The Widow's Lantern (Short Story)
The Widow's Lantern It was upon a Wednesday - the sort that arrives sodden and salt - bitten, with a reluctant pallor of daylight like milk dashed into tar - that we stood in to Winter Quay and let go the anchor with a clank that rang in my bones. Three weeks of rough weather had scoured our faces to leather and soaked our speech in oaths, so that even good mornings had the sound of maledictions. Yet land, however mean, softens even a coppered heart; and Winter Quay - huddled as it is beneath a black shoulder of cliff, its houses crouched like sheep against the wind - was, to my eyes at least, a kind of mercy. I am not a gentleman; I am a sailor of five years’ standing, perhaps six if one counts the miseries of boyhood as a kind of apprenticeship to worse miseries after. I am in my middle twenties, old in weather and young in wisdom, and my name is of no account to this relation. Let it suffice that I have hauled ...