Chapter Forty-One
Thepostcameupon Fridays with young James Robson, who collected it from the receiving office at Seahouses when he went for the chandler’s supplies. Elizabeth had learned the rhythm of it the way she had learned every other rhythm on this coast—by the body, by the waiting, by the small adjustments of expectation that a woman makes when her happiness depends upon a man three hundred miles south and a mail coach on a road she has never seen.
His letters arrived in clusters. Two together after a ten-day gap. Then nothing for a fortnight, then three at once, their dates scattered across a week and a half that the weather and the roads had compressed into a single delivery. She had grown accustomed to the irregularity. February was not a month that respected correspondence. The Great North Road flooded at Durham. The local carriers between Alnwick and the coast ran when they ran, which was when the mud permitted it, which was not often. She understood this. She had mapped the postal route the way she had mapped the coastal profile—methodically, accounting for variables, building the model that would tell her when to expect the next letter and when to stop expecting.
The model had always been reliable. Until it was not.
Two weeks passed without a letter.
She counted the days the way one counts coins in a purse running low—not anxiously, not yet, but with the careful awareness that the supply was finite. His last letter had arrived on a Friday, as usual, carried up with Peter’s sack of flour and brick of tea. It had been dated nine days earlier, which placed the writing in the week before last—a delay that existed independently of the miles, produced by weather, by roads, by the indifference of systems that did not know what they carried.
She had replied the same evening. Her letter would have gone down to Seahouses with James on Saturday, caught the carrier to Alnwick on Monday if the roads held, reached the mail coach by Wednesday, arrived in London by Saturday or Sunday. A week. Then hisreply—another week back, if he wrote the day he received hers. Two weeks, minimum, for a single exchange. In good weather. In February, with the roads as they were, the exchange could stretch to three.
She knew this. She had calculated it, reconciled it, accepted it. But calculation did not account for the way the tower contracted or the flame shortened when the post arrived, and his hand was not among the letters. Calculation did not account for the way her eyes went first to the stack in James’s hand, sorting by shape and seal before he had finished climbing the hill, finding or failing to find the cream paper and the precise slant of his direction.
On the first Friday without a letter, she told herself it was the roads.
On the second Friday, she told herself it was the roads again, or the carrier, or the receiving office at Seahouses, where old Mr Fenton sorted the post with arthritic fingers and a system of organisation that defied external logic.
On the evening of that second Friday, she climbed to the gallery and tended the flame. It burned not strong, but acceptably well. She checked the oil, trimmed the wick, cleaned the reflector plates with the cloth that had long since taken the shape of her hands rather than his. The beam swept the water.
But it wavered once, near midnight. A single guttering—the flame dipping and recovering in the space of a breath—that had no mechanical cause. The oil was full. The wick was sound. The draught from the eastern panes was no worse than usual. There was no reason for the flame to falter, no reason that the logbook could record or that an engineer could diagnose. She recorded it anyway:
Flame steady. Single variation at approximately midnight. Cause undetermined. Oil and wick in good order.
She did not record what she had been doing at midnight, which was lying on the cot with her face turned to the wall, holding his last letter against her chest, doing the arithmetic of silence for the hundredth time and arriving, for the hundredth time, at a sum that did not balance.
MrGardiner’sletterarrivedon the third Friday.
It came with a letter from Mary—a steady, sensible account of Mr Percy’s virtues that read like a character reference prepared for a magistrate—but no cream paper, no slanting hand, nothing from London that was not her sister’s courtship or her uncle’s seal on brown wax. She opened Mr Gardiner’s first because Mr Gardiner was reliable in a way that the postal system was not, and because reliable things had become precious to her in a manner she would not have understood six months ago.
The letter was longer than his usual. It began with family news—her mother’s health, Kitty’s artistic efforts, the state of affairs at Longbourn as they had been reported to him, where Mr Collins had begun improving the shelving in the closets with a zeal that Charlotte found difficult to moderate. These paragraphs were written in the easy, affectionate style her uncle employed when the news was ordinary. The paragraphs that followed were not.
My dear Lizzy,he wrote, in a hand that had grown smaller, as though the words required compression to fit within the boundaries of what could be safely committed to paper.
I must acquaint you with certain facts that have come to my attention regarding the trust that governs your appointment at Blackscar Tower. I have delayed writing until I was certain of them, because certainty in matters of law is both more difficult and more necessary than certainty in matters of opinion, and I would not alarm you without cause.
The solicitor who called at Gracechurch Street, and who, as I have since confirmed, also called at Mr Philips’s office in Meryton, was acting on behalf of the trustees of the Blackscar endowment. His name is Furnival. He is employed by a Mr Norwood, whom I believe you have met in his capacity as assessor for the trust.
Elizabeth set the letter down while her heart did something rather irresponsible.
Norwood. The assessor who had inspected the cottage in November. The man who had walked the tower with his notebook, who had noted the two cups on the table, who had delivered his verdict—operational, endowment released—with the clipped efficiencyof a functionary performing a task he considered beneath the dignity of the institution he served. Norwood, who had been and gone in an afternoon and whom she had not seen since, had been watching her from London. Through solicitors. Through inquiries. Through the careful accumulation of information about her character, her family, her fitness for a post she had believed was hers.
She read on.
Mr Furnival’s enquiries were, as I understand it, conducted under the authority of the trust deed itself, which grants the trustees the right to monitor the conduct and competence of any appointee during what is termed a probationary period. Your appointment, as you know, carries a probation of one year starting with the date of your arrival, from 23 September 1813 to 23 September 1814, during which the trustees retain the power to challenge the stewardship and, if they determine the appointee unsuitable, to revoke the appointment entirely.
I must be plain with you. This is not merely a formality. I have engaged my own solicitor, Mr Abbot, to examine the trust deed, and he has confirmed that the trustees possess a specific mechanism for dissolution. You will recall that you were told, upon accepting the post, that if you declined it, the stewardship would not pass to your sisters, because the trustees intended to petition for dissolution of the trust upon the twentieth anniversary of my mother Prudence Gardiner’s death. Because your majority, unhappily for them, fell a month earlier, they were obliged to notify you, and I doubt they received your acceptance with pleasure. You assumed, and I confess I shared the assumption, that by accepting the post, you had forestalled that petition. This is not entirely the case.
The dissolution clause operates independently of the appointment. The twentieth anniversary of my mother’s death occurred on the sixteenth of October. The trustees may petition for dissolution at any point following that date, provided they can demonstrate that the trust has failed in its purpose. That is, that the navigational light has not been adequately maintained, or that the steward has proved unfit for the post. Your probationaryyear is the period during which such a demonstration would be most easily made, because during probation, the burden of proof lies with you rather than with the trustees. After September, the burden reverses. The stewardship becomes presumptive, and the trustees would need to show cause before a court rather than merely before their own board.
In short: you are secure after September, but you are vulnerable until then. The trustees’ enquiries into your character and circumstances suggest that they are assembling a case, not necessarily to use, but to possess. Whether they will act upon it depends, I suspect, upon whether you give them cause.
Mr Abbot advises vigilance. I advise the same, with the additional counsel that you write nothing to the trustees or their agents that could be construed as dissatisfaction, complaint, or doubt regarding your fitness for the post. Your letters to me and to your sisters should contain nothing that, if read by a hostile party, would suggest anything other than competence and contentment. I say this not because I doubt your competence, for I do not, but because I have learned, in thirty years of commerce, that the appearance of confidence is itself a form of defence, and that men who wish to find weakness will find it in the smallest crack.
I am sorry to burden you with this, my dear. You have enough to carry. But I would rather you carried it with knowledge than without.
Elizabeth folded the letter and pinched it between her hands.
