The Borrowed Light

About this book

Point Verity kept ships off the Wrecker's Teeth for a hundred and one years, its first order lens, French glass, eight feet of prisms in a bronze cage, visible twenty one miles at sea. In 1968 the light was decommissioned, and the record states that the dismantled lens, crated for the state museum, was lost en route, a scandal briefly, then a footnote, then folklore. Nell Harper, forty one, conservator of lighthouse optics, one of perhaps a dozen such specialists alive, arrives five decades later to assess the empty tower for a restoration grant that the town of Verity has applied for with suspicious unanimity. The tower is sound. The lantern room is swept. The town is welcoming, organised, and, she begins to notice, rehearsed, as if the whole harbour were a choir waiting for a downbeat.