Elizabeth’s attention turned from her uncle back to the three men. “Oh?”
“The steward, upon formal acknowledgment, must reside at Blackscar for the space of one full year.”
She stared. Blinked, glanced from one face to another, and stammered. “A… ayear?”
“Yes. The founding instrument required that she dwell upon the property for a full turning of the seasons, that she might understand the charge in its entirety.”
Herhands, which had been folded in her lap, separated. One went to the arm of the chair. The other pressed flat against her knee. A year. Gracechurch Street, her uncle’s study, Kitty’s needlework by the hearth, Mary’s scales through the wall at seven each morning—all of it held at a distance she could not cross for twelve months.
“Furthermore...” Rotherdam shifted in his chair until it creaked, and his arm fell heavily over the papers on his desk. “She may not enter into marriage during that probationary year.”
The words were delivered plainly, without flourish. Elizabeth glanced at her uncle but found no denial there. “But... why?”
“It was judged,” the second Trustee clarified, “that no steward ought to assume the office lightly, nor relinquish it hastily under marital influence.”
Elizabeth did not immediately answer. “A year,” she said again, more quietly.
“Yes.”
“And if she does marry before that date? I mean... I have no prospects at present,” she hastened to clarify. “But if I did... what then?”
“Well, the language of the trust says the stewardship is vacated and passes to the next eligible sister, if there is one. If there is not, the endowment for repairs becomes... inaccessible once more to the Trustees.”
Her uncle drew a slow breath beside her.
“If, however, you fulfil the obligations laid upon the steward, including the one-year probationary period, then the stewardship remains in the female line as intended, with heirs of your body standing first consideration over any nieces.”
Her uncle shifted slightly, as though inclined to speak, then restrained himself.
She stared down at her hands. “I shall require time to consider.”
“Of course. The deed grants you until the end of the quarter,” Mr Rotherdam replied. “After which we must proceed.”
She tilted her head. “Proceed with what? I thought your hands were bound.”
Rotherdam glanced at his fellows, and there was a hint of grimness in his look when he returned his gaze to her. “In the absence of an acknowledged steward for a period of twenty years, the Trustees are empowered to petition for alteration of the settlement. And, by a curious happenstance, the twentieth anniversary of the last steward’s decease is the sixteenth of next month.”
Elizabeth glanced swiftly at her uncle. Mr Gardiner was quiet for a few seconds, but then he gave a small nod. “Yes, I do believe that is correct.”
Mr Rotherdam spread his hands upon the table. “We are not without interest from other quarters. There have been enquiries—from mining concerns, from harbour investors. Should the settlement lapse, we would be empowered to entertain such offers.”
“You would sell it?”
“We would discharge our fiduciary duty in whatever manner the law permitted. That might mean sale to a private interest. It might mean referral to Trinity House, who oversee the national lights and have been known to absorb smaller, private affairs when circumstances require it. In either case, the endowment would be dissolved and the original governance extinguished.”
She looked at him. Three men behind a long table, with their careful language and their ledgers and their fiduciary duties, and between them and the sea a two-hundred-year-old promise made by a woman who had trusted her own daughters to keep it. Mining concerns. Harbour investors. Men who saw the coast as resource rather than obligation.
Elizabeth swallowed. “Then I do not have until the end of the quarter.”
“You have until the sixteenth,” Mr Rotherdam said. “After which the petition may be filed, and the process, once begun, cannot be reversed by a late acceptance.”
She looked at the map still spread upon his desk. The coastline drawn in faded ink. The small square that marked the tower. The reef sketched in a careful hand, its teeth extending into water that the cartographer had left blank, because blank was what the sea was to a man with a pen in London.
“You shall have my answer,” she said, “before then.”
Thewickhadbeentrimmed twice before dawn and once again at noon, though there had been no flame to justify the care. He had dismantled the housing until the brass lay in ordered pieces upon the worktable and reassembled it with hands that did not tremble. The lenses had been cleaned, the vents cleared, the oil strained and replaced. Nothing in the mechanism suggested defect.
He had done everything correctly. He knew this because he had done it all twice.
