She smiled. The smile cost her more than the tears had, because the tears had been involuntary and the smile was a choice—a choice to give him something to carry south along the coastal track tomorrow morning. Not sorrow, not reproach, but the face of a woman who loved him and was sending him into the world, trusting him to return.
He kissed her once more. Reverently this time. A seal on something that could not be written in a contract, recorded in a logbook, or explained to a surveyor or a trustee or a colonel. Then he stood, and she stood, and they held each other in the small room with the fire dying and the night coming on.
“Go,” she said into his shoulder. “Before I change my mind and bar the door.”
He laughed. A real laugh—not the almost-laugh of the cleft or the breath-that-was-not-quite in the gallery, but a sound of genuine, startled joy, pulled from him by a woman who could make him laugh even now, even at the worst of it, because she was Elizabeth and laughter in the dark was what she did.
He released her and went to the door. He looked back once, and the glance carried everything the word of four letters would have carried if he had been able to say it.
She raised her hand. A small wave. The kind exchanged between people who would see each other again, because the alternative was unthinkable and therefore would not be thought.
He closed the door behind himself.
She went to sit at the table once more. The journal lay closed beneath her hand. Through the window, the gallery glass caught the last of the evening light, and the flame inside it burned bright and sharp across the sky the way it had not done for two nights. She watched it the way she had watched it every evening since autumn—with attention, with vigilance, with the fierce and private love of a woman who understood that some lights endured and some did not, and that the difference was not in the flame but in the keeping.
She let herself cry then. Properly. With both hands over her face, and her elbows on the table, the journal beneath her arms and the fire burning low. She cried for the leaving and the loving and the name she had not known and the name she had, and for Jane, who was somewhere beyond the reach of any flame, and for Papa, who would have liked this man and would have told her so in his quiet, amused, irreplaceable way.
When it was done, she washed her face. She pinned her hair. She banked the fire and blew out the candle and lay in her bed and looked at the ceiling and did not look at the window, because the flame was visible through it and the flame was burning and tomorrow it would burn without him and she could not think about that tonight.
Tonight, she would sleep. Tomorrow, she would tend alone.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Januaryhadnobusinessproducing a sky like this—clear, pale, the blue so thin it was nearly white, the air sharp and still and carrying the kind of cold that clarifies rather than punishes. The headland lay open beneath it, every stone and blade of grass defined with a cruelty of detail that made the landscape impossible to look away from, as though the coast had decided to show itself at its best on the morning he was leaving it.
The second horse stood tethered at the provision post. Richard had hired it from Robson’s yesterday—probably fearing that Darcy would “forget” to arrange the thing on his own. Richard had saddled his own horse an hour ago and was waiting on the path with the patience of a man who had accomplished his mission and was content to let the aftermath take whatever time it required. He leaned against the stone wall with his arms folded and his face turned to the sea. He did not look at the tower door, which was a kindness Darcy had not expected from his cousin and would not acknowledge aloud.
He stood in the lower room. The logbook lay open on the table. He had written the morning’s entry—oil level good, wick freshly trimmed, flame... robust and holding—in the same hand he had used for five years. The ordinariness of the record was grotesque beside what the day contained. Beneath the logbook, the small leather case held the flint, the taper, and the cloth for the lens. These he left where they were, because they were hers now.
The stone sat in his coat pocket. He had put it there that morning—taken it from the shelf beside his books, where it had stood since Christmas, and slipped it into the inner pocket where it rested against his chest. The quartz vein was smooth under his thumb. He had rubbed it once, standing at the shelf, and the gesture had been so instinctive and so private that he had looked around the room to confirm he was alone before permitting himself to feel what the touching of it produced.
She had not come up this morning. The cottage chimney was smoking—he could see it from the window—and the smoke told him she was inside. She was giving him a clean departure without her face in it, because her face would have made the leaving impossible. She knew that, and it was an act of love so severe that it sat in his chest beside the stone and would not be dislodged.
He picked up the logbook. Put it back. Picked it up again and wrote, beneath the morning’s entry, in a hand that was not the logbook hand but his own:
The steward will tend in my absence. I will return.
He closed the book. He went to the door. The headland stretched before him—the knoll, the cottage, the cliff, the sea. The tower at his back. He did not look up at the gallery. If he looked at the gallery, his mind’s eye would see the floor where they had slept and the housing where the flame burned and the wall where she had rested her head against his shoulder and counted gulls. The seeing would unmake him, and unmade men do not ride two hundred miles south to settle accounts and present sisters.
He crossed to the horse. Richard straightened from the wall and took his own mount’s reins without comment. The path south ran along the cliff edge for the first half mile before turning inland toward the Alnwick road. The riding of it would be slow, and the looking-back would be inevitable.
No, he must not look back, because looking back was the thing that would break the leaving, and the leaving was required.
He mounted. Richard mounted. They turned south.
He looked back.
The tower stood against the pale sky with the gallery glass catching the morning sun. The cottage sat below it, smoke rising, the door shut. And in the cottage window, a face. Small at this distance, indistinct, but he knew it the way he knew the tide—by quality, by feel, by the particular attention it directed at the world.
She was watching him go.
He raised his hand. She could not have seen the gesture at this distance—or perhaps she could, because she saw everything, because the woman in that window had spent four months cataloguing every movement he made on this headland, and the raising of a hand was the simplest thing she had ever had to read.
He turned the horse south. The headland fell behind. The cliff path narrowed. The tower shrank against the sky until it was a single vertical line above the sea, and then the road curved inland and the line was gone.
Shewatcheduntiltheroad took him.
The cliff path carried two riders south—two dark shapes against the pale morning, diminishing with each minute, the horses picking the coastal track with the careful tread of animals unfamiliar with the terrain. She stood at the cottage window with her hands on the sill and her forehead nearly touching the cold glass and watched until the path curved inland and the shapes dissolved into the landscape. Until the headland was empty.
