What if the enquiry was connected to him in yet another way? What if—not the trustees, not his solicitor, but someone in his circle—a cousin, an aunt, a family adviser—had learned of the steward at Blackscar and had taken it upon themselves to investigate the woman with whom their relation had spent several months in close quarters? The colonel had said, had he not, that Georgiana Darcy had told him about her? He knew the name Elizabeth Bennet because Darcy had written to his sister about her, and his sister had talked.
Sound judgement. Steady temperament.Those were the words one used when assessing whether a person was suitable—for a post, or for a family.
He had said he did not care about station. He had said it in the cottage, on his knees, with his hands in her hair. He had said it with the conviction of a man who had lived in a tower for five years and believed himself free of the world he had left.
But he was back in that world now. He was being shaved by a valet and sitting in a chair that governed twelve thousand acres and receiving callers who addressed him assirand expected him to behave as his father had behaved, as his brother would have behaved, as the master of Pemberley was required to behave.
Had the world reminded him of what she was? Had the distance between brown-paper gowns and carved oak shelves reasserted itself in his drawing room with a clarity it could not achieve on a headland where everyone wore salt?
She did not believe it. She knew him. She knew the man who had written about oakum and gulls, who had buried the truth of what he meant inside the language of weather and maintenance. That man had not changed.
But she had spent weeks alone in a tower, and the days had been long, and the nights had been longer, and the knowing of a man is a different thing when the man is present than when the man is two hundred miles south in the house he was born to inhabit. The belief required effort. It required the active, daily renewal of certainty, the way the flame required the active, daily renewal of oil.
She folded both letters and placed them beside the others. The question sat in her chest—not an answer, not a conclusion, but a question—and questions, left unanswered, had weight. They accumulated. They squeezed.
She wrote to her sisters. To Lydia, she wrote lightly—the tower, the sea, a droll account of Mrs Hargreaves’ opinions on the proper brewing of tea. To Kitty, she wrote with more care. She wrote about Nell Calder’s stories and the gulls that circled the headland in the morning light. She did not write about the solicitors. She did not write about the flame or the nights alone in the gallery or the blanket that no longer smelled of him. She did not write about the question in her chest, because writing it would have given it shape, and shaped things are harder to dismiss than shapeless ones.
She signed the letters. She sealed them. She placed them with the outgoing post.
Then she climbed the stair to tend the flame.
Onthetwenty-firstdayof his absence, the sea took a piece of the path.
She heard it in the night—not the fall itself, but the aftermath. A settling, a subsidence, the sound of earth and stone rearranging themselves after gravity has made its argument. She was in the gallery, checking the flame at the midnight watch, and the sound came from below and to the west. She could not see it in the dark, but she knew what it was. The cliff had been losing ground all winter. Peter had reported two feet gone near the harbour. The upper path had held, but holding was not permanent. Holding was a negotiation between stone and sea, and the sea did not negotiate in good faith.
In the morning, she walked the path and found the damage. A section of the eastern approach had collapsed. Perhaps eight feet of path were gone, replaced by a raw edge of earth and stone that dropped to the rocks below. The collapse had not reached the main path, the one that connected the tower to the village. But it had narrowed the margin. Another storm, another surge, and the margin would narrow further.
She recorded it in the logbook. She mentioned it in her next letter to William—the professional letter, the steward’s report, with its figures and its facts and its careful omission of everything thatmattered.
The eastern approach has suffered further erosion. I recommend the path be closed to regular use until spring assessment can determine the extent of structural compromise.
She did not mention that the collapsed section was the place where she had run toward the shape in the water. The place where she had believed, for thirty seconds, that Jane was lying on the beach. The place where the sea had taken her, and he had pulled her out and carried her to the cleft and breathed life back into her body. That section of coast was gone now. The sea had reclaimed it. The memory remained, but the ground it had occurred on did not.
She stood at the raw edge and looked down at the rocks and the water, and the absence of the path that had held her weight in October, and the looking was not sentimental. It was geological. The coast gave, and the coast took. The coast did not consult with the people who lived upon it about what it would keep and what it would surrender.
Chapter Thirty-Seven
Londonreceivedhimtheway London received everyone—with noise, with indifference, with the drab grey that was not the sparkle of the sea but the dullness of stone and smoke and six hundred thousand lives pressed together into a space that was not designed to hold them.
The Matlock house on Grosvenor Street was lit when his carriage arrived. He had written ahead. Richard had written further ahead, which meant that the household knew more than his letter had contained, because Richard’s discretion operated on a different scale than his own. Richard would not betray a confidence, but Richard’s silences were eloquent, and the family had spent thirty years reading them.
Lady Matlock met him in the drawing room. His aunt was a tall woman, handsome in the manner of women who have been beautiful and have transitioned to something more durable without the intervening crisis of vanity that afflicted lesser constitutions. She had raised Georgiana for five years. She had done it well, by all accounts, though it was an act of love that also served as an indictment, because the raising of Georgiana was his responsibility. The fact that his aunt had shouldered it was a kindness that contained, at its centre, a judgement.
“Fitzwilliam.” She used his Christian name. She had always used his Christian name. “You look thin.”
“I am well, Aunt.”
“You look thin, and you look as though you have not been indoors for a considerable time. Sit down. There is tea.”
He sat. The drawing room was the same one he remembered—silk wallpaper, good furniture, the portrait of his grandfather above the mantelpiece. Lord Matlock was not present. Richard was not present. Lady Matlock had arranged this audience alone, which meant that the questions she intended to ask were the questions she did not wish her husband or son to hear the answers to.
“Georgiana knows you are here,” Lady Matlock said, pouring. “She has elected not to greet you immediately.”
“I see.”
“You do not see. You have not seen her in five years. She was eleven years old when you left her with us, and she is sixteen now. The alterations wrought in that time contain more than you have any capacity to imagine from the outside.” She handed him the cup. “She will see you when she is ready. You will not press her.”
“Of course not.”
