course, my mother wouldn’t hear of my traveling alone, accusing me of being deliberately obstinate just to upset her. “If you’d been this uncooperative when it came to ‘other matters’ we wouldn’t be in this dreadful mess in the first place.” Her words had stung far worse than the accompanying slap to my cheek. In the end my protests, like everything else I had to say about this trip, were completely ignored.
As the tender slips its moorings I open my book, hoping Mrs. O’Driscoll will take the hint and leave me in peace.
“What’s that you’re reading?” she asks, leaning forward and peering at the cover. “Instructions to Light Keepers. Never heard of it.”
“You wouldn’t have. It’s a family heirloom. Of sorts.” It is, in fact, an ancient volume which explains the operation of lighthouses in great and very boring detail. Passed down to me with the locket, it has idled in a drawer for years, the tell-tale freckles of age quietly multiplying on the unturned pages.
Mrs. O’Driscoll makes an unpleasant sucking noise with her humbug. “Well, I suppose life would be fierce dull if we all liked the same things.” She takes a copy of Gone with the Wind from her own bag. “Scarlett O’Hara. Now there’s a woman to take your mind off a long sea crossing.” She chuckles to herself and opens the book at her marked page, instantly engrossed.
I turn my book over in my hands. The spine is cracked. The embossed title faded. Instructions to Light Keepers. By authority of Trinity House and the light-house board. While the subject of the book has never interested me, the inscriptions inside hold a particular fascination: For dear Sarah. So that you might know. Grace and beneath that, written in a different hand, For my darling Matilda. From Mummy. x Below these inscriptions, several other names record the various recipients of the book over the generations.
To discover there’d been another Matilda in the family had enchanted me. As a child I’d often imagined her, talking to her in my games of make-believe until she became real. When a great aunt had secretively explained that this other Matilda was my great-great-granny Sarah’s daughter, tragically lost in a shipwreck with her brother, I grieved for her as if she were my sister. In a way, she’d become the sister I never had, the playmate I’d never laughed with or whispered secrets to. With so much of my childhood spent alone, and so much of my life having always felt strangely untethered, I found something comforting in the permanence of the book and locket. I’d brought the book with me not because I wanted to read it, but because its freckled old pages somehow anchored me to my past in a way other parts of my life never had. Something once owned by my great-great-grandmother and part of my family’s past, helps me face the uncertain future I am sailing toward.
The transfer across the harbor is mercifully short. As the tender turns around the end of Spike Island I look away from the buildings of the British soldiers’ garrison, refusing to dwell on the murky memories it provokes. I focus instead on the great transatlantic liner that looms dead ahead. My stomach lurches at the sight of it.
Mrs. O’Driscoll stands up, smoothing her coat with a brisk flick of her wrists. “Fierce big, isn’t she. Twice the height of Carrauntoohil if she stood on end. Plenty of space to lose me in, that’s for sure.” There is an almost playful look in her eyes as she unexpectedly takes my hand and squeezes it tight. “You may feel as though you’re making this trip on your own, Matilda, but that doesn’t mean you have to be alone.”
Her words strike an unexpected blow to my determination to dislike her. Growing up without sisters or brothers, andwith a mother who couldn’t care less what I was doing as long as I wasn’t bothering her, being alone is what I’m used to, and yet I’ve always felt it shouldn’t be. A sense of having lost something follows me like a second shadow, but like my granny when she walks into a room and can’t remember why, I can never quite grasp what it is I’m looking for. Standing here with Mrs. O’Driscoll’s warm hand in mine, I’m suddenly tired of being alone. I stare up at the enormous vessel, blinking away the tears that blur my vision.
“Come along so,” Mrs. O’Driscoll chirps, passing me a handkerchief without so much as a “dry your eyes now.” “We’ve a ship to board, young lady.”
With everyone aboard, the anchor raised, and the engines churning the water far below, three sharp blasts of the whistle signal our departure and we slip peacefully away with a gentle sigh carried in the ship’s wake. We soon pass the Old Head of Kinsale, the proud lighthouse sending us on our way, the endless Atlantic Ocean stretching out before us. I stand at the railing and watch Ireland, my home, disappear behind a light sea mist.
“I’m a little tired, Mrs. O’Driscoll,” I say. “I think I’ll take a nap before dinner.”
She studies me carefully. “Hmm. You do look a little peaky all the same. It might take a few days to find your sea legs. Best have a rest. We’ve an awful long way to go before we see Lady Liberty.”
Lady Liberty. New York. I can hardly believe I will soon see the famous soaring skyscrapers. I’m not as excited to see them as I’d always imagined I would be. The sight of them will signal the start of nothing short of a prison sentence.
I lie down on the bed in our cabin, trying to ignore the increasing sway of the ship as I map out the journey ahead in my mind. From New York I will travel to Providence, Rhode Island, and then on to Newport, to stay with Harriet Flaherty, a distant relative who was triumphantly rediscovered like a forgotten family heirloom as it dawned on my parents that Harriet offered the perfect solution to their problem. Their problem. Not mine. I wasn’t part of their discussions and plans, but I heard enough—Mother’s voice, shrill as a tin whistle; Father’s, turf-thick with quiet disappointment—to understand that Harriet Flaherty was something of a black sheep, so I suppose I will have that in common with her, at least.
The decision made, Mother had related the arrangements to me as if I were a maid being instructed to prepare the guest room. “You’ll stay with Harriet until the child arrives. She’ll help with doctors and appointments and those things. The child will remain in America—your Father will make arrangements—you’ll come home, and we need never speak of it again.” Like a tumor, the unfortunate little creature will be lanced from me, and we’ll all breathe a sigh of relief and carry on as if nothing ever happened.
She made it all sound so simple. Too simple. I wonder at what point her neat little plan will start to unravel.
DESPITE MRS. O’DRISCOLL’S certainty that I’ll find my sea legs, I don’t. Three days into our journey I still spend hours every day hanging over the railings, reproducing my breakfast like a cheap circus act, the locket swinging like a clock pendulum at my neck, ticking away the interminable hours as the ship plunges on and my stomach heaves in endless protest. In this way, the days pass until Ireland becomes a full stop at the end of a long paragraph, impossibly small and far away, and still we don’t reach America.