“Then it is her duty as steward? I cannot see why that should be a bother. Such people need not live on the premises, and another lantern keeper could easily be found. If she is the only thing keeping you from coming home, then bring her with you!”
Darcy shook his head. “That is not the language of the trust instrument. She must remain on site and unmarried for one year. The year is not complete.”
Richard frowned and released a thoughtful sigh. “I see. And after the year?”
“After the year, the clause’s restrictions expire. But the stewardship does not, and the lantern...” His brow creased. “...thrives by the touch of its steward. And in partnership with the keeper.” He glanced up at his cousin. “If I were to leave, she would have to... to find another. I cannot...”
“What you cannot do is remain a lighthouse keeper for the rest of your life. You know this. You are the master of Pemberley. You have tenants, a sister, obligations that do not disappear because you have chosen to tend a flame instead of an estate.” Richard leaned forward. “Go home. See to Georgiana. Settle the accounts. Repair the roof. And come back, if this place is truly where you belong. Come back as Darcy, not as ‘Wickie.’ Good God, how could you let them call you that? Come back as a man who has faced his life instead of hiding from it.”
“And if the flame dies while I am gone?”
Richard’s expression grew foggy. “I fail to see why your presence matters. We are talking about a wick and oil, Darcy. Do you think Miss Bennet cannot tend it? That someone else could not be found to help her while you are away?”
Darcy closed his eyes. “It is... I cannot explain it without sounding as if I have run mad. Not everyone... understands this mechanism.”
Richard shook his head. “Then you will have to find some way of making your peace with it. You cannot hide from one duty by claiming another overshadows it. You may have taken this on of your own will, but you were born to Pemberley, and no one can replace you there. Perhaps you may yet find a way to be all things to all people, but for now, you are half a man. If it is Miss Bennet you truly want, do you not think she deserves the whole of you?”
He looked at the flame through the gallery floor—the faint glow visible through the stair opening, the beam turning in its reduced arc. The flame that had burned at full strength when Elizabeth kissed him in the dark. The flame that had answered to their unity and punished their fracture and carried the truth of their bond in its small, persistent fire.
“How do I leave her?”
Richard looked at him with an expression that offered no answer, because there was no answer, and the question was not one that could be solved by a colonel’sdirectness or a cousin’s affection or any of the social machinery that Richard operated with such ease. It was a question that could only be endured.
“You tell her the truth,” Richard said. “All of it. And you trust her to hold the flame while you are gone.”
Chapter Thirty-Two
Hecametothecottage that evening. The colonel was in the village—Meg Robson had offered supper, and the colonel had accepted with the gracious efficiency of a man who recognised when his absence would be welcome.
He lingered in her doorway while she sat at the table with the journal open and the candle burning. The fire in the grate threw its warmth across a room that was hers in every particular—the bed, the mirror, the gowns on their pegs, the feather pinned above the washstand where she had placed it. Because the washstand was where she began each morning, and the feather was a gift, and gifts should be seen.
“I have to go.”
She had known it. She had known it since the rider appeared on the southern track, since the name landed in the January air, since the colonel’s voice through the door had named the truth she had been circling: that the man she had fallen in love with—and itwaslove, she could call it that now because the alternative was cowardice and she was done with cowardice—belonged to a life that existed beyond this headland.
And that life had come to collect him.
“I know.” Her voice did not tremble. She had been making it steady for an hour, practising the flattening of her tones the way she had once practised her Longbourn hairstyle—pin by pin, strand by strand, until the arrangement held. It would hold. She would make it hold because if it did not, if she let him see what lived beneath the composure, he would stay. And he could not stay, because the staying would destroy him more slowly and more completely than the leaving, and she loved him too much to let him do it.
“Not permanently. Not... I will come back.”
“You do not know that.”
Something kindled in his eyes. “I know it, Elizabeth.”
“You know your intention. You do not know what will happen when you return to a life you left five years ago, and the life closes around you again. You do not know what Georgiana will need, or the estate will require, or the world will demand.” She swallowed. The swallowing was visible—she could feel it move in her throat, a betrayal so small that a less attentive man would have missed it. He was not a less attentive man.
“You know what you want. Wanting is not the same as returning.”
He entered the cottage and closed the door behind himself. The room was too small for him—it would always be too small for any man who entered it, but for this man, this particular man, the smallness was unbearable because the room contained everything she had built on this headland, and he was about to walk out of it.
He stood beside the table and looked down at her. She looked up at him, and the candlelight caught his face and made it the face she had memorised in the gallery—the jaw, the dark eyes, the mouth that had kissed her temple on Christmas morning with a tenderness so careful it had broken something in her that she had not known was still intact.
“Elizabeth. Please.” He held out a hand, inviting her to him.
She glanced at his hand but did not move yet. “How long?”
“I do not know. Weeks. Perhaps a month. There are legal matters—the estate requires signatures, decisions that have been put off for too long, and cannot be delegated. And Georgiana—”
