Good men, all of them. Men who could climb the stair and trim the wick and keep the log and tend the flame with competence and regularity and none of whatever it was that the covenant demanded beyond competence and regularity. She did not know which of them could make the lantern burn. She did not know if any of them could.
She only knew that she could not make it burn alone, and alone was what she was. Pretending otherwise had cost the coast eleven dark nights and Hugh Calder’s trust, and the last of her authority to stand in this gallery and call herself steward of anything.
She folded the list and placed it in the drawer beside his letters.
Then she opened the second letter.
It was from a Mr Farraday, of Craster. She had written to him in January at the suggestion of Mrs Hargreaves, who knew him as a man with connexions among the coastal parishes between Amble and Berwick. Elizabeth had asked him—as she had asked half a dozen men in half a dozen villages since her arrival—to make inquiries about a young woman, fair-haired, twenty-one years of age, who had gone missing near this coast nearly two years ago now.
Mr Farraday wrote with the careful sympathy of a stranger who understood that his letter would land heavily. He had found a grave. A small churchyard in a village called Longhoughton, three miles inland from Boulmer. A woman had been pulled from the sea by fishermen in the spring of 1811 and carried to the doctor at Alnmouth, but the water had been in her lungs too long, and she had not recovered enough to speak. Shehad lived four days. She had died without giving anyone her name, and the parish had buried her in a plot marked only with the year, because there was nothing else to carve.
He described what the doctor remembered. Young. Fair. Well-made clothing, though damaged by the sea. No papers on her person. No ring. Nothing that identified her except the quality of her dress, which suggested she was not a local woman and not poor.
Mr Farraday extended his sympathies. He could not say with certainty that this was the person Miss Bennet sought. But his enquiries had turned up no other unidentified woman recovered from the coast in the year and month in question, and the details—the age, the colouring, the clothing—were consistent with what Miss Bennet had described.
Elizabeth read the letter through once. She set it on the table beside the keeper’s list and pressed both palms flat against each other in her lap and held them there until her hands stopped shaking.
It was not proof. There was no proof. There would never be proof, because Jane had gone into the sea or off a cliff or down a road that ended nowhere, and the sea and the cliffs and the roads did not keep records. There was only a grave in a churchyard she had never seen, in a village she had never visited, with no name on the stone and no certainty beneath it.
But it was all she had. And if she had to choose between a grave she could visit and an absence she could not, she would choose the grave, because the grave was a place and the absence was everything, and a woman could survive a place. She could bring flowers to a place. She could sit beside a place and speak to it and weep over it, and eventually, in some year she could not yet see, she could stand up from a place and walk away from it and continue.
She would go to Longhoughton. As soon as the trust allowed her to leave the headland long enough to make the journey. As soon as she had appointed a keeper who could hold the light for a day and a night. As soon as the road permitted.
As soon as she could afford to be a sister for an afternoon instead of a steward for every hour.
She folded Mr Farraday’s letter and placed it in the drawer beside the keeper’s list and beside William’s letters. Then, she sat at the table with her hands in the lap of her blue woollen gown, with the grey March light on the wall and nothing in the tower moving except the wind against the glass.
NellCaldercameonSaturday morning with bread and a jar of broth and the quiet, unsentimental presence of a woman who did not require conversation as the price of company. She set the bread on the table and the broth on the hob and then stood at the window looking out at the headland with her arms folded and her profile dark against the glass.
“The boats went out this morning,” she said. “Hugh made them wait for the tide. He’s been reading the water himself since the light went.”
“I could build the pyre again.” She had been thinking of it since Sunday—the knoll was still there, the stone base Clark had reinforced in February still sound. Darcy had kept it burning for days before her arrival, when the lantern had first failed. It was not the beam. It did not sweep. It did not reach the Farne line or clear the outer channel. But it had been something—a mark on the headland, visible from the harbour at least, enough for the inshore boats to steer by.
Nell shook her head. “Hugh talked it over with the others. The pyre wants a full day’s cutting and a man to feed it through the night, and it doesn’t reach past the reef. Not in March, not with the haar coming in. He can’t spare a man from the boats for a fire that won’t keep his son off the rocks.”
She said it without blame. She said it the way the village said everything that mattered—as a calculation made against the sea, where sentiment did not factor. “If the lantern won’t light, the pyre won’t save it.”
Elizabeth cut the bread. The knife was dull—she had not sharpened it, had not tended to any of the small domestic tasks that had once given structure to the hours between watches. The quarters had acquired the look of a place where a person was surviving rather than living: the cot unmade, the books stacked but unread, the kettle cold on its hook.
“I’ve sent for a new keeper.”
Nell turned from the window. Her face wore nothing that could be easily named, but her hands, which had been still at her sides, came together and pressed at the knuckles.
“You’ve heard from him?”
She meant Darcy. Everyone in the village meant Darcy when they asked if she had heard, and the asking had become less frequent in recent days, which was its own answer.
Elizabeth shook her head. “No.”
Nell let the word stand between them. “The light knew before you did.”
Elizabeth set down the knife. The bread was cut. The broth was warming. The tower was silent above them in a way that had become so familiar she no longerheard it as silence—she heard it as the absence of the sound the flame had made, the low constant breathing of oil and heat that had been the tower’s pulse since September and was now gone, and the gone was louder than the sound had ever been.
“I think it did.”
Nell left the bread and the broth and went back down the hill without saying more, and Elizabeth ate standing at the window because sitting at the table meant facing his chair, which she had pushed against the wall but could not bring herself to remove.
OnMonday,Norwoodcame.
