“Mr Calder.” She spoke quietly. The quiet stopped him. “Thank you.”
Graves touched his hat and nodded to each of them in turn. He picked up his case of instruments and walked down the headland path to his horse with the unhurried gait of a man who hadcompleted his task and was satisfied with the completion, regardless of the wreckage it left behind.
They watched him go. The three of them, standing in the tower doorway, watching the dark coat diminish along the path until the horse carried it out of sight.
Hurst spoke first. “He’s not wrong, you know.”
Elizabeth turned to him.
“About the keeper,” Hurst said. He had the grace to look uncomfortable, but the discomfort did not prevent him from continuing. “It's been weeks, miss. The flame holds, but there are nights when it wavers, and the village has noted it, and Graves has noted it, and the longer Wickie remains in the south—”
“I had a letter from him this morning.” She was grateful for the letter—grateful for its existence, for its timing, for the fact that it sat in her pocket at this moment and could be invoked as evidence. “He will return. He has promised it.”
“Promised.” Hurst turned the word over. “A promise from the south is easily made and quickly forgot.”
“Not by this man.” Calder’s voice was low, rough, the words of a fisherman who had watched the tower for forty years and who did not offer opinions lightly. “Not by this man, Hurst. I’ve watched him keep that light for five years, and if he says he will return, the sea will freeze before he breaks his word. Besides...” His gaze flicked to Elizabeth before he recalled himself and dropped his eyes. He cleared his throat, then, and drew out his empty pipe to tap it. “He'll return.”
Hurst raised his hands in the gesture of a man who had said his piece and would not press further. “I hope you are right. For all our sakes, I hope so.”
He descended the path. Calder lingered. He stood beside her in the doorway, looking out at the headland and the sea and the grey February sky that pressed down upon both with the impartial weight of a season that had not yet decided to end.
“The maniscoming back,” Calder said. “Isn't he?”
“He is coming back.”
“Then hold the light until he does. That's all anyone can do.” He put his cap on. He nodded to her—he had given what comfort his nature permitted—and walked down the path toward the village.
Elizabeth stood alone in the doorway, watching them go. Graves would file his report. Trinity House would read it. The recommendations would arrive—the new lens, the structural work, the relocation that would gut the tower of its purpose and replace it withsomething modern, efficient, and entirely ignorant of the covenant that had kept this coast lit for two centuries.
She went inside and climbed the stair, then opened the logbook and wrote: Inspector Graves, Trinity House, conducted full assessment. Report to follow. Recommendations expected: lens replacement, structural modification, possible relocation. Steward has lodged objections regarding coastal angles and vessel approach data. Objections noted by inspector but outcome uncertain.
She closed the book and sat in the gallery beside the mechanism, her back against the wall, in the place where he had sat beside her on the night they fell asleep together with the beam sweeping above them. The glass was cold. The wind groaned against the eastern panes, finding the gaps where the oakum had begun to dry and shrink.
She drew the letter from her pocket and held it against her knee. His handwriting was on the outer fold, the same hand that had kept this logbook and trimmed this wick and touched her face in the cottage on the night before he left.
I will return, he had written.I cannot yet say when. But my direction is north. It has not changed, and it will not change.
She pressed her hand flat against the pocket and held it there, the paper crackling faintly beneath her palm. The flame would burn above her again tonight, as it always did. The tower held its ground.
She would hold hers.
Chapter Forty
ThehouseinBerkeleySquare was little more than dust and disuse and something fainter beneath both—the ghost of old residents, perhaps, or the memory of fires that had not been lit in five years. The two servants his solicitor had retained stood in the entrance hall with the stiff courtesy of people who had been maintaining an empty house for half a decade and were uncertain whether the arrival of its owner was cause for relief or alarm.
The rooms were intact. That was the most that could be said for them. The furniture wore its dust sheets like shrouds. The curtains had been drawn so long that the fabric had stiffened in its folds, and when Darcy pulled one aside in the front parlour, a fine silt of grime drifted from the rod and caught the January light in a grey veil. The chandelier above the dining table was wrapped in muslin. The mirrors were covered. The carpets had been rolled and stacked against the walls in the manner of a household preparing not for absence but for burial.
He walked the house from cellar to attic. The cellar was dry, which was more than he had expected of a London cellar left unattended for five years. The kitchen was clean but bare—the range cold, the pantry empty save for a tin of tea and a jar of salt that the servants had kept for their own use. The bedrooms on the first floor were orderly beneath their shrouds. His father’s bedroom—the master’s room, which was now his—held the same mahogany bed, the same writing desk, the same view of the square through windows that had not been washed since the year of his departure.
He opened the window. London entered—the clatter of carriages, the shouts of street vendors, the grey noise of a city in winter. The air was cold and tasted of coal smoke. He stood at the window and breathed it in and tried to remember the last time he had stood in this room. He could not. The memory refused to resolve. He had been here, once, in this house, in this life, but the man who had stood at this window bore so little resemblanceto the man standing at it now that the continuity between them had been severed, and no amount of dust sheets could restore it.
Lady Matlock had visited the house the previous month, apparently, in anticipation of his return. Her inventory was thorough and her verdict merciless. The house required new staff—a housekeeper, a cook, two maids, a footman at minimum, and that was only the beginning. Only enough to open it for repairs. The kitchen required equipping. The dining room required new curtains. The drawing room required new upholstery, as the existing fabric had deteriorated past the point at which recovering would be more economical than replacing. The front parlour needed papering. The nursery—she mentioned the nursery without comment, which was a comment in itself—needed airing. And the mistress’ chamber… He would not look at her recommendations there just yet. There was only one woman’s opinion he wanted there.
He sat at his father’s desk, with the letter in one hand and the stone in the other, adding the figures in his head. The London house would cost nearly as much to open as the north gallery had cost to repair, and the opening was not optional if Georgiana’s presentation was to proceed from a proper address. Lady Matlock had made the arrangements for the season’s planning, and her efficiency in that regard left him little to do but approve her choices, which he did without argument, because the alternative was to sit in her drawing room and be consulted on matters of lace and invitation stock about which he had no opinion and no competence.
But the house was his to manage. The house was the thing that could not be delegated, because the tradespeople required the master’s eye and the master’s signature and the master’s presence in the rooms where the work was to be done.
He spent three days choosing fabrics. Or rather, he spent three days being shown fabrics by an upholsterer from Mayfair who had been recommended by Lady Matlock and who treated the selection of drawing room silk with a gravity that suggested the fate of nations hung upon the distinction between primrose and pale gold. Darcy could not distinguish between them. He chose the one that was less yellow, for no reason he could articulate, and signed the order, and the upholsterer departed with the satisfied air of a man who had guided an incompetent safely through treacherous waters.
