that was. Billy shook his head. It was all too complicated. The sun was shining outside. He dragged his eyes back to the little flame floating in its pool of oil. ‘Anyway, if you do know, just spit it out and be done with it.’
‘That’s what I’m trying to do! But you have to listen! I knew there must be a letter. And a letter would go to Aunt Lucy, not to Mam, if it was important, because she’s the lightkeeper. So if Aunt Lucy had hidden it, it would be with her things. In her chest. And I looked, and it was. It was folded in with her clean petticoat, halfway down her sea chest. It was addressed to the Light Keeper, Ellan Bride, and there was a red seal on it.’
‘A seal?’ repeated Mally. ‘There can’t have been! Not wrapped in a petticoat! It would be much too big and wet. Do you mean dead?’
‘Not that sort of seal. A seal,’ said Breesha mysteriously, ‘is like putting a lock on a letter. If you break the seal everyone knows that someone has read the letter who shouldn’t have. But this seal was broken already.’
Mally tried to imagine the broken red seal. It was still seal-shaped in her mind, like a little slug, or a drop of blood-coloured water sliding down the window.
‘What was on the seal?’ demanded Billy.
‘I didn’t look—’
‘Well, you should have. That way you’d know exactly who you were up against.’
‘How …’ began Mally.
‘—because it was more important to read the letter,’ went on Breesha as if neither of them had spoken. ‘Besides, I didn’t know how much time I had. And it was all in script so it was very hard to read.’
‘But you always say you can read script!’
‘There’s script and script. And this was a hard sort, so I couldn’t work out all of it. But listen! The important bit—’
‘We are listening. We’ve been listening for ages! Just spit it out for goodness sake!’
‘All right, I will. They’re going to build a new lighthouse on Ellan Bride, and they don’t want us!’
For a long moment they were all struck dumb. Breesha, having spoken the terrible words out loud for the first time, was as stricken as any of them. She felt guilty, as if by having said the thing, she’d made it real. They all stared at the little yellow flame as it burned unflinchingly, untouched by their troubles. Which might be a good thing or a bad thing, thought Breesha. Callous, and yet reassuring.
‘What?’ Billy tried to gather his thoughts. ‘What? I mean who? Who says this?’
‘A man called Wm Rae says it. I think it’s Wm. He writes from the Commissioners of Northern Lights.’ Those words had been easy to read because people talked about them so often. The Calf Lights were Commissioners of Northern Lights. St Bees and Skerries were Trinity House. The South Rock and Haulbowline were the Ballast Board in Dublin. But Ellan Bride was none of these things. Ellan Bride was a Private Light, and belonged to the Duke of Atholl. But the Duke had never come to claim his light and now he was dead. Ellan Bride was their Private Light. It was Private because no one else ever came, except Finn with the supplies. Ellan Bride was the safest place in the whole world, or had been, up till now.
‘But they can’t come here!’ said Mally, echoing Breesha’s thought. ‘They wouldn’t know how to land! Finn wouldn’t bring horrible people to Ellan Bride. No one else could.’
‘Wm is short for William,’ said Billy numbly. ‘I could write Wm for me if I liked.’
‘Is that all you’ve got to say?’
‘No,’ said Billy. ‘I need to think, though.’
‘Think about what?’
‘What we’re going to do, of course.’
‘What does it mean, they don’t want us?’ asked Mally. ‘Does he mean because we’re children?’
‘Not us, silly. He means they don’t want any of us. They don’t want Aunt Lucy to be the lightkeeper any more.’
‘Is that what the letter said?’ demanded Billy, ‘Or did you just think it from what was in the letter?’
‘The letter said an … an … alternat-ing arrangement.’
‘Altern-at-ing? Maybe he means a revolving light like the ones on the Calf. But that would be silly, because the whole point of the Calf lights being flashing, and ours not, is that the ships know which is which. Anyway, Mam would still be able to work that. Maybe they don’t know yet how good she is at working things. But my Mam could work any machine they chose to invent, I reckon. And I could help her, anyway.’
‘She could do it anyway, without any help. But that’s why it’ll be,’ said Breesha. ‘They’ll think she can’t work the lights because girls don’t. If you were grown up –’ she flung at Billy, ‘– I bet they’d keep you on!’
‘It’s hardly my fault I’m not grown up!’
‘I didn’t say it was!’
But Breesha had been accusing him of something. Billy stared unhappily at the lamp, willing himself not to get into a fight with her. This news was far too important to squabble over. ‘What exactly did the letter say?’ he asked her. It crossed his mind he’d never have dared to look for a letter, even if he’d been the one to guess it was there. Certainly he wouldn’t have had the courage to read it, even if he had been able to read script, which was not the case. No one had ever had a secret letter on Ellan Bride before, but Billy knew very well that they were supposed to steer clear of one another’s secrets in other ways. Breesha, he felt, had not only been clever but also brave enough to be bad. He had to hand it to her. ‘Anyway,’ he added, because it was only fair to say so, ‘it was something that you read that letter. Otherwise we wouldn’t even know. And we need to know, so that was pretty good, you doing all that.’
Breesha’s face lit up like the sun coming out; her moods changed so suddenly these days that Billy was bewildered. He hadn’t said anything that special, only what was true.
‘But why are they going to build a new lighthouse?’ asked Mally. ‘I don’t see why, when we’ve got one already.’
‘I expect they want a better one,’ said Billy. ‘Ours is quite old. Finn says the ones on the Calf are much more modern than ours, and even those are quite old already. They have Argand burners and we don’t. And now there are new sorts of lenses too. They’re better than reflectors. You can see them much further away, specially in bad weather. I don’t mind if they build a lighthouse with a new revolving lens. But it’s the bit about us. Are you sure the letter said that about not wanting us?’
‘They don’t want us,’ Breesha repeated dully. ‘That’s what the letter said.’ The light that had swept across her face when Billy praised her had vanished as fast as it came. Suddenly she clenched her fists, and tossed her head. ‘If anyone comes to Ellan Bride and tries to make us go away, I’ll kill them.’
Mally gasped. The lamp never flickered, but she was sure there was a small movement in the shadows
