M’Lady’s Dingy Undercroft

At the isolated Skerry Point Lighthouse on the rugged Caithness coast, sixty-three-year-old keeper Balsac has spent nineteen years charting tides, managing fuel logs, and quietly coexisting with his eccentric past—including a preserved, amputated toe kept hidden in his handkerchief drawer. Alongside his fiercely practical assistant, Euphemia Clasp, and the reclusive superintendent, Reginald Plum, the station operates with an invisible, unblemished precision. However, the arrival of Cornelius Tench, an efficiency-driven inspector from the Northern Lights Board, threatens to dismantle their solitary existence with a cold consolidation proposal. Faced with a mysterious, site-specific light flicker at two o’clock every morning, a deeply analytical Swedish physicist, and the treacherous, three-directional currents of the Pentland Thribbles, Tench is forced to confront the profound gap between measurable data and the irreplaceable human element required to guide ships safely through the dark.