Read Online The Lightkeeper's Daughter by Iain Lawrence - Free Book Online

there.”
    He drew every bit of land that he could see, with lovely squiggles for the shore. And the farther he got from the tower, the more his lines grew faint, until they faded away into nothing. He drew great slashes at the edges. “Reefs,” he wrote to the north. At the south, “Here there be rocks.”
    “You mean here there
are
rocks,” she said.
    He told her, “You wouldn’t understand.”
    And the next day they set off, in Murray’s glass-bottomed boat. They hoisted a broomstick and flew a flag that Alastair made, a little red cross on a square of white. He said, “We’ll plant that flag and claim all the land for ourselves.”
    It seems so silly now, though at the time it was such an adventure. A
mission,
Alastair called it. “You can be captain,” he said, and wasn’t she proud of that? Until he told her, “
I’ll
be the admiral, and the navigator.”
    Tatiana’s not quite asleep, but nearly. Her eyes open and close as she watches her mother. She’s small and fragile, and Squid can’t imagine letting her go wandering off alone in a boat, without a thought for her safety.
    But Hannah didn’t even bother to see them away.
    They went alone, like Columbus did, proud at the time of their independence. But now it seems sad to Squid. She wonders sometimes if she was ever truly loved.
    She smiles at her daughter. “Okay, Tatiana?”
    The map is covered with names. Most of them are ridiculous, written in all sizes of letters. “BlAck sKulL ISLaNd.” “BiG RocK rOCk.” “CaMPfIre PoinT.” Squid is embarrassed to see them now, in her own pathetic writing. Only one of the names ever came into use; the little rocky island with its group of huddled cedar trees, the place that would become Alastair’s refuge, was called Almost Nothing Atoll.
    Squid lays the paper back on the bed. She looks up at the shelves crowded with books, along the bent and twisted ones, down to the bureau with a microscope on top, searching for a strip of red.
    Alastair started his notebook that day. He used it to record the times they arrived on each island, the interesting things they found. It was only later that he used it for a journal. And then he was so secret about it that she didn’t even know he was doing it until weeks before his death.
    “What are you writing?” she asked, surprising him at his desk.
    “Nothing,” he said.
    “Let me see.”
    He was so sad then. He was skinny and pale. He folded himself over top of the book, shielding it with his arms and his chest. “It’s private,” he said.
    “You let me look before.” She walked up and stood beside him. “You showed it to me all the time.”
    “That was years ago,” he said. His glasses slid from his nose and hit with a thud on the desk. They stood on their lenses, rocking softly, magnifying ovals of the wood.
    “Come on,” she said. “Please, Alastair?”
    His eyes were puffy and pale, so strange that she realized she hadn’t seen him once without his glasses in at least a year or more. There was a huge bright welt across his nose. “Leave me alone,” he said.
    “Are you writing about me?”
    His whole face turned as red as the welt. “I write about
things,
” he said. “About stuff.”
    “I want to see.”
    She tried to force her arms under his. He fought against her. He pushed her away and slammed the book shut. He leaned his elbows on it, his pointed spikes of elbows. And then he collapsed; he started to cry. “It’s private,” he said again. “Let me have
something
on this island that’s just my own.”
    “Okay,” she said.
    “Please promise me that.”
    “I promise,” she said.
    Still, he didn’t trust her. He hid the book, and it took her nearly half an hour to find it, tucked where it was behind the others on the shelf, standing up against the back of the bookcase. She took it to her own room and sat with her shoulders against the closed door. And she went first to the last thing he’d written.
    I’m drowning. Can’t