The third blow split the skin across his knuckles. He gripped the rail with both hands and leaned his full weight against it, arms locked, head dropped between his shoulders, breathing like a man who had hauled himself out of deep water. Below the gallery the sea was black and the reef was invisible. The channel where the barque had nearly foundered was a darkness he could not distinguish from any other darkness because his light was not burning and had not burned and would not burn and hecould not make it burn!
Blood ran down his fingers and along the rail in a thin line and dropped onto the stone. He watched it fall. The keeper's blood on the keeper's floor, and the lamp cold above him, and the glass chimney in pieces behind him — the spare, the only spare, the one he could not replace before the next supply run.
That was what brought him back. Not the pain, not the blood, not the breathing. The chimney. He had broken his own chimney. He had damaged his own equipment in a room where every piece of glass was irreplaceable and every fitting was his responsibility and every act of carelessness was an act against the coast he had sworn to keep.
He uncurled his hands from the rail. The knuckles were already swelling. He would need to wrap them before he could grip anything. He would need to sweep the glass before he cut his boots on it. He would need to find the chimney from the lower store — the old one, clouded, ill-fitting — and clean it and seat it and try the flint again with hands that shook and bled and had just proved that the steadiest man on this headland was not, in fact, steady at all.
The rail rattled in its brackets with the force of his grip, but held. His breathing did not steady for some time.
Below, the sea continued its work against the reef. The wind moved across the gallery with its indifferent patience. The tower did not care what he did or failed to do. It stood because stone stood. The flame had been his charge, not the tower’s, and it had failed, and he could not say why.
He released the rail. Turned back to the mechanism. His right hand throbbed where the iron had bitten into the heel of his palm, and he flexed it once before picking up the flint.
He would try again in the morning. And if it failed again, he would try at noon. And if it failed at noon, he would stand on the cliff at dusk with the hand-lantern and do what could be done until he understood what could not.
He descended the stair slowly. At the bottom, he stopped and looked back up into the dark column of the tower, where no thread of light descended and no warmth answered from above.
Five years, he had kept this light. Five years without failure, without absence, without a single night in which the beam had not swept the water from dusk to dawn. He had given it everything the post demanded and several things it had not, and the flame had answered him as surely as tide answered the pull of the moon.
He stood with one hand on the rail and the flint still in the other, as though some miscalculation in himself might yet be corrected if he were patient enough to see it.
Chapter Four
Thedrawingroomhadgrown dim before anyone remarked upon it. The fire burned low; the lamplight gathered softly against the walls. Elizabeth stood at the escritoire, the Trustees’ letter open once more beneath her hand.
Mary had already withdrawn to fetch her music. Kitty sat close to the hearth, shawl drawn about her shoulders, the cough that had troubled her these past two days held at bay by hot tea and honey.
Mr Gardiner removed his spectacles and folded them with care. “You are not obliged,” he said for the third time. “You must not feel pressed.”
Elizabeth did not look up. “I am not pressed.”
Her aunt regarded her gently. “It is a considerable undertaking, Lizzy. Northumberland is not Hertfordshire. And I cannot… Well. Your uncle and I have our obligations here. We could not stay with you.”
“No,” Elizabeth agreed.
“I could go with you,” Kitty offered. “I have always wished to see the sea.”
Mrs Gardiner shook her head. “You shall see it one day. Not in October. You would be ill within a month.”
Kitty drew breath to protest, but it emerged as a rasping cough, as though to confirm the wisdom of that pronouncement.
Elizabeth folded the letter. “If Jane had been here,” she said, not loudly, “she would have gone.”
Mr Gardiner leaned back in his chair. “Perhaps. You do not know that.”
“Yes,” Elizabeth said. “I believe I do.” She tapped the edge of the folded letter on the desktop. “I do not quite like the notion of Trinity House assuming control. Or worse—the land sold to some mining concern that sees the coast as an investment rather than a charge.”
Her uncle’s brows rose faintly. “Why ever not? Trinity House would ensure the safety of the coast, and they have both the resources and the expertise to see it done.”
“I am sure they would,” Elizabeth replied. “But was it not strange how the trustees mentioned Trinity House almost as an afterthought? Why, I am sure of it, for earlier in the conversation they even mentioned that if I should refuse, I had still three more sisters who might take up the charge. Did they or did they not say that, Uncle?”
The faintest approval flickered across Mr Gardiner’s face. “If not stated directly, that much was certainly implied. Although...” He passed a fleeting glance over Kitty, who was trying to swallow her tea without sputtering, and Mary, who had returned with her music and was happily engrossed with her piano. “If they had met your younger sisters, they might not have considered any of them an option.”
“Uncle,” she chided him gently. “Do be serious. Did it not seem to you as if they were spending a great deal of effort impressing upon me the magnitude of the task and the personal expectations of the role, only to confess at the end that they have a means to abolish the old trust entirely? Declare the stewardship extinct and sell the land or turn the affair over to Trinity House? I think they would prefer that I declined.”
Her uncle lowered his book fully and frowned, then heaved a long sigh. “You mean to go. I might have known that those gentlemen telling you how hard the thing is would only inspire you to attempt it.”
Elizabeth met his eyes then. “Yes.”
