The stove ticked as the coals contracted. The wind rattled the latch on the door. Above her, the flame burned, thinned by distance, holding its diminished arc through the glass.
Probation. She was on probation. She had been on probation since September, and though she had known it, she had not seriously considered the ramifications. The trustees had released her endowment. They had sent their assessor. They had permitted her to repair the cottage, to tend the mechanism, to sleep in the keeper’s cot while the keeper was three hundred miles south being fitted for a life she could not share. They had permitted all of it while reserving the right to take it away.
And they were watching. Norwood was watching. The solicitor in Meryton and at Gracechurch had been Norwood’s instrument. Every question about her character, her judgement, her temperament had been asked not on behalf of a suitor or a well-wisher but on behalf of men who wanted to know whether Elizabeth Bennet could be removed from a post they wished to abolish.
She had been right, in the end. The arithmetic that had caught her when she first read Kitty’s letter—the dates that did not allow for Darcy’s involvement—had pointed her toward the trustees. Such early suspicion should have felt like satisfaction in her clairvoyance. It was not.
She took out paper and ink and began to frame a reply to her uncle that would show no cracks.
Dear Uncle,
I thank you for your candour and Mr Abbot’s counsel. I am well. The tower is in good order. The flame burns. I intend to remain at my post until September and beyond, and I trust that the trustees will find no cause for complaint in my conduct or my competence. I will write to you again next week with a full account of the tower’s condition and the village’s support, so that you may have it on record should the need arise.
She sat at the table until the ink dried, her uncle’s letter open before her. The legal language blurred. The specifics—probation, dissolution, burden of proof—receded into the general shape of a truth she had been circling since November without quite arriving at its centre.
She was alone. More alone than she had understood. The tower was hers only by sufferance, the keeping hers only by permission—permission that could be withdrawn by men who had never climbed the stair or trimmed the wick or stood in the gallery at midnight watching the beam sweep the water that kept this village alive.
They could take it from her. They could dissolve the trust, sell the land to the mining company whose interest Norwood had surely been cultivating, let Trinity House build its modern tower on the northeast headland with improved reflectors, a qualified keeper who was not conflicted by the ownership of an estate, and an absolute indifference to the covenant that had burned in this gallery for two hundred years.
They coulddo all of this. They could do it before September.
And she could not stop them alone.
She climbed the stair and tended the flame, which burned as it had burned every night since his departure—thinned by distance, stretched across too many miles, but burning still. The beam swept the water. The light held the coast.
When she descended to the cot and lay down, she did not permit herself to weep. Weeping was a crack, and cracks were what they were looking for.
But the flame wavered twice that night, near the small hours, when the discipline of waking could not quite hold against the discipline of grief. She recorded it in the morning:
Two brief variations, approximately 2 and 3 o’clock. No mechanical cause identified.
Chapter Forty-Two
GracechurchStreetwasnarrowerthan he remembered. Five years away from London had compressed the city in his mind to its broadest strokes—the river, the parks, the squares—and he had forgot how the commercial streets crowded in upon themselves, how close the upper storeys leaned toward their neighbours, how many bodies a single pavement could absorb without yielding passage. He walked the last quarter mile from where the hack had set him down, his new calling cards in his breast pocket, their edges sharp against his fingers through the linen.
The printer had delivered them only that morning. The engraver in Jermyn Street had studied the name on the order form and then studied Darcy’s face with the scrutiny of a man who dealt in the currency of reputation. The cards were plain—his name, the Berkeley Square address, nothing more. He had not yet left one anywhere. The tray in the entrance hall held six invitations he had not answered and a note from Lady Matlock he had answered too briefly. The cards sat in their case like ammunition he could not bring himself to load.
Number forty-seven was a solid brick house, taller than its neighbours by half a storey, with clean windows and a painted door that had been recently sanded and sealed against the late February damp. The railings were black and well-oiled. A tradesman’s house, kept with the practical pride of a man who had earned what he maintained. Elizabeth had described the Gardiners’ home with the kind of offhand affection that revealed more clarity, probably, than she realised—the green curtains in the front parlour, the study her uncle kept locked not from secrecy but from his nieces’ talent for redistributing his correspondence. She had not said she loved this house. She had not needed to.
He took the card from its case and mounted the steps.
The servant who opened the door was a woman of perhaps fifty, brisk and grey-haired, who looked at the card and then at Darcy with the swiftness of someone accustomed to sorting callers by category before they crossed the threshold. He was still composing hisrequest—a card left, nothing more, the correct gesture for a first approach—when, from somewhere beyond the entrance hall, a young woman coughed.
Not the dry clearing of a throat. A deeper sound, low in the chest, followed by the gasping silence of someone who had been coughing long enough to have learned the discipline of suppressing it in company. Kitty. Elizabeth’s voice came to him as clearly as if she stood beside the servant—Kitty does not complain of it, which is how I know it troubles her. She has our father’s talent for silence on the subjects that matter most.
A piano began in another room. Not well, but with conviction—someone practising rather than performing, the same passage attempted twice, corrected, attempted again with the dogged persistence Elizabeth had described with a tenderness she would not have called tenderness.Mary believes that diligence is a form of prayer. I have never had the heart to tell her that it ought occasionally to sound less like a siege.
The servant waited for him to speak the proper formalities. He should leave the card. He should incline his head, descend the steps, and wait for a return call that might or might not come. That was what the card was for—a name placed on a tray to be considered at leisure, accepted or declined without the awkwardness of a face in the doorway.
Then a voice from the room beyond the piano, raised in good-natured complaint about the volume, and the cadence—not the words, which he could not distinguish, but the shape of the sentence, the rising note of amusement caught and held just short of laughter—went through him like a hand pressed flat against his chest. That sounded so likeher...
“Is Mr or Mrs Gardiner at home?” He took the card back from the tray. “If so, I should be grateful to be received.”
The servant’s expression adjusted by a degree—the caller had been sorted into one category and had just moved himself into another. She asked him to wait and disappeared into the house. The piano continued. Kitty coughed once more, quietly. A woman’s voice trickled from somewhere down the hall and was answered by another, and the whole house breathed with the warmth of a family in the middle of its afternoon, undisturbed and unsuspecting.
He stood in the entrance hall with his hands behind his back and the card pressed between his fingers. He could still leave it, if they declined to receive him, but that was a thing he could not conceive of just yet. The stone from Blackscar was heavy in his coatpocket as he waited for the people who had sheltered her since Longbourn to decide whether they would admit him.
It did not take long. The servant returned and led him to the front parlour, and then a woman entered whom he recognised from no physical description Elizabeth had ever given, but from something less definable, a quality of direct attention that met him at the door and did not look away.
