“Elizabeth,” he pleaded. “Say something. Please, I cannot bear it. Say yes—say no! Please do not say no. Marry me. We can stay—be as we were. I would stay here the rest of my life, Pemberley and London be hanged, if you would stay with me.”
Finally, she blinked away the daze over her eyes and released a long, shuddering sigh. “How could I marry you and stay here? You have given me back the land, and I am grateful—more than grateful, though I have not the words for it yet. But the coast still needs tending. The tower still needs a keeper. The village still depends on this light, and if I am to remain responsible for it, I cannot walk away from that in good conscience, not after everything—”
She stopped. Drew breath. “And you cannot stay. You have a life waiting for you, William. A family. An estate that has been without its master for five years. I will not be the reason Pemberley waits another season.”
“You are not asking. I am offering.” He kissed her hands again. “And you have a family too, Elizabeth. Sisters who miss you. An uncle who has been fighting for your interests since before you knew they were threatened. A life that does not end at this headland, however much it may have begun here.”
He turned her hands over in his, the callused palms, the keeper’s hands. “But this is the place where we both learned to live again. So, we see it tended well until the keeping can be passed into the hands of another. And then, perhaps—for holidays. In the summer, at least. When the gulls are thick on the water, and the shore stretches out past the reef, and you can see for miles across the islands.”
Warmth returned to her eyes. “I have never seen it in summer.”
“No.” He lifted her hands to his mouth. “But you will. And I will be there to see it with you, if you will permit it.”
Her eyes searched his face—not with doubt, not any longer, but slowly, thoroughly, as though she meant to learn him so completely that no distance and no silence could ever take him from her again. Then her hands turned in his, slipping free, and for one terrible breath, he thought she was pulling away. But her fingers rose to his jaw, both hands cradling his face, tilting it down toward hers, and she kissed him with such unhurried tenderness that he understood, before her mouth had fully left his, that she had said yes.
He drew her closer. She came without resistance, her body fitting against his the way it had fitted that first night in the gallery when the storm drove her against him, and the flame answered—as though the shape of her had been designed for exactly this proximity.
He rested his cheek on the top of her head, pulling her closer with each breath. When his eyes finally opened again, he caught the reflection of their bodies in the window... one shape, twined together. Her shoulders lifted in a long sigh. “I love you, William.”
He pulled back just enough to caress the underside of her chin, stroking down her throat and then letting his finger curl up around the base of her ear. It was enough simply to soak in that word they had so dutifully left unsaid for so long. The one that now defined his being, and the one she had a right to hear from him. To give it was no sacrifice.
“I love you, Elizabeth Bennet.”
Her eyes kindled—the spark returned, the light bold as a beacon. That was as good a guide as any he knew, so he followed it and found her waiting to welcome him.
Her mouth opened under his, and the kiss deepened beyond anything the tower had witnessed between them—beyond the doorway, beyond the candlelight, beyond every careful boundary they had drawn around themselves since September. His hands moved to her waist, her ribs, the small of her back where the wool of her gown had worn thin enough that he could feel the warmth of her skin beneath it. Her fingers slid into his hair, pulling him down, pulling him closer, and a sound escaped her that was neither word nor breath but something more honest than either, and it undid whatever remained of his composure.
He kissed her jaw, the hollow of her throat, the place where her collarbone met the rough neckline of her gown, and her head fell back and her hands gripped his shoulders, and the whole of her body arched toward him with a trust so complete it staggered him. She kissed him again, harder, her teeth catching his lower lip, and the flame above them surged as though the lens had caught a wind that did not exist.
His hands tightened on her waist, and hers tightened in his hair, and for several breathless, ungoverned minutes, the keeping and the covenant and the logbook and the law ceased to matter, and there was only this—her mouth, her warmth, her hands, the pulse at the base of her throat beating against his lips.
It was Elizabeth who broke the kiss. She pressed her forehead against his chest, breathing hard, her hands still fisted in the fabric of his coat. He rested his chin on her head. His own breathing was no steadier. The candle on the table had burned to a stub, but the gold light from the gallery above turned its patient sweep across the walls, indifferent to what it illuminated.
“We should step outside,” she said, her voice uneven, her face still hidden against him. “Before I forget that I have not yet married you.”
He exhaled something that was almost a laugh. “The shore? I daresay it is cold enough out there to recall me to my senses.”
She nodded against his chest. He released her waist—slowly, reluctantly, with the excruciating difficulty of a man setting down something he had only just been given permission to hold—and she stepped back. The air between them cooled, and they stood looking at each other in the golden light with flushed faces and disordered hair and the knowledge that the restraint they had just recovered was a temporary and fragile thing.
She took his hand and led him to the door. They stepped out together onto the headland, where the March wind met them like cold water, and the beam swept the dark sea in its wide, steady arc. Below the tower, the boat lanterns rocked on the tide like aconstellation that had fallen into the bay and was in no hurry to climb back—fishermen who had seen the beam return and put out onto the water under a light they had not trusted for nearly a fortnight, small and distant and following the gold.
Elizabeth caught his hand as they counted the boats. “They’re out. They saw the light, William, and... Oh! The oil! I have not checked it—I have not filled it in days. It cannot last at this strength if the reservoir—” She started to twist away, to run back to the tower.
He followed and caught her hand before she could reach the stair. Drew her back. Kissed her once more, briefly, his mouth warm against the corner of hers.
“The keeping is mine,” he whispered. “I will tend.”
He released her hand and climbed the stair. His boots found the spiral with the old certainty—each step falling where it had fallen a thousand nights before, the stone welcoming him as though he had never left it. The oil was heavy in his grip, and his palms, softened by weeks of drawing rooms and laundered linen, protested against the brass threading of the reservoir cap. He filled it anyway. The wick drank. The flame, already strong, deepened to a gold so rich it seemed less like burning than like breathing, and the beam swept outward across the glass and found the water and held it.
Below, through the stone, he could hear nothing. But he knew she was there—seated at the table with the log book open and her face turned toward the light that moved above her in its long, unhurried arc. The reef lay dark beneath the swell. And out beyond the headland, one by one, the boats turned for harbour.
Chapter Forty-Seven
Thegalleryfloorwascold against her back, but his hand was warm.
She did not know when she had fallen asleep. The last thing she remembered clearly was the beam turning above them in its steady sweep, the light so deep and golden that it coloured the insides of her eyelids when she closed them, and his voice somewhere beside her saying something about the oil level that she had been too tired to answer.
They had climbed the stair together sometime after midnight—after another look at the shore, after losing her hairpins to the wind, after the long walk back inside with their fingers laced and neither of them willing to let go—and they had sat on the gallery floor with their backs against the stone wall beneath the lens and their faces turned upward like two people watching the same star. They had talked, softly, about nothing that mattered and everything that did, and at some point the talking had given way to silence and the silence had given way to sleep.
