“How long what?”
“Do not be obtuse. How long do you intend to continue this? The tower. The flame. This... arrangement.” He gestured at the room. The two cups. The shelf with its books and its stone. The settle where he had been sleeping and where Darcy had once held Elizabeth. “You have been here five years. The penance—and itispenance, do not insult me by denying it—has gone on long enough.”
“You do not have the authority to determine what is enough.”
“I have the authority of a family that has waited for too long. Georgiana is sixteen. She will require presenting soon. A brother to approve of her suitors and a house to receive them in. She could be presented by Mother or Lady Catherine alone, but you and I both know how that appears. She requires her guardian. Her brother. The man who wassupposed to be there to give her the love she lost in her father, and who has been standing in a lighthouse for five years while his sister grew up without him.”
The words found their marks. Each one. He stood at the shelf and heard them the way the cliff stood against the sea—absorbing the force, holding the ground, feeling the erosion beneath the surface where it could not be seen.
“And then there is Pemberley,” Richard continued. His voice had dropped. Not gentler—more direct, the way a surgeon’s voice drops when the cut must go deeper. “Twelve thousand acres. Tenants who communicate through Mr Harding because they cannot speak to you. A roof that has leaked for two years above the north gallery—the gallery where your mother used to sit, Darcy, the gallery where Georgiana practised. Mrs Reynolds has asked for it to be patched twice, and it still leaks. Harding writes to you every quarter, asking for instruction and receives your signature and nothing else. How long does loyalty sustain a household before it becomes something less charitable? How long before faithful service becomes faithful resentment?”
He said nothing. His steward’s letters sat in the gap behind the gallery railing—every one of them, every quarter, folded and hidden and answered with the minimum his hand could produce. He had read them. He had understood them. He had returned them with a signature because a signature was the most he could give without giving himself, and giving himself would have meant going back, and going back would have meant facing what he had left. And facing it was the one thing the tower had been designed to prevent.
“You cannot continue to pretend that this tower is your life,” Richard said. “It is not your life. It is a sentence you have imposed upon yourself for a failure that was never entirely yours, and the penance has lasted long enough.”
“It is not penance. Not any longer.”
Richard’s eyes narrowed. The directness broke—a redirection, sharper than the colonel’s usual assessments, because the answer had not been the one he expected. “Then what is it?”
“It is the work. It is the flame. It is...” He stopped. The sentence was heading towards the cliff edge. He could not pull it back, and he could not follow it over, and the silence that followed carried the shape of what he could not say.
Richard said it for him. “It is the steward. Miss Bennet.”
The silence that followed filled the room.
“You are not bound to this lantern, Darcy.” Richard set his cup on the table with a clink. “You are bound toher. I can see it. The village can see it. Your Mrs Hargreaves cansee it, and she sees everything. Oh, yes, she caught me in town yesterday, knew who I was, and asked me in to tea. I heard it all, Darcy. Do you know how fragile Miss Bennet's reputation is in the village? She has their respect now because they need her. They see the good she has done, and they are willing to accept her words and dignity at face value, but one breath—one mistaken look, Darcy, and you will have ruined her.”
“You think I do notknowthat?” he erupted. “You think every moment has not been a miserable sort of dance where seeking one sort of honour does not destroy another form?”
Richard blinked. “You are making no sense, Darcy. What can you mean, honour destroying honour?”
“I mean precisely what I say.” He crossed to the window because he could not stand still, and he would not pace before Richard like a man in a cell. “If I leave this post, the lantern has no keeper. The coast is unprotected. Ships strike the reef, and men drown, and I have failed the only obligation that justifies my presence on this earth. That is one form of honour. If I remain—if I stay here, in this tower, a hand's breadth between me and a woman I—”
The word caught like a bone in his throat. He swallowed it. “Her reputation is a glass I carry in both hands every hour of every day, and every hour I am aware that one stumble shatters it beyond any repair I could make. I cannot protect the coast and protect her name simultaneously, because protecting the coast requires my presence here, and my presence here is the very thing that endangers her. That is what I mean. The one honour cannot be served without threatening the other, and I have not slept a full night in months for the weight of it.”
Richard went quiet—genuinely quiet, which was unlike him and therefore dangerous. When he spoke, the officer’s drawl had gone from his voice entirely. “Then marry her.”
“On what grounds? On what right? I am a lighthouse keeper who has lied about his name, his station, and his past! I possess a fortune I will not touch and a family seat I will not claim. I have nothing to offer her that does not require me to become the man I came here to cease being. And she—she does not even know who Fitzwilliam Darcyis, Richard! Nor do I, for that matter. She knows William. She trusts William. And that is the reality of who I am.”
“So, you will do nothing?”
“I will do my duty.”
“Your duty.” Richard leaned back in the chair and regarded him with the particular expression he reserved for men who had talked themselves into corners and refused to see thewalls. “Your duty is a word you use the way other men use brandy—to avoid feeling what is actually happening to them. I do not believe a word of it. Other keepers can be found. You are not staying on this headland because of the lantern, Darcy. You are staying because she is here, and if you left, you would have to walk away from her, and you cannot bring yourself to do it.”
“Miss Bennet and the lantern are one and the same. I cannot keep one without keeping the other, nor can I walk away from only one because it would destroy the other.”
He heard the words leave his mouth and knew they were true. Such truth, spoken aloud to his cousin in the morning light of a tower that knew every secret he had tried to keep, could not be taken back. The flame and the woman. The tending and the love. The mechanism that required both of them and the life that required him elsewhere, and the impossibility that sat between those requirements like a reef between two channels.
The minutes drew out. When Richard spoke, the soldier’s voice was gone. What remained was the cousin—the boy who had fished the same stream and run the same gardens and known him before the sea and the tower and the failure had made him into whatever he was now.
“Then you understand the problem better than I feared.” Richard sat down. “She has made you strong enough to go back. I can see it in you—the way you hold yourself, the way you speak, the way you look at the world as though it contains something worth looking at. She has done what five years of solitude could not. She has made you whole enough to face what you ran from. And the cruelty of it is that facing it requires leaving her.”
“I will not do that.”
“You cannot stay. Not like this. Not in a tower on a cliff with a woman you say you cannot marry. Dash it all, Darcy,whycan you not marry her? She is clever enough, fetching enough. Not good enough for Mother, but I daresay at this point, my mother would declare it a triumph if you married anyone at all. Aye, she probably has little enough to her name—heiress to the land, which is not nothing, but not entirely hers to dispose of. Still, your fortune can certainly overcome any deficiency in hers.”
“It is not wealth or position, Richard, and you know it perfectly well.”
