05 - A White Horizon
The waves below came and went like white lace drawn over deep grey silk, a warning boiling roil in the eddies that spoke of currents stirred and pulling hard below. Grey sea, a near-white sky and white birds turned suddenly dark against the light, lifting to the sky. Fog lay low out at sea, smudging the horizon and rolling with the wind. The Captain considered those answers, working, but did not pry further in so blunt a way.
"Not often so thick this early in the season," he answered, casting a wary eye back on it. Matt picked up some tension in the older man's frame, but whether it pertained to the weather or something else was as obscure as all within the white.
Taken through the technicalities of heat and steam and pressure once the lens and panes were washed, Matt was set some minutes of furnace-feeding whilst the Captain went to greet his niece and update Hetty on the imminence of a hard fog. The increasing heat dried his skin and prickled fine grains of salt in the corners of his eyes, so different to the temperature outside that when the elder Dowling returned again it was a relief to see the door opened on the same space it had left. The Captain inspected the gauges and let Matt spin up the mechanisim that caused the foghorn to pull 'breath' like a live thing and bellow out across the water, audible even through two feet of concrete and stone.
{{BLOOOOOOOORT}}
The two hastened in to breakfast between blasts, meeting a smug seagull still in the kitchen and a Hetty with porridge ready and tea and toast to hand. Their conversation had to fit itself around the blares outside, the windows beginning to mist just faintly with approaching damp.