Correction Applied

The signal came at its hour, and the clock was wrong by about the amount she had expected it to be wrong by, and she wrote it down.

That was the part of the job that went in the book. The Sceir Light had a lamp, a glass, a stair, a tide gauge on the landward steps and a clock that timed the character, and each of them was the Lights Board's, and had been the Board's since long before the first hull up the shore was laid, and what the Board asked of an attendant was that she keep them correct and write down what keeping them correct had cost. Glass. Movements. Seconds.

She read the signal, and read the clock against it, and applied the correction in the direction every correction in the book had gone, which was the only direction she had ever applied one in. Then the line. Date. Signal received. Clock reads. Correction applied, in seconds. Initials. The column had outlasted the hands that kept it and the instruments it was kept on, and she had not been tempted to add to it: a column that had asked the same five things for better than two centuries was not improved by a sixth. N.B.

Then she did the thing that was not in the column, which was to run a finger down the season's entries and add them.

Nine.

The last season before the new movement had come to nine as well. That had been the season she wrote to the Board, in the plain terms the Board preferred, that the corrections at the Sceir Light had been growing for some years and were now larger than a movement in good order ought to need, and would the Board consider a replacement. The Board had considered it for most of a winter and then sent one, and she had fitted it in the cold with the lamp out for a day and the glass stopped down, and it had cost the Board more than she was worth, and she had been glad of it. The new movement was a good one. It ran as true as any she had kept. The seasons since had run at seven and eight, and now this one had come to nine — the movement had nothing to do with it, as she had told the Board it would not, in terms the Board had read as a request for a movement.

She shut the book on the page and left it on the table, because the inspector was coming down on the falling tide and would want to see the page, and then she went down to the gauge.

The dry weeks had been long this year. The marsh behind the spit had gone pale at its edges and the wind was light from the west, which on this shore was as near to no wind as the shore came, and the water lay flat out to the horizon with the station's docks standing on it to the north like a line drawn on a chart. Thirteen years the station had been there. Its people called the light the light and the shore the shore, there being one of each, and came down the spit for the tide tables on a bad week and never for anything else, and she bore them no ill will for it. They had their instruments. Nothing afloat had steered by the Sceir Light in her time or in the time of the hand before hers; the traffic carried its own solutions and had done for generations, and the Board's register recorded the light's fixes as a formality against a failure nobody had invoked.

The gauge read what a gauge reads at that hour on that tide, and she wrote that down too. The Board's datum plate was set into the steps at the height the Board had set it. There was an older plate below it, and an older one below that, each a little lower, and the lowest stood under water at every spring tide now and had done since before her hand was in the book. She had never written to the Board about the plates. The gauge was read at the high water and the figure went in the book, and that was what a gauge was for.

The inspector was on the spit by then, a dark upright mark on the shingle a long way off, walking the way everybody walked the spit the first few times, with an eye on the water either side.

He timed the character from the shingle before he reached the tower, because he always did, and because a character timed from a kilometre off by a man with a watch set at the Board that morning was the inspection, and everything after it was the paperwork.

Two flashes. Dark. Two flashes. Dark. He counted five groups against the watch and had fifteen seconds group to group, inside the tolerance, and wrote the figure on the sheet with the sheet held against his thigh in the lee of his own body. The light was correct. It had been correct every time he had come down this spit and every time the man before him had, as far back as the Board's sheets went, which was a long way, and it would be correct the next time, and he had long since stopped thinking of that as information.

The tower was more tower than the picture on the Board's file suggested, which was true of all of them. Its door faced landward. The attendant had it open before he reached it, as she always did, and he went in past her into the whitewashed room at the foot of the stair with the sheet already out, because the falling tide gave him two hours on the spit and the sheet took one.

The Board's sheet for a light was a page. Lamp: he went up and looked at it and came down. Glass: clean, stopped down for nothing, no crazing. Structure: sound, the pointing good, the gallery rail tight. Stores: the usual. Gauge: read against the plate, the plate against the Board's datum, both in order. Clock. The sheet gave the clock two boxes, corrected against signal and correction logged, and he ticked both, because both were true, and the sheet had been drawn by people for whom both being true was the whole of the matter.

The register was open on the table at the page.

He had no need to read it. He knew the page the way a man knows a page he has signed a requisition against: nine, and under it a season, and under that the line of a season's corrections in a hand that did not vary, and off to one side, in a hand that was not hers and a decade that was not this one, the note every inspector who had ever come down this spit knew by heart whether or not they had ever seen it written. The tower has its own habit and always has. He had been told it in his first year at the Board by a man who had been told it in his, as the ordinary account of the Sceir Light, the way you were told which lights took a boat and which took a walk. He had not known until his first inspection here that it was a sentence in a margin. He had assumed it was a fact.

"Nine," he said.

"Nine. The second."

"The movement made no odds."

"None." She was at the sill with her arms folded, looking at the water and not at him, which was how she looked at most things. "I said it wouldn't, and the Board sent it, and I was glad to have it, and it made none."

He looked at the sheet. Under the two boxes the Board's sheet had a line, Remarks, for what the boxes could not hold, and in his experience it held that the stores were low.

"I can put it to the Board," he said. "As a remark. The rate."

"It's in the book."

"The book stays here."

"That's where it's kept."

He had an answer to that and gave it, because she had been straight with him and the Board's position deserved to be stated once in the room where it applied. A book in a tower was a record. It was not a report. Nothing in it reached the Board unless an attendant wrote to the Board or an inspector carried it up the spit on a sheet, and the Board could not act on what it had not been sent, and had never claimed it could.

"And what would they do with it," she said. Not a question, quite.

He thought about that honestly, because she had asked it honestly. The Board kept lights. A remark saying that the Sceir Light's clock needed nine seconds a season would go into the file where the requisition had gone, and the file would be read by the people who had read the requisition, and they would read it as the requisition had been read, as a clock asking for attention, and the attention the Board had to give a clock was a movement, and the movement had been given. There was no other box. He did not think that was a fault in the Board. A Board that kept lights had drawn a sheet for keeping lights, and the light was kept.

"They'd send you another movement," he said.

"I'm not asking for one."

"No."

He wrote under Clock, in the space the two boxes left: Corrected against signal and logged. Rate as previously noted. The previous note was the requisition, which was in the Board's file under this light's number, and said what it said. He read the line back once. It was true, and it was complete, and it committed the Board to nothing it had not already done, and he was aware, writing it, that it was also exactly the line the man thirty years dead had written in a different place, and that his was going up the spit to the Board and that one had stayed in the margin, and that he had no way to say which of the two was the better placed.

He did not write in the margin. The margin was the attendants' and had one inspector's hand in it already, and one was enough.

Before he left he went up to the gallery and timed the character again, from the rail, against the same watch, and it was correct, as it had been from the shingle, and he wrote that down as well. The glass carried the wind as a note so low he felt it in his teeth before he heard it, though the wind was nothing today. He had never known the glass to be silent. Nobody at the Board had ever thought that worth a box either, and he supposed they were right.

She lit the lamp at the hour and went up to see it turn.

The inspector had gone up the spit with an hour of the falling tide in hand, which was more than most of them left themselves, and had thanked her at the door in the Board's own form of words, and she had given him the Board's answer. The sheet had gone with him. The book had gone back up the stair, to the shelf where it lived, where anybody who climbed the stair could have reached it down, and nobody had.

Dark came late at this end of the summer and came slowly, the water going from grey to a darker grey with the station's three working lights standing in it before the sky had made up its mind. Nothing on the water — there never was anything on the water that needed her — and the lamp went round over all of it regardless, two and dark, two and dark, the way it had gone round over a shore that had been rearranging itself when the first attendant climbed this stair, and had settled since, and was still settling, a plate at a time.

She counted it anyway. There was no call to; she had set the clock that morning and the inspector had timed it twice and written it on the Board's sheet, and the character was as true tonight as it would be at any hour of its life. Fifteen seconds, group to group, by a clock that was keeping the Board's time to the second.

It would keep it for a while.